IN THIS EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT FROM THE NEW EDITION OF THE END OF TIME: FAITH AND FEAR IN THE SHADOW OF THE MILLENNIUM (VINTAGE 1999), DAMIAN THOMPSON INVESTIGATES A NEW BREED OF MILLENNIALIST - THE COMPUTER PROGRAMMER
Amidst the sagebrush and cacti of the Southern California desert, an apocalyptic believer called Scott Olmsted is preparing for the collapse of civilization on the stroke of midnight, - December 31, 1999. He has put up a chain-link fence round his mobile home; he has laid."I'm still not 100 per cent sure that the world's coming to an end," he says. "But the idea that I might want to get out of town for a while is not such a long shot." Olmsted's comments make him sound rather like one of the legendary terror-struck peasants of the year 1000, or perhaps a survivalist in the Randy Weaver mould, ear pressed to the ground to catch the rumblings of the federal Antichrist. In fact, he is a computer programmer who has been infected by a new strain of millenarianism. His prophecies have no supernatural component whatsoever. His imagined apocalypse is limited to the failure of computer technology - which is to say that it is not limited at all, but worldwide, unpredictable and
devastating. As Wired magazine puts it, "veteran software programmers are blazing the millennial trail. The geeks have read the future, not in the Book of Revelation, but in a few million lines of computer code".(cont)
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