n light of my work on the United States as an apocalyptic culture, I want to point out the saturation of many contemporary technologies with apocalyptic and millennialist desire and explore the masculinist disposition of both of those inclinations. Jodi Dean's discussion of virtual fear addresses the apocalyptic rhetoric that surrounds technology these days, and many of the mechanisms she describes for easing the fear and anxiety about technology fit into a millennialist hope for a perfected technoculture. As she indicates, in our turn-of-the-millennium civilization, such heightened fears and hopes constitute new forms of regulatory power. But to better understand this contemporary expression, it is important to grasp just how deeply entrenched apocalyptic belief is in the United States and the extent to which much apocalyptic belief is misogynistic and racist. Apocalypticism, or the belief that the world is about to end through divine intervention, crossed the Atlantic with the Puritans and has been shaping the way American history has been understood ever since. It served as a motivating force for Protestant colonization, which was seen as preparation for the End-time and for the Millennium, the one thousand years of heaven on earth promised in Revelation (the New Testament book that remains the key text for both religious and secular apocalyptic thought). Like today's Christian fundamentalists, the Puritans sought to establish a theocratic society in which explicitly patriarchal law, based primarily on the Old Testament, would prevail. For a variety of social and economic reasons, the Puritan legacy of fears of the End-time -as manifest, for example, in the witch trials or in the millennialist dream of the nation as a chosen site, a rhetoric used to justify genocidal actions against Native Americans prevailed over competing belief systems. The gender, race, and sex dichotomies within this sort of apocalyptic belief are extremely rigid. Women are seen either as Jezebels sexually sinful women who refuse male authority--or as submissive handmaidens of