In April of 2014, televangelist Pat Robertson devoted a segment of his 700 Club TV program to discussing what he ominously termed the “biblical implications” of radio-frequency identification, or RFID. In the tech world, RFID rather mundanely refers to technology that allows information to be stored and transferred on radio-sensitive tags at a distance of at most a few feet, aiding in commercial micro-transactions and other smartphone-enabled conveniences of modern life.
As Robertson and his guest, author and biblically-oriented “privacy expert” Katherine Albrecht explain, matters on Earth are never merely as reported. For them, new developments in the world of techno-commerce align in troubling parallel with the Book of Revelation. RFID is nothing less than a strong candidate for the Mark of the Beast. According to chapter thirteen of John of Patmos’s book, this 666, “the number of his name,” shall be inscribed upon the bodies of “small and great, rich and poor, free and bond” so that none may buy or sell without such a mark. The mark divides the sinners from the Christians who will refuse branding and suffer persecution and martyrdom in the Last Days.
RFID is, of course, not the first novelty to be singled out as the Mark of the Beast. A famous image from the fierce vernacular art of twentieth-century American biblical tracts shows a Satan-figure, rising above Saint Peter’s Square and a multitude of human corpses, clutching an executioner’s axe. The words “666 VISA” are emblazoned on his broad chest. Radio-frequency identification technology thus merely figures as the latest supposed harbinger of the end times in a culture obsessed with both the apocalypse and technology. “We’re going into some strange worlds ahead of us, ladies and gentlemen,” Robertson warns. He’s not wrong.
These anxieties about the entanglements of human life and technology, of the movements of the body mapped onto the geographies of power, have a deep pedigree in Judeo-Christian thought.