The Internet is a great place to shop for shoes, gather celebrity gossip, start up a business and net a quick zillion or two. At least, that's what you're supposed to think. What if the ruse of a dot-com wonderland merely cloaks the Web's true agenda, and agenda far more sinister than, say, turning Matt Drudge into a household name?
We all know how the idea of the Net was spawned by the U.S. Defense Department back in 1969: In the aftermath of a nuclear war, even as the red rain fell on the barren wasteland that was once North America, the military needed to be sure that its top brass could send e-mail to one another. Of course, no one in 1969 had the slightest idea what e-mail was. Thus, they had to invent it. But what would transmit this “e-mail” from place to place? The Internet, naturally. So they invented that first.
Because speaking to people with slightly funny ideas is one of the things we are known to do, we spoke to some conspiracy theorists about the Internet and found, not really to any one’s surprise, that in their view the Internet’s military origins are not so innocent -- and the conspiracy extends well beyond a paltry plot to invade your privacy by tracking your credit card spending and the porn sites you surf on your lunch break.
The conspiracy theorists believe a powerful group that includes businessmen, politicians and intellectuals has long been manipulating world events from behind the scenes, working toward the goal of a quasi-fascistic, one-world government. This cabal has a name: The Illuminati.
As with many other great developments, the Illuminati are (is?) behind the Internet, these conspiracy theorists say. But why?
Here are a few of the reasons that are spoken of:
- TO SPY ON YOU
“Their purpose,” says Anthony Hilder, who has produced hundreds of video and audiocassette programs outlining the Illuminati plot, “is not simply a source of control but a recovery of information from all people, knowing that people would become involved around the world and voluntarily supply information which could be used against them.”
- TO CLOUD YOUR MIND WITH NAUGHTY THOUGHTS
The belief that the Illuminati uses sexual symbolism as a means mind control is another key element of the conspiracy theory. Even “WWW” is a sexual symbol. “W is the 23rd letter in the alphabet,” notes Robert Sterling, whose Konformist.com site is one of the Web's best known repositories of conspiracy-theory research." And 23 times three, of course, equals 69. So you've got the whole psycho-sexual thing going on."
- TO HAIL SATAN
Are the Illuminati agents of the Anti-Christ, the "Beast" prophesied in the Bible who will cause the end of the world? Some researchers believe the "number of the beast," 666, is used as a signal by the Illuminati to indicate their true purpose. Aaron Johnson, a Southern California conspiracy researcher and self described "Patriot," believes that the letters “WWW” reveal the link.
“The letter Wis the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet,” Johnson says. “The three Ws -- World Wide Web. That's not by accident. To me it means 666. It’s another part of the infrastructure of control of society and the world.” (It should be noted that in the Hebrew alphabet letters are assigned numerical values, and “Vav,” a close equivalent of the letter "W," is indeed the number 6. But in Hebrew numerology "Vav-Vav-Vav" translates not as "666" but as "18," the numerical value of the word “Chai” which means "life." In fact, 18 is one of the most important “lucky numbers” in the Jewish religion.)
- TO DRUG YOU INTO SUBMISSION
Robert Sterling wrote an article entitled "The Web and the Pentagon," in which he compares the creation of the Internet to the military's well-documented use of LSD in mind-control experiments. “Could the Web be merely the twin companion of LSD?” asks Sterling in the article (which appeared in the anthology Cyberculture Counterconspiracy Vol. 2), “the final key in an occultic project created to destroy the existing order and establish a new one?”
Sterling, however, has less in common with "Patriot" conspiracy theorists like Hilder and Johnson than he does with the late psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, who believed that the Internet, like LSD before it, can be a liberating force, rather than an oppressive one, in spite of its possibly conspiratorial genesis. “Of course the Internet is a conspiracy,” says Sterling. “It was created by the Defense Department. But then again the Defense Department also created LSD. That doesn't mean you don't take it.”
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