Not long ago, claims that the world was moving toward a global digital dictatorship were confined to people who demand the government reveal its alien contacts and believe tinfoil clothing protects them from electromagnetic radiation. Those halcyon days are gone, and today leading investigative journalists use the phrase \u201cdigital gulag\u201d without irony.<\/p>\n
At ForkLog\u2019s request, Roman Korolev, author of the Telegram channel \u201cDark Culturology<\/a>,\u201d examines this new reality by tracing the roots of conspiracy beliefs about the coming of the Antichrist, an infernal computer and a concentration camp encircling the entire globe.<\/p>\n Many conspiracists argue humanity is on the final turn toward a total system of suppression and control that uses computer technologies to surveil people and strip them of their freedoms \u2014 in short, a \u201cdigital concentration camp.\u201d Conspiracy believers inclined toward religiosity often equate this looming cybernetic world of universal unfreedom with the Kingdom of the Antichrist, to be established before the Second Coming.<\/p>\n \u201cHuman technophobia is a permanent phenomenon, but it is in the second half of the 20th century that fear of new technologies begins to take on a religious underpinning,\u201d Igor Kuziner, a scholar of religion, told ForkLog.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n According to him, scholars of conspiracy theories identify several causes. One is the atom\u2019s entry into human life, including its terrifying military use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another, perhaps the most important, is the growing complexity of technologies to the point where they become a \u201cblack box,\u201d hermetically sealed from the average person.<\/p>\n A 19th-century technopessimist could hate a steam engine for threatening his job, but at least he could see how steam moved pistons and grasp the principles behind it. The modern person, who spends much of life in front of a screen, usually can\u2019t fully explain how a computer works. The post-silicon-revolution world is more complex, and complexity inspires fear.<\/p>\n \u201cBut computers will become part of everyday life later, in the 1990s. In the 1960s\u201370s, the main threat conspiracists saw in them was that they would become part of government bureaucracy. In radical American Protestant circles, the idea spread that the government was concentrating financial levers in its hands in order to control the economy and all human life through calculating machines. This coincided with the global fuel crisis, when after another Arab-Israeli war Middle Eastern countries refused to export oil to the US, and prices on everything else rose with the fuel. And despite their marginality, such ideas became quite popular in the US,\u201d Kuziner says.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n For someone raised in a Christian culture, the notion that things are moving not toward progress but toward a fatal catastrophe would hardly seem new. After all, that is precisely the scenario foretold in the Bible, which prophesies that before the end times will come the Great Tribulation \u2014 a period of immeasurable suffering and unimaginable cruelty. Since the days of Roman persecutions, Christians have seen in the surrounding world signs of that prophecy\u2019s fulfillment.<\/p>\n Anglo-Irish clergyman John Nelson Darby, who in the 19th century had a profound impact on Protestant fundamentalist culture, quite precisely calculated<\/a> the Great Tribulation to last seven years. Roughly midway, according to Darby\u2019s projections, a totalitarian dictatorship of the Antichrist will be established, with the figure hiding his true nature behind the mask of a charismatic peacemaker until the appointed time. He will gain a plenitude of power humanity has never even imagined and will wield it for persecution, torment and terror on an unprecedented scale.<\/p>\n Dire as that sounds, Darby predicted the suffering would be comparatively short-lived: just three and a half years until Christ returns to earth and routs the Antichrist\u2019s army at Armageddon. The truly righteous, he said, won\u2019t have to suffer at all, because at the start of the Great Tribulation the Lord will \u201crapture\u201d them to heaven, where they will remain with the Savior until his return to the world.<\/p>\n Authors who extended this line of thought, as noted by American sociologist Michael Barkun in \u201cA Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America<\/a>,\u201d tended to equate the Antichrist\u2019s unprecedented managerial abilities, as foreseen by Darby, with the development of information technologies.<\/p>\n Indeed, in the second half of the 20th century what better tool could there be than television for the Son of Perdition to attain worldwide fame and infect minds with sweet lies? It took a few decades to learn the tool truly exists \u2014 and it is the internet.<\/p>\nReligious fear of the machine<\/h2>\n
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