overview

dark forces

end times

precursors

fizzles

day after

flicks














related
Guides:

Digital
environment

Governance



related
Profiles:

Surveillance

Echelon

RFIDs

ICANN

auDA

Messaging

Assassination

     overview

This note considers digital technologies as a focus of eschatology and as mechanisms for the expression of chiliasm.

It covers -

• this overview
• dark forces - conspiracism about and on the web
• end times - religious faith and paranoia about digital technologies and the end of life as we know it
• precursors - chiliasm before the net
• fizzles - failed predictions about the end of the world
• day after - visions of life after the big day
• flicks - the end of the world according to Hollywood

     orientations

Points of entry to the literature include Norman Cohn's classic The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Harper & Row 1961), Eugen Weber's Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1999), Frederic Baumgartner's Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (New York: St Martin's 1999), Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements (New York: Routledge, 2000) edited by Richard Landes, The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism (New York: Continuum 1998) edited by Bernard McGinn, Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture (Boston: Kluwer 2001) edited by John Laursen & Richard Popkin, Visionary fictions: apocalyptic writing from Blake to the modern age (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1996) by Edward Ahearn, Have a Nice Doomsday: Why Millions of Americans Are Looking Forward to the End of the World (London: Ebury Press 2007) by Nicholas Guyatt, Hitler's Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (New York: New York Uni Press 2005) by David Redles and Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought & Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon 1985) or When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1992). Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Allen Lane 2007) by John Gray is vastly but unintentionally amusing.

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