Off the Edge
Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A deep dive into the world of Flat Earth conspiracy theorists . . . that brilliantly reveals how people fall into illogical beliefs, reject reason, destroy relationships, and connect with a broad range of conspiracy theories in the social media age. Beautiful, probing, and often empathetic . . . An insightful, human look at what fuels conspiracy theories.” —Science
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 look at its unbelievable present, Off the Edge introduces us to a cast of larger-than-life characters. We meet historical figures like the nineteenth-century grifter who first popularized the theory, as well as the many modern-day Flat Earthers Weill herself gets to know, from moms on vacation to determined creationists to neo-Nazi rappers. We discover what, and who, converts people to Flat Earth belief, and what happens inside the rabbit hole. And we even meet a man determined to fly into space in a homemade rocket-powered balloon—whose tragic death is as senseless and absurd as the theory he sets out to prove.
In this incisive and powerful story about belief, Kelly Weill explores how we arrived at this moment of polarized realities and explains what needs to happen so that we might all return to the same spinning globe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daily Beast reporter Weill focuses this insightful and surprisingly empathetic survey of conspiracy theories on the history of Flat Earth theory, "the ultimate incarnation of conspiratorial thinking." She traces the belief's origins to a 19th-century utopian English commune and profiles modern-day believers including "Mad Mike" Hughes, who died in February 2020 while attempting to reach the earth's upper atmosphere in a homemade rocket. According to Weill, conspiratorial thinking is not some "weird pathology," but part of the same "powers of abstraction that make humans good at detecting patterns." She documents spikes in conspiracy thinking during historical periods of "rapid industrialization and income inequality," and links the resurgence of Flat Earth theory in the early 2000s to Y2K paranoia and 9/11 trutherism. Weill also delves into Pizzagate and QAnon, arguing that the "flat earth and pro-Trump movements share strands of the same conspiratorial, counter-factual DNA"; details how Big Tech's efforts to stop the spread of misinformation have backfired; and notes that "real-world communities" can pull people out of the rabbit holes they find online. Weill's immersion in the Flat Earth community and acknowledgment of her own conspiratorial thinking gives her reporting a refreshingly compassionate slant. The result is an illuminating take on a much scrutinized subject.
