WHAT do you do when your Web design company tells you not, to call until after Easter because they are going to be "involved with monastery activities", and the next thing you find their names plastered all over the news in headlines such as "INTERNET KILLS 40 PEOPLE" or "The Internet's First Mass Suicide"?
That's what happened to Heather Chronert, office manager of the San Diego Polo Club.
Last Wednesday her Web designers turned out to be the death cult who thought the arrival of a comet was a sign that the alien spacecraft had finally come to pick them up, and 39 of them committed suicide.
When the word spread that the cult had also designed World Wide Web pages, the mainstream media inflated this Internet angle enormously. Shots of shocking deathbed scenes were interspersed with views of rooms packed with computer terminals, but by Thursday morning CNN was also calling Heaven's Gate the "computer cult". The San Francisco Chronicle referred to them as "Net savvy cultists", and yesterday's London Independent on Sunday said they were "people of powerful technological competence, computer programmers all".
Were they really? The coverage of the tragic events raises plenty of questions about how news gathering organisations continue to play on people's ignorance about the Net...
Did the cult have a Web site?
Yes - two. The Higher Source site (for its Web design and Internet consultancy business) and the Heaven's Gate site (for the cult proper). Some of the members apparently knew about Java, Shockwave and Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML), systems analysis and HTML or HyperText Mark up Language - the basic language for creating Web pages.
Who did they design for?
Local firms, from the aforementioned Polo Club (www.sandiegopolo.com) to a Madonna fan club. Once the story broke, these sites suffered the Net's equivalent of a giant traffic jam.
Were the cult "people of powerful technological competence"?
Depends on who you ask. Newspapers and TV shows quoted the clients as saying that the pages were professional looking and "well maintained". The cult's designers were "talented", "extremely conscientious", "really knew their business as far as computers".
But what would the clients know about web design? Fellow designers have been scathing, to say the least: at a quickly erected satire site, one designer wrote: "This group did mediocre template HTML at best." Another fanatic argued that most of the work involved pouring text into predesigned "templates", regarded within the industry as "high tech grunt work".
Some reports say the cult undercut the general going rate by 20 to 30 per cent, and most leading designers in the region hadn't heard of them.
But wouldn't you have to have your act together to do all this high tech computing?
Yes - it just shows that it's possible to believe in apocalyptic comets and flying saucers, yet work in a growing computer based service industry.
The irony is that while most people still regard Web page construction as something akin to alchemy in the middle ages - as a dark, mysterious art somewhere between science and the occult - the technology and skills required aren't that difficult. Even schoolkids can do it (see Computimes, March 24th), and it's still very much a "garage industry", much as desktop publishing was in the late 1980s, where entry is still relatively easy.
Were the cult members nerds?
We read that the cult "left everything behind" - partners, children, jobs, homes - for this obsession. It does sound sort of nerdy alright, because computer programmers have traditionally been stereotyped as outcasts and loners. The subtext is that the cult members are geeks, the hippies of the 1990s, tripping out on HTML and VRML instead of LSD.
Did they use the Web to recruit and spread their ideas?
Well, they tried to. Besides "their Web consultancy page, their other Web site explained their ideologies. Someone possibly involved in the mass suicide also spent months spreading an apocalyptic message (by spamming") on fringe Usenet newsgroups that discuss conspiracies, culture, aliens, religions. How did the Internet react to the story?
By Thursday the group's Web site was nigh on impossible to access, so many major online news agencies created mirrors of it. Then by Friday they had stories with timelines of other mass suicides, links to the pages designed by the cult, archive stories about the Jonestown suicides, background stories about the "Swank Enclave Known For Privacy, Posh Estates", info on the HaleBopp comet, links to suicide groups, local media in San Diego and cult analysis. It's a good example of how the Net can now amass a large amount of quality information about an event.
And what about the satire site you mentioned earlier?
It was set up by a group of Web designers fed up of all the misinformation - particularly about their trade. They included Mike Emke, who was fuming: "One expert on CNN mentioned that cults often recruit on the Net because - and I quote - technical people are often more gullible and more trusting."
It took about eight or 10 hours to set up the site. Many of the hits at www.highersource.org were probably generated by people trying to access the cult's real site (at the similarly named www.highersource.com).
Though they expected plenty of criticism about the site's black humour - a greeting reads: "We kill ourselves working for you!"
the parody has clearly hit a nerve among Web users.
Netizens must be fed up with the all those stories after the Oklahoma Bombing and the Belgian paedophile ring, where everything's blamed on the Internet...
Absolutely - the cult's use of the Web just shows how the Net "has become an increasingly everyday, widespread medium. Blaming the Net for suicides is a bit like blaming the fax machine for Waco, or Hitler's telephone for the second World War, or stone masonry for the siege of .......
As Mike Emke told reporters: "I think if all these guys who committed suicide were construction workers they wouldn't be showing all these buildings and saying construction workers are vulnerable to cults."
But it's not building workers - it's West Coast utopians!
California has often been a melting pot for high tech and alternative religions. The West Coast is where virtual reality companies collide with LSD casualties and "retreats" into the desert.
Several Net observers have also noted that the writings of "digital evangelists" such as Nicholas Negroponte or John Perry Barlow often have uncanny parallels with the language of cults and fundamentalist preachers. Take Barlow's legendary call to arms, his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and the line it draws between believers and unbelievers: "Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here."
And cyberspace, as if we need reminding, has out of this world (otherworldly?) qualities.
But what the Higher Source tragedy is quickly turning into is a mishmash of North American myths: the European Puritans and Quakers taking their ships (rather than spaceships) to the New World; the obsession with UFOS, conspiracies and The XFiles; the end of millennium nutters; a secular resurrection movement (e.g. cryogenics); and day to day technophobia.
Ironically, after all that, the cult will probably live on, in an immortality of sorts, in the modern mediasphere which now includes the Internet itself.