“Planet Earth is going to self-destruct. Your only chance to evacuate is to leave with us. » This is the promise of Marshall Applewhite, known as “Do”, famous guru of Heaven’s Gate, a Californian millenarian sect nourished by new age and science fiction series. Star Trek, born in the 1970s. If Do’s proposal is relatively agreed, Heaven’s Gate marks a milestone in the history of sects. “Despite being born offline, Do’s disciples have seized digital – not only computer tools, used as a recruiting arsenal, but above all geek culture. The latter has been perfectly assimilated into the theological corpus of the group, which considers computer language to be sacred.explains Quentin Bruet-Ferréol, journalist and novelist, specialist in sectarian excesses.
Just before the collective suicide of most of its members in 1997, the sect transferred its entire theology to a still active site, serving as a digital mausoleum. For the novelist, Heaven’s Gate is “the first sect of the Internet era”. But not the last. As observed, in a video from the news site Blast, the essayist Pacôme Thiellement: “It is not surprising that the Internet, over the past thirty years, has been able to establish a mood and an atmosphere within which certain people, whose culture was almost exclusively acquired on the Internet, have been able to create new religions in their own image, new religions of which they were the star god. »
In 2017, Tsuki, an enigmatic Internet user, revealed his new religion on the 4chan forum: Systemspace. Inspired by the anime Serial Experiments Lainbroadcast in 1998, Systemspace promises eternal life within a cyberpunk paradise accessible to those who died before the 1is July of the same year. To his 5,000 followers (the “migrants”), Tsuki specifies, in a Github document called “The Compendium”, that our reality is only a simulation, a “system” in danger following a coding error. At the deadline, the site where the “migrants” were registered disappeared. According to interviews conducted by the Anglo-Saxon media Vice, Systemspace could be the cause of several suicides. Cryptic fanfiction, cruel prank or real cult? If today the vagueness remains, other organizations leave no doubt as to their sectarian nature.
TikTok and evangelism
This was the case of the group Love Has Won (“love has won”), founded around 2014 by the American Amy Carlson, aka Mother God, an “old soul” aged some 19 billion years. To spread the good word, Mother God and her handful of faithful broadcast live, through YouTube Live, the daily of the small community located in Crestone, a hamlet in Colorado.
You have 67.78% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
Related News :