For the record I differ with the author about their statement the "Children of God" was a "Christian sex cult", or related to the vastly wealthy Congressional Prayer Breakfast-sponsoring "The Family". "Oddly enough, Heaven’s Gate—the cult that became infamous in the 1990s—funded itself through web design, via a front company called Higher Source. Indeed, the web was an integral part of the cult, leading cultural theorist Paul Virilio to deem it a “cybersect,” a religious fringe movement marked by an extensive use of the internet to congregate or proselytize. The Heaven’s Gate website, like the Space Jam website, is a primo example of ’90s web-iana. It has the quintessential starry background—a common feature of Geocities-era websites, but particularly poignant when used on the page of a UFO death cult. A “RED ALERT” gif zooms in and out above the proclamation “HALE-BOPP brings closure to: Heaven’s Gate”—referring to the mass suicide committed by members in order to (they believed) evacuate the earth and exit their “physical vehicles” (bodies) by hitching a ride on a spaceship trailing behind the passing comet Hale-Bopp, which made its closest approach to earth on March 22, 1997. The Heaven’s Gate website is lovingly maintained (including, as of 2016, the answering of email inquiries) by two remaining members of the cult, who believe that those who traveled to the “Next Level” (another plane of existence reminiscent of heaven) in 1997 will return to earth, offering passage to anyone who wants to join them. Taking a deep dive on the Heaven’s Gate website is difficult. During the many times throughout the years that I’ve remembered its existence, I could never muster up the courage to click through the links on the home page. It was too surreal, too close to death; a more superstitious person might say the website feels haunted, and probing it would be like disturbing a graveyard. Part of me was irrationally worried that what I would find inside there would make sense to me, that I would get sucked into the world of Do and Ti (the monikers of Heaven’s Gate’s founders) unironically. One thing, however, causes me, and others, to persevere deeper into this dark corner of the web: the need to understand why these people did what they did. Why would they commit mass suicide in tracksuits and Nike Decades? One page, titled “Our Position Against Suicide,” is particularly chilling; the last paragraph becomes a tool to justify mass death: “The true meaning of ‘suicide’ is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered.” The Heaven’s Gate website led me to wonder about the web presence of the other notorious cults that captured the public imagination in the 1990s. While some millenarian sects like the Branch Davidians lack a web presence, two others—the infamous Christian sex cult Children of God (now called The Family International or TFI) and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese group responsible for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks—both continue to exist (unlike Heaven’s Gate), albeit as reformed or reorganized groups, and both continue to have web presences. All of these websites are equally displaced in internet-time." Continued: https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/haunted-by-cybersects-wagner