I’m reading a book about people who believe in a flat earth* so I’m frankly quite frightened of the USA. While I was deep into reading about people who think the rest of the world is crazy for thinking they’re crazy this morning on metro, 2 very unconventional looking people got on the train—a tall skinny circle bearded man in a trucker hat with an American flag on a pole sticking out of his backpack and a female I assume is his significant other, a tall and gaunt sour faced heavily made up dyed blonde also with a backpack who took the seat behind him, both of them facing me. I imagine the flag poking out of the backpack is what made the dude take so long to sit down. I had to not stare at them for 2 stations and when I got off, the dude gave me the eye. I’ll just say they fit the profile that is forming in my mind. I was reading at the time about a guy who engaged in flat-smacking I think he calls it which is aggressively confronting globe earthers about their beliefs. Globe earthers are everywhere of course, so all he has to do when he’s walking down the street and feeling pugnacious is film himself defying anyone who catches his eye to challenge his beliefs. He has a video channel for YouTube documenting the lunatic intransigence of globe earthers.
It's important to note that those 2 weirdos were each wearing military green jackets and seemed to have the same material backpacks, but were decidedly not active enlistees if you catch my drift. And the dude whose backpack was quite tall and as I say unwieldy onaccounta it had a big old broomstick with an American flag affixed sticking out of it, really slouched expansively in his seat with his giant backpack next to him which is probably why his old lady knew not to sit next to him but upright and alert in the seat behind him. Real charmers in my fervid imagination. But I’m not judgmental.
A sudden spray of Glock fire did cross my mind as a possibility. It wasn’t an obsession. I was more in a hating frame of mind myself honestly. Almost grateful to be handed a dickwad to loathe. Just as a palliative or something. Because truthfully I am interested in the topic of what makes people be like people. Why is everyone so typical? I hear a bit of myself when I imagine flat earthers’ laying into those who in their company innocently betray a passive working theory that the world is round and not the center of the universe. I hear in them myself reacting to someone innocently parroting some ass on CNN about Ukraine. (usually keeping it to myself unless it’s my wife. Sorry, honey.) So let me be clear: I hate in flat earthers and conspiracy dolts to a great extent what I hate in myself. I feel like my convertibility flag was activated and hyperextended by religion and religious people when I was too young to know better and it makes me an obnoxious convert about everything that makes sense to me as an injustice. It’s why I fear becoming a Flat Earther or a q-nut. I engage with the facts the same way. Like someone itching to proselytize (if only I could find a belief to proselytize about.) I’m overstating a tad, but let’s be real, not completely.
A thesis of the book* is that facebook and youtube’s algorithms bear a good bit of responsibility for the global blossoming of flat earth theory (especially amongst certain types of Americans) after almost 2 centuries of nearly universal indifference to flat earth theory punctuated by periodic and isolated flowerings, because both platforms exploited the curiosity factor to push freaky fringe ideas on anyone who betrayed any interest in adjacent eccentric belief systems. Flat Earth theory having a uniquely WTF allure to it fit the bill of both companies’ interest in addicting users of their sites to longer and longer dippings into the rabbit hole. There probably wasn’t an appreciation at either facebook or youtube that in the face of near unanimous planetary consensus among scientists and laypeople alike that the planet is as round as all the evidence plainly shows, the hurdle of believing such a patently absurd notion as that the earth is as flat as the writers of the bible thought it was all evidence to the contrary is a guarantee that the belief will be unshakeable even in the face of ostracism and ridicule. It’s tailor made for cult level thinking like so many other ideas that have been churned up from the depths of the web. There’s a quality that these absurd theories have in common—they make fanatic true believers who are highly motivated to keep the addictive corrosive irresistible material coming. That’s really all that matters. I mean what are they going to do, censor the stuff? That’s even worse than giving it free reign in the marketplace of ideas.
Catherine Liu's American Idyll is in many ways about this too. People hate the experts. They hate the know-it-alls. So they full throttle embrace anything that flips the motherfuckers off. They worship the anti-experts largely as a fuck you to the experts. And let's be honest, our experts are a very sorry lot who have fuck yous coming to them. And ironically the people who hate experts, in flocking to anti-experts replicate a negative image of the institutions they hate, of the canon. But it's a canon for them, and not for the know-it-alls.†
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