English translation from Italian of "Il diagramma della macchina: Corvaglia e Azal sulla tecnognosi digitale" (The Diagram of the Machine: Corvaglia and Azal on Digital Technognosis)

 English translation of the Il diagramma della macchina:Corvaglia e Azal sulla tecnognosi digitale

 

 

The Diagram of the Machine: Corvaglia and Azal on Digital Technognosis

 

22 July 2025 (original date of Italian publication)

I am pleased to publish the final dissertation of one of my students from the course in transcultural psychology

by Cosimo Barone

It is difficult to imagine two people more different than Luigi Corvaglia and Wahid Azal. The first is a secular researcher and thinker, rationalist, grounded in scientific logic and Western democracy; the second is a mystical-political author of esoteric inspiration, a fierce critic of Occidentalism, technocratic liberalism, and transhumanist “techno-gnosticism.” And yet their readings of the telematic network as a place of shifting spiritual currents useful to a certain cultural domination not only converge, they actually complement one another. Both glimpse in the structure of the network the potential for the emergence of new forms of cultism: decentralized, mimetic, techno-spiritual.

The common starting point is a vision of the network as a field in which a modern, vulgarized form of gnosticism is enacted. Just as the ancient Gnostics believed the material world was a prison created not by God but by a lesser god—the deceiving Demiurge—and that only secret knowledge (gnōsis) could free the soul and restore it to divine light, so today the idea spreads online that shared reality (institutions, science, media, medicine, politics) is a grand illusion imposed by dark powers—often portrayed with mythical features: “elites,” “the system,” the “deep state.”

In this context, the net ceases to be merely a formidable informational and connective space and becomes an initiatory environment where the user can “discover the truth” that has been hidden. Whoever accesses this hidden knowledge is considered “awakened,” set against the sleeping masses. Thus an epistemic dualism is created between those who know and those who do not, between the saved and the profane—reproducing the spiritual hierarchies of ancient gnosticism but also the sectarian logics of modernity.

Corvaglia and the Swarm-Cults

In his essay devoted to infodemic and new digital cults (Pandemonium. Cyber-cults and digital fascism, 2019), Luigi Corvaglia analyzes a process radically changed from the past: the genesis of subcultures and alternative ideas today no longer requires charismatic leadership or a vertical structure, but manifests as systemic emergence, i.e., the effect of chaotic communicative dynamics governed by network algorithms. Consider the spread of conspiracy theories and the proliferation of subcultures distrustful of established knowledge such as medicine. These are sociopoietic conditions, produced spontaneously by social interactions yet strengthened by echo chambers generated by algorithms. Social-platform algorithms (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) play a central role in creating echo chambers, because they decide which contents to show each user based on what they have already watched, liked, or shared. In short, they analyze user behavior (likes, shares, time spent on certain posts, comments), predict what might please, and propose similar content while excluding dissonant content that could cause boredom, disinterest, or abandonment. The result is that the user sees only a filtered portion of reality—the one that most resembles or pleases them. The endpoint is the individual’s closure inside an information bubble. Mutual confirmation of one’s ideas within the bubble amplifies convictions and radicalizes them; opposing opinions disappear or are attacked, and disinformation can circulate undisturbed.

In sum: algorithms do not create ideas directly, but organize the environment in which those ideas strengthen, radicalize, and become tribal. They are the invisible architects of alternative subcultures. These digital places are ideological incubators where truth does not count; what matters is coherence with the group’s narrative and the sense of belonging. They are a key factor in the transformation of social networks into sectarian and paranoid ecosystems. This is the perfect infrastructure for the rooting of what Corvaglia calls “cult-like swarm belief systems”—group phenomena which, though lacking vertical leadership and codified doctrine, behave as real sects. They are autopoietic social formations born from the continuous interaction of actors, algorithms, and contents—not from a pre-ordained plan. Belief is not imposed from above; it emerges from below by viral aggregation, exactly like the murmurations of birds or insect colonies. They operate as distributed intelligences, where each participant feeds the group’s collective identity without necessarily being aware of it. It is the idea of the hive mind. As in a swarm of social insects, each individual responds to simple signals (hashtags, keywords, emotional frames), but the collective effect is the emergence of a coherent, replicable system capable of attracting new adherents and redefining common sense.

A paradigmatic example is QAnon, the theory to which Corvaglia has dedicated an essay (QAnon. Cybernetic cult and digital fascism), in which he shows how a conspiracy theory without an identifiable author can generate a global cult with believers, codes, rituals, and martyrs. QAnon reinterprets gnosis as access to forbidden truths in a world dominated by dark forces. It is a churchless cult, where “truth” is crowdsourced and charisma is diffused as an emergent property of the ecosystem. Nor is it the only case. The most emblematic manifestation—because it fully reprises the gnostic model—is the incel movement, made up of men who live with angry frustration the impossibility of having sexual or affective relationships because they do not fit female standards of desirability (incel = “involuntary celibate”). Incels use the metaphor of the red pill (from The Matrix), according to which whoever “takes it” stops believing the illusions imposed by society (such as equality between the sexes) and recognizes a supposed reality in which women hold relational and sexual power, choosing only a narrow elite of dominant males (the Chads) and excluding all the others. The Matrix “red pill” becomes a symbol of postmodern gnosis: truth is hidden, the world is a simulation, salvation is for those who “awaken”—central concepts both in New Age spirituality and in digital conspiracism.

An emblematic example of a cult with gnostic characteristics that unfolds exclusively online is the New Earth Project, led by the charismatic figure Sacha Stone. Operating through YouTube, Telegram, and dedicated platforms, the group spreads an apocalyptic spiritual vision in which reality is controlled by dark forces (elites, Big Pharma, 5G technologies), while salvation is obtained through an interior “awakening” and disconnection from the system’s matrix. Although it has no physical headquarters or traditional rites, the cult functions as a virtual sectarian community with esoteric language, paid courses, digital rituality, and a salvific narrative that isolates the individual from the outside world.

Other phenomena in this frame include eco-fascism of neo-pagan matrix (e.g., Ringing Cedars), or Pastel Q—“anti-system” and conspiratorial messages conveyed with graphics aimed at a female audience and an influencer-style wellness mode, where pastel-background posts mix yoga, beauty care, and conspiratorial content. The latter is one of the main examples of conspirituality (fusion of spirituality and conspiracism) and represents a sophisticated memetic strategy in which a reassuring domestic aesthetic serves to legitimize, normalize, and spread violent and radical messages.

In the world of swarm cults, reality is treated like a collective Rorschach test: each person projects archetypes, anxieties, and personal myths into it, but everyone finds echo and reinforcement in the system.

The fact that digital swarms are the product of a hive mind—i.e., not guided—does not mean some digital cults are not directed, constructed, or infiltrated by real stage-managers. This is certainly the case with AllatRa. AllatRa is not a traditional cult: it makes massive use of artificial intelligence to produce delirious videos and articles and also draws on pop culture, comics, and rap—always with AI’s help. This prototype of cult 2.0 spreads climate disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pan-Slavic propaganda with enormous firepower exclusively through the web, managing to gain visibility and infiltrate institutional spaces like the United Nations and the U.S. Congress. Within AllatRa’s digital ecosystem, bots play a fundamental role in building an artificial appearance of consensus and popularity. These are automated accounts programmed to post and repost content systematically, often using hashtags like #CreativeSociety or recurring phrases tied to the movement’s language. Their main purpose is to amplify the visibility of sectarian messages, manipulating social-media algorithms so that contents trend or reach a wider audience. The real strength lies in coordination: hundreds of bots can activate simultaneously, simulating spontaneous mobilization (astroturfing) and making AllatRa’s contents appear part of an authentic public debate. Alongside this are trolls—real or semi-automated accounts—intervening with provocative, emotional, or seemingly spontaneous comments, further reinforcing the group’s narrative. In the article The AllatRa Case Luigi Corvaglia recounts his direct experience: a disinformation campaign launched by this Russian-language apocalyptic movement that publicly accused him of wanting to establish a new world Reich. In a short time, the web was flooded with defamatory content about the author in every language, with the most incredible accusations, such as calling him a coprophile.

Together, bots and trolls create an ecosystem of hybrid disinformation: the former build numerical mass; the latter give the message a human appearance. The result is a refined digital strategy that confuses collective perception, discourages dissent, and strengthens the apparent legitimacy of the cult.

Apocryphal Cults and Digital Apocalypses: Wahid Azal’s Vision

Wahid Azal addresses the same phenomenon from another angle: the gnostic-metapolitical one. This is a radical critique of the esoteric-political and nihilistic drift of the digital. For Azal, the network has become a spiritual battlefield where a perverse form of gnosis is enacted: no longer a path of inner liberation, but an instrument of power, manipulation, and control. Azal warns against what he calls a false gnosis, a nihilistic technognosis that reduces spiritual experience to a simulacrum, replacing awakening with paranoia and inquiry with toxic narrative. The net is full of transhumanist and cyber-gnostic currents that see reality as a simulation to flee via technology or inner awareness.

Azal denounces what he defines as a totalitarian mutation of the sacred: a passage in which the occult, gnosticism, and religion merge with the cybernetic infrastructure of surveillance and algorithmic consent. According to Azal, we have entered an era in which fascism no longer presents itself with boots and black shirts, but with interfaces, platforms, neural networks, and prêt-à-porter spirituality. AllatRa seems an exemplary case.

Azal’s writing is mystical, full of neologisms, at times hermetic. In his recent Postpartem to The Goal of the Unwise (June 2025) he describes the emergence of a “meta-theocratic machine,” designed to simulate transcendence and produce obedience. According to Azal, digital cults are not merely strange or deviant communities but true post-human religious technologies—digital tools that imitate spirituality with the aim of training minds into submission, exploiting the power of algorithms. In Azal’s view, the net does not elevate; it trains: its “fake transcendence” is negative because it does not lead to spiritual liberation but to a form of cognitive conformism, domestication of consciences; it does not generate faith but automation of beliefs. This digital spirituality is not authentic revelation but a choreography of the sacred that keeps the user in a state of affective, perceptual, and ideological dependence.

For Azal, platforms like YouTube, Telegram, Reddit, or TikTok are not just communication tools but true digital liturgical spaces in which new cults—often fragmentary, violent, apocalyptic—find fertile ground. The danger is not a secret conspiracy but the emergence of a “machine” that imitates God: a network of symbols, algorithms, platforms, and narratives. He uses the metaphor of the Demiurge, the craftsman-god of the universe whom the Gnostics saw as the principle of the present cosmic order—a metaphor also used by Corvaglia (L’illusione di scegliere, 2023). This machine feigns transcendence while training conformity. The process is often unconscious even for its participants. Here enters the idea of the meta-theocratic machine: not a sect with a visible leader, but a diffuse techno-sacral structure that produces obedience while masking it as spiritual freedom. Here there is a parallel with Corvaglia’s hive mind.

Azal speaks symbolically of a curvature of algorithms, meaning that platforms—far from being neutral—shape information and perception in such a way as to favor:

• the memetic reproduction of extreme, spiritualist, conspiracist content;
• the construction of self-referential ecosystems (metastable digital bubbles);
• symbolic seduction through images, sounds, and sacralized languages.

In this sense, the algorithm is not just a filter but a computational priest regulating what one sees, believes, and feels as “true.”

Beyond possible mystical overreach, the most interesting aspect is that Azal refers to groups like AROLP (Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light) as “metastable,” i.e., capable of withstanding attacks and reproducing their contents in hostile informational environments, thanks also to the algorithmic protection of platforms. These digital-era cults are systems designed to endure, able to reproduce their core contents and profit from algorithmic dynamics that favor their diffusion despite censorship or contestation. This observation underscores how the network’s dynamic flows and the “folds” of algorithms not only affect the structuring of myths and online cults but are also responsible for their persistence.

The investigation conducted by Corvaglia into the transnational network linking contentious cults like Scientology, lobbying organizations defending religious freedom, centers for the study of new religious movements (such as CESNUR), and neocon American foundations (The mafia of cult apologists, 2024) seems to Azal a confirmation of his intuitions:

“Corvaglia has diagrammed the machine.”

By this Azal recognizes that Corvaglia’s work has traced, analytically and with documentation, the ideological and geopolitical functioning of the very structure of symbolic power that he has described in theological and metapolitical terms.

In other words, Corvaglia provides the “rational proof” of what Azal perceives as intuitive or revealed truth. The two approaches—the gnostic-metaphysical and the scientific-psychosocial—converge in identifying in digital cults and the sacralized network a new system of epistemic power.

Corvaglia (more empirical, based on social psychology and analysis of soft power dynamics) shows how those mechanisms of the meta-theocratic machine translate into concrete reality.

Azal provides the “vertical” reading (gnostic-metaphysical); Corvaglia the “horizontal” one (structural-observable). Together, they show two faces of the same system.

Narrative Shields and Salvific Algorithms: The Hegemony of the Simulated Sacred

Corvaglia and Azal also converge on a critical point: digital cults do not act alone. They need legitimizing structures, such as CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions, directed by Massimo Introvigne) and the magazine Bitter Winter.

These entities defend controversial groups (Scientology, Falun Gong, Church of Almighty God, etc.); attack activists and critical scholars (defined as part of an “anti-cult movement”); and participate in international lobbying networks, often in synergy with pro-Russian and reactionary clerical environments, as Corvaglia has also shown in the AllatRa case.

These structures function as “narrative shields,” conferring media and academic legitimacy on organizations operating in the gray zone between spirituality, propaganda, and manipulation.

Influence in favor of the cults passes not only through content but through the very grammar by which they are presented, exploiting platform algorithmic logics. Sectarian groups and their apologists use highly indexable keywords—religious freedom, tolerance, spiritual diversity, awakening, peace—that reframe critical concepts semantically. Reports of abuse are thus transformed into “religious intolerance”; disobedience to a sect into “ideological persecution.”

Algorithms favor content that generates engagement, and cult organizations have learned to modulate their language to be compatible with the platforms’ value filters. In this way, manipulative content appears neutral or edifying, while analytical critiques, more complex and less viral, remain invisible. It is within this semantic and perceptual imbalance that, as Corvaglia and Azal observe, the new hegemony of the simulated sacred is played out. The result is automated protection, where toxic content is disguised as spiritual pluralism, making it difficult—if not impossible—for the average user to distinguish it from legitimate initiatives. In plain terms, algorithmic curvature—the set of invisible mechanisms through which digital-platform algorithms select, amplify, or silence content—favors the apologists’ narrative.

As Corvaglia and Azal note from different perspectives, today’s war is semantic: “a battle over who has the power to dominate reality, to define religion, to weaponize transcendence.” In other words, it is a struggle over who has the power to name, to define what freedom, truth, spirituality are. And algorithms, far from being neutral, are the new clerics of this invisible war.

Conclusion: Two Diagnoses, One Common Enemy

Corvaglia and Azal start from very different positions: clinical rationalism for the former, radical mysticism for the latter. Yet they converge on a fundamental intuition: the net has made possible cults without cult, obediences without orders, totalitarianisms without a State.

Corvaglia proposes critical education and unmasking. Azal calls for a counter-sacred narration capable of opposing the algorithm with new symbols. Both remind us that today the battle for freedom is fought not only in politics or the economy but in language, symbols, and shared semantics.

The real threat is not fanaticism. It is invisible influence disguised as awakening or as the defense of human rights.

Essential Bibliography

Luigi Corvaglia

• Pandemonium. Cyber-cults and digital fascism (2019): essay on infodemic, online radicalization, and “swarm cults.”
• QAnon. Cybernetic cult and digital fascism (2021): analysis of the conspiracist cult as a paradigmatic example of the hive mind.
• L’illusione di scegliere (2023): study of algorithmic influence and the concept of free will in the digital world, with reference to the gnostic Demiurge.
• La mafia degli apologeti dei culti (2024): investigation into transnational networks that legitimize destructive cults under the mask of religious freedom.
• Il caso AllatRa (2025, article): exposure of AllatRa’s organized disinformation operation against the author himself.

Wahid Azal

• Wake up! A fatwa and Epistle in Refutation of ʿAbdullāh Hāshim the Father of Lies (2025): theological and symbolic attack on the AROLP cult.
• Postpartem to The Goal of the Unwise (2025): mystical-political treatise on the digital cult and the “meta-theocratic machine.”

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