So yesterday I fell into an internet hole watching “flat earth” videos on YouTube.
In case you haven’t heard, the ancient idea that the world we live on is flat, stationary, and perhaps the center of the universe has been having a bizarre revival lately.
The topic jumped off the internet and into the mainstream media last month when rapper/producer B.O.B. started Tweeting about his newfound faith in flatness, ultimately getting into a sort of rap battle with everyone’s favorite astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson.
It turns out it’s not only B.O.B. who has decided that the globe is a lie. Over the past year, a sort of flat-earth counterculture has blown up online. On Youtube, a small battalion of flat earth “truthers” spread the new gospel to hundreds of thousands of fans in videos that range from the charmingly amateurish to the surprisingly slick.
The new flat earthers don’t just reject the idea of the earth as a spinning ball; they reject the concept of gravity itself (suggesting that things fall to earth simply because they’re denser than air, which, what?), not to mention evolution and pretty much most of modern science.
Many of them see the Bible as a better source of information about the earth than science, and rail against what they see as a vast conspiracy to keep the supposed truth about the flat earth from the public. Naturally, it’s all the fault of the freemasons and the Jews. (It’s telling that B.O.B. is not only a flat earther but also, apparently, a Holocaust denier who referenced the discredited historian David Irving in a dis track aimed at Tyson.)
One of the reasons I’ve been so obsessed with MRAs and other misogynists over the past five years or so is that I think they offer an instructive case study in the cultural and intellectual history of bad ideas, and the subcultures that nurture them. Obviously the flat earthers do as well.
The similarities between the “manosphere” and the flat earthers are considerable, and not just because both groups have found their ideal audiences on Youtube; like their MRA and MGTOW counterparts, popular flat earth Youtubers have tens of thousands of subscribers, and their most popular videos get hundreds of thousands of views.
Members of both subcultures not only have their own interpretations of the world but an array of shared “facts” as well, which they cling to with the misguided arrogance of the fanatical autodidacts they are: MRAs insist that domestic violence “isn’t gendered”; flat earthers insist that there are no direct flights from Australia to South America. (No, really.)
I may return to this topic in more detail later but I thought you’d find the following charts from Google Trends to be of some interest, since they show that the public’s newfound interest in flat earthery has evidently eclipsed its interest in Men’s Rights, MGTOW, and pickup artistry combined.
Not only is “flat earth” way more interesting to people than all that manosphere stuff but interest in Men’s Rights, pickup artistry, and MGTOW has been declining. Have they all peaked?
This isn’t a perfect representation of interest in these topics. People searching for “pua” might actually be interested in retired soccer star Víctor Púa; people searching for MRA might be interested in Magnetic Resonance Angiography. Alternately, people interested in any of these topics may have used different terms — though when I searched for ‘men’s rights” there were almost no searches for that term.
Hey, let’s add feminism to the mix.
D’oh! “Flat Earth” beats feminism, too! But, hey, at least feminism is still doing better than “men’s rights,” and it’s been on an upswing.
Let’s swap out feminism for “gamergate.”
No surprise it’s been on the decline, but I would have expected a lot more interest at its peak.
Now let’s put all this in perspective.
POOP BEATS EVERYTHING!
But I am a little puzzled by poop’s declining poopularity.
I’m going to keep watching the flat earthers, and will report any interesting findings. If I find an explanation for the poop conundrum I will share that as well.
David Futrelle,
No surprise. Turns out the misnamed “Men’s Rights Movement” is an utter fail!
Interesting. It looks like there was a spike in MRA searches around the Elliot Roger murder spree. At least that’s my guess.
When I read about Flat Earth theories years ago, I remember their explanation for what we call gravity was that the Earth, which is a flat disc, is travelling “upwards” with a constant acceleration. Or something? I’m no physicist.
Also this:
http://i.imgur.com/UFh5hFr.jpg
I’m just gonna make an OT comment here:
The Minecraft server I’ve been playing on, on and off, for a few years is doing a map reboot this week because of 1.9, and I’ll probably get back to playing on the server again. This is the server that PZ Myers has posted about on Pharyngula. Does anyone here happen to be a Sitosis player? Or would like to be? 🙂
Isn’t it hilarious when people who believe the Bible also hate Jews? They seem to miss one tiny little detail: Jesus was a Jew…so was his mom!
It’s a bit of a myth that flat earth was a common belief in ancient times. The Greeks not only knew the Earth was a sphere, they had a pretty good approximation of its size. The reason people were sceptical about Columbus wasn’t because they didn’t know the Earth was round, it’s that they thought he’d under-estimated the size. They were right too; good job for him the Americas were in the way.
The oldest property deeds we know of describe ownership of land being from the centre of the Earth all the way out to infinity.
Boring Alan Fact Warning:
The US deliberately allowed the Russians to orbit Sputnik first so as to establish a precedent that space flight didn’t violate usual rules about overflight of territory.
VioletBeauregarde – alas, some of them have come up with explanations for why Jesus *wasn’t* a Jew. Don’t forget, they overlap with the people who claim that the Nazis were leftists.
There’s an anti-Masonic Catholic writer who is also promoting Biblical geocentricity. Presumably he and his associates have realized that ‘geocentricity’ sounds less ridiculous than ‘the earth is flat’.
Everyone knows that it’s turtles all the way down.
“But I am a little puzzled by poop’s declining popularity.”
Mmmm…maybe people have caught on that it’s always going to be around and that we’re never going to have to deal with a shortage. Which means the law of supply and demand stands unchallenged, along with the law of, um, gravity.
“When I read about Flat Earth theories years ago, I remember their explanation for what we call gravity was that the Earth, which is a flat disc, is travelling ‘upwards’ with a constant acceleration.”
That’s a bow towards Einstein…apparently flat-earthers can do without Newton in a pinch but still need Einstein. Maybe they think that Einstein refuted Newton so they’re willing to give him (Einstein) the time of day. (Though if they think Einstein refuted Newton, they’d be wrong.)
Addition: upvote to Judas’s comment.
Last year I was fortunate enough to get hold of this book for review:
http://galileowaswrong.com/
It took some doing–there were apparently no copies at all in the UK; the copy I got came from a Catholic university in Indiana.
There is a lot of fascinating stuff going on here, but the biggest takeaway I got from it was that the author and people like him have no problem with ‘poetic’ language in the Bible; what makes them so desperate to ‘prove’ that everything we know about physics and astronomy is wrong is that Paul V in 1616, Urban VIII in 1633 and Alexander VII in 1664 made it absolutely clear that heliocentrism was wrong, and papal decrees are infallible.
And as Saint Paul says in 1 Corinthians, ‘But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.’ If you let one thing slide, then what good is the rest?
That depend on what you call “refute”. Einstein did point that gravity did not work the way Newton though. But on the other hand, it’s mostly a refinement of its description.
Flat earthers have the advantage that the belief of Flat Earth isn’t directly harmful, even if David show how it can lead to actual toxic belief.
Now, how the fuck can the earth being a flat disk that travel upward, without it having a lot, and I mean a lot, of various problem ? And upward compared to what ? And what do they do when they take a plane ? Or even climb a high mountain ? I have lived in the alp, the horizon is something that can be seen !
@IP:
Re minecraft: Yes, I’d love that. Me please!
Re that picture: That’s hilarious. I adore it.
@Ohlmann:
As someone who’s done a lot of orbital mechanics equations, please allow me to assert that believing in a flat earth (and thus getting your orbit wrong) can be immediately harmful, both to you and to the people you land on.
No direct flights from Australia to South America? Wait, then what is Quantas trying to pull, here?!?
http://www.qantas.com/au/en/destinations/south-america.html
LOOK AT ALL THOSE LIES! I’m off to hypothesize what their end game is.
@ EJ
Orbital mechanics gas to be one of the biggest mindfucks going. How can throwing a hammer forwards make you go faster!
Being a particle/astrophysics nut, I am still psyched about the recent proof in the existence of Gravitational Waves. As the news was being reported it was fun to watch the flat earthers go bonkers trying to prove that the whole thing was a lie/propaganda. They had diagrams and everything. And it’s amazing to me that there are more believers in flat earth than ever before. Not just in numbers, but in overall percentage of the population.
There’s two things I got from this discovery; people can be morons, and Einstein was inhumanly brilliant.
Actually, those aren’t the same. Geocentrists believe that the Sun goes around the Earth. Flat-earthers believe that the Earth is flat. If it seems like I’m splitting hairs, well, think of MRAs vs. MGTOWs vs. PUAs vs. redpillers vs. ROK bugfuckers. This kind of thing tends to happen in movements that can’t supply evidence to suport their claims. See also: theology.
kupo, I saw one vdeo in which a flat earther pulled up a list of direct flights onine, and declared that he didn’t think they were real. It was just part of the conspiracy.
Flat earth and geocentrism are actually pretty distinct, despite both being wrong. In a geocentrist model the earth is a sphere at the center of the universe and everything orbits around it, as opposed to it being a flat disk.
@Alan:
Orbital mechanics is perfectly sensible. It merely requires you to accept that your intuition is wrong, because your intuition only works for the special case where we’re standing on the surface of a ball of rock. Once you teach your intuition to work for the general case of physics, it’s much easier.
This is probably true for most disciplines.
@J^3:
I know, right? It was the coolest thing ever. We’ve already picked up several other black holes’ waves. This looks like an amazing technique and it’s going to revolutionise astro in our generation.
If you had asked me last year what the best thing in our generation would be, I would have said this, or possibly the discoveries around Hubble’s Constant. This is new and exciting and
will make those particle people stop mocking usmakes me remember why I love astro so much.@ EJ
Yeah, but that would mean accepting I don’t know everything; and you know I have issues around that 🙂
(What was that other anti intuitive thing we were on about recently?)
Mano(sphere), however, does describe the shape of the earth more accurately.
I don’t see the point of flat earthing, it doesn’t provide any useful purpose, why would anyone need a vast army of fakers to stop people knowing what shape the earth was.
maybe in a few decades space tourism will be so cheap, you can just go to space and look at earth directly.
Seriously, I’m pretty worried about the direction that the world seems to be going. With the resurgence of homeopathy, anti-vaccination, flat-earth… these are all things that go against accepted science (and… you know, facts) for no reason – all of these people combined with MRAs and the like would seem to want to get us back to a time when men were banging rocks together and relationships were about clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her back to the cave by the hair. Because that’s somehow safer – it doesn’t challenge their beliefs.
@EJ
The server is officially closed to new applications right now, but it’s not because we have too many players. It’s just because we don’t have any proper griefing protection, so a stream of new unknown players could become a problem. Bringing in friends shouldn’t be a problem, so do you want me to send your Minecraft name to the mods for the whitelist? (If so, what’s your Minecraft name again? I forget.)
Here’s the map that’s about to be reset:
http://mc.sitosis.com/map/
I made that unfinished giant square in the ocean at -3000, -3600. It’s a Minecraft replica of the Sinnoh region from Pokémon Diamond/Pearl. I never had the patience to finish it. :/
I also made the incredibly long rail (8K blocks or so).
The Galileo Was Wrong people seem to be geocentrists, not flat-earthers. Technically it should be Copernicus Was Wrong, of course, but hey, he doesn’t fit as neatly into a science-versus-religion narrative.
ETA: Everyone else is already on this. “Flat earth” is just kind of a straw catch-all term for reality-deniers and I’m not super fond of it.
You know, I actually think most disciplines work best if you assume we’re standing on the surface of a ball of rock, given that we usually are.