Suspicion, vengeance, and irrationality have become the new norm. As in previous times of radical social change, zealotry and demagoguery surge as faith in the established order recedes. The collective pursuit of democratic ideals, built on Enlightenment principles never quite fulfilled, suffers waves of backlash, resentment built up from centuries of promise and disappointment. Democracy, gamed by the twin forces of privatization and media spectacle, is forced to watch its failures writ large, its susceptibility to rule by personality at last delivering the role of leader as farce.

Retreating further and further from a collective sphere into the digital bantustans of social media, the entity once known as the public concedes to the machinations and experiments of technocrats in the service of youthful billionaires whose unassuming presence distract us from otherwise obvious comparisons to robber barons of the 19th century. Mining not coal or iron but the depths of billions of individual psyches, the growth model of unfettered capitalism turns in on itself, atomizing individuals into dark recesses of a new medieval realm which thrives on irrational fervor, antagonism, and polarization.

Pit against one another and therefore the whole, society gropes backward to a darker, unenlightened past that technology promised to deliver us from. As YouTube’s "recommend" algorithms, fueled by contempt and suspicion for empirical inquiry, send us down the rabbit hole of sensation and conspiracy, we’re offered proof, once again, that the earth is flat.

The Earth is Flat. catalog

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