Off the Edge

Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

Unabridged, Length: 7 hours 13 minutes, Narrator: Xe Sands

English language

Published Feb. 22, 2022 by Hachette Audio.

ISBN:
9781649040800
4 stars (1 review)

Since 2015, there has been a spectacular boom in a centuries-old delusion: that the earth is flat. More and more people believe that we all live on a pancake-shaped planet, capped by a solid dome and ringed by an impossible wall of ice.

How? Why?

In Off the Edge, journalist Kelly Weill draws a direct line from today’s conspiratorial moment, brimming not just with Flat Earthers but also anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s. We learn the natural impulses behind these beliefs: when faced with a complicated world out of our control, humans have always sought patterns to explain the inexplicable. This psychology doesn’t change. But with the dawn of the twenty-first century, something else has shifted. Powered by Facebook and YouTube algorithms, the Flat Earth movement is growing.

At once a definitive history of the movement and an essential …

4 editions

This is not a joke

4 stars

It's easy to make fun of flat earthers but this book shows that they sit at the intersection of a lot of other conspiracy theories, and share a lot in common with cults. Weill goes through the history of the movement, in the 19th Century (it's not old, the Greeks had already figured out that the Earth was a globe). But, surprise surprise, it is really with Youtube and Facebook that the contemporary movement took off (see what I did there?) thanks to their recommending algorithm. And yes, flat earthers gravitate in the same orbit (natch!) as antisemites (if there's a conspiracy, there have to be conspirators), neo-Nazis, Q, and vaccine troofers. So it's not a movement of harmless eccentrics who can just be ignored. They join the crowds of radicalized by social media. It's not cute. It's dangerous.