Heaven's Gate: The End? by Wendy Gale Robinson

HEAVEN'S GATE: THE END by Wendy Gale Robinson
7/15/04 11:39 AM
JCMC 3 (3) December 1997

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Heaven's Gate: The End?

Wendy Gale Robinson
Department of Religion
Duke University
School of Journalism and Mass Communication
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Who Were Heaven's Gate?
Decoding the Code
Advertisement
Keywords
Apocalypse 2000
Is Cyberculture to Blame?
Cyborg: Meat Machine
Transcending the Body
Online Multiplicity
Afterlife
Footnotes
References
Web Sites Cited in the Article
About the Author
Hale-Bopp's approach is the"marker"

we've been waiting for -the time for the arrival of the spacecraft
from the Level Above Human
to take us home to "Their World" -in the literal Heavens.
-- Heaven's Gate Home Page
Abstract
In San Diego on March 26, 1997, the bodies were found of 39 similarly dressed men and women who took their own
lives in a mass suicide. Led by Marshall Applewhite, the Heaven's Gate cult believed that a flying saucer was traveling
behind the Hale-Bopp comet. They chose to leave their physical bodies behind to find redemption in an extraterrestrial
"Kingdom of Heaven." The sect also left behind apocalyptic messages in their Rancho Santa Fe mansion and on home
pages on the World Wide Web. This paper looks at online material produced by the cult and the media coverage of
their tragic end, it explores the background of the cult and the science fiction and millennial influences on their beliefs, and
it considers the group's connection with cyberculture and some of the questions raised by their mass suicide, which
perhaps, as David Potz said in Slate, "promises to be the first great Internet mystery" [(Potz, March 28, 1997)].
Introduction
It was late Thursday evening, March 27, 1997, when the first headlines crossed my
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue3/robinson.html
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These "keys to the kingdom " link tofurther

information on the Heaven's Gate home page,
which serves as the cult's suicidenote and
mission statement.
7/15/04 11:39 AM
desk at the Raleigh News and Observer. I had come to expect a certain decorum at
the N&O, but with the Heaven's Gate suicides, the difference in tone was striking: "Cult
members were deeply into cyberspace," "Cult leader believed in space aliens and
apocalypse," "Tapes left by cult suggest comet was the sign to die" [(Nando.net,
March 28, 1997)]. At last, I thought, the press has found the bad-news story with an
Internet angle that it has been waiting for.
Since the first Internet covers of Time and Newsweek in 1992-93 that legitimized and
sensationalized the Internet, followed by the mainstream popularity of the World Wide
Web, the Net has been vilified as often as it's been hailed as a panacea to the world's ills, a late twentieth-century
electronic Eldorado.[1] In practice, of course, the Net is in itself neither a utopian nor a dystopian place, but rather is
made up of people who for the most part are sitting in front of monitors and keyboards exchanging commonplace
information a bit more conveniently, if often with a sense of "virtual community" [(Rheingold, 1993)] within "cyberspace"
[(Gibson, 1984)]. Nevertheless like William Gibson who coined the term, the press seems deeply ambivalent about
cyberspace and its populace. As Joshua Quittner wrote in "Life and Death on the Web" in Time, "Every time this country
extrudes any significant bit of evil at its fringes my editors dispatch me to the Internet to look for its source" [(Quittner,
April 7, 1997, 47)].
The Heaven's Gate techno-deaths delivered the sensationalist goods. [(Quittner, 1997)] continued, "Here was
obsession, delusion and mass suicide played out in multimedia and hypertext -- a horror, finally, best observed online."
Yet most of the early reports spent disappointingly little time looking at Heaven's Gate online. There was abundant
coverage of the curiosities -- the castrations, the purple shrouds, the comet, The X-Files -- but little about the individual
cult members as celebrated Webmasters. It seemed to be enough that the group had a Web presence business and used
the online medium among other
other media
media to
to disseminate
disseminate messages to declare the Net guilty by association.
The virtual community reacted with outrage.[2] The suicides and the media's blinkered condemnation came fresh on the
heels of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which had been argued with mixed success before the Supreme
Court on March 19 (but which was overturned on June 26 [(Reno v. ACLU)]). A groan passed across the Net as
members of the community
community wondered
wonderedwhether
whetherthe
theactions
actionsof
ofthe cultists might influence public policy at a particularly
vulnerable time, when free speech and openness, and the Net's importance as an electronic town hall, was a matter of
public debate [(e.g., in 1996-97, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Blue Ribbon Campaign, the Citizens Internet
Empowerment Coalition, and 24 Hours of Democracy]). In "Deaths in the Family" on HotWired, Jon Katz said:
The killings gave our fearful guardians in politics and mainstreammedia yet another new Net phobia to warn America
about. Cultists momentarily
momentarily pushed
pushed aside
asidepornographers as the demonic and threatening offspring of new technology.
The Internet,just last week an interstate highway for perverts, was transformed for a few days into anatural breeding
ground for fanatics and zealots [(Katz,March 31, 1997)].
Writing for The New York Times, George Johnson similarly noted in "From Porn to Cults, the Net Looks Nasty":
For the techno-libertarians intent on keeping
keeping the
the abstract duchy calledcyberspace the freest of all lands, the last few
months have been a nightmare of badvibrations rippling through what the electronic elite derisively calls the "old
media." Every day, itit seems,
seems, television
television newscasts
newscastsand
andnewspapers
newspaperscarry
carry reportsof unspeakable acts conducted over the
Internet. Pedophiles and maybe even prisoners
prisonerstrade pornography and tips on kidnapping, while trying to seduce
children in electronicchat-rooms.
electronicchat-rooms. .. .. .. From listening to some people's fears, one would think thatInternet bandwidth had
increased to the point where a distant evil hacker could downloadyour mind [(Johnson, March 30,1997)].
Rather than informing the public and setting the record straight, the singular Heaven's Gate incident was exploited by the
traditional media to fan the flames of suspicion
suspicion much as pornography had been used all along.[3] The Net of dangerous
pictures became the Net of dangerous ideas. The media, which over the past year or so had been colonizing and
commercializing the Web, and therefore didn't even seem to be acting in its own best interest, let us down. Again
[(Rheingold, 1996)]. As Highersource.org, one of the best known parodies of the cult that quickly sprouted on the Net,
put it:
The media spin on the suicide of religious cult members is, in a word,inexcusable. Television, radio and print media
sources have reported this
this as
as ifif the
the cultdid all their recruiting online and killed themselves by ingesting poison computer
parts.The cult was around for 22 years, LONG before the web. They only recently began makingsome money making
VERY bad web pages (Highersource.org,
(Highersource.org, March 1997 ).
A vocal segment of the online community seemed to hold the group in disdain because they did less than stellar Web
work in terms of graphic and programming sophistication. While the term "Webmaster" often has little practical meaning,
the fact that these apparently minor-league talents represented the majority of people putting up Web pages was felt to
be insulting, although the democratization of publishing wrought by the Web does mean precisely this: that anyone with
some pages written in HTML can claim Web expertise. Morgan Davis, operations director of one of San Diego's largest
Internet providers, typified this attitude when he said, "They're rather mediocre. . . . Their art work is kind of amateurish.
The layout and typesetting is not cutting-edge. It really looks like anything anyone could have done in their spare time"
[[(as
(as cited in CNN, March 28, 1997)].[4]
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7/15/04 11:39 AM
Still the scornful Webmasters were hardly alone. With the notable exception of the millenarians, nobody wanted to be
associated with Heaven's Gate, not Nike, not the gay community, not San Diegans, Californians, astronomers, the UFO
community, or Trekkies [(News and Observer, March 30, 1997; Nando.net, April 1, 1997; Wambaugh, April 7,
1997)]. Even other cultists were backpedaling [(Kendall, March 30, 1997)]. Heaven's Gate's strange amalgam of
beliefs made them the fringe of the fringe. In remarks that were widely quoted, the ultimate head of CNN himself, Ted
Turner said: "It's a good way to get rid of a few nuts, you know, you gotta look at it that way. Well, they did it
peacefully. At least they didn't go in like those S.O.B.s who go to McDonald's or post offices and shoot a lot of innocent
people and then shoot themselves. At least they just went out and did it to themselves" [(Reuters, March 29,
1997)]. Gallows humor seemed to be the main statement made by their deaths.
Heaven's Gate quickly became a cyberculture in-joke.[5] By the time I was invited to speak on the topic ten days later
[(Robinson, April 8, 1997)], friends were feeding me one-liners. It took all the restraint I could muster not to use the
presentation as an opportunity to get my start as a stand-up comic with puns playing on Unix and eunuchs and
references in questionable taste to keeping up with the "Joneses" (Heaven's Gate Humor, 1997). But the incongruity
between these shallow jokes and sensationalist press coverage and the brutal reality of 39 people choosing to kill
themselves upon a sign from the heavens was startling. Here was a group that scorned mortality, who considered their
bodies to be nothing more than disposable shells, for whom the most profound issues of life and death and faith must've
been part of their daily existence. Yet they seem ridiculous to many of us, whether we consider ourselves to be members
of a Net community or not.
The gap between us and them in itself struck me as interesting in both the Freudian, cathartic sense [(Freud, 1922)] and
in the way that [(Stephen O'Leary, 1994)] uses Kenneth Burke's conception of the tragic and comic frames to
simultaneously embrace the open and closed aspects of the apocalypse. Yes, laughter provides a safety valve for the
aggression we feel toward the members of the sect for their apparently complete lack of basic common sense, but it also
helps us accept the enormity of the end-times that await us all. Heaven's Gate didn't shrink from this reality; they
embraced The End. The headline of their suicidal home page in bold print announced [italics added]: "Red Alert -- HaleBopp brings closure to Heaven's Gate . . . . "
What is it about these people, their chosen end, and what they believed and practiced that touched a common chord?
Why were we so eager to dismiss them out of hand?[6] To what can we attribute their thorough alienation, I wondered.
After all, while many of us thought that Hale-Bopp was memorably spectacular, few were inclined to read the comet as
an omen -- or did we? And do we today view Applegate's followers less as flesh-and-blood people with whom we
might feel a sympathetic human connection than as representatives of dangerous cults, as signs of the coming millennium,
and not least of all, as a case-in-point of what's wrong with cyberculture or, conversely, how the media typifies
cyberculture?
Who Were Heaven's Gate?
Higher Source is the sect's Web presence

business. Clients included the San Diego Polo
Club, amail-order music catalog purveying early
Madonna, and a New Age Christian company
specializing in inspirational messages (see Keep
the Faith's statement on Heaven's Gate).
The facts are well known. The group lived together in a large immaculate house in
Rancho Santa Fe, a wealthy community in San Diego. On March 26, 1997, the
bodies of 21 women and 18 men, ranging in age from 26-72, were discovered in
various stages of decomposition. Several days before, they had ingested applesauce
or pudding laced with barbiturates and a shot of vodka, and they had submitted to
suffocation from plastic bags placed over their heads. They were identically dressed
in unisex black shirts, pants, and Nikes, and had purple shrouds placed across their
faces. Many of the men had been castrated. Nevertheless still frustrated with their
bodies, they chose to leave their "earthly containers" behind in San Diego to join
aliens who would take them to the Next Level with a newly embodied life. The
extraterrestrials were believed to reside in a starship traveling behind the Hale-Bopp
comet.
Much more than a Net cult, Heaven's Gate was a UFO cult. Marshall Herff Applewhite, known as "Do" (formerly
"Bo"), and Bonnie Lu Nettles, known as "Ti" (formerly "Peep"), met in Texas and formed Heaven's Gate in the early
1970s.[7] The group settled in the Southwest where they lived in seclusion, eventually attracting as many as 1000
followers [(Niebuhr, March 28, 1997)]. Do and Ti preached that they were Christ-like extraterrestrials who had taken
human form. As early as 1975, Applewhite and Nettles (who passed on from natural causes in 1985) told of a spaceship
that would spirit true believers away toward a higher level of existence [(Phelan, 1976)]. The Two as they called
themselves, after the "Two Lampstands" prophesied in the Bible, always drew as much on science fiction as on Biblical
prophecy. Their early chronicler, Robert Balch, wrote about the group circa 1975:
Claiming that
that [a]
[a] biblical
biblicalcloud
cloudreferred
referredtotoaaUFO,
UFO,Bo
Bo and Peep promised eternallife in the "literal heavens" to anyone
willing to devote
devote "100
"100 percent
percentof
ofhis total energy" to overcoming his attachments to the human level. Over aperiod of six
months Bo and Peep recruited over 200 believers, and for a brief time the
theUFO cult was America's most publicized new
religious movement.
movement. .. .. .. Bo
Bowas
wasaatall,
tall,greying, slightly overweight figure with remarkable stage presence and steel-blue
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7/15/04 11:39 AM
eyeswhich he could use effectively to captivate an audience. By all accounts Bo wasextremely persuasive. A few exmembers claimed their minds went blank in hispresence, and one man insisted that he saw a vivid image of a UFO the
moment Bo touchedhim on the shoulder. The experience was so real that even long after defecting, theman continued
to believe he had actually put his hand on the spaceship's landing gear [(Balch, 1982, 21-24)].
Heaven's Gate flourished in the Southwest, where UFO sightings have been common since the postwar boom in aviation
and the government's use of the region for nuclear testing. UFO mythology resonates strongly in contemporary popular
culture. Concerns over the atomic bomb as well as hopes and fears that we aren't alone in the universe have spurred
countless Hollywood films and television shows in which beings from outer space warn the people of earth of impending
disaster. H.G. Wells in his late phase, notably the apocalyptic The Shape of Things to Come (1933), is a major literary
influence. Another well-acknowledged influence is the 1947 UFO sighting and rumored cover-up that took place near
the airforce base in Roswell, New Mexico, where some believe two alien starships collided. Located northwest of Las
Vegas, the inspiration for last summer's Men in Black is Area 51, thought to be the government's top-secret installation
for investigating flying saucers.[8] The members of Heaven's Gate took such science fact and fiction seriously; indeed,
they watched The X-Files and Star Trek religiously.[9]
The group recruited with pamphlets and other print publications for two decades before moving to California and
actively using the Internet to transmit messages in the mid-1990s. Members of the cult opened a Web consulting
business, Higher Source (a name that can be assumed to be intended to evoke both bodily liberation and HTML source
codes). Despite what the Net community thought of their work in retrospect, in Southern California they had a
reputation strong enough to attract a client list that included the San Diego Polo Club and Kushner-Locke, a Hollywood
production company. Their work shows some programming expertise in that they used Java, VRML, audio and video
clips, and advanced HTML that many mom-and-pop Web businesses did not provide in late 1996-early 1997.
Similarly, Higher Source was ahead of the curve with using meta tags in inventive ways, in their case for evangelical
purposes.
Members of the cult believed they were leaving their bodies behind in a chrysalis that would take them to The
Evolutionary Level Above Human (TELAH). According to Balch, these beliefs date back to the early period:
Ultimately the Two held out the promise of eternal life at the "Level AboveHuman." There . . . their followers would
become . . . complete withandrogynous bodies forever free of disease, decay, and death. Eventually they alsomight be
able to help with a harvest in some distant part of the universe, or even, likeJesus and the Two, "do the Christ trip" on
another garden [(Balch,1982, 27)].
From the beginning, then, the group made plans to leave this planet and their bodies, which they called "shells" and
"vehicles," for new life in a more evolved corner of the universe. The sign they were waiting for came with Hale-Bopp
and its ghostly companion vehicle.
On Nov. 14, 1996, Houston-based amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek phoned Art Bell's "Coast to Coast" to say that
he had taken a photograph of a mysterious object traveling behind Hale-Bopp.[10] Art Bell's popular radio program
discusses matters of interest to the UFO community. The next night a guest on Bell's show, Courtney Brown, director
of the Farsight Institute in Atlanta, asserted that three professional psychics associated with his organization had detected
the companion vehicle and found it to be inhabited by extraterrestrials. Although there are conflicting reports as to
whether Shramek's call was intended as a hoax or was simply a mistake, the sighting of Hale-Mary, as the companion
spaceship came to be known, has been widely attributed to have been enough to break Heaven's Gate's holding pattern
and to have perhaps triggered the 39 cult members' exit from their mortal containers. O'Leary is among those who point
out that the "suicide of the Heaven's Gate sect was timed to coincide with the nearest approach to Earth of the comet
Hale-Bopp -- a celestial event that, like many comets throughout history, has been greeted in apocalyptic circles as a
harbinger of cosmic change" [(O'Leary, April 1997)].
There is no question that when first reporting the Rancho Santa Fe suicides, the press acted irresponsibly by hastily
pointing the finger at the Net although many factors influenced the decision of Applewhite and his followers to end their
lives. And the follow-up coverage was never given the prominence of the first few days in which the Net was implicated
by the association with UFOs and cult mania. The general public probably still associates Heaven's Gate with the Net
and thinks that the Rancho Santa Fe suicides somehow happened because the cult members spent too much time in
spooky cyberspace.
The mass media based broad assumptions about the group on the "fact" that they were part of the online community and
therefore were taken to be representative of cyberculture. Whether we accept that premise or consider the Heaven's
Gate cult members' connection with the Internet to be tenuous at best -- as just another medium they used for
proselytizing if also for commerce -- there is nothing to be lost by examining the online evidence, even if it's not difficult
to see that the blame, if any, for their deaths should be shared. In addition to bringing out the significance of celestial
influences, O'Leary notes, "Heaven's Gate gives a new and terrifying significance to previously innocuous media products
which had long enjoyed what are commonly, and unthinkingly, referred to as 'cult followings': the 'X-Files,' 'Star Trek,'
and 'Star Wars'" [(O'Leary, April 1997)]. Perhaps the Net encourages pop idolatry. Perhaps the Net encourages
addictive behavior. Perhaps any number of assumptions, which is all they can be without examining the evidence firsthttp://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue3/robinson.html
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hand. In the hope that it might be illuminating to explore the ways in which the members of the sect were typical or
atypical of the Net and its virtual community, a consideration of the Heaven's Gate Website is in order.
Decoding the Code
The Heaven's Gate Website contains "secret

codes" used as keywords for search engines and
forproselytizing purposes. To see these codes
hidden within the meta tag, click on thegraphic
and display the source code of the cult's home
page on your browser. WithNetscape, choose
View on the menu bar, then Document Source.
The words excerpted belowappear behind the
top and bottom of most pages on the site.
Much has been made of the liberatory potential of hypertext, of its undoing and
decentering of the author, authority, and linearity itself [(e.g., Bolter, 1990; Malthrop,
1991; Landow, 1992; Lanham, 1993; Gaggi, 1997)]. The World Wide Web,
however, offers other avenues of exploration. Unlike how we interpret the printed
word, with the Web we aren't restricted to the foregrounded text since we can look
beneath to see what's embedded in the computer code or literal subtext. We can, in
other words, decode the code or do a digital deconstruction of pages written in
HTML to uncover what they reveal or suggest. As it so happens, the material below
the surface of the Heaven's Gate pages is unusually rich.
Nevertheless, in terms of intentionality, the subtext of the Heaven's Gate pages is every
bit as deliberate as the messages that might otherwise be considered the "preferred
reading" [(Hall, 1980)]. Already a subculture in the sense of being a cult, Applewhite's
followers were cannily in control of their messages on several levels although obviously
their audience reception could not be prescribed [(Hebdige, 1979; Fish, 1980;
Radway, 1984; Fiske, 1989)]. It's difficult to accept the cynical view that Heaven's Gate might've staged their suicides
for laughs or as a publicity stunt.
stunt. Although
Although Heaven's Gate's suicide page is surely one of the best read open letters to the
Net community, its message has proven to be largely incomprehensible despite its intratextual redundancy.[11] HaleBopp did not bring closure to Heaven's Gate.
Access the home page of the Heaven's Gate site and view the source code.[12] (If your browser is Netscape, go to the
menu bar, choose View and then select Document Source). At the top and bottom is text otherwise hidden from view
contained within the meta tag (a.k.a. <meta>). The meta tag is used by some people making Web pages, particularly
commercial sites, to supply information for search engines. Some search engines, such as AltaVista and Infoseek, gather
information by pulling up the first few lines of code from a file. The reasoning goes that if you want your site to float to the
top when a user does
does aa search,
search,you
youstand
standaabetter
betterchance of being found if you control what words the search engine
finds. Just as a user chooses keywords when running a search query, you as the Web page designer can help things
along by providing keywords to match the expected query.
This is fine in principal, but Heaven's Gate
Gate took
took keywording
keywording and developed it to an unusual degree. They glutted search
engines in a form of spamming or sending out junk mail on the Internet. Using the meta tag this way is considered poor
Netiquette, or bad manners online and an improper use of bandwidth.[13] But the group's use is consistent with how
they used other media. Like many evangelical groups eager to spread their message, they used direct mail techniques,
broadcast and video, posters, books, pamphlets,
pamphlets, and
and word
word of mouth. Heaven's Gate's use of the meta tag is in keeping
with their media suffusion. It's worth pointing out, however, that just as most of us in the general public don't completely
welcome unsolicited mail, the cult's "spamdexing" was frowned on by what we can consider to be the Net community.
Their misuse of HTML
HTML put
put the
the cult
cultatatodds
oddswith
with the accepted practices of the Net rather than in accord. Furthermore,
Heaven's Gate not only placed these meta tags at the top of their pages, they also ran them along the bottom for reasons
that will be discussed shortly but that serve little practical purpose in terms of search engines.
Advertisement
When we examine the meta tag at the top of the Heaven's Gate home page, the first information that comes to view is an
advertisement that was posted to aa wide
wide variety of newsgroups:
Heaven's Gate
How and When the Door to the Physical Kingdom Level Above Human May Be Entered
Organized Religions Are Killers of Souls
UFOs and Space Aliens -- Sorting Good from Bad
Final Warning for Possible Survivors
(Heaven's Gate )
-- www.heavensgate.com (Heaven's
The recruitment ad lays out the four basic tenets

tenets of
of Applewhite's teachings:
1. That the physical body
body can
canbe
beleft
leftbehind
behindfor
forTELAH
TELAHin which the inviolate spirit will live on at a higher
evolutionary level,
2. That traditional religion is untrustworthy,
3. That escape is forthcoming through alien abduction, and
4. That this is the final warning.
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The latter was a common theme following the death of Nettles. The ending of her life from cancer instead of from alien
abduction proved difficult to explain to the faithful. Wojcik notes that after Nettles' death Heaven's Gate disappeared for
nearly a decade until May 27, 1993, when they "placed an ad in USA Today entitled 'UFO Cult Resurfaces with Final
Offer,' which declared that societal institutions and mainstream religions are controlled by a conspiracy involving Satan"
[(Wojcik, 1997, 182)]. When they re-emerged, it was in crisis mode.
Heaven's Gate was a doomsday cult with a predilection for conspiracy theory, views they vigorously disseminated. Sixtytwo of the group's Usenet postings from rep@heavensgate.com, ranging from alt.bible.prophecy to alt.blasphemy that
date from mid-1996, can be accessed through Deja News. The Washington Post maintains a large collection of
"Heaven's Gate" Documents, including videotapes and advertisements such as the USA Today ad that cost nearly
$30,000 [(Bayles & O'Driscoll, March 28, 1997)]. The Heaven's Gate Manifesto,"Time to Die for God?," which was
posted to a number of newsgroups, can be found on the Pathfinder site. Earlier in 1995, they posted their philosophies
on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), but discontinued after being flamed by members [(Guglielmo, March 31,
1997)].
The Heaven's Gate group's cross-posting did not endear them to the Net community. Indeed, the cult can be considered
guilty of deviating from at least the first five of what [(McLaughlin, Osborne, & Smith, 1995)] have defined as the seven
"Standards of Conduct on Usenet." However, it seems as though Heaven's Gate never felt an obligation to observe the
tacit rules of the Net; rather, it was the Net community that was supposed to come around. There is nothing in their
literature and the interviews with surviving cult members to support the idea that they felt part of cyberculture or that the
Internet was anything more than a digital bulletin board on which to affix their messages. The communal joy of
connecting, sharing, flaming, ranting that many people associate with what it means to be online apparently was not part
of the cult members' experience or interests. In other words, there was no interactivity. Heaven's Gate's messages are
one-way, authoritarian. Applewhite, presumably, talks at the world, preaching, proselytizing. Submission is the expected
response, not dialogue. In "'Un-Homey' Potential in the Public Discourse of Heaven's Gate," Robert Glenn Howard
notes:
The Heaven's Gate group's newsgroup "recruitment" communicationsdisplay a static and deterministic rhetoric. Railing
against the bodily manifestations ofhuman beings, they developed a belief set that allowed them to view suicide as a
positiveexperience. This attitude failed to effect large groups of individuals on the Internetbecause, for the most part,
their rhetoric failed to attempt any sort of persuasion. Intheir e-mail posts, they made no real attempt to persuade anyone
of anything. They simplydogmatically asserted their version of the truth [(Howard, 1997, 51)].
Nor does Heaven's Gate seem to have experienced the medium as a new religious agora. The potential for participatory
affirmation called "the ritual view of communication" by [(James W. Carey, 1975)] and celebrated by those who write
on the Internet's interfaith networking potential [(Davis, 1995; Brasher, 1996; O'Leary, 1996; Cobb, 1998, in press)]
similarly wasn't valued by Heaven's Gate. Posting information on the Net doesn't seem to have been any more meaningful
to the members of the cult than buying a newspaper ad, although obviously the Net was quite a bit less expensive. The
group wasn't "of" the Net from lack of interest as well as ostracism, which likely fed each other. Heaven's Gate was
alienated from the virtual community that they in turn alienated by failing to observe the social contract.
Keywords
The next set of words within the meta tag is a list of keywords used for search engines. Strung together in this form, the
keywords resemble chanting. If you scroll to the bottom of the source code, you'll see two more lists, the first in a meta
tag, the other colored black so that it isn't visible against the background. On the home page, they run behind the
foregrounded text in the blank space at the bottom (below the footer and information on how to order Applewhite's
book). The lists are provided below:
Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's Gate Heaven's GateHeaven's Gate Heaven's Gate ufo ufo
ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo ufo space alienspace alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space alien space
alien spacealien space alien space alien space alien extraterrestrial extraterrestrialextraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial
extraterrestrial extraterrestrialextraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrial extraterrestrialextraterrestrial
extraterrestrial misinformation misinformation misinformationmisinformation misinformation misinformation misinformation
misinformation misinformationmisinformation misinformation misinformation freedom freedom freedom freedom freedomfreedom
freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom freedom second coming second coming secondcoming second coming second
coming second coming second coming second coming second comingsecond coming angels angels angels angels angels angels
angels angels angels angels endend times times end times end times end times end times end times end times end times endtimes
end times.
Key Words: (for search engines) 144,000, Abductees, Agnostic, Alien, Allah, Alternative,Angels, Antichrist, Apocalypse,
Armageddon, Ascension, Atheist, Awakening, Away Team,Beyond Human, Blasphemy, Boddhisattva, Book of Revelation,
Buddha, Channeling, Children ofGod, Christ, Christ's Teachings, Consciousness, Contactees, Corruption, Creation, Death,
Discarnate, Discarnates, Disciple, Disciples, Disinformation, Dying, Ecumenical, End ofthe Age, End of the World, Eternal Life,
Eunuch, Evolution, Evolutionary,Extraterrestrial, Freedom, Fulfilling Prophecy, Genderless, Glorified Body, God, God'sChildren,
God's Chosen, God's Heaven, God's Laws, God's Son, Guru, Harvest Time, He'sBack, Heaven, Heaven's Gate, Heavenly Kingdom,
Higher Consciousness, His Church, HumanMetamorphosis, Human Spirit, Implant, Incarnation, Interfaith, Jesus, Jesus' Return,
Jesus' Teaching, Kingdom of God, Kingdom of Heaven, Krishna Consciousness, Lamb of God,Last Days, Level Above Human,
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Life After Death, Luciferian, Luciferians, Meditation,Members of the Next Level, Messiah, Metamorphosis, Metaphysical,
Millennium,Misinformation, Mothership, Mystic, Next Level, Non Perishable, Non Temporal, OlderMember, Our Lords Return,
Out of Body Experience, Overcomers, Overcoming, Past Lives,Prophecy, Prophecy Fulfillment, Rapture, Reactive Mind,
Recycling the Planet,Reincarnation, Religion, Resurrection, Revelations, Saved, Second Coming, Soul, SpaceAlien, Spacecraft,
Spirit, Spirit Filled, Spirit Guide, Spiritual, Spiritual Awakening,Star People, Super Natural, Telepathy, The Remnant, The Two,
Theosophy, Ti and Do, Truth,Two Witnesses, UFO, Virginity, Walk-ins, Yahweh, Yeshua, Yoda, Yoga (Heaven's Gate ).
The same information can be found in the source code of How and When "Heaven's Gate" May Be Entered, written
by Marshall Applewhite, and other Websites made by the cult. After examining the hidden text, what comes through
loud and clear for this interpreter is thorough alienation:
1. Abduction Mythology and Reification of Alienation: The entire first section is about being rescued by
extraterrestrials who are envisioned as New Age angels come to set true believers free in the second coming
before the end times. This apocalyptic vision is reinforced by other Heaven's Gate writings posted on the Net.
While most of us view alien abduction with a mixture of skepticism and abhorrence, to Heaven's Gate such
escape was felt to be affirmative. Life on this planet is fallen and redemption can only come with the next cycle.
The words in the second section reinforce this idea: e.g., "life after death," "past lives," "resurrection," "star
people." Since [(Jung, 1964)], flying saucers have often been considered to be manifestations of modern
mythology, the archetype of cosmic intelligence we call God, not unlike Zeus appearing before Dana as a
shower of gold or the experience of Moses at the burning bush. Like many UFO cults, Heaven's Gate fervently
pointed to passages in the Bible that could be interpreted as proof of extraterrestrial visitation. In this sense, the
group happily anticipated their release and demise through alien abduction, even to the extent of taking out
abduction life insurance in the amount of $1 million per cult member [(NandoNet, March 30, 1997)]. To see their
taped suicide messages and to read their exit statements is to witness unshakable belief expressed as smug
certainty: they really thought they were going to a level above the rest of us lowly earthlings and were about to
embark on the ride of their lives. They don't show any remorse or concern for the people they left behind.
2. Alienation from the Self and Embodiment: A number of the terms above suggest a Cartesian or Gnostic mind/
body split: e.g., the entire first section and "abductees," "eunuch," "genderless," "out of body," and other such
terms in the second. The Heaven's Gate cult members were not people who liked their bodies. Their unisex dress
and castrations have been well-chronicled.
3. Alienation from the World in which They Lived: Again, the entire first section is about leaving the planet. Much
of the second is about mundane corruption, the apocalypse, and the "Next Level." In light of their suicides, a
standard reading of alienation seems self-evident. The cult members obviously were estranged from society.
4. Existential Alienation or the Dissociation Wrought by the Mechanistic Modern/Postmodern World: Too
simply put, the French Marxian tradition from Sartre and Ellul through Barthes to Deleuze and Baudrillard holds
that the capitalist system turns human beings into cogs in the machine. By becoming part of the mechanistic
process, we lose our humanity and free will and accept naturalistic falsehoods that are intended to keep us from
the truth (i.e., "false consciousness"). Consequently in the postmodern world simulated reality has replaced
genuine reality. While an existential/postmodern reading of Heaven's Gate springs partially from their writing, it
largely can be read into the subtext of their subtext. The cult members were deluded; they believed that the
fantastic was true. Yoda, for instance, a Star Wars character, is lumped together with the Messiah in the second
half of the meta-tag repetitions. From this standpoint, Heaven's Gate is a singular instance of the pervasive
"Disneyfication" of contemporary culture [(Baudrillard, 1981)].They believed they were entering a pop culture
Kingdom of Heaven, not unlike belief in Elvis sightings.[14] Reality and its semblance, scripture and popular
culture have been conflated to such an extent that the meaning of life, should there be any more master narratives,
has become pathologically skewed. Furthermore, the extremity of their fantasy life tends to both normalize the less
bizarre aspects of their beliefs and social existence, which would be otherwise deemed quite bizarre, and
conversely to exaggerate what's ordinary, such as the Nikes and spare change in their pockets [(Morse, March
28, 1997; CNN, April 7, 1997)]. It comes as no surprise that the people who joined Heaven's Gate would be
attracted to the Net and digital culture in which it can be difficult to distinguish real life from virtual life. To
paraphrase [(Sherry Turkle, 1996)], reality wasn't their "best window."
Their alienation communicates itself to us. We do not feel warmly toward Heaven's Gate; they tend to incite us to
mockery. Wojcik says that this reaction on the Net following their 1996 spamming contributed to the cult members'
decision to leave their earthly shells: "The group's beliefs were generally ignored or ridiculed on the Internet and this
response was interpreted by believers as a sign that they should begin to prepare to return to their home in the heavens,
because 'the weeds of humanity' had taken over earth's garden" [(Wojcik, 1997, 182)].
Their messages, then, transmitted through many forms of media in addition to the Internet -- which includes the secret
codes designed for machines, which signify perhaps nothing more than a message in a virtual bottle since for the most
part the subtext wasn't "consciously" picked up by either search-engine bots or human beings -- with one notable
exception that will be discussed shortly, were ignored. Since Heaven's Gate was aware of the poor reception of their
messages, we may assume that part of their intent in providing the subtextual or subliminal text within the meta tags was
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performative. The codes were meant to be shared, sung among themselves, a wall of words, a private understanding. By
tuning out the world, they could find strength and solace in each other. It was Heaven's Gate against corrupt, fallen,
despicably "mammalian" humanity.
Apocalypse 2000
While the assortment of marginalized beliefs Heaven's Gate brought together was
strange, the cult didn't emerge from a vacuum. They saw themselves as martyrs, as
part of the tradition of Masada, Christian saints, self-flagellating monks, and other true
believers who put faith and a sense of mission before self-preservation and self-interest
(Our Position Against Suicide), however much these values are out of step with the
reigning ethos of the 1990s. There have long been (arguably false) prophets who
preached about the coming of The End and End Times, particularly around major
ingresses such as a new century or millennium. The group's desire to leave their bodies
also draws on the Western metaphysical tradition.
As previously stated, Applewhite preached that he and Nettles had been reincarnated
from The Evolutionary Level Above Human (TELAH). They came as dual entities
who had assumed human form, i.e., extraterrestrial messiahs who were "doing the
Christ trip." Their mission on the planet was to warn the people of Earth about its
coming end. In a scenario not unlike a [(Douglas Adams, 1985)] radio script, the only
escape for their followers was to leave their human shells behind and hitch a ride to the
galaxy aboard the spacecraft traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet, itself a sign of the
coming apocalypse. But however much their separation of mind and body with a sprinkling of New Age mysticism may
Gnosticism, they
they weren't seeking transcendence per se. The cult members
sound like a variation of Cartesianism or Gnosticism,
thought that they were literally, not just metaphorically, leaving their bodies behind to become newly embodied as aliens
or beings higher on the evolutionary scale, much as Applewhite claimed, but in reverse. See, for example, this passage
from "Heaven's Gate 'Away Team' Returns to Level Above Human in Distant Space" on the cult's Website:
The caption to this imageon the Heaven's Gate
site reads: "Howa Member of the Kingdom of
Heaven might appear." Cult members believed
that theywere exchanging their earthly bodies
for extraterrestrial life-forms, thereby achieving
immortality in a physical "Evolutionary Level
Above Human."
of God,
God, the
the Level
Level Above
AboveHuman,
Human,isisaa physical world, where theyinhabit physical bodies. However, those
The Kingdom of
bodies are merely containers, suits of clothes --the true identity (of the individual) is the soul or mind/spirit residing in
tool for
for that
that individual's
individual's use
use ---- when
when itit wearsout, he is issued a new one (Exit Press
that"vehicle." The body is merely a tool
Release ).
Perhaps needless to say,

say, their
their belief
beliefin
incosmic
cosmiceco-bodily
eco-bodilyrecycling is solidly heretical in terms of mainstream Western
Christian thought, whether or not Biblical scripture is cited as evidence. Rather than Christian, these beliefs not only call
to mind routine science fiction but reincarnation,
reincarnation, Egyptian
Egyptian mystery cults, theosophy, and other forms of Orientalism that
the West construes as decadent and "Eastern" [(Said, 1978; Gilman, 1979; Torgovnick, 1990)] although without -indeed, deeply dissociated from -- the sensuality generally associated with exoticism.
The Heaven's Gate group was Other in still
still other
other ways.
ways. The
The press gleefully uncovered Applewhite's checkered past and
problems with homosexuality in the restrictive American South of the 1950s [(Chua-Eoan, April 7, 1997; Daniel, April
14, 1997)]. There has been much armchair psychologizing about what might've driven this son of a Texas preacher to
become an evangelist of the anti-body. Much
Much of
of this
this line
lineof
ofthought
thought holds that because he hated his sexuality and the
misfortunes it brought him, Applewhite looked to the heavens for The Answer. While we'll never be able to pinpoint the
origin of Applewhite's calling, surviving cult
cult members tell of strict aestheticism and celibacy, and ultimately castration, of
purifying the body to prepare it for a return to TELAH. Androgyny was the norm. In their last days on the planet, many
of Applewhite's followers made tapes of their final mortal thoughts. The following is an excerpt from the "Earth Exit
Statement: Why We Must Leave
Leave at
atthis Time," of Glnody, who gives the renunciation of the body a biotech prosthetic
twist:
These "lower forces" have
have succeeded
succeeded in
in totally
totally addicting humans tomammalian behavior. Everything from ads for
toothpaste to clothing
clothing elevates
elevateshumansexuality.
human
Being from a genderless world, this behavior is extremely hideous to us.
Evenif we go on an outing as harmless as visiting the zoo, the tour guides
guides lace
lace theircommentary with sexual
innuendoes, even when the group they
they are
are addressing
addressing is
is full
full ofsmall
of
children. Even the medical profession promotes
sexuality. Procedures such as
asliposuction, breast enlargements, and even sex-change operations are considered perfectly
acceptable, but ask a physician
physician to
to neuter
neuter your vehicle for the sake of the Kingdom ofHeaven and you will more than
likely be referred to aa psychologist
psychologist who
who will
will help
helpyou
you"get in touch with your true sexual desires." It is inconceivable to
most humansthat you could make such a request and be of sound mind (Glnody, March 19, 1997).
From the unsympathetic point of view of [(Alan Hale, March 28, 1997)], co-discoverer of the comet and an outspoken
advocate for scientific reason and against superstition, the Heaven's Gate cult was utterly misguided. For Hale, "for all its
beauty . . . [Hale-Bopp] is a dirty snowball that's orbiting the sun. Nothing more. It has no influence on earthly events."
The scientifically reputable SETI (Searching
(Searching for
for Extra-Terrestrial
Extra-TerrestrialIntelligence) League similarly released a statement that
did not lend support to the claims of "radio emissions emanating from an Earth-sized artificial satellite allegedly
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shadowing Comet Hale-Bopp. . . . We in SETI would like nothing more than for these claims to be true, and verifiable.
But faith alone is not proof" [(Shuch, 1997)].
It's important to acknowledge, however, that there is absolutely nothing wrongheaded or out of the norm with the
cosmic question Heaven's Gate was asking. Who hasn't looked up at the nighttime sky and wondered: "Are we alone?"
Author of the 1985 novel Contact , on which last summer's film was based and in which Heaven's Gate can be glimpsed,
astronomer and former member of the SETI advisory board [(Carl Sagan, 1979)] wrote in Cosmic Search: "In the
deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves." Despite their escapism, or perhaps
because of it, the Heaven's Gate cult members were particularly in touch with the childlike wonder that most of us never
quite lose. As a UFO cult, they were attuned to the heavens and, in fact, Nettles had been an astrologer [(Chua-Eoan,
April 7, 1997)]. While the Heaven's Gate cult members undoubtedly were further out on the continuum, many people
have a limited belief in the ability of the stars to portend the future or otherwise attach significance to celestial cycles and
events.[15] While this is exactly the kind of superstition that Hale didn't want to taint his comet, it's hard to ignore this
deep current within human nature, no matter how much science provides rational explanations and despite no solid
evidence from outer space of any other life-forms or earthly visitations. Nor are such feelings entirely irrational: HaleBopp like other comets was said to contain the building blocks of life [(DiChristina, Aug. 1997)]. Everything on
Buckminster Fuller's (1964) "spaceship earth" is, of course, part of the heavens. We are the stuff of stars. In searching
for meaning in the universe, we are also trying to make sense of who we are, where we came from, and where we're
going.
If these New Age concerns don't sound so new, there is good reason. These we-are-stardust-we-are-golden ideas are
once again making the rounds as we approach the next millennium and can be found in abundance on the Internet.
Mostly in their 40s, the Heaven's Gate cult members were of the baby-boomer generation responsible for the PC
revolution of the 1980s and that gravitated to the Net in the early 1990s. Their writings speak of God and the heavenly
garden, which we have to nostalgically return to, in terms that don't significantly differ from how Joni Mitchell captured
the Woodstock moment of 1969. The Heaven's Gate Website links to a few New Age organizations, such as Spirit
Web, information and links on angels, channeling, healing light, reincarnation, yoga, and UFOs; Christ Net, Christian
resources and spiritual guidance in cyberspace; Origin, a global interfaith networked community; and the Millennial
Prophecy Report, "the premiere online news service for the End Times."
Yet these warm and fuzzy vibes could lead the susceptible astray, much as was feared might be the influence of the
"flower children" of the 1960s. One of the Heaven's Gate cult members who committed suicide on March 26 was, in
fact, recruited through the Net.[16] Yvonne McCurdy-Hill, 39 years-old, a postal worker and a mother of five including
week-old twins, became attracted to the cult after reading Applewhite's teachings on the Web, exchanging email with the
group, and experiencing a sense of belonging with the cult that she apparently didn't find elsewhere. With a look of
beatific certainty on her face, McCurdy-Hill says on the exit tapes that "there is nothing for me here" (Students of
Heaven's Gate Expressing Their Thoughts before Exit, March 21, 1997). Six months after joining Heaven's Gate, she
was dead.
But in terms of the Heaven's Gate belief system, suicide was more of a means to an end than The End since their intent
was to reunite with the cosmos, not unlike Timothy Leary and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. On April 21, a
few weeks after the events at Rancho Santa Fe, a sprinkling of ashes belonging to Leary and Roddenberry and a few
others who could afford the interplanetary boost were launched into space on the maiden voyage of a mortuary service
called Celestis, Inc. [(USA Today, April 22, 1997)]. Rkkody, formerly Charles Humphrey (a.k.a. Rick Edwards), who
currently maintains the Right to Know Website as well as the restored Heaven's Gate site, is among the former cult
members who believe that Applewhite and his fellow "crew members" succeeded in their mission. On the Web page
"What If They're Right?" (with perhaps an inadvertent allusion to [(Tom Wolfe, 1966)]'s article about Marshall
McLuhan, "What If He Is Right?"), Rkkody keeps the faith:
What if Do IS from the Kingdom of God? What if He IS the same mind, the samesoul, who was here 2000 years ago in
the body of the one called Jesus? What if they aretelling the TRUTH about how we can enter the Kingdom of Heaven? .
. . [No] one seemsto be asking if maybe these individuals went exactly where they said they were going, tothe Next
Level (What If They're Right? ).
If Applewhite was right, then the 38 crew members have joined Do and Ti within Heaven's Gate. They're flying high
through the universe, New Age angels with new genderless cyborg-vehicles that don't feel pleasure or pain, who have an
eternity in which to follow their bliss, to watch sci fi reruns and to surf the Net without commercial interruption (in this
heavenly vision, bandwidth isn't a problem). Moreover, if he was right, then how long will it be until we start hearing
reports of Applewhite sightings?
Is Cyberculture to Blame?
On Easter Sunday, "Paradise Lost," an editorial by San Francisco-based journalist
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Richard Rodriguez, appeared in the Los Angeles Times:
Marshall Herff Applewhite's book, How and

When "Heaven's Gate"May Be Entered, sets
forth the cult's philosophy. Biblical citations are
used tosubstantiate their position.
In the end, the religion propounded by Heaven's Gate owes more to theAge of Bill Gates and Microsoft than to the Age of Saint
Teresa and the illuminatedmanuscript. Today, North County, San Diego, where the sect settled, is home to a globalvillage of
high-tech, bio-tech, info-tech. . . . A brave new line
line stretched along thePacific coast . . . through the famous Silicon Valley, all
the way north to
to Redmond,Washington.
Redmond,Washington. IsIsit a coincidence of demographics or economics that so much technological
discovery is happening along
along this
this Pacific coast? Or is it again the coastline isencouraging many of us to seek a new world
because the ocean reminds us of land's end? Wemay be living through a period of intellectual discovery and innovation . . . as
great asany in history. Clearly, however, there
there is
is aa lurking
lurking temptation
temptation ---- the
the temptation familiarto earlier California religious sects
-- to fear the coastline and
and fear
fear time,
time, to
to abandon
abandonthe dry, scrub foothills of Rancho Santa Fe and enter the cool of cyberspace,
floatingfree in the night. . . .
Click onto the Web. Enter the
the realm
realm called
called cyberspace
cyberspace where
where all
all information is availableto you. Locate Heaven's Gate. There! In
several colors, blinking, with
with its
its list
list of
of options
options. . . you are now, safely, forever, in cyberspace. The dead yet speak to us on our
computer. One of them
them said,
said, in
in an
an interview
interview before
beforeher
hersuicide
suicide. . . . "There isnothing for us here." She meant that there was no way
for her to go on living in SanDiego,
SanDiego, in
in California,
California, in
in the
the sun light. This is not religion. It is the expression ofdespair in our
technological age[(Rodriguez,
age[(Rodriguez, March 30, 1977)].
Rodriguez is one of the better informed commentators and his thoughts merit some scrutiny. He locates Heaven's Gate's
suicidal renunciation more in what technology is attracting to the West Coast than to the influence of the Internet on its
pilgrims. He associates the cult's religious beliefs with
with an
an unnatural fixation on computer technology and perhaps with
technology in general. Rather than staying in their place as simple labor-saving devices, the mechanisms are running
amuck and ruining human lives. Instead of enhancing our lives, mechanization is impoverishing them. This is a familiar
Luddite or neo-Luddite claim, "It is the expression
expression of
of despair
despair in our technological age," and one that isn't possible to
either wholly agree or disagree with, since it is founded in point of view [(e.g. Mumford, 1934; Ellul,1954; Postman,
1985; Brook & Boal, 1995; Stoll, 1995; Dery, 1996; Noble, 1997)].
But Rodriguez goes a bit further with his description of cyberspace: "floating free in the night. . . . all information is
available to you . . . . safely, forever." Is this heaven or hell? It certainly is imaginative, since most of us probably don't
experience cyberspace quite this poetically. We sit in front of our cathode-ray tubes and keyboards to do our business,
which often means no more than routine correspondence, and we log off. We don't have time to linger and get entranced
by the "colors." This is cyberspace as drug, as hallucinogen, as Internet addiction. A dangerous place. A place where
deluded souls like the Heaven's Gate cult members may take hold and lead others astray. Rodriguez cites the sole cult
member who had been recruited online, McCurdy-Hill, who felt there was nothing more for her on this planet. But
cyberspace resists simple explanations. Rodriguez uses a restricted palette in this portrait of cyberspace, which contains
many colors and means different things to different people [(Jones, 1995; 1997)]. As Jeff Zaleski says in The Soul of
Cyberspace, "[trying] to define cyberspace is like trying to tie a bow on a jellyfish" [(Zaleski, 1997, 30)].
Despite the evidence that the cult
cult was
was more
more about
about UFOs
UFOs and
andmarginalized or pop-culture religion than the Net and the
Net was simply one of the means by which they conveyed information, the persistence of the public's fears as filtered
through the mass media suggests that these claims deserve
deserve to
to be aired and taken seriously and addressed at least in part.
Arguments about Heaven's Gate as a Net accident-waiting-to-happen
accident-waitingare similar to what was said about the CDA -- in
that many felt that it was, and continue to feel that it is, necessary to block harmful information from minds that don't
have the critical ability to filter through spurious from true and arrive at a sensible conclusion. Given the potentially
widespread acceptance of the Internet and its ease of use, ideas, or in the case of the CDA, pornography, can spread
more easily online than through print and broadcast, which have a limited audience or require more specialized skills and
equipment in order to publish or transmit information.
Another line of thought that doesn't get much play in the media, but is a pressing concern of the government and military,
is information warfare, a form of terrorism.[17] It's easy to view the Heaven's Gate group as more pitiful than threatening
-- and as Ted Turner bluntly pointed
pointed out,
out, practically speaking, they hurt no one but themselves -- but nevertheless there
are those charged with the protection of
of the
the citizenry who feel that such ideas must be carefully controlled lest they get
out of hand and encourage mass hysteria, incendiary behavior, and worse. [(President Clinton, March 27, 1997)], who
found the suicides "sickening . . . shocking," said, "I think it's important that we . . . try to determine what, in fact,
motivated those people, and what all of us can do to make sure that there aren't other people thinking that way out there
in our country, that aren't so isolated that they can create a world for themselves that may justify that kind of thing. It's
very troubling to me." Attorney General Janet Reno said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was "monitoring" the
case and standing by "ready to assist," although there was "no indication of any federal crime" [(Orange County
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Register, March 28, 1997)]. The men in black were prepared to take the appropriate measures, should alien-abduction
frenzy have suddenly seized the nation.
In a surprising editorial in Newsweek , Geoffrey Cowley cited Aaron Lynch who drew on [(Richard Dawkins, 1989)]:
[As] the Heaven's Gate tragedy reminds us, hosts who swallow both theheaven-is-ours and the end-is-near memes may
conclude the end is theirs to hasten -- andhasten it. But a virus that kills its host doesn't always kill itself. . . . "Let'ssay
100 million people were exposed to the Heaven's Gate meme [on television] as a resultof the 39 suicides," Lynch
speculated. "If one in a million of those peoplecontracted the meme, the suicides would have yielded 100 new
infections" [(Cowley, April 14, 1997, 14)].
Heaven's Gate could be considered dangerous just because of the existence of their ideas, which could spread through
media and take on an untoward life of their own like a mutant virus or cancer. Digital code is alive and seeks to remain
alive, obeying nothing like Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics."[18] In Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines,
Social Systems, and the Economic World, Wired editor Kevin Kelly says that: "The meanings of 'mechanical' and 'life'
are both stretching until all complicated things can be perceived as machines, and all self-sustaining machines can be
perceived as alive. . . . The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two
really are, and have always been, of one being" [(Kelly, 1994, 13)]. Kelly terms this merging "neo-biology."
Perhaps if the Net can be thought of as a neo-biological organism, then it can heal itself, protecting itself from ideas that
could possibly spread out of control. The ethos of the Net that applies to censorship may act as censorship if, as
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gilmore anthropomorphically asserted in The Virtual
Community , "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" [(as cited in Rheingold, 1993, 7)]. Maybe
the Net also has the volition to route around evil memes and its own bad neighborhoods. Even if Charles Manson,
considered to be a far more dangerous false prophet than Marshall Applewhite, is successful in uploading a home page,
it's unlikely that he would be heard above the cacophony of other voices, which surely includes voices that would arise in
protest against him.[19] And hopefully most of us online who are thinking adults are unlikely to jump off a cliff, lemminglike, because a charismatic West Coast father-figure commands us, be it Applewhite, Manson, or the Reverend Schuler.
Nevertheless one death is still one too many. Rodriguez reminds us that McCurdy-Hill abandoned her five children and
worldly possessions to join Heaven's Gate after being attracted to Applewhite's teachings on the Web. Zaleski says:
Those most vulnerable to a cult's message -- the lonely, the shy, misfits,outcasts -- are often attracted to the Net,
relishing its power to allow communicationwith others while maintaining anonymity. While the Net offers an
unprecedented menu ofchoice, it also allows budding fanatics to focus on just one choice -- to tune into thesame Web
site, the same newsgroup, again and again, for hours on end, shut off from allother stimuli -- and to isolate themselves
from conflicting beliefs. Above all, theheadiness of cyberspace, its divorce from the body and the body's incarnate
wisdom, giveseasy rise to fantasy, paranoia, delusions of grandeur. It wasn't a great surprise to learnthat the members of
Heaven's Gate were described . . . as being "unnaturallypale," or that they emphasized nonsexuality even to the extent of
castration andhoped to "shed" their bodily "containers" in order to pass on to the"Level Above Human" [(Zaleski,
1997, 249)].
Zaleski gets at the heart of why the Net may have contributed to the events that led to Rancho Santa Fe. Freedom from
the physical body and the free reign given to the imagination in cyberspace, the very elements of psychic freedom
celebrated by the Net's most prominent spokespeople, could have contributed to the cult members' decision to go the
next, if illogical, step. Generational and pop-culture commonality are among the reasons why the beliefs that Applewhite
preached happen to fit with some of the most influential ideas circulating within cyberculture. It's within the realm of
possibility that Applewhite's ministry plus cyberculture was a toxic mix.
Therefore, rather than dismissing the Heaven's Gate group as extremists -- even though the evidence strongly supports
such a view -- let's instead navely consider them to be representative of garden-variety cyberculture, which is what the
mass media did in its initial coverage of the Heaven's Gate deaths. Let's examine some of the aspects of digital culture
that are most commonly considered to be potentially dangerous and explore them despite the fact that due to his age
difference and background in UFOlogy, Applewhite was coming from a different place and probably wasn't much
influenced by cyberculture. His New Age followers who worked online and used that medium to communicate probably
read Wired, surfed the Web, and participated in Usenet. For the sake of argument, let's assume that this is so and follow
through on three sets of ideas central to cyberculture that seem relevant to Heaven's Gate: cyborgs, physical
transcendence, and polymorphous online identity.
Cyborg: Meat Machine
In the sense in which [(Donna Haraway, 1991; 1997)] and [(Sandy Stone, 1995)] use the term, the Heaven's Gate cult
members can be thought of as cyborgs. Heaven's Gate's neutering, their fascination with fringe faith and science, their
identification with technologically mediated gods and goddesses (whether personified as the Messiah, the Two, or a
deity drawn from popular culture) not only evinces the dualism of the technorganic merging of human with machine but
perhaps points up what can go wrong when the celebration of the deeply unnatural moves beyond theory and into the
realm of experience. To paraphrase Stone, the members of Heaven's Gate "fell in love with their prosthesis."
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In "Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialization and Its Link to the Religious Function of
Popular Culture," Brenda Brasher follows John Fiske, as well as Haraway and Stone, to offer a religio-cyborg theory in
which subcultures may find their own meanings simultaneous with or oppositional to their producers' intentions:
Maneuvering among the contradictory images, ethics, and narratives oftechnologically- mediated popular culture . . .
meaning-seeking cyborgs reconfigure thebits and bites of mass-produced culture into popular culture faiths. Evidence
attesting tothe religious function of popular culture abounds. It has . . . . given birth to a zealot:the Unabomber, a
bizarre, antisocial cyborg trying to usher in a technological apocalypseon his own. Today's borged humans may or may
not attend an overt religious group; but theyprobably do view . . . "Star Trek: The Next Generation" . . ."religiously" and
discuss them with others, treating their fictional orquasi-fictional scenarios as a base for determining behavioral norms
and creating newvisions of community. . . . As Thomas Jefferson once treated the Bible, cyborgs sortthrough the
technologically-mediated offerings of popular culture to select what they findreligiously useful. Developing their social
ethics in television talk shows, theirtheology in science fiction . . . cyborg religionists refashion the pleasure offerings of
modernity into an anchor composed of the world to ground themselves within it [(Brasher, 1996, 821-22)].
Brasher's thoughts were written before the Heaven's Gate tragedy, but they are very much on target. The Heaven's
Gate's cult members can be thought of as cyborgs "who sort through the technologically-mediated offerings of popular
culture to select what they find religiously useful." As users, they identified with their computer systems to the extent that
the interface became part of themselves, like an organic or bodily system. This could work in reverse as well, as when
prosthetics means a reduction in body parts such as is required to "neuter [a] vehicle." It's not altogether clear, however,
that "the pleasure offerings of modernity" provided much of a grounding for the cult members. It may be that "reality
hacking," as Stone puts it, opened up boundaries into popular culture and cyberspace that the Heaven's Gate cult
members were unable to explore without peril.
In "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Haraway
outlines her vision of woman as Other, cyborg as Other, and cyborg as transgressor of the boundaries between human,
nonhuman, and inhuman, and by extension other naturally assumed patriarchal and national ideologies: "Cyborg imagery
can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. It
means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound
in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess" [(Haraway, 1985, 181)]. Haraway prefers deus ex
machina to mythological deity as a way of resolving the binaries and atomization intrinsic to digitization and other
manmade categories. Empowered as a cyborg, Haraway's transgendered, multicultural goddess is conceived as a kind of
postmodern gladiator -- not unlike some of Gibson's fictional heroines.
Rodriguez's conception of cyberspace is largely drawn from [(William Gibson, 1984)], as is much of what we think of as
cyberculture. Author of the cyberpunk science fiction classic Neuromancer, Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" from
cybernetics. Although dismissed by Marvin Minksy [(as cited in Stork, 1997, 30)] as being all "atmosphere," style with
no cybersubstance, Gibson's cyborgs have been enormously influential in the Net community, where its users often
overlook Gibson's dark undertones and embrace the fictional world and genre he created. Fitted with artificial body
parts imbued with intelligence, the characters in the Sprawl trilogy seek more and greater simulated sensory immersion.
The neural Net is alive and pulsating, inhabiting a space where mind and digital code merge and secede from the physical
body or "meat."
In terms of Heaven's Gate, however, what authors such as Gibson, Haraway, and Stone actually say may be less
important than how their ideas are received and reshaped by cyberculture, especially since any linkage of their ideas with
the cult is conjecture. What matters is that they have a pervasive influence. In Wired, the unofficial voice of the Net, the
cyborg is glamorized and romanticized and generally sold to its readers. Haraway's desire to become empowered as a
cyborg goddess and Gibson's bleak, mechanized vision informs countless technophilic articles and advertisements, such
as the regular "Fetish: Technolust" column. Arthur Kroker notes in "Virtual Capitalism" that what's being sold is: "[not] a
wired culture, but a virtual culture that is wired shut: compulsively fixated on digital technology as a source of salvation
from everyday life, and determined to exclude from public debate any perspective that is not a cheerleader for the
coming-to-be of the fully realized technological society" [(Kroker, 1996, 168)]. We're incessantly reminded that
cyborgs are cool, technology is sacred, and "wetware," or brain plus mind, is the only bodily organ worth recycling
[(Rucker, 1997)].
It's not difficult to put zero and one together to see how this techophilic mindset might have influenced Heaven's Gate.
Already halfway there because of their avid interest in science fiction and UFOs, through familiarity with the Net and its
culture the younger Heaven's Gate cult members who contributed to Usenet and the Web very well might have
encountered a lifestyle that underscored the devaluing of the human and the reification of the mechanical that already
attracted them in the teachings of Marshall Applewhite. Thus the alienation they already felt was given the luster of some
added "cultural capital" [(Bourdieu, 1984)]. But as they seem to have experienced in their other social encounters, online
too the Heaven's Gate cult members were outsiders with their noses pressed to the virtual glass. As cyborgs they
encountered one more reason to leave their meat behind.
Transcending the Body
Frank Biocca writes on "The Cyborg's Dilemma":
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The more natural the interface the more "human" it is, the more itadapts to the human body and mind. The more the
interface adapts to the human body andmind, the more the body and mind adapts to the non-human interface. Therefore,
the morenatural the interface, the more we become "unnatural," the more we becomecyborgs [(Biocca, 1997)].
Is the technorganic process so insidious and naturalized, as Biocca suggests, that we accept its reality and semblance
thereof without critical distance? Biocca's reading of the cyborg draws on McLuhan's (1965) formulation of media,
which extends human consciousness, enabling the audience, or user, to have more open channels and greater immersion,
to become completely surrounded or enveloped by media, as is the experience of virtual reality or VR. The more
successful the interface, the more we are unaware of its effect, as with magic or cinematic tricks in which we don't see
the apparatus at work but accept its fiction as reality [(e.g., Baudry, 1975; Comolli, 1980; Metz, 1981)]. In addition to
a willing suspension of disbelief, what we are aware of is an enlargement of our consciousness and capacity to receive
information. We are there, without matter, telepresent [(Lombard & Ditton, 1997)].
The Heaven's Gate cult members were attracted to the idea of leaving the body for a technologically- or computermediated consciousness. We know that they identified with science fiction and fantasized about being "beamed up."
Indeed they thought that they were casting aside their human shells for alien embodiment. Perhaps ideas about VR as
opposed to RL, or real life, filtered down to the cult members because of their familiarity with the Net and through
working in the field on the West Coast. The dilemma for them, therefore, would've been that they lacked the common
sense and perspective necessary to separate fact from fiction, RL from hallucinogenic VR (used here to mean both VR in
the technical sense as well as what's popularly conceived of as VR, which is a combination of communication in
cyberspace and highly immersive experiences, such as Rodriguez describes).
From this assumption, we might infer that for Heaven's Gate the idea of alien abduction was analogous to a VR "trip"; in
other words, that they didn't realize that there was no return ticket. Leaving aside for the moment the thorny question of
whose reality is the "real" reality, we would have to assume that somewhere in the back of their minds the Heaven's Gate
cult members didn't wholly believe that they were leaving this world for the next, just as the real-life consequences of
castration weren't wholly apparent to them. For this interpreter, that's a difficult conclusion to arrive at. On a sliding scale
of reality perception, sex and death seem vividly real. Moreover a willingness to commit suicide as an act of faith is just
about as strong an avowal as can be made. Suicide and semblance would seem to be mutually exclusive; hence, since
suicide cannot be feigned, it must be real. Suicide is a dilemma unavailable to cyborgs -- although where do cyborgs go
after they die is an interesting spin on the question posed by [(Adele Clarke, 1995)] ("Mommy, Where Do Cyborgs
Come From Anyway?"). Nevertheless, however deluded someone considering suicide may be, it seems that a moment
of self-preserving clarity would be likely to arise while arriving at the decision to permanently relinquish life in favor of
something else, even if immortality is thought to be one of the options available after voluntary death.
But perhaps these reflections themselves are the product of popular culture, the life-flashing-before-one's-eyes of a
thousand television commercials and countless second-rate Hamlets staring into the abyss. Therefore, let's dismiss the
seriousness with which Heaven's Gate acted and let's assume that they didn't make the conscious decision to end their
lives. Instead, let's assume that they were somehow more influenced by the Net than by Marshall Applewhite, however
unlikely that may have been. Let's go even further and assume that the Heaven's Gate cult members wholly subscribed to
the ethos of the Net arguably best represented by its ambassador at large, John Perry Barlow. Longtime WELL
member, EFF co-founder, and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Barlow espoused the online union of minds in "A
Cyberspace Independence Declaration," written on the occasion of the passage of the Telecommunications Act with its
CDA provision:
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thoughtitself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our
communications. Ours is a worldthat is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live. . . . We arecreating
a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter howsingular, without fear of being coerced
into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts ofproperty, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to
us. They are basedon matter. There is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, wecannot obtain
order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightenedself-interest, and the commonweal, our governance
will emerge. Our identities may bedistributed across many of your jurisdictions [(Barlow, Feb. 8, 1996)].
Barlow describes a cyberspace that is intangible and incorporeal, yet it lives and breathes and defies the material world's
preconceptions and containers. It is a world of unparalleled freedom, of freedoms only promised in the First
Amendment: freedom of speech, of religion, from law, and from the body. The Internet stretches across national and
state boundaries, respecting none. But rather than falling apart into chaos and anarchy, the online world will be governed
by "ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal." Interestingly, Barlow says that his manifesto "passed through
me, and as soon as it got out there [on the Net] it took on a life of its own. Literally. And continues to cruise around
cyberspace without my doing anything whatsoever" [(as cited in Zaleski, 1997, 37)]. Barlow's ideas circulated through
the circuitry of the Net far beyond the intentions of their producer, taking on their own neo-biological life.
A latter day Thomas Paine, Barlow's ideas are intended to provoke and stimulate discussion. But even taken at face
value, could the members of Heaven's Gate have confused Barlow's rhetorical flourishes with the bluster of their spiritual
leader? To accept this idea, you would have to infer that talk of civil disobedience, by its mere existence, is dangerous,
an idea that is absurd in light of the First Amendment (although ideological censorship is obviously one of the uses that
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might've been made of the CDA). Furthermore, there is nothing in Barlow's commonly known writings that is anything
but life-affirming. Indeed, he's talked movingly about the death of his former partner and of "soul data," or life
experiences shared across wires that carry the essence of their senders' humanity [(Barlow, et al. 1995, 38-39)].
Without the human element, zeros and ones are nothing more than information, data without knowledge or wisdom
[(Zaleski, 1997)], lacking what Walter Benjamin called "aura" (1936). Barlow envisions a cyberspace peopled with
minds who freely exchange ideas without the fear of reprisal that comes with the physical world with its materialist legal
structure and bodily punishment [(Foucault, 1975)]. But he is never nihilistic. Rather Barlow could be and often is
censured for his tendency to see only the positive aspects of the virtual community, although for Barlow this doesn't
come at the expense of experiential life, which for him means living on a ranch in Wyoming.
If not Barlow, then maybe former Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary more properly represents dangerous
ideas in cyberspace. A threat to reality lovers everywhere, Leary was generally considered to be the world's foremost
authority on mind-expanding experiences from hallucinogens to VR. In Chaos and Cyberculture, Leary expounds on,
among other things, the ecstatic joy found in communal sharing in virtual environments, the organic merging with the
digital in a realm free of physical constraints that is paradoxically more human than manmade, more spiritual than
material: "The closest you are probably ever going to get to navigating your soul is when you are piloting your mind
through your brain or its external stimulation on cybernetic screens" [(Leary, 1994, 5)].
Or if not Leary, than maybe we should point the accusatory finger at VR pioneer and musician Jaron Lanier, who
similarly unsettles because he doesn't accept empiricist definitions of reality and consciousness. Contra Barlow and
Leary, Lanier argues that VR doesn't exist without bodies and that, unlike virtual amusement-park rides, the medium is
interactive to such an extent that "if you don't do anything, you won't perceive anything -- the only thing that makes
virtual reality seem real is your activity" [(as cited in Parker, 1997)]. For Lanier, virtual consciousness is inseparable
from bodily consciousness.
These "digerati" [(Brockman, 1996)] hold different views on bodily liberation through virtuality. But what partially sets
Barlow, Leary, and Lanier apart from the Heaven's Gate cult members is an insistence on cyberculture. Practicing a
kind of cyber-ecology, they've put back into the virtual community whatever they've taken from it, which is quite
different from Heaven's Gate, which never seemed to consider the Net to be anything more than a cheap medium for
broadcasting messages. These men are or were not ostracized from society and they don't preach estrangement and
despair. Barlow, Leary, and Lanier are among digital culture's heroes and icons whose feet are or were firmly planted on
the fluid "ground" of cyberspace. Rather than viewing RL and VR as oppositional, they see these ways of thinking about
consciousness as being continuous and not even as particularly new. They are comfortable with the idea that as social
actors we're increasingly inhabiting a technologically mediated environment in which the boundaries between RL and VR
are blurred [(Laurel, 1993)]. But can the same be said of fragile individuals with low self-esteem, the type of people
drawn to cults, followers rather than leaders? Might reality-bending media technology conversely limit rather than extend
the consciousness of people for whom common-sense reality is already difficult to negotiate?
Online Multiplicity
In their "Earth Exit Statements," the Heaven's Gate cult members at first glance uncannily resemble MIT sociology
professor Sherry Turkle's subjects, who notably talk of reality being "just another window" and "cycling through"
different personae. Through MUDs and MOOs, Turkle's users have found an outlet for behaviors that might not be
acceptable in RL or the conditions of RL may preclude being as fully present as is possible through multiple online
identities. For Turkle, the self is protean:
The essence of this self is not unitary, nor are its parts stable entities. Itis easy to cycle through its aspects and these
are themselves changing through constantcommunication with each other. . . . Dennett's notion of multiple drafts is
analogous to the experience of having several versions of a document open on a computerscreen where the user is able
to move between them at will. The presence of the draftsencourages a respect for the many different versions while it
imposes a certain distancefrom them. No one aspect can be claimed as the absolute, true self. When I got to know
French Sherry I no longer saw the less confident English-speaking Sherry as my oneauthentic self. What most
characterizes the model of a flexible self is that the lines ofcommunication between its various aspects are open. The
open communication encourages anattitude of respect for the many within us and the many within others [(Turkle,1995,
261)].
Turkle's users are so close to their systems that online life is analogous to multitasking, to having several windows open
simultaneously. In a vast improvement over experiential life, there even is an undo button as well as a way to search and
replace. Many of us enjoy this level of comfort with our computers and find that simultaneously playing different social
roles feels perfectly "natural" online. We may, for instance, carry on several email conversations at the same time or in
close succession and have wide variations in tone and intimacy between the messages.
The Heaven's Gate cult members, on the other hand, weren't interested in "open communication." What they were
interested in was leaving the world behind. The sect's Website encourages online visitors to "find your 'boarding pass' to
leave with us during this brief 'window'" (Heaven's Gate, 1997). Rather than cycling through different aspects of
themselves, what they wanted to undergo was a chrysalis from which they would on one hand emerge a cyborg-alien
and on the other hand, would never emerge from again. In his or her exit statement, Chkody wrote:
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[Our] exit will probably make many feel that we were wrong in thinking the NextLevel was a physical place. In reality, we
will just have made our transition to a moreadvanced Next Level vehicle (more physical and real than this body) much
easier. You see,it is very much like the caterpillar making the transition towards becoming a butterfly --discarding the old
shell so the new one inside can emerge (Chkody, March 22, 1997).
The differences between these cyber-personae styles can be seen through online gaming. Compare what Turkle
observes about the players in a Star Trek game:
In an interactive, text-based computer game designed to represent a worldinspired by the television series Star Trek:
The Next Generation, thousands ofplayers spend up to eighty hours a week participating in intergalactic exploration and
wars. Through typed descriptions and typed commands, they create characters who havecasual and romantic sexual
encounters, hold jobs and collect paychecks, attend rituals andcelebrations, fall in love and get married. To the
participants, such goings-on can begripping: "This is more real than my real life," says a character who turns outto be a
man playing a woman who is pretending to be a man. In this game the self isconstructed and the rules of social
interaction are built, not received [(Turkle, 1995, 10)].
. . . with what one of the cult members, who didn't pretend to transcend gender, who may well have been among those
who underwent an irrevocable surgical procedure to ensure it, said on a farewell tape:
We watch a lot of Star Trek, a lot of Star Wars , it's just, tous, it's just like going on a holodeck. We've been training on a
holodeck . . . [and] nowit's time to stop. The game's over. It's time to put into practice what we've learned. Wetake off the
virtual reality helmet . . . go back out of the holodeck to reality to bewith, you know, the other members on the craft in
the heavens (Students of Heaven's Gate Expressing TheirThoughts before Exit, March 21, 1997).
While Turkle's subject seems to consider online gaming to be serious fun, if perhaps played a bit too close to the edge
for those who prefer their reality less equivocal, the Heaven's Gate cult member has, it could be said, gone well over that
edge. The "social construction" [(Berger & Luckmann, 1966)] of the cult member's reality not only inverts reality and
virtuality from a common-sense standpoint, there just about is no common-sense standpoint. What we might think of as
reality, the cult member cited above considered a game, and what the cult member calls reality is nothing like the reality
known outside of the sect. Chkody made a similar statement: "Humans have accepted such a fairy tale, that most have
no idea of the reality of the Next Level" (Chkody, March 22, 1997).
The Heaven's Gate cyborgs may have lost the ability to differentiate reality from virtuality from hyperreality [(Eco, 1975;
Baudrillard, 1981)]. Toggling between mundane and celestial causes and events, biology and science fiction, the self
before joining the cult and the androgynous selves they became afterwards, the members of Heaven's Gate seem to have
lacked a coherent sense of self. Like Turkle's users, they conceived of their daily existence as cycling or channel-surfing
between programs. Life could be turned on and off like a television or computer, the mechanisms of media technology
becoming an extension of their I/O identity.
But in an extraordinary identification with popular culture, the cult members seem to have taken fandom to the extreme of
seeking to merge with their favorite shows by beaming up to join the pop icons they were dying to meet. Life after death
doesn't appear to have been any less certain or significant than flipping the remote to tune in to another show or surf to
another Web page. As with a particularly immersive VR entertainment ride, the Heaven's Gate cult member cited above
seems to have envisioned death as the ultimate Trekkie trip to the final frontier. It doesn't appear that the Star Trek
allusion was meant metaphorically, e.g., committing suicide is like leaving the holodeck. It seems that the cult member
literally meant that exiting the planet is a means for entering the "craft in the heavens." Other than in the unlikely event that
their alien abduction was successful, it seems that they desired to enact what [(Minksy, 1980)] originally defined as
telepresence, an illusion of synchronous transportation to a real location through telecommunication devices, except that
the location of their illusion was unreal, or its reality was death (which may or may not have been what they wished for),
and equally unreal was the mode of telecommunication device, the holodeck.[20]
It's tempting, quite tempting, to do some second- and third-hand armchair psychoanalysis on the deceased Heaven's
Gate cult members and to view them as borderline personalities, indicative of the kind of postmodern slippage that
Turkle describes. Significantly, Turkle too is uncertain as to whether her subjects are dysfunctional, meaning that they
may suffer from Internet addiction (which may be analogous to cultism), schizophrenia, wish fulfillment, or a host of other
social maladjustments, or whether the phenomena that she's observed over the past decade is developing into a new
technormalcy [(Turkle, 1984; 1995)]. But there is an enormous difference between Turkle's subjects and the cult
members. Where Turkle's users speak of an abundance of personality and perhaps splintered selves, multifaceted
realities, it's not clear that the Heaven's gate cult members had a firm grasp on any identity, singular or plural, real or
fantastic. Under Applewhite's ministry, they sought the annihilation of their individuality, then the annihilation of their
sexuality, and finally the annihilation of themselves. Arthur Kroker writes on "reverse nihilism":
Reverse nihilism . . . the nihilistic will turned inwards, decomposingsubjectivity, reducing the self to an object of
conscience- and body-vivisectioning. Whatdoes it mean when the body is virtualized without a sustaining ethical
vision? Can anyonebe strong enough for this? What results is rage against the body: a hatred of existence sotrue and
so sharp that it can only be satisfied by an abandonment of flesh andsubjectivity and, with it, a flight into virtuality.
Virtuality without ethics is a primalscene of social suicide: a site of mass cryogenics where bodies are quick-frozen for
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future resequencing by the archived data networks. The virtual class can be this dynamicbecause it is already the
aftershock of the living dead: body vivisectonists and early(mind) abandoners surfing the Net on a road trip to the
virtual inferno [(Kroker, 1996, 169)].
Fascination with bodily prosthetics turned inward to become self-hating vivisection perhaps contributed to the
abandonment of matter and embrace of the bits and bytes of virtuality. Heaven's Gate is now among the living dead,
forever digital (or however long "forever" might be online). On the question of responsibility, however, this observer
probably wouldn't damn to quite the extent of Kroker, who wrote well before the Heaven's Gate suicides. My position is
closer to that of Douglas Rushkoff, who wrote in his New York Times Syndicate column, "Internet Apocalypse": "Did
the Internet lead 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult to commit mass suicide? Of course not. But the way the Internet
changes how its users think about themselves and their relationship to the universe may have contributed to this tragedy"
[(Rushkoff, March 30, 1997)]. Rushkoff speculated that it was the cult's faulty pattern recognition that may have led
Applewhite's followers to look for answers where there aren't any. Or the apocalypse itself offers an answer, however
untidy, whereas online there are always more open-ended uncertainties and linkages [(Eco, 1962)].
In digital environments in which users can be human and machine, mind and body, man, woman, and borg, the only
nontechnical limits are the imagination and the capacity of the user to cope with the uncharted possibilities of cyberspace.
For some people this kind of fourth- or perhaps even fifth-order simulation may prove too much. When there is no
"there" there, when the conditions of real life are already fantastic, continued contact with the virtual life could lead to a
Rancho Santa Fe. In light of the Rancho Santa Fe suicides that took place on March 26, it's difficult to deny such a
possibility or its actuality. While the Net isn't to blame for the Heaven's Gate deaths, it's possible that Applewhite's
teachings collided with just enough other factors, including some ideas central to cyberculture, to enable the creation of
conditions that might favor mass suicide. Life in the cult ensured alienation from society, and the cult members weren't
encouraged to develop selves that could withstand some of the more potent seductions of virtuality. Without the
restraints of responsibility, family, and a grounding in the community, cyber or real, the cult members didn't have the
real-world anchor they may well have needed. Instead, they were free to drift further and further out in cyberspace and
into the cosmos, ultimately unable to connect with the living. Heaven's Gate looked to the heavens for meaning but found
answers in pop culture gods and goddesses who visit our homes on television screens and computer monitors, whose
talking heads beckon to us from deep within mediated space.
Afterlife
Despite the ample documentation they left behind, we still know little about Heaven's
Gate. The cultists remain enigmatic, Other. It's difficult to understand them. The cult
members were so "far out" that the inclination is to read into them whatever we want
to see because on a superficial level they continue to seem ridiculous. How could
anyone believe that the "literal heavens" could be reached by "[backing] out of the
holodeck" to hop aboard a flying saucer traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet?
The Higher Source sitepartially serves as an
online portfolio of the cult's Web work.
Seeming to anticipatetheir parodists, at the
bottom of the page they posted this sample
advertisement, whichdepicts a flying saucer
leaving the planet. The ad says: "Planning a
Future Move? ASKyour Continuum Rep about
our New, Improved, Instantaneous Relocation
Plan! Contact yourlocal Q-HAUL Center . . .
for the latest in moving technology and service.
2002 Q-HAULInterGalactic." "Contact" is
likely intended as a sly allusion to aliencontact.
O'Leary notes that:
The significance of the fact that Heaven's Gate derived inspiration from popularscience fiction in equal measure with
religious scripture has yet
yet to
to be
be realized. Themedia coverage of Heaven's Gate gives ample evidence of the media's
tendency tomarginalize these groups by emphasizing their differences
differences from
from the rest of us whileneglecting their
similarities. One
One theme
theme that
that came
camethrough
throughinininterview
interviewafter
afterinterview with those who had recent contact with the sect
members was the reporters'insistent
reporters'insistent questioning
questioning about signs of mental illness or suicidal tendencies. Theinterviewers
were clearly nonplused by the responses, which emphasized the friendliness,professionalism and reliability of the
individuals in the group [[(O'Leary,
(O'Leary,April, 1997)].
This is what I too have found, both in

in the
the interviews
interviews I've
I've viewed and read and those I've conducted with a few surviving
cult members. The people associated with Heaven's Gate that I've consulted, largely over practical matters such as
copyright permission and to get to the bottom of rumors, have been unhesitatingly cooperative and pleasant. As offputting or alienating as their beliefs might be, as computer-mediated
computer-mediated personae (since I haven't met these people face to
face) they seem well within the range of normalcy -- they seem, for instance, far less remarkable than the people Sherry
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Turkle interviews. O'Leary partially attributes their paradoxical fervor to millennial fever. He seems to view Heaven's
Gate as perhaps the most significant thus far of the bizarre incidents that may take place as we approach the year 2000.
Fellow millenarian Hillel Schwartz might concur. Senior Fellow at the Millennium Institute, Schwartz has reviewed the
historical evidence and developed a theoretical framework within which Heaven's Gate might be placed. The great
ingresses, Schwartz argues, are not arbitrarily the products of calendars nor are they wholly attributable to cosmic
influences. Whatever the cause, many of us seem to feel large-scale numerical changes. The change to the year 2000 is
deeply meaningful in human terms, soul data or neo-biology writ large. In "Generational Change, Historical Age,
Calendar Page," Schwartz delineates seven "Tendencies at Centuries' Ends," paraphrased below:
1. Compulsively Counting Down: Reckoning in terms of numbers and seeingpatterns. "The numbers that count
down to century's end add up, literally, toone's identity."
2. Trying to Keep Up with the Times: The feeling that things are speedingup, trying to avert disaster.
3. Feeling Distraught and Depleted: "Centuries' ends are taken toheart as ends of the line. . . . Suicide is viewed
4.
5.
6.
7.
with enormous seriousness, forthe ending of one's own life is . . . resonant of larger ends: toxic pollution, mass
extinctions, a dead planet."
Getting Confused about Conclusions: "Centuries' ends seeminterminable; the end has been held in sight for so
long that it seems to take forever foranything decisive to happen." The desire to bring closure leads people to
take hastyaction.
Searching for Signs and Synchronicity: "[No] coincidence can befree of hidden meaning. People are obsessed
with conjunctions (astrological oreconomic), correlations (poetic or politic), convergences (historic or
harmonic)."
Going for Broke: "At centuries' ends people believe that events andinventions are spinning out of control. . . .
Our world is broken; we must fix it,now or never. . . . People fantasize new sources of energy which can keep
humanityhumming."
Thinking Globally: "We look for 'universal' languages ortechnologies to unite the world. We are inclined
toward short-term prophecies of --and speedy therapies for -- personal, familial, social, and ultimately global
transformation" [ (Schwartz,1996)].
Schwartz's prescient thoughts provide a useful way to contextualize Heaven's Gate. We can view the group less as an
anomaly than as a millennial case-study. Indeed, the cult members' "Earth Exit Statements" suggest that they may well
have been acting under the influence of Schwartz's seven tendencies or symptoms (counting down, getting confused,
searching for signs, etc.). Moreover, we may feel such foreboding ourselves, even if we might not carry through to the
extent of Heaven's Gate. Just a week and a half after the Rancho Santa Fe suicides, the countdown of the 1000 days
until the dawn of 2000 was widely celebrated by calendar-watchers and other millennial enthusiasts. These cosmic
markers have deep personal meaning, which in turn become cultural touchstones like where you were when you heard
about JFK or when the Challenger exploded. The poignant ache of expectation associated with New Year's Eve and
birthdays will be felt that much more keenly, we can assume, with the change to the year 2000 and perhaps more so with
2001, the true cusp of the third millennium. Other well-wishers recently celebrated HAL's "birthday."[21] The
ambivalent Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic mainframe with the Panopticon-like lens of Arthur C. Clarke's and
Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 (1968) "became operational" in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997, not far from the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the birthplace of Mosaic and distributed hypermedia. Another
strange coincidence? Another sign?
Still Heaven's Gate eludes us. Millennialism is an attractive answer, but like blaming the Net or cyberculture, it may be a
bit too convenient, incomplete. As with most handy case-studies, its subjects exceed their explanations just as the group
wasn't completely successful with determining the meaning they so ardently desired that their mass suicide would bring,
that they went to such lengths to broadcast on the Net and through other media. They are dead, yes, which is as final an
end to life as there can be on this planet, as offline as offline can be, but still their story is being inscribed. Hale-Bopp did
not bring closure to Heaven's Gate.
Former members have set up new Websites, sometimes in conflict with each other (and over, it can be assumed,
interpretations of what will become the Heaven's Gate gospel). At least one former member ended his life and there
have been copycat suicides. The sect's former Rancho Santa Fe mansion is on the market. ABC is filming a docudrama
of the Heaven's Gate story. Right to Know carries on Heaven's Gate's evangelical work and Higher Source still provides
Web services for clients. The access counters on their sites offer evidence that the Heaven's Gate Websites continue to
receive a hefty number of visitors, months after the initial prurient interest has passed.[22] The group will continue to be
a mass media -- not specifically a Net -- phenomenon for years to come. Their ideas, dangerous or silly depending on
your point of view, may well continue to spread, which is, of course, partially what they hoped to accomplish through
their online/offline deaths.
In 1997, the Net became an extension of the mass media. If Heaven's Gate was the Internet's first great mystery [(Potz,
March 28, 1997)], then their suicides may also serve in retrospect as signifying the beginning of the Net's demystification
process. The maverick status of the Net has become cumbersome, a backward-looking reminder of the good old days
of the Silicon Valley gold rush. The cyberfrontier is fading as quickly as did the mythic American West of the previous
century. And surely for many, a tamed, suburbanized, sanitized Net is not altogether unattractive. We want a Net that is
safe for families, even if the CDA overshot the mark. One of the promises of Vice President Gore's Information
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Highway, which is roaring through the cyberfrontier like the locomotive and telegraph that preceded it, is law and order,
necessary for colonization and economic development.[23] Fringe groups such as Heaven's Gate no longer are
completely acceptable to either long-time members of the virtual community or its newbie settlers. The taint of
association isn't welcomed by the former, and the latter are afraid of contact with their children.
As discussed throughout, the practices of the Heaven's Gate group were more atypical than typical of Net standards and
behavior. They were alienated from and alienated other Net users. Applewhite's followers belong to the traditions of
which they were knowingly a part, e.g., religious martyrdom, UFOlogy, messianic cults, millennialism. The Net is almost
incidental. But if we want to go ahead and blame the Net and cyberculture, we need the right supporting evidence. Yes,
there are some ideas central to cyberculture that, no matter how tangential to Heaven's Gate, may be relevant. And it's
true that if we want to make a case, perhaps there is something inherently dangerous about cyborgs, bodily liberation,
and multiple online identities for some people who lack a secure sense of self. Perhaps the Heaven's Gate cult members
would've been better off if they hadn't been exposed to the Net and those of us on the Net would've been better off if
we hadn't been exposed to their memes. But it's equally true that the comet may have come at the wrong time. That the
dawn of the year 2000 may account for their lunacy. That exposure to Southwestern UFOlogy unduly influenced them at
a vulnerable time. That they may have seen too many episodes of The X-Files. Their credulity and the syncretist nature
of their beliefs accommodates a wide range of explanations.
Most of us, perhaps instinctively, view human and machine as antipodal. We partially gauge our humanity by contrast
with machines, which may lack immortal souls but are oblivious to the indignities of mortal aging. Who doesn't want to
become just a wee bit more cyborg-like if it means improving on our humanity in the here-and-now? To want a nip here,
a tuck there is perfectly understandable, particularly if the promise of "being digital" is taken to mean eternal perfection
[(Negroponte, 1995)]. Most of us rely on some form of mechanical slave to take care of repetitive tasks. We
appreciate the dependability of our home and office machines and take pride in our ability to outsmart their limitations.
We clean them with a soft cloth and dutifully maintain their physical condition. We probably even feel some affection for
our computers, household appliances, and motor vehicles. But they're inanimate. Manmade. We don't want to become
them.
To want to become more inhuman perhaps holds greater abhorrence for us than to want to lose humanity through
bestiality. We can understand the latter, but the former is beyond our ken. It's unnatural, miscegenation, truly alien. One
of the elements of the Heaven's Gate story that has held this observer's interest is that their perspective on the
denaturalization-bastardization or prosthetics-vivisection problem, no less awkwardly referred to as
"Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" by [(Donna Haraway, 1997)] -- a
science fact and fiction theme that can be traced to Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1818) and the medieval golem -- is, for
now, unique. They were repulsed by their corporeal materiality and wanted to, genuinely believed that they could, in the
real world, become more like cyborgs, as in [(Isaac Asimov, 1976)]'s "The Bicentennial Man" but in reverse. Thirty-nine
people sought escape from their fleshly humanity so badly that they eventually did away with themselves, together. But
their vehicles weren't completely turned off. Rodriguez was quite right when he said that the "dead yet speak to us on our
computer [sic]." It would be short-sighted to laugh off the cult members' smorgasbord of freak-show peculiarities while
insidiously, transparently, unknowingly we too are merging with the interface. Online and off, as ghosts in our machines,
Heaven's Gate's inexplicably human messages will haunt us well into the coming millennium.
Footnotes
Twosurviving cult members, Rkkody (Charles

Humphrey), and a woman named Crlody,
currentlymaintain the Heaven's Gate Website
and provide an accompanying site, Right to
Know. Cult mementos such as this Away
Team patch, areplica of those worn by the 39
cult members who ended their mortal lives,
tapes, mugs,and T-shirts may be purchased
from their organization based in Venice,
California.
[1] The mass media's attentionto the Net has been a mixed blessing from the start. Time's first
cover story wasby Philip Elmer-Dewitt, "The Century Ahead: Dream Machines: Technology
WatchersForesee a World Filled with Multisensual Media, Smart Roads and Robots that Are
AlmostAlive" [(Elmer-Dewitt, Fall 1992, 39-41)], followed by"Cyberpunk: With Virtual Sex, Smart
Drugs and Synthetic Rock 'n' Roll, a NewCounterculture Is Surfing the Dark Edges of the
Computer Age," by David S. Jackson [(Jackson, Feb. 8, 1993, 57-65)]. Newsweek's first cover
story on the Net was only slightly less sensational: "Live Wires: More than 12Million Americans
Are Living 'On-Line' -- Looking for Love, Stock Tips and Therapy onComputer Networks," by
Barbara Kantrowitz et al. [(Kantrowitz,et al., Sept. 6, 1993, 42-49)]. Cyberculture, however, was
already wellunderway. Mondo 2000 's first issue waspublished in 1989 and Wired waslaunched
in 1993.
[2] See, for example, JohnSchwartz's "Characterization of Cult Strikes an Online Nerve"
[(Schwartz, March 29, 1997)], in the WashingtonPost , and some of Jon Katz's Media Rant
columns for HotWired, such as "Deaths inthe Family" and "Finding the Middle Media" [(Katz,
March31, 1997 ; April 1, 1997)].Other literate protests raised by members of the online news
"establishment,"such as by Brock N. Meeks for MSNBC and published by E-Media, have since
gone offline.
[3] The precedent had been setby Carnegie-Mellon undergraduate Martin Rimm's notorious
study, "MarketingPornography
"MarketingPornography on
onthe
theInformation Superhighway," published in the Georgetown LawJournal [(Rimm, 1995)], which
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was picked up by Time magazine, which published Elmer-Dewitt's "On a ScreenNear You: Cyberporn" [ (Elmer-Dewitt, 1995)], which led
to thecyberporn scare of 1995, which in turn fueled the Communications Decency Act (CDA), Sec5:A of the TelecommunicationsAct
of 1996, which within two years traveled up to the Supreme Court and wasoverturned in [(Reno v. ACLU, 1996/1997)]. See the Project
2000 study,which refutes Rimm's findings, by Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak at Vanderbilt University.
[4] In "The Web Is Ruinedand I Ruined It," noted graphic designer David Siegel claimed that "severaldog-eared copies of his book,
'Creating Killer Web Sites,' were found at the scene of theHeaven's Gate suicides" [(Siegel,April 11, 1997)]. In personal communication
(Nov. 25, 1997), however, Siegel said thathis intent was humorous, playing off the word "killer" in the title of his book,which was then
on Amazon's best seller list, and the timeliness of his article.
[5] Typical of cybercultureirreverence, the newfound notoriety was celebrated through the Heaven's Gate parodies, aswell as through a
new online news category, wacky news. See for example Yahoo's Odd News and CNN's Fringe News.
[6] Although the death of PrincessDiana has been stretched to fit just about every meaning the media might want toattach to it, it's
worthwhile pointing out that on the Net her death was the Next BigThing after Heaven's Gate. The Net's response to her passing and
that of Heaven'sGate were polar. While a few parody sites were uploaded after the princess's fatalaccident, just as a few sympathetic
sites appeared after the incident at Rancho Santa Fe,for the most part the online Diana shrines were an extension of the week-long
mourningfelt by the British and shared throughout the world. While Heaven's Gate seems torepresent everything we don't want to be,
the tall, thin, beautiful, blonde, extremelywell-born yet sad princess represents aspirations that now we'll never get to live through
her. Her death cheated us of that vicarious pleasure. The Heaven's Gate deathsprovide the opposite sort of vicarious, if guilty, pleasure.
[7] The Washington Post provides a timeline of Heaven's Gate, FromHouston to Hale-Bopp. See the Post 's chronology of cults in the
UnitedStates in the second half of the twentieth century on the Cult Controversy Website, including the Heaven'sGate page. Other
news organizations that provide useful articles and pointers are:CNN, Mass Suicide Links ;Nando.net, The Heaven's GateCult; the
New York Times, Death in a Cult; TimeWarner's Pathfinder, Heaven's GateSuicides (see also "A Level aboveHuman" and their Special
Report );and Yahoo, Heaven'sGate.
[8] Last summer marked thefiftieth anniversary of the Roswell incident. See the Website of the International UFO and Research Center,
located inRoswell. The Area 51 Research Center is alsoonline. The Mother of All UFO Links is known for being the best online
resource on this subject.
[9] Thomas Nichols, thebrother of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhara on the original Star Trek, was one of the members of
Heaven's Gate who ended his life on March 26, 1997. The groupwas known to have been avid fans of The X-Files and Star Trek. They
liked The Next Generation better than the original series and decorated theirwork space at Rancho Santa Fe "with posters of alien
beings from The X-Files and E.T." [(Gleick,April 7, 1997, 33; Corliss,April 7, 1997)].
[10] The Hale-Bopp Companionphotographs can be found on the Art Bell site. Also online is the Farsight Institute. The Ground Crew,
based in Concord,C.A., and UNARIUS (UNiversal ARticulateInterdimensional Understanding Science), based just outside San Diego,
are among the UFOcults that believe in alien abduction and that maintain Websites. See also UFOs and the Bible. Although Chuck
Shramek's home page, with photogalleries of extraterrestrial images, is linked from the Heaven's Gate site, Rkkody(Charles Humphrey,
also known as Rick Edwards) is skeptical of drawing too much of acorrelation between the Heaven's Gate suicides and the comet and
coming millennium,viewing such conjecture as terrestrial, thereby at a lower, animalistic stage in theevolutionary process and a
misreading of the group's exit (personal communication, Nov.25, 1997).
[11] There were so many hitson the Heaven's Gate and Higher Source Websites in the first few days after the suicidesthat the servers
and networks they were on crashed -- even the mirrored sites crashed [(CNN, March 28, 1997; Neuborne, March 28, 1997)]. Although
the FBI was rumored to haveshut down the Heaven's Gate site, which didn't come back online until July, Rkkody says hesuspects that
the site was pulled instead by InterNIC (personal communication, Nov. 25,1997).
[12] Chip Bayers, at WiredNews, in "Viewing Source at Heaven's Gate" [(Bayers, March 27,1997)], Joshua Quittner, writing for Time, in
"Life and Death on theWeb" [(Quittner, April 7, 1997, 47)], and Ken Morrill,of webdesk.com, in "Pre-Comet Clues Under the Hood of
the Higher Source WebSite" [(Morrill, April 15,1997)] are among those who noticed this peculiar use of keywords but didn't do much
with the discovery, although news accounts reported millions of hits and failed servers inthe wake of the Heaven's Gate deaths.
[13] Overdoing the meta tagis typical of pornography and soft porn online. Look at the source code of, forinstance, Playgirl. For a fee,
the Adult Submission Service will helppurveyors of adult material obtain greater online recognition in a highly competitivemarket by
providing expertise with meta tags along with other tricks of the HTMLtrade. Meta Medic is anonline service that works similarly to
validation checkers, but is designed specificallyfor meta tags. Users can submit a URL and have the tool analyze the tag for errors.
After submitting the Heaven's Gate site, I received numerous warnings about duplicationand the tag's exceeding the recommended
limit. In other words, the search enginerobots that use the Heaven's Gate meta tag would simply ignore most of what theysubtextually
provided.
[14] Yahoo provides a listof ElvisSightings pointers. The Original (Unofficial)Elvis Home Page also contains sightings information and
a Heaven's Gate Survey that asks usersif they believe that the cult members successfully joined up with aliens aboard a UFO.
[15] Many timely articles,from a broad spectrum of periodicals, cited the significance of the comet. See, forexample "Comets Spawn
Fear, Fascination and Web Sites" [(Johnson, Mar. 28, 1997)]. Ted Turnerkept an open mind: "They could be behind that comet," he
said. "It doeslook good. I've been looking at it. I would kind of like to go up there myself. Is therethat much difference in other religions
saying you're going to heaven?" [(Reuters, Mar. 29, 1997)].
[16] Rkkody confirmed thatMcCurdy-Hill was the only cult member recruited through the Internet (personalcommunication, Nov. 25,
1997).
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[17] The threat of nationaland international terrorism is the ostensible rationale for the (still not defunct)Clipper Chip, or key encryption
escrow. Information warfare is considered to be thecutting edge of the military but, due to its classified nature, not much information
leaksout other than some VR simulation experiments. See infowar.com and Michael Froomkin's papers on the Clipper Chip [ (Froomkin,
1995; 1996)].
[18] Isaac Asimov's"Three Laws of Robotics" are: "1) A robot may not injure a human being, or,through inaction, allow a human being
to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the ordersgiven it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;
3) Arobot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with theFirst or Second Law" [(Asimov, 1990, 8)].
[19] At his ninth paroleboard hearing, coincidentally held on March 27, 1997, the day after the Rancho Santa Fesuicides, Manson is
reported to have said after being denied parole again: "That's OK-- I'm building a Website." In fact, Manson is not allowed access to
the Net,although there are several Websites devoted to him, most prominently Cease to Exist and Access Manson [(Metzger, 1997)].
Manson's prosecutor, Stephen Kay, says that theAccess Manson site is nevertheless run by Manson through Sandra Good, one of
the membersof his "family," who befriended George Stimson, who maintains the site [(Raney, 1997)].
[20] See Jonathan Steuer'sspeculative Vividnessand Interactivity Chart (1995), which places the holodeck in the highly immersiveupper
right quadrant, grouped with Gibson's cyberspace and Bradbury's nursery.
[21] See, for example, theWebsite that accompanies David Stork's volume, HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer asDream and Reality
[(Stork,1997)] and the official HAL's Birthday site,provided by NCSA. The Millennium Institute provides an excellent list of Internet
Resources on theMillennium.
[22] ABC is developing amade-for-television reenactment of the group's tragic end [(Purdum, April, 4, 1997)], based on the life story of
surviving cultmember Rio DiAngelo (known in the cult as Neody, a.k.a. Richard Ford), who still providesWeb consulting services
through Higher Source (personal communication, Nov. 21,1997). There have been copycat suicides [(Purdum, May 7, 1997)]. A dispute
seems to have arisen between Rkkody,who currently maintains the Heaven's Gate site,and some other former cult members who are
starting their own TELAH organization. Rkkodyalso tried to end his life a few months later, but survived and feels his destiny is to
spread the word about the true Heaven's Gate mission and to combat rumors [(Taylor, May 20, 1997)]. See also Heaven's Gate: The Day
After, "adocumentary about 'The Next Level'."
[23] Congress may try againwith the CDA (see Yahoo's Internet Decency news and Brock N. Meeks' WWWashington column for
MSNBC). Another bill has been introduced by the CDA's original sponsor, Sen.Dan Coats, that would fine or jail commercial
distributors who upload information deemed"harmful to minors" for free. In Dec. 1997, a three-day conference was held inWashington,
D.C., Internet Online Summit: Focus onChildren, that was supported by the White House, industry, and some civil libertieslobbiests.
See the White House's A"Family-Friendly" Internet and The President's Educational TechnologyInitiative.
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Web Sites Cited in the Article

Reference
Available URL
24 Hours of Democracy
http://www.scripting.com/twentyFour/
Access Manson
http://www.atwa.com/
Adult Submission Service
https://secure.rt66.com/swestart/ass/
Area 51 Research Center
http://www.ufomind.com/org/
Art Bell
http://www.artbell.com/
Blue Ribbon Campaign

(EFF)
http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html
Cease to Exist
http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~nhenness/manson.html
Christ Net
http://www.christnet.org/
Citizen's Internet
EmpowermentCoalition
http://www.ciec.org/
Cult Controversy
(Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/
From
Houston to
Hale-Bopp
(Timeline)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/timeline.htm
Heaven's
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/cult/heavens_gate/main.htm
Page 26 of 29
7/15/04 11:39 AM
Gate
"Heaven's
Gate"
documents
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/documents/heavensgate/contents2.htm
Death in a Cult
(New York Times)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/suicideindex.html
Elvis Sightings
(Yahoo)
http://www.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Music/Artists/By_Genre/Rock_and_Pop/Presley__Elvis/Elvis_is_Alive/
Elvis_Sightings/
A "Family-Friendly"Internet
http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/Ratings/
Farsight Institute
http://www.farsight.org/
Fringe News
(CNN)
http://cnn.com/WORLD/#fringe
Ground Crew
http://www.portal.ca/~ground/crew/index.html
HAL's Birthday
(NCSA)
http://www.halbday.com/
HAL's Legacy
(MIT Press)
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/Hal/
Heaven's Gate
(official)
http://www.heavensgate.com/
Chkody's
statement
http://www.heavensgate.to/misc/exitchk.htm
Earth exit
statements
by students
http://www.heavensgate.to/misc/exit.htm
Exit press
release
http://www.heavensgate.to/misc/pressrel.htm
Keys to
kingdom
http://www.heavensgate.com/index.html#keys
Member of
kingdom of
heaven
http://www.heavensgate.to/misc/member.htm
Our position
against
suicide
http://www.heavensgate.to/misc/letter.htm
Heaven's Gate
(Yahoo)
Humor
http://www.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Religion/Faiths_and_Practices/New_Age/Organizations/
Heaven_s_Gate/
http://www.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Religion/Humor/Heaven_s_Gate/
Heaven's Gate Cult

(Nando.net)
http://www.nando.net/newsroom/nt/moresuicide.html
Heaven's Gate Estate
http://www.callagent.com/heavensgate/
Heaven's Gate Suicides

(Pathfinder)
http://pathfinder.com/news/spotlight/heaven/
A level
above human
http://pathfinder.com/@@lfT1jQcAwKHnHBmb/time/reports/cult/index.html
Page 27 of 29
7/15/04 11:39 AM
Manifesto
http://pathfinder.com/@@LZhCFQYAFp7@@XyS/news/breaking/exclusive.html
Special report
http://pathfinder.com/time/magazine/1997/dom/970407/toc.html
Heaven's Gate: The Day

After
http://www.swmm.com/heavensgate/
Heaven's Gate Usenet

Postings
(Deja News)
http://xp5.dejanews.com/profile.xp?author=rep@heavensgate.com
Higher Source
(official)
http://www7.concentric.net/~Font/
Q-HAUL
advertisement
http://www7.concentric.net/~Font/pro/graphics.htm
Highersource.org
http://www.highersource.org/
How and When "Heaven's

Gate" May Be Entered
(Applewhite's book)
http://www.heavensgate.to/book/book.htm
Biblical
citations
http://www.heavensgate.com/book/b-2.htm
Keep the Faith: Statement

on Heaven'sGate
http://www.keepthefaith.com/hotnews.htm
infowar.com
http://infowar.com/
International UFO Museum

andResearch Center
http://www.iufomrc.com/
Internet Decency
(Yahoo)
http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/Tech/Internet_Decency/
Internet Online Summit:

Focus onChildren
http://www.kidsonline.org/
Internet Resources on the

Millennium
http://www.igc.org/millennium/links/millen.html
Mass Suicide Links

(CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/US/9703/28/mass.suicide/links.html
Meta Medic
http://www.northernwebs.com/set/setsimjr.html
Millennial Prophecy Report
http://www.channel1.com/mpr/
Mondo 2000
http://www.mondo2000.com/
Mother of All UFO Links
http://ufo-world.simplenet.com/ufolink.html
Odd News
(Yahoo)
http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/odd/
Origin
http://rain.org/~origin/origin.html
Original (Unofficial) Elvis

HomePage
http://sunsite.unc.edu/elvis/
Heaven's
Gate survey
http://sunsite.unc.edu/elvis/survey.html
Playgirl
http://www.playgirlmag.com/
The President's Educational

Technology Initiative
http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OP/edtech/
Page 28 of 29
7/15/04 11:39 AM
Princess Diana
(Yahoo)
http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/World/Princess_Diana_1961_1997/
Project 2000
http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/cyberporn.debate.cgi
Right to Know
http://www.rkkody.com/
Heaven's
Gate
mementos
http://www.rkkody.com/rkk/rkktape.htm
Students of
Heaven's
Gate
expressing
their
thoughts
beforeexit
(videotape 2)
http://www.rkkody.com/rkk/rkktape.htm#VT
Chuck Shramek Home Page
http://www.NeoSoft.com/~cshramek/
Spirit Web
http://www.spiritweb.org/
Telecommunications Act of
1996
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c104:S.652.ENR:
UFOs and the Bible
http://www.mt.net/~watcher/ufos.html
UNARIUS
http://www.unarius.org/
Vividness and Interactivity

Chart
(Jonathan Steuer)
http://www.cyborganic.com/People/jonathan/Presentations/DCI-950920/vivid.html
Wired
http://www.hotwired.com/wired/
WWWashington
http://www.msnbc.com/news/contents.asp
About the Author

Wendy Robinson (PhD candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MA, Duke University, BA, New York
University) is an instructor in the Department of Religion at Duke University, where she teaches Ethics and the Internet,
and coeditor of this issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication . Her dissertation explores instances
of authenticity and identity in popular and virtual culture. In addition to Duke, Ms. Robinson has taught courses on new
technology, the Internet, and computer skills in the School of Journalism at UNC-CH and Wake Technical Community
College, and she is a research associate of the M.I.N.D. Lab in the telecommunications department of Michigan State
University. Responsible for the development and maintenance of several World Wide Web sites, her practical
experience includes journalism and public relations in New York City and North Carolina, where until recently she was
the weekend online news editor of the News and Observer in Raleigh.
Address: Department of Religion, Duke University, 118 Gray Building,Box 90964, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
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JCMC 3 (3) December 1997