Our planet is a sphere, or rather a flattened sphere, slightly compressed at the poles and a bit wider at its equator; anyway, real planets have their curves. But our Earth does not cease to be spherical. Too bad, because if it were flat it would offer every night an unparalleled view of the stars, it wouldn’t cast such a large shadow as to cause eclipses, and it would also make the cartographers’ job much easier. Unfortunately, however, the Earth is not flat.
And yet, leveling all proven scientific facts, there are people who believe that the Earth is flat. They even have their own global organization, the Flat Earth Society, an organization which is steadily increasing its members and its influence around the world.
In the 1990s, the Flat Earth Society had gone bankrupt, was barely surviving, and was just a breath away from its final burial. But then came the internet! And it made people want to believe again that the Earth is flat.
The following images are the first photographs of Earth from a distance greater than 100 million miles in space. They were taken by the American military in 1947, using a German V-2 rocket, captured as war booty from World War II. It was one of the first times we actually saw Earth from a distance. And it was clearly spherical.
Less than a decade later, the Flat Earth Society was formed, promoting a view of the planet that did not match the latest images sent from space and, furthermore, was a view that had been repeatedly and thoroughly rejected by the scientific community for more than five centuries. According to the ideas of the Flat Earth Society, the Earth was a flat disc with the Arctic at the center and a tall wall of ice at the perimeter. The sun, the moon, and the stars, flat-earthers claimed, were no farther away than London is from New York. They also argued that everything NASA showed was nothing more than an elaborate hoax.
A little after the first man’s walk on the Moon, the founder of the Flat Earth Society died. A small but dedicated group of his followers kept the work alive and continued publishing a newsletter about the flat Earth. Over the years, the Society grew, slowly but steadily, eventually counting 3,500 members in the 1990s. But in 1997, a fire at the flat earth headquarters destroyed the library and members’ registry. The inability to collect subscriptions led the organization into financial suffocation and problems worsened further when the last of its organizers died a short time later. The Flat Earth Society could have closed its circle there and been forgotten—but then came the internet.
In 2004, the Flat Earth Society returned as an online discussion forum. Anyone who had a thing for flat Earth theories and an internet connection could post questions, start new discussion topics, or exchange “sources” and links. But most importantly, a way was found for the few and scattered flat Earth believers to connect with each other.
Significantly, 2004 was also the year Facebook was created. YouTube started a year later, followed by Twitter. By the time the Flat Earth Society built its own website in 2009, social media had already begun to dominate the digital universe. Today’s internet users spend 22% of their online time on social media. For many, social media is the internet. From sports fans to amateur cooks, from professional gossips to desperate housewives, social media has a community to offer for everyone; even for flat Earth believers.
Before the advent of the internet, the Flat Earth Society needed fifty years to reach 3,500 members. Today, however, its website receives more than 300,000 unique visits every day. There are pages for the flat Earth on Facebook with more than 100,000 likes, while related videos on YouTube count millions of views. Not to mention the users on Twitter and Reddit, the forums and discussion groups – all dedicated to spreading flat Earth theories.
With a potential audience of billions, social media can give someone who works on their computer in their mom’s basement the same impact as a traditional television studio. Publishing anything is now just a matter of a few clicks and uploads. Ultimately, social media has leveled – or perhaps “flattened”? – the public discourse.
User-generated content is the nectar that feeds social media. If there were no status updates, tweets, and video uploads, social media would be practically empty. It is absolutely in the interest of the companies that manage social media to constantly encourage users to upload new content to the platforms, regardless of how silly it might be – not only flat Earth theories, but everything, from UFO arrival cover-ups, to anti-vaccine campaigns, to revelations about ETs and their alien origins, to the corrosion of governments by humanoid reptiles, all are accommodated and promoted. And as content increases, so does interest. It is indicative that in recent years, internet searches with the term “flat Earth” have skyrocketed:
In a 2018 statistical survey by YouGov, a British multinational research company, one-third of those born after 1980 (the infamous millennials) stated that they are not entirely convinced that the planet is spherical, even though there has been accumulated evidence supporting this fact for five hundred years. As it turned out, even a small amount of attention to an overly publicized yet completely categorical mistake was enough to make even a nonsense like the flat Earth theory a subject of discussion.
From all the imbalanced and absurd ideas circulating these days among the most unfortunate of bipedal mammals, the “flat Earth theory” is perhaps one of the most harmless. In fact, it doesn’t bother anyone, so much so that for most people it makes little practical difference whether our planet is round, triangular, or like a multi-story cake, as long as they feel it as their home (except if they believe they are aliens on a secret mission). Others believe in the undead, others in capitalism, and others that the Earth is a flying saucer. Is there a problem?
The problem is that the digital ecosystem and the google-anti-criticism mentality that incubate ideas of the “flat Earth” kind are exactly the same factors that spread, nurture and reinforce opinions such as those “against vaccines” or those that treat migrants and refugees as an “invasion” and conspiracy to “alter” the indigenous national element. In the first world, deadly diseases that had disappeared for decades have reappeared, endangering public health, because a mob of modern and “open minded” parents prefers to be informed by conspiracy influencers and refuses to vaccinate their children.
In the border regions of the same first world, electronic racism has reached such cannibalistic levels that concentration camps and systematic murders of migrants appear as “normality”. Here we no longer deal with paranoid ideas that end up in ice walls at the edge of the horizon, but with attitudes and mindsets that lead directly to extremely real – and deadly – consequences. If tomorrow the internet collapsed, it does not necessarily mean that paranoia would vanish with it; the human species has proven capable of embracing the worst, even when offered written on tablets by the hands of some “prophet”. But the manic repetition and amplification of every foolish opinion through digital channels that ends up elevating stupidity to unquestionable gospel makes things not just worse, but dangerous…
Hurry Tuttle