Cary Harrison (Brother Jasper Culpepper) originally performed this piece on The Cary Harrison Files, KPFK 90.7 FM / Pacifica Radio, Los Angeles.
Friends, this is a glorious and deeply troubling time for True Christians everywhere.
Glorious, because the Lord has once again confirmed through the miracle of consumer electronics that the End Times are upon us. Troubling, because in delivering us these signs, He has chosen as His vessel the one garment that True Christians have always known to be — at minimum — theologically suspicious.
The undergarment, friends. The underpants.
Now, before we get to the government surveillance program embedded in your waistband, let us acknowledge what the Lord already knew when He fashioned Adam and Eve in the garden: clothing was not His idea.
Clothing was the consequence of sin. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve walked freely in God’s presence, unashamed, unencumbered, and — critically — unwired. It was the serpent’s influence, the awareness of nakedness, the birth of shame that introduced fabric into Eden.
Clothing is therefore the original evidence of human corruption.
And underwear — underwear, friends, is the most corrupt layer of all. It is clothing’s confession. It is the garment closest to the very site of original transgression. It is where the devil lives, and now, apparently, where IARPA has put its microphones.
We’ll get to that. Let us begin at the face, because that’s where God started before He moved south.
We’re talking about Facebook’s Meta glasses.
We had always assumed the Mark of the Beast would be something dramatic. A brand. A microchip. A bureaucratic nightmare administered by a one-world government run out of Brussels by people with good haircuts. We imagined we would know.
We did not imagine it would come in tortoiseshell frames. We did not imagine it would pair with Spotify.
And yet.
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The Lord moves in mysterious ways, and apparently His most recent instrument is Mark Zuckerberg — a man who has the emotional warmth of a DMV notice and the spiritual energy of a Terms of Service agreement — who took the hallowed icon of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen and transformed it into what Scripture clearly describes:
“He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark.” — Revelation 13:16–17
The mark, friends, is on your face. It has a five-star rating on Amazon and comes with a ninety-day return window, which is more mercy than the Lord offered Sodom — though Sodom at least had the dignity not to issue a press release about it.
Praise Him. For He allowed the surveillance state to arise not through jackboots and midnight raids but through accessorizing.
For thirty years, the Deep State could not do what Zuckerberg accomplished over a long weekend in Menlo Park. The government needed warrants. It needed subpoenas. It needed windowless rooms in Fort Meade with blinking servers and a man in a polo shirt eating a sad desk sandwich.
God in His infinite efficiency said: inefficient. Cut out the middleman. Convince the prisoners to build the Panopticon themselves. And wear it. On their faces. As a lifestyle choice. With a matching carrying case.
Jeremy Bentham — a man the Lord sent ahead as a warning, like John the Baptist but for surveillance capitalism — designed his Panopticon in 1791. The prison where the warden sees every cell but the prisoners cannot see the warden. The genius of it was the uncertainty. You might be watched. You might not. But you behave as though you always are.
Zuckerberg improved on this by simply removing the uncertainty.
Which is, as any True Christian will tell you, also a sin.
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” — Ecclesiastes 1:2
We are indexing our neighbors’ faces into machine learning databases while committing, simultaneously, the sin of vanity. The Lord is efficient in His condemnations.
Now you’ve got 23-year-olds at farmers markets filming heirloom tomatoes while their glasses quietly background-map the political affiliations of everyone in the zip code based on bumper stickers and tote bags. That data goes to whom, under what Terms of Service that nobody read because it was forty-seven pages of boilerplate designed by lawyers whose specific and sacred calling is to ensure you never understand what you agreed to?
Oh, it’s in the Terms. It is always in the Terms.
The Terms of Service is the modern covenant. Except Moses’ covenant fit on two tablets, was legible to the average Israelite, and did not harvest their retinal data. Moses would have been a considerably less impressive prophet if he’d come down from Sinai and said:
“God wants you to initial here, here, and here, and by accepting these terms you grant Him a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to your face in public spaces.”
You are not merely the product, friends. You are the factory.
You are walking around producing surveillance data in real time. Every face your glasses scan. Every protest. Every person at the coffee shop who did not consent to being indexed into a machine learning dataset but is now — because you walked past them in your adorable frames — forever associated with your biometric profile and a targeted ad for Cialis.
Which, while we’re here, is itself a pharmaceutical instrument of the devil — enabling the very sins that the underwear, which we are getting to, was designed by God’s absence to discourage.
But God — or the Devil, the paperwork is still being processed — was not finished with just the face.
For behold.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, known as IARPA, an arm of the Office of the Director of National Defense — not to be confused with the CIA’s psychic spy program from the 1970s, which was also real, which tells you everything you need to know about the kinds of Fridays they have in these buildings — has announced that it is developing computerized clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data.
Shirts. Pants. Socks.
Underwear.
That is the actual, God-given name of the actual, government-funded surveillance underwear program. Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems. The Lord has blessed us with the acronym we deserve and, frankly, He is not being subtle about the eschatological messaging.
Over twenty-two million dollars of your tax money has already been consecrated to this unholy sacrament. Twenty-two million dollars to give your boxer briefs a wi-fi connection and a security clearance.
These are not passive garments. These are active smart textiles — embedded with weavable conductive polymer wire, energy harvesters powered by the movement of your own body, ultra-low-power printable computers on cloth, microphones that behave like threads, and — hear this in your soul —
scrunchable batteries that can function after many deformations.
Scrunchable. Batteries. In your pants. Deformed by your body. Continuously. Surveilling.
Now. Let us think about where, exactly, on the human body these batteries are being deformed.
The Lord has given us bodies in His image. The Lord has also given us, through the consequence of the Fall, the need for undergarments. And the Lord — knowing the weakness of the flesh, which is considerable and historically documented — has generally encouraged us to keep the undergarment region quiet, modest, and inaccessible to federal contractors.
The fact that a government agency has now placed recording equipment in the precise garment that covers the region most associated with the sin of lust is not, friends, a coincidence. This is either God’s final test of our resolve or the devil’s most intimate territorial conquest to date.
We are praying on this. The deacons are divided.
Because here’s the theological problem that IARPA has not addressed in its twenty-two million dollar budget: if the underwear records, someone has to listen.
Someone, somewhere, in a government facility with a security clearance and a government-issued headset, will be receiving the audio output of your body in its most private and least dignified moments. We are told the garment monitors bodily conditions. Temperature. Blood pressure. Bodily responses to stress.
Friends.
Certain bodily responses are not stress.
Certain bodily responses are, in fact, the direct result of the sin of lust — the sin the undergarment was spiritually designed, by God, through shame, in Eden, to conceal. And now those responses will be logged, timestamped, and transmitted to a government server, where they will be processed by an algorithm and possibly flagged for review by a human analyst, who will then be exposed to data of a nature that can only be described as arousing by proximity.
Which is a sin. For the analyst. On government time. With federal equipment.
The devil, friends, has thought this through more carefully than IARPA has.
This technology is currently designed for military, espionage, and private use — but it could see a commercial debut sometime in the future. After all, everyone wears clothing. And we all use an external smart computing device. So why not combine the two?
Why not, indeed. Why not follow the exact trajectory of every other surveillance technology in human history, which begins as a tool of the state, migrates to the corporation, gets rebranded as a wellness product, and ends up on an end cap at Target between the protein bars and the seasonal throw pillows.
SMART ePANTS Pro. With heart-rate monitoring. In heather gray. Machine washable. Scrunchable. Coming soon in a church-friendly modest cut that nonetheless contains a federal microphone and a conductive polymer waistband reading the temperature of your conviction.
The Roman Empire gave the people bread and circuses to keep them docile and prevent them from noticing the empire was collapsing. The surveillance economy gives people bread and podcasts — and the circus is all of us. Cameras on our faces. Microphones in our trousers. Generating behavioral data that gets sold to pharmaceutical companies, political consultants, insurance actuaries, and defense contractors while we think we are simply trying to find a good taco place.
And the taco place ad shows up immediately. Because it always does.
And you think: huh. That’s convenient.
That is the voice of the serpent in the garden.
He did not appear with fire and brimstone. He appeared with a coupon. And then he appeared with Ray-Bans. And then — having worked his way systematically downward through the human form — he appeared in the one garment that True Christians have always known was the devil’s anteroom.
The anteroom the government has now wired for sound.
Bentham built a prison. Zuckerberg built an accessory. The Defense Department built a waistband. The serpent built all three. Same contractor. Better marketing.
True Christians everywhere had best unpack their bags, clean their weapons, and — if any dignity survives — examine the thread count on their undergarments before stepping outside. For it looks as though the surveillance state will not merely expand outward into every public space, every face, every transaction.
It is expanding inward. Into the garment of shame. Into the original consequence of sin. Into the region where the Fall began and federal contractors have now planted their listening devices.
God tested Adam with an apple. He is testing us with elastic.
Let us pray in mourning for our souls, our data, and our waistbands.
Amen.
Next week, Brother Japer Culpepper will declare war on neck tattoos and oat milk.
Cary Harrison (Brother Jasper Culpepper) originally aired this on The Cary Harrison Files, KPFK 90.7 FM, Los Angeles / Pacifica Radio Network. Subscribe, share, and for God’s sake — check your underwear.
If this made you check the thread count on your boxer briefs — forward it to someone who needs to hear it.
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