“Planet Earth is going to self-destruct. Your only chance to evacuate is to go with us. » This is the promise of Marshall Applewhite, known as “Do”, famous guru of Heaven’s Gate, an ancient Californian sect that thrives on new age and science fiction series. trip to the stars, Born in the 1970s, if Do’s proposal is relatively accepted, Heaven’s Gate marks a milestone in the history of sects. “Despite being born offline, Do’s disciples have taken over the 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 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, which served as a digital mausoleum. For the novelist, Heaven’s Gate is “the first sect of the Internet age”. But not the last. As seen in a video from the news site burst, the essayist Pacôme Thiellement: “It is not surprising that the Internet, over the last thirty years, has been able to establish a mood and atmosphere within which certain people, whose culture was acquired almost exclusively on the Internet, have been able to create new religions in their own lives. 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 anime Lying serial experimentsIssued in 1998, Systemspace promises eternal life within a cyberpunk paradise accessible to those who died before 1Ahem 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 just a simulation, a “system” in danger after a coding error. Once the deadline expired, the site where the “migrants” were registered disappeared. According to interviews conducted by Anglo-Saxon media Vice, Systemspace could be the cause of several suicides. Cryptic fanfiction, cruel joke or real cult? If the vagueness persists today, other organizations leave no doubt about their sectarian nature.
TikTok and evangelism
This was the case of the group Love Has Won (“love has won”), founded around 2014 by American Amy Carlson, also known as Mother God, an “old soul” about 19 billion years old. To spread the good word, Mother God and her handful of faithful broadcast live, through YouTube Live, the daily from the small community located in Crestone, a village in Colorado.
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