Haunted by Cybersects

[Razer]

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


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