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

I first realized the extent of the internet’s takeover of U.S. politics while standing in the lobby of a drab hotel convention center, listening to an elderly gentleman 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 distributed papers watermarked with a custom edit of Pepe, a cartoon frog that achieved infamy as an unofficial mascot of the too-online, 4chan-dwelling alt-right of the 2010s. I wasn’t at an alt-right conference. Nor was I at a meetup of tech-savvy trolls. I was at the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference in Aurora, Colorado. The hundreds of globe denialists who’d gathered included friendly retirees, mother-daughter duos, chipper grade-schoolers, and ultra-earnest hippies who played pan flute in the lobby. Normal people, within a standard deviation or so. Nearly everyone I interviewed told me they’d become flat earthers after encountering the community online. In conversational tones, they described to me a world-warping plot by political elites. They also described the videos and internet posts that had awakened them to the anti-spherical truth. It’s easy to laugh at flat earthers. But they were early adopters of a delusional digital mode that, a couple years later, would come to dominate political speech. When I first started lurking in flat earth forums and discussion threads as a reporter at the Daily Beast nearly 10 years ago, flat earthers were a curiosity. Today, the powerful aspire to sound like them. The modern flat earth movement, I thought as I wandered the convention, was not so much a thriving, real-world scene as it was an internet-based ideology that was breaking containment. As we milled around a coffee trolley, attendees greeted each other by screennames, or tried sketching out their place in rough hierarchies based on which forums they’d used, and for how long. Presentations, ostensibly about the earth’s shape (flat), quickly lapsed into relitigation of internet drama and second-order conspiracy theories about plots to silence flat earthers online. I heard young men speak in a stilted syntax, narrating events in a series of staccato, present-tense sentence fragments, eg. “journalist looks at horizon; sees a straight line; concludes the earth is a spinning ball. Okay!” It was, I realized, the rhythm of a 4chan greentext post. Having absorbed their worldview online, the convention-goers were recreating it in the meatspace, all the way down to its grammar. A growing cohort of young digital journalists, myself included, had been dutifully documenting that grammar. We wrote about rotten websites and their real-life runoff on the far right. To the growing irritation of more than one journalist groupchat, we found our work frequently siloed outside conventional politics verticals. Internet trends were tech news, maybe, or freak shows, or fodder for SEO-friendly explainer articles. “Extremism,” a label applied to our beat over many journalists’ hesitation, suggested that our subject matter was somehow divorced from meaningful power, even as politics grew visibly more extreme. The internet was implicitly understood to exist in reaction to real life, not to control it. But the internet is an apex predator of human attention. It ensnares us by offering us exactly what we want. We click on content that indulges our lizard-brain interests: on the strange and confrontational, on the posts hinting at secret knowledge or us-versus-them conflict. Conspiracy theories, conveniently, play to these same cravings, promising us hidden truths while turning reality into a competitive team sport between different belief communities. It’s no coincidence that conspiracy content thrives online. And it’s little wonder that the grievance-ridden, falsehood-filled, outrage-baiting language of image boards would find its way to mainstream politics. This stuff does numbers. At my first flat earth conference, I saw Chan culture leech into a middle-aged, suburban American bloodstream. Today that barrier between online fringe and 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’s unbanned now and Twitter, no longer called that, is owned by a different billionaire with terminal meme-brain.) What we once sternly called “misinformation” might be more tiredly dismissed today as “slop,” due to new digital tools that allow us to crank out surreal, hyper-partisan nonsense at a rate that far outpaces human output. As I write this, I notice that Donald Trump has shared an artificial intelligence-generated news segment that falsely purports to show him unveiling new, miraculous “med bed” devices for all Americans. The “med bed” conspiracy theory, once relegated to tiny forums for the medically desperate, claims the U.S. has secretly developed beds that can cure all illnesses, including regrowing limbs. And why wouldn’t the president post like a cracked-out forum moderator? That’s how people talk now, online and off. The internet is no longer a distinct place, but an ambient presence in daily life, a hyperreal overlay through which IRL occurrences can be observed, categorized, exaggerated for engagement, distorted for outrage, or shared in a shot-in-the-dark bid for sympathy amid increasing atomization. Everyone is online now, and we bring online everywhere with us. To speak of “internet culture” is to speak of mainstream culture. The world has flattened: not in the way flat earthers believe, but because we’re all mediating our realities through a centimeter-thick slab of screen. After my first flat earth conference in 2018, I kept attending conspiracy events — sometimes as a credentialed reporter and sometimes as the physical manifestation of a forum lurker, watching from the edges as a perverse pastime. As years passed, I saw an increasingly networked movement, cross-pollinating between conspiratorial tendencies amid the swift normalization of fringe theories. At one flat earth conference, a woman pressed a QAnon bracelet into my palm. She wasn’t a flat earther, but was recruiting potential believers to her own internet-based beliefs. At a demonstration by Proud Boys and other reactionaries outside the American Museum of Natural History in 2020, I spotted a milky-eyed old woman holding a posterboard about the “gangstalking” conspiracy theory. She had deduced (presumably from the internet, where the theory percolates, and from which she’d printed the images on her poster) that a vast network of shadowy agents was trailing her every move. When I approached, she wordlessly held out her poster like a sacred text. Look at these image macros; look at these memes. They explain everything. Messageboard-style misinformation 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 non-fiction book about the flat earth movement, both of which we’d started writing in 2018. When we’d begun, the subject matter was niche; maybe even too niche, some publishers had cautioned me. As we’d written and revised and rehearsed and reviewed print layouts, conventional wisdom caught up to us. Conventional language caught up to conspiracy theorists. I was fortunate to publish my book in 2022, when my once-niche subject matter could mostly pass for timely, if not a little late. None of our work was wrong. The scope of my research, the cadence of my friend’s fictional conspiracy theorists — all of it was correct. We had simply been working during an early flood of online delirium that has likely not yet reached its high-water mark. As we walked, my friend and I considered a different word for the mindset that informed our early drafts. The word was “quaint.”