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
Add in “racists are being persecuted by minority bullies” and “we have to vote for fascists to counterract the tolerant “pc” people.”
Well, if we want to get technical, it should be Aristarchus was wrong, as he was the earliest heliocentrist and Copernicus based his work off Aristarchus’ work. Copernicus is the one who brought popularity to the idea, however.
@ David
Since you are thinking about revisiting the topic I would suggest thinking about “names of groups” vs. “names of explanations”. That might throw some problematic variables in there that complicate even a humorous comparison. To me they tend to be little more than “sexist” or “misogynist” with different expressions of those. The self-selected name and externally applied name might be significant too, as well as the fact that it’s an acronym name.
That comparison between “gamergate” and the others is more interesting. Perhaps “gamergater”? There has to be a name of a group that would better fit. I realize that I’m overthinking this but I like to overthink things like this.
I’m in the process of analyzing that awful video Dawkins posted on Twitter and I needed to read up on the current theories of humor to get a good explanation of how humor works and now my imagination is using the info.
*Why did the MGTOW cross the road? Because the chicken crossed to the other side to get away from the complaints about women and feminists.
*Why did the MRA cross the road? Because the chickens getting petitions signed to have a crosswalk installed were making them look bad.
*Why did the PUA cross the road? Because…
(I’m still working on this one, something about predatory behavior, gas-lighting or weakening confidence)
Why did the PUA cross the ro
I’m sorry sir, but you have to add “allegedly.” All of these accusations against my client are completely unfounded even though he brags about what he totally didn’t do in his books and in speaking engagements.
PUA crossed the road = negging the sidewalk?
Q. Why did the PUA cross the road?
A. It was satire!
@ brony
Re: gaslighting
Why did the chicken cross the road? It didn’t; you’re just imagining that it did.
“Assume a perfectly spherical flat earth…”
The rise in conspiracy beliefs/cultish thinking (and I would definitely lump MRA/RedPill/MGTOW in there) perfectly parallels the rise in distrust of authority figures and institutions over the last few decades. People have gotten really cynical about government, corporations, democracy, Wall Street, the media, the military, academia, etc. Instead of acknowledging that these institutions need reform, there’s this sense that everything is rotten, money corrupts, and the only trustworthy people are outsiders with no axe to grind. They turn to YouTube randos and InfoWars rather than traditional, more credible sources for explanations of how the world “really” works. Hucksters like Roosh, Paul Elam, and Rush Limbaugh amass sizeable followings by channeling the anger of people who truly have been screwed over by global capitalism, and redirecting it safely downward rather than at its true target.
It’s ironic, and sort of infuriating, that the Dunning is getting ever more Kreuger in an age where people literally carry around the sum total of human knowledge in their pockets.
False road-crossing allegations are much more frequent than actual road crossings.
Why did the PUA cross the road? To impress a lady by ramming into people on the sidewalk, of course.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/10/13/impress-the-ladies-by-ramming-into-people-on-the-sidewalk-red-pill-writer-suggests/
I’d like there to be a new political scandal about the Watergate hotel itself, just to see what they called it.
Q: Why did the MRA cross the road?
A: FEMINISTS CROSS ROADS TOO YOU KNOW! STOP PICKING ON US! YOU’RE BIAS!
Q: Why did the PUA cross the road?
A: He wouldn’t cross the road to speak to you. You’re barely a 7.
Q: Why did the MTGOW cross the road?
A: Because his ex-wife couldn’t see him going his own way on the far side.
Q: Why did the #Gamergater cross the road?
A: Gamergaters don’t cross roads. That’s slander. You probably crossed the road yourself. Anyway, I already reported that road-crossing.
Q: Why did the Honey Badger cross the road?
A: She’s not really a Honey Badger. She’s pathetic. You should give your money to me instead.
The Catholic Church and the Protestant churches never taught that the Earth is flat. People like Thomas Aquinas read Ancient Greek philosophers and understood the geometric arguments for a spherical Earth. A tiny minority of Protestant theologians argued that the Bible describes a flat Earth covered by a dome, but they were pretty much ignored since most theologians were aware of Ancient Greek philosophy and didn’t want to go there.
Uneducated people probably mostly thought the Earth was flat before the 1800’s. The modern Flat Earth theory became popular in the UK among a small proportion of evangelicals in the late nineteenth century, but the movement almost completely collapsed after airplanes became a thing. Then Flat Earth societies became popular among a few highly eccentric evangelicals who were also interested in “alternative science” stuff and their focus was less religious. Charles K. Johnson brought back the religious focus.
In the current YouTube iteration it seems to be mostly crackpot conspiracy theorists and occultists with a minority of Christians and Muslims. I’d suppose there are still a few isolated and uneducated religious people who always accepted Flat Earthism.
@IP:
My minecraft name is my real name, because I have no imagination. If you can’t remember my real name, send me a Steam message and I’ll contact you. You do have my steam ID if I recall?
@everyone
XD
Watergategate, obviously.
Only on the internet can these bullshit theories become popular.
@EJ
Sure, I’ll message you on Steam then. I know your last name but I’m not sure what exactly the MC handle would be. I’ll message you in the morning.
If Watergategate turns out to be a false flag, is it Watergategategate?
I’ll be at work tomorrow morning, but I’ll get the message tomorrow night. Thanks; I really enjoyed minecraft on Kirby’s server and would like to play some more socially.
@Buttercup: It’s mostly just cherry-picking, I imagine. People can go to the world’s repository for knowledge and start with a biased conclusion and work backwards from there.
Like in one episode of If Google was a Guy, there’s a woman who goes in and ‘searches for’ “vaccines cause autism”.
Well, that took all of five seconds to debunk. Went to the Sydney airport website, looked at international arrivals, one of the first things was a flight from Santiago, Chile. (via Auckland, but it still debunks this)
Not sure why they even bother with that sort of a half-assed explanation, believing the Earth is flat kinda requires you believe everything we know about physics is wrong anyway.
“The flat earth society has members all around the globe” – I love this.
But how do they suppose the sun and moon work? Okay, they might think the moon is a shiny disk with a black disk in front of it that slides back and forth. Still, the sun? And how would they explain the sun being at different places in different parts of the world?
My brain hurts. Where are all the nonsensical but simple beliefs? …Oh, that’s right, the assorted anti-feminists have got ’em.
(Also I’m laughing at the chicken-crossing-the-road jokes here. I can’t add anything, but I’m laughing.)
GAmergater
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Literally.
Literally who?
@Paradoxical – Yeah, I think consumer-driven content feeds into it in a major way. In the US, back when the evening news was Walter Cronkite and the three major networks, there was something of a national consensus on what was going on. It was highly problematic, of course, because of all the voices that got excluded, but at least people accepted a common set of facts as a starting point. Now we can’t even agree on the facts. How can you even debate people who believe in a flat earth, or that feminists secretly want to be raped? Nothing about conspiracy thinking is falsifiable, so any bullshit goes.