Society obviously has a range of critical thinking capability. It used to be that every village had its idiot and the village knew who that was, and thus who to promptly ignore. The problem with the internet, is that all the village idiots found each other and started to form their own villages online. Along the way those that weren’t quite as dumb saw the groups they formed and thought, “Gee, that many people surely can’t be wrong”, and the groups got larger and larger until they were big enough to actually cause harm.
Sometimes, the seed of that stupidity were jokes and trolls. Flat Earth Theory was one of those seeds. Trump’s political career was kickstarted by 4Chan taking advantage of the same online landscape and legacy media’s inability to stay away from a constantly expanding train wreck that generates infinite ad revenue.
Flat earthers actually started as a troll, but people are really fucking stupid.
Society obviously has a range of critical thinking capability. It used to be that every village had its idiot and the village knew who that was, and thus who to promptly ignore. The problem with the internet, is that all the village idiots found each other and started to form their own villages online. Along the way those that weren’t quite as dumb saw the groups they formed and thought, “Gee, that many people surely can’t be wrong”, and the groups got larger and larger until they were big enough to actually cause harm.
Sometimes, the seed of that stupidity were jokes and trolls. Flat Earth Theory was one of those seeds. Trump’s political career was kickstarted by 4Chan taking advantage of the same online landscape and legacy media’s inability to stay away from a constantly expanding train wreck that generates infinite ad revenue.