The Big Tech egregore has his harem, each concubine an entrepreneur.
A million ‘male gazes,’ through a single glass lens and circuit board. Many men, oceans away, concentrated into one terrible cycloptic eye.
Platforms like OnlyFans, whose growth in recent years is notable, have democratized and normalized virtual prostitution. Any person (mostly, but not exclusively, young women) may make themselves a sex worker.
The scale of this is unprecedented, but scripture provides a framework to understand the damage being done.
The Bible presents us with a typology, a recurring thematic image, whereby evil is shown seeking after a bride.
Scripture’s central metaphor of bride and bridegroom, Church and Christ, has its diabolical parody in the serpent tempting Eve with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:6), the fallen angels or “sons of god” called “Watchers” uniting with the daughters of Adam (Gen. 6:2), and the Egyptians taking Sarai from Abram for Pharaoh to keep (Gen.12:14).
Each time, we read that something was ‘seen’ to be beautiful, or pleasing.
Eve saw that the tree was lovely, the lustful angels saw that the human females were attractive, and the Egyptians saw the beauty of Sarai.
In itself, this is nothing remarkable. In Biblical Hebrew, seeing refers to assessing a thing. After all, God saw what He had created and saw that it was good.
But the three examples above can nonetheless be said to constitute parallel instances of a certain pattern. They are all to do with improper union, all leading to alienation, or separation, of man from woman: Adam blames Eve, the daughters of Adam face alienation (going by 1 Enoch’s expansion of Genesis 6), and Abram temporarily separates from his wife.
Eve desired the knowledge of good and evil, which in itself is not negative (see 1 Kings 3:9, 2 Samuel 14:17), but this knowledge was arrived at improperly and prematurely in the garden, and so became the cause of expulsion from Eden.
Just so, an enterprising generation of camgirls has been seduced by the promise of prosperity and, perhaps, male attention—far from intrinsic evils, so long as they are arrived at correctly: namely, through honest work and a husband.
The Watchers, angelic intelligences meant to oversee aspects of human life, abandoned their role in order to unite with creatures of another order, producing a terrible mismatch, the result of which was the birth of giants (‘Nephilim’).
In the same way, a technology whose role could be, and in many respects is, a net positive—and which allows us to be seen by, and communicate with, people far away—is now used to engage in improper, virtual, and dare I say fallen ‘angelic’ connections, feeding the giant of Big Tech capital.
The Egyptian men who saw Sarai’s beauty took her to the Pharaoh’s harem, one of a myriad to add to the pomp of a powerful king.
Just so, the lust of atomised, digitally obsessed users encourages young women to join the company of a new lord, the 21st century’s sovereign—Big Tech.
But why does scripture present evil as wanting to insinuate itself into the human family by way of the woman?
There are at least two obvious answers.
The first is that the woman is the portal through which new life enters the world. If a generation of women is conditioned into delaying childbirth, this will handsomely facilitate the extraction of value by economic oligarchs.
These have no interest in reproducing the labour force. Cheap labour is abundant in the Global South, from which it can be imported for now—and in any case, it’s looking like a technologically advanced future will not need large populations of serfs to maintain its elites.
The second reason is that the psyche of a people depends on gender relations. If young men are forced to accept that the women they pursue have been seen by legions of others, and might continue to be so seen, a man’s pride is broken from his youth.
He is robbed of his spiritual function: the instinct to guard particularity, to cultivate the health of a body distinct from other bodies, the love of character, household, identity and borders upon which all harmony and grander unity must be based.
For Satan to make the bride (the ‘church,’ the human family) his own means sharing her as widely as possible.
If a woman is not a wife, not exclusive to him, to his eyes, a young man is thwarted from the righteous sense of possession on which civilization is based.
There is accordingly no exclusivity, no home, no border, no trench from which to resist the oligarchy.
