Not long ago, claims that the world is moving towards a global digital dictatorship were dismissed as the ramblings of conspiracy theorists who demand the government disclose its contacts with aliens and believe that tin foil hats can protect them from electromagnetic radiation. Those days are gone; today, the term "digital GULAG" is used seriously by leading investigative journalists.

At the request of ForkLog, Roman Korolev, author of the Telegram channel "Dark Cultural Studies", explored this new reality, tracing the roots of conspiracy beliefs about the coming of the Antichrist, an infernal computer, and the concentration camp that the entire globe is supposedly trapped in.

Religious Fear of Machines

Many conspiracy theorists assert that humanity is on the brink of a totalitarian system of suppression and control, utilizing computer technologies to surveil individuals and strip them of their freedoms. In simpler terms, a "digital concentration camp." Those with religious inclinations often equate this impending cybernetic world of universal unfreedom with the Kingdom of the Antichrist, which is said to be established before the Second Coming.

“Human technophobia is a persistent phenomenon, but it is in the second half of the 20th century that fear of new technologies begins to acquire a religious undertone,” explained religious scholar Igor Kuziner in a comment to ForkLog.

According to him, researchers of conspiracy theories identify several reasons for this phenomenon. One is the introduction of atomic energy into human life, particularly through its terrifying military application in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another, perhaps more significant reason, is the increasing complexity of technology to the point where it becomes a "black box," hermetically sealed from the average person.

A 19th-century technopessimist might have hated the steam engine for threatening his job, but at least he could see how steam moved pistons and grasped its principles. In contrast, a modern individual, spending a significant portion of life in front of a screen, often cannot fully explain how a computer works. The world has become more complicated since the silicon revolution, and complexity breeds fear.

“However, computers would become part of everyday life later, in the 1990s. In the 1960s and 70s, the primary threat perceived by conspiracy theorists was that they would become part of government bureaucracy. Among radical American Protestantism, there was a belief that the government was consolidating financial levers to control the economy and all human life through computing machines. This coincided with a global fuel crisis when Middle Eastern countries refused to export oil to the U.S. after another Arab-Israeli war, causing prices to rise across the board. Despite their marginality, such ideas gained popularity in the U.S.,” Kuziner recounts.

For someone raised in a Christian culture, the notion that things are moving not towards progress but towards a catastrophic end should not seem new. After all, this is precisely the scenario predicted in the Bible, which contains prophecies about the Great Tribulation—an era of unimaginable suffering and cruelty before the end times. Since the days of persecution by the Roman Empire, followers of the Christian faith have seen signs of prophecy fulfillment in the world around them.

Anglo-Irish priest John Nelson Darby, who significantly influenced Protestant fundamentalism in the 19th century, calculated the duration of the Great Tribulation as limited to seven years. According to Darby, a totalitarian dictatorship of the Antichrist would emerge roughly halfway through this period, initially masquerading as a charismatic peacemaker. He would wield a level of power unimaginable throughout human history, using it for unprecedented persecution, torture, and terror.

This prediction sounds terrifying at first glance. However, Darby foresaw that humanity's suffering would be relatively short-lived. It would last only three and a half years until Christ returns to defeat the Antichrist's army at Armageddon. True righteous individuals would not have to endure anything, as at the beginning of the Great Tribulation, the Lord would "rapture" them to heaven, where they would remain with the Savior until His return to Earth.

Subsequent authors who continued this line of reasoning, as noted in the book "A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America,” sociologist Michael Barkun, who studies right-wing radicalism, tended to equate the Antichrist's predicted managerial capabilities with advancements in information technology.

Indeed, could there have been a more convenient tool in the late 20th century than television for the Son of Perdition to gain worldwide fame, infecting minds with sweet lies? It took decades to discover that such a tool truly exists—and it is the internet.

Similarly, street cameras and surveillance integrated into electronic devices would be used by the Antichrist to monitor billions of people, while barcodes containing the "mark of the beast" would allow him to exert complete control over their economic lives. Eventually, he would abolish cash altogether, ensuring that all transactions occur via credit cards processed through a banking system under his control.

Once his plans are realized, the Antichrist would govern the world through a supercomputer capable of analyzing and predicting the behavior of all living humans on Earth. It has reached the point where, as Barkun writes, in the eyes of some conspiracy theorists, the concepts of "Antichrist and computer have become practically interchangeable." In an even more extravagant version, the Antichrist himself may turn out to be a super-powerful computing machine to which humanity willingly cedes control over the world.

Generator of Evil

To understand how such beliefs spread, we must introduce another Protestant preacher: American David Wilkerson, who in 1972 produced the pseudo-documentary film "The Rapture." It depicts a future where news anchors report on events leading up to the Great Tribulation: the sudden disappearance of millions of people (including those driving cars or piloting planes), earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other manifestations of nature's fury.

As part of the film's promotional campaign, Wilkerson published a newspaper titled "Signs of the Times," filled with similar fantasies about the Great Tribulation. One article is written from the perspective of Dr. Hendrik Eldeman—a fictional "chief analyst of the Confederation of the Common Market." He claims that in Brussels, there exists a super-powerful computer occupying three floors, named "The Beast," which plans to assign "every citizen of the world a number used for all purchases and sales." This invisible number will be laser-etched on the forehead or the back of the hand, allowing each person to function as a walking credit card.

Notably, Wilkerson did not hide the fictional nature of the articles he published, yet within months, his fellow evangelical Protestants began writing about the existence of "The Beast" as a proven fact. This theory was recounted in this manner by preacher Mary Stewart Relf in her book "When Your Money Loses Its Meaning: The 666 System in Action," published in Alabama in 1981.

As Russian anthropologist Alexander Panchenko writes, "Relf paid particular attention to the development of international payment systems and the spread of plastic debit cards, which, in her view, would become the primary tool for the economic subjugation of humanity. In Relf's book, the story of the Brussels computer and Dr. Eldeman was repeated several times. Moreover, it stated that a new supercomputer, replacing the 'little beast' in Brussels, would soon emerge in Luxembourg."

By 1983, Athos monk Parfeny included a troubling message about "The Beast" in his apocalyptic pamphlet "Signs of the Times," distributed among Greek laypeople. It is evident that Relf's book was the source that allowed the legend of the infernal computer to escape the Protestant fundamentalist community and begin spreading among other conservative Christians.

Researchers have established that even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the dreadful truth about the computer "The Beast" circulated within the Old Believer community through samizdat. After the USSR's dissolution, nothing hindered the spread of such rumors. For instance, Russian monarchist writer Sergey Fomin reported the existence of "The Beast" in his bestseller "Russia Before the Second Coming," published in 1993 by the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. The founder of the "Mother of God Center," seer John (Veniamin Bereslavsky), and Maria Devi Christos (Maria Tsvigun), leader of the infamous "White Brotherhood," sharply condemned the activities of the demonic computer.

American researcher of Russian religious movements Eugene Clay notes that the legend of the computer "The Beast" was equally exploited in propaganda by American Protestants, Greek and Russian Orthodox, conservative European Catholics, and representatives of new religious movements. This is likely because, in any environment, these beliefs expressed a common anxiety about the state of the economy and a deep distrust of computer technologies, government oversight, globalization, and Europeanization.

In Russia, such beliefs soon gave rise to a movement against the adoption of the Tax Identification Number (TIN), with one of its most notable representatives being the infamous schemamonk Sergiy, who was then the spiritual leader of the Mid-Urals Women's Monastery. In his sermon, he predicted the advent of "electronic slavery for soulless people who will be eternal inhabitants of hell. The mark is the barcodes on products and goods. Everyone has a TIN, and it contains three sixes. The mark of the Antichrist will take away God's grace from a person. If you consent to the processing of personal data, all information about you is transmitted to a global computer located in Brussels. Its name is THE BEAST."

A typical agitation by Orthodox fundamentalists against "The Beast." Source: Eesti Rahvaluule.

Currently, schemamonk Sergiy, deemed excessively conservative even by the standards of the Russian Orthodox Church, has been defrocked, included in the federal list of terrorists and extremists, and is serving time in prison. However, the concepts he promoted have certainly not disappeared.

“These ideas have taken root in Russian society against the backdrop of the post-Soviet economic situation and the anticipation of the end of the world in 2000. As we know, nothing happened then. However, this did not prevent numerous intellectuals from that milieu from announcing new ends of the world, each time pushing the date back by another year. With the COVID pandemic, these beliefs gained unprecedented strength worldwide, but Russia has always been at the forefront of 'electronic' conspiracy theories. In the RF, there were protests against TINs, against new passports, whose numbers supposedly add up to '666', against vaccinations that somehow 'chip' people. All these fears are based on the belief that the Antichrist will mark us, and we will cease to be individuals with names given to us at baptism and become mere numbers in his vast electronic concentration camp,” Kuziner explains.

‘The Beast’ Becomes ‘Hitler’

Modern Russian conspiracy theorists do not necessarily refer to apocalyptic imagery borrowed from their American "colleagues." Instead, they may speak in the language of popular culture. For instance, they jokingly refer to the super-powerful computer of the secret world government as "Computer Hitler," borrowing this image from the cult album of the thrash metal band "Corrosion of Metal." Or they might use the name "Rovoam," which such a computer bore in the series "Westworld."

Yet the essence of these beliefs remains unchanged. It is believed that evil forces will gather information about each individual’s actions into a single electronic system, gaining absolute power over people by predicting any possible actions through probability theory.

Looking around, many of our readers may not find these fears entirely unfounded. Governments in various countries are striving to limit cash circulation. Global technological elites have long behaved as if they are familiar with the darkest conspiracy theories and are determined to bring them to life. It does not seem far-fetched to think that the management of human society may soon be handed over to neural networks, whose devilish nature is easy to recognize for anyone who has ever worked with them.

Can we conclude from all this that the fighters against the "digital concentration camp" were right in their predictions about humanity's future? There is, however, a caveat. Sociologist Michael Barkun, whose research we began discussing, linked the explosive spread of beliefs in a totalitarian digital control system to the end of the Cold War.

The Antichrist's special plan for this world. Source: JungleJournalist blog.

Although the U.S. emerged victorious, the world paradoxically did not become safer in the eyes of Protestant fundamentalists. The fear of the communist threat from the East was replaced by phobias about the establishment of a globally unified system, managed from a single center, completely devoid of any hints of local identity and equally unfree. In conspiracy circles, this system became known as the "New World Order." It is hard not to notice that the reality we perceive from 2026 bears far less resemblance to a prologue for the realization of a globalist utopia than it might have seemed at the end of the second millennium.

“Conspiracy theorists are fighting against something inevitable, believing that our world is developing towards digital globalization, although there are many completely opposing theories about humanity transitioning to techno-feudalism, techno-nationalism, and so on. It is quite possible that we are moving towards global digital fragmentation,” Kuziner concludes.

If both proponents and critics of these projects are correct, we can confidently say that the Antichrist's plans are doomed to fail. Instead of a single digital concentration camp, we will have many small autonomous concentration camps, divided by borders and irreconcilably hostile to one another. Let the reader take comfort in this.