num_pages: 256
description: Since 2015 there has been a spectacular boom in a nearly two-hundred-year-old delusionthe idea that we all live on a flat plane under a solid dome ringed by an impossible wall of ice. It is the ultimate in conspiracy theories a wholesale rejection of everything we know to be true about the world in which we live. Where did this idea come from? Weill draws a straight line from todays conspiratorial moment back to the early days of Flat Earth theory in the 1830s showing the human impulses behind divergences in belief. Faced with a complicated world out of our individual control we naturally seek patterns to explain the inexplicable. The only difference between then and now? Social media. And powered by Facebook and YouTube algorithms the Flat Earth movement is growing. At once a definitive history of the movement and a readable look at its expansive absurd and dangerous present Off the Edge introduces us to a cast of larger-than-life characters from 19th-century grifters to 20th-century small-town tyrants to the provocateurs of Alex Joness early-aughts internet whose rancor sowed the early seeds of our modern division. We accompany Weill to Flat Earther conferences where we meet moms on vacation determined creationists scammy YouTube celebrities and their victims neo-Nazi rappers and even a man determined to fly into space in a homemade rocket-powered balloonwhose tragic death proves as senseless and absurd as the theory he set out to prove. Incisive and clear-eyed Off the Edge tells a powerful story about belief exploring how we arrived at this moment of polarized realities and explaining what needs to happen so that we might all return to the same spinning globe.
language: English
title: Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
publisher: Algonquin Books