I don’t know how many other people are keeping track of this rubbish, but I’ve recently been watching quite a few ‘Flat Earth’ videos on Youtube; or rather, I have been watching videos both debunking it and looking into it as a psychological and cultural phenomenon. As a rule, I try not to watch anything by people who actually claim that the world is flat, as it just gives them the attention they clearly crave. While this may at least be partially due to my search algorithms, there seems to have been a recent surge in interest in it, especially since the so-called ‘Final Experiment’, which apparently sent a group of people to Antartica to establish whether the sun was visible for twenty-four hours there.

I think you can call both my brothers scientists: Mark is a physicist and Luke is a bioinfomatician. They both have PhDs and conduct their own research. When I asked Luke whether he had heard of the Final Experiment over christmas however, he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Thus I think it’s fair to assume that the scientific community proper is completely uninterested in such things, and you might as well be debating which kind of cheese the moon is made from.

Where academia might be interested, though, is in the psychology underpinning this phenomenon. As I touched upon a while ago here, a lot of this boils down to a general feeling of disenfranchisement: people are increasingly feeling sidelined and downtrodden, so they are more and more eager to find things which make them stand out from the mainstream – lone champions of free thought against the indoctrinated heards. The problem is, that seems to be forcing them to take more and more ridiculous positions, and seems to have now reached a point where people are trying to argue against the absolutely incontestable. Thus online we’re now seeing videos trying to debunk the final experiment, claiming it was all done against a green screen in a studio and so on.

As ludicrous as all this is, I really think this sociological phenomena needs to be looked at. Of course, plenty has already been written about the psychology of conspiracism; but I think there is a lot which can now be discerned from this particular (online) trend, it’s apparent surge in popularity, and the way in which it’s adherents seem to be going to more extreme, absurd lengths to maintain their position. Frankly it is becoming weirder and weirder, more and more astonishing, to the extent that I think it can be used to discern a lot about contemporary culture, politics, and the increasing rejection of the so called establishment. For one, I don’t think it is a coincidence that this nonsense has come alongside the rise of right wing populist figures like Donald Trump, who openly advocate rebelling against what they dismiss as ‘the establishment’. Whatever is being taught in schools, universities and through mainstream media is being deliberately and overtly rejected in favour of increasingly idiotic ideas, regardless of how little evidence there is to support them. The problem is, as it becomes more and more extreme, more and more ridiculous, you have to wonder where such phenomena may lead us socially, and whether that might be somewhere very dark indeed.