What It’s Like to Watch An Internet-Based Ideology Break Containment

I first realized the extent of the Internet’s stranglehold on American politics as I stood in the lobby of a drab hotel and convention center, listening to an elderly man rattle off a list of fringe conspiracy forums he frequented.

“Prison Planet,” he told me, and “Infowars.”

“Wow,” I said. In the conference room behind us, a man was handing out handouts watermarked with a custom edition of Pepe, a cartoon frog who gained infamy as the unofficial mascot of the too-online alt-right and 4chan inhabitant of the 2010s.

I wasn’t at an alt-right conference. I wasn’t at a meetup of tech-savvy trolls, either. I was at the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference in Aurora, Colorado. Among the hundreds of world deniers gathered were friendly retirees, mother-daughter duos, freshmen and ultra-serious hippies playing panpipes in the lobby. Normal people, within about one standard deviation. Almost everyone I interviewed told me they would become a Flat Earther after meeting the online community. In a conversational tone, they described to me a conspiracy aimed at distorting the world led by political elites. They also described the videos and Internet posts that had made them aware of the antispheric truth.

It’s easy to laugh at flat earthers. But they were the first to adopt a crazy digital mode which, a few years later, would dominate political discourse. When I started lurking in flat-Earth forums and threads as a reporter at the Daily Beast nearly 10 years ago, flat-Earthers were a curiosity. Today, the powerful aspire to be like them.

The modern flat Earth movement, I thought as I walked through the convention, was not so much a thriving, real-life scene as a lockdown-breaking, Internet-based ideology. As we circled around a coffee cart, participants greeted each other by pseudonyms or tried to plot their place in rough hierarchies based on which forums they had used and for how long. The presentations, ostensibly about the shape of the (flat) Earth, quickly degenerated into yet another contestation of internet drama and second-rate conspiracy theories about plots to silence flat earthers online.

I heard young men speak with stilted syntax, recounting events in a series of staccato sentence fragments in the present tense, for example. “The journalist looks at the horizon, sees a straight line and concludes that the earth is a spinning ball. Okay!”

It was, I realized, the beat of a 4chan green text message. After absorbing their worldview online, conference attendees recreated it in the meatspace, right down to its grammar.

A growing cohort of young digital journalists, including myself, were dutifully documenting this grammar. We’ve written about rotten websites and their real trickle-down to the far right. To the growing irritation of more than one group of journalists, we found that our work was often siled outside of conventional policy verticals. Internet trends might have been tech news, or freak shows, or fodder for SEO-friendly how-to articles. “Extremism,” a label applied to our beat in the face of many journalists’ hesitation, suggested that our subject matter was somehow divorced from meaningful power, even as politics became visibly more extreme. It was implicitly understood that the Internet existed in response to real life and not to control it.

But the Internet is the main predator of human attention. It traps us by giving us exactly what we want. We click on content that satisfies our lizard-brain interests: on the weird and confrontational, on messages hinting at secret knowledge or conflict between us and them. Conspiracy theories, conveniently, play on these same desires, promising us hidden truths while transforming reality into a competitive team sport between different communities of beliefs.

It’s no coincidence that conspiratorial content thrives online. And it’s no wonder that the language of picture boards, filled with grievances, lies and outrage, is finding its way into mainstream politics. This thing does numbers.

At my first Flat Earth lecture, I saw Chan culture seep into the bloodstream of a middle-aged American suburbanite. Today, this barrier between the online fringe and the median voter doesn’t really exist. Today, the president shares QAnon memes on Truth Social, a social media site he launched after he was temporarily deemed too extreme for Twitter. (He is no longer banned now and Twitter, which is no longer called that, belongs to a different billionaire with a terminal meme brain.) What we once harshly called “disinformation” might be more wearily dismissed today as “slop,” due to new digital tools that allow us to produce surreal, hyper-part nonsense at a rate that far exceeds human production. As I write this, I notice that Donald Trump shared an artificial intelligence-generated news segment that falsely purports to show him unveiling miraculous new “medicine bed” devices for all Americans. The “medical bed” conspiracy theory, once relegated to tiny forums for the medically desperate, claims that the United States has secretly developed beds that can cure all diseases, including regrowth of limbs.

And why wouldn’t the president post like a cracked forum moderator? This is how people talk now, online and offline. The Internet is no longer a distinct place, but an ambient presence in everyday life, a hyperreal overlay through which IRL events can be observed, categorized, exaggerated to spark engagement, distorted to spark outrage, or shared in an attempt at sympathy in the dark amid increasing atomization. Everyone is online now and we take it with us everywhere. To speak of “Internet culture” is to speak of dominant culture. The world has flattened: not as flat-Earthers believe, but because we all transmit our realities through a centimeter-thick screen panel.

After my first Flat Earth conference in 2018, I continued to attend conspiracy events – sometimes as a credentialed journalist and sometimes as the physical manifestation of a forum lurker, watching from the edges as a perverse hobby. Over the years, I have seen an increasingly networked movement, a cross-pollination between conspiratorial tendencies amid the rapid normalization of fringe theories. At a flat-Earth conference, a woman put a QAnon bracelet in my palm. She was not a flat earther, but recruited potential believers for her own beliefs based on the Internet. At a protest by the Proud Boys and other reactionaries outside the American Museum of Natural History in 2020, I spotted a milky-eyed old woman holding a billboard about the “gangstalking” conspiracy theory. She had deduced (presumably from the Internet, where the theory percolates and from which she had printed the images on her poster) that a vast network of shadowy agents was following her every move. When I approached, she wordlessly handed me her poster like a sacred text.

Look at these image macros; look at these memes. They explain everything. Misinformation in message board form had become an American lingua franca.

On a recent hike, a playwright friend and I discussed two of our works: his, a play about online conspiracy culture, and mine, a nonfiction book about the flat Earth movement, which we had both started writing in 2018. When we started, the subject matter was niche; maybe even Also niche, some publishers had warned me. As we wrote, revised, rehearsed and revised the printed layouts, conventional wisdom caught up with us. Conventional language has caught up with conspiracy theorists. I was lucky enough to publish my book in 2022, when my once-specialized topic might pass for most as timely, if not a little late.

None of our work was wrong. The breadth of my research, the cadence of my friend’s fictional conspiracy theorists – it was all fine. We were simply working through an initial wave of online madness that probably hasn’t peaked yet.

As we walked, my friend and I thought about a different word for the mindset that informed our first drafts. The word was “picturesque.”