The contemporary Flat Earth movement, primarily Internet-driven, is a loosely connected set of beliefs united more by skepticism toward established science than by a single coherent doctrine.

It revives an ancient disproven idea that Earth is flat; this concept was conclusively refuted millennia ago by scholars such as Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and Al-Biruni through geometric and astronomical measurements.

The modern resurgence of flat Earth ideology commenced in the 19th century with figures like Samuel Rowbotham, who framed flat Earth claims within conspiracy theories opposing mainstream scientific authority.

Organizations Promoting Flat Earth Beliefs
The flat Earth movement today is fragmented, with several organizations active primarily in English-speaking countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom.

Notable groups include:
- Flat Earth Society (US/UK): Founded originally in the 1950s, it experienced a revival through digital platforms, operating online forums and producing flat Earth content.
- Other smaller international groups and online communities, which tend to operate independently with varying interpretations of flat Earth theory but without unified global leadership.

Public Figures and Celebrities Supporting Flat Earth Ideas

While no major mainstream celebrities publicly endorse the flat Earth theory, several internet personalities with niche followings are known to promote these ideas.

Examples include:
- Eric Dubay:

A prominent YouTube personality widely recognized for his flat Earth videos and conspiracy content.
- Mark Sargent: Another influential figure who gained popularity through YouTube documentaries and live streams promoting flat Earth beliefs.

These individuals have amassed sizable audiences, using digital platforms to question conventional scientific understandings and promote alternative narratives involving hidden knowledge and conspiratorial control.

Common Flat Earth Arguments
Flat Earth proponents typically deploy core arguments challenging established scientific evidence, including:
- Denial of photographic and satellite imagery depicting Earth’s curvature, claiming such images are fabricated.

- Assertion that horizons and water surfaces look flat to direct observation, contradicting the spherical Earth model.
- Claims that governments, space agencies, and scientists deliberately deceive the public to conceal Earth's true shape.

- Selective or misinterpreted physical experiments, such as airplane flight paths or water surface behavior, presented as evidence of flatness.

- Emphasis on personal observation, intuition, and mistrust of expert knowledge, often framed as a healthy "question everything" stance.

These arguments rely more on conspiracy and mysticism than on empirical evidence, routinely dismissing scientific methodologies and research.

Reasons for the Resurgence in the Internet Era
The flat Earth movement’s revival is propelled by psychological and sociological factors amplified by the Internet and social media:
- Mistrust of institutions and scientific authorities fueled by broader societal polarization and conspiracy culture.
- Social alienation, leading individuals to seek identity and belonging within contrarian groups.
-

The Internet’s facilitation of rapid peer-to-peer information exchange, community building, and reinforcement of conspiratorial narratives.

- An emotional appeal to insider status with supposed secret knowledge opposing mainstream dogma.
- Algorithmic amplification on social platforms exposing susceptible individuals to fringe ideas.

Together, these factors create a feedback loop resembling a "gold rush," whereby growing follower numbers reinforce each other’s beliefs and societal identity in the flat Earth community.

Demographics and Characteristics of Flat Earth Believers
Studies indicate flat Earth adherents often share these traits:
- Social or intellectual isolation.
- General skepticism or opposition toward mainstream scientific accounts.
- High susceptibility to conspiracy theories.

- Preference for simplified or alternative explanations for complex realities.

- Engagement with online communities that validate their worldview and provide social belonging.

Typically younger adults or teens, though ages vary, flat Earthers identify as truth seekers rejecting what they consider a deceptive mainstream.

Risk Assessment: Misinformation versus Danger
The flat Earth movement is essentially a pseudoscientific subculture propagating misinformation that distorts basic scientific understanding.

It currently shows no strong ties to violent extremism or coordinated political radicalism.

However, its social impact includes eroding trust in science and educational authorities, which may undermine critical thinking and informed decision-making.

Emotional and cognitive manipulation in online flat Earth communities raises concerns about psychological effects but does not equate to direct physical harm or extremist behavior.

Clear distinctions must be made between spreading falsehoods and incitement to violence or hate.

Summary for Concerned Parents
For parents worried about teenagers affiliating with flat Earth believers, the situation is generally non-threatening physically or socially.

The movement:
- Constitutes a fringe ideological group rooted in conspiracy theories rather than rigorous inquiry.
- May promote skepticism toward education, science, and institutions, potentially impeding critical reasoning.

- Operates mainly online, offering identity and social connection to members.

Parents are advised to maintain open, respectful dialogue fostering critical evaluation of information and scientific literacy.

Awareness of the movement's nature will assist teenagers in thoughtfully navigating related interactions without alienating peers.

In conclusion, the contemporary flat Earth movement is a loosely organized, mostly Internet-based phenomenon driven by conspiracy and mistrust of science.

It is propagated by known organizations such as the Flat Earth Society (US/UK) and notable internet personalities including Eric Dubay and Mark Sargent.

While not directly linked to extremism, it spreads misinformation that can influence cognition and social perspectives, especially among vulnerable populations .

The contemporary Flat Earth movement, primarily Internet-driven, is a loosely connected set of beliefs united more by skepticism toward established science than by a single coherent doctrine.

Title:

Content: "The Lost Earth Truth 1": The level of the earth seems to be the "gold rush" of our time.
Photo Credit: iStock
What we want you to know is
Through the multi-dimensional advanced high-tech "heterogeneous meta-helmet", scientists learned that the earth is full of four-dimensional entrances, the third dimension of the material plane and the fourth dimension of the etheric plane are originally "twins".
Written by Radu Cinama
Tiping said it was the "gold rush" of this era.
Based on a reference to the House of the Cabal, which hides the door to multidimensional interaction, I found an informative note that I had never seen before, floating among dozens of notes on my desk.
In general, I prefer to work in electronic form or wait for notes or files in digital format, but given my particular interest in the Dimension Portal, I decided to check everything on my desk, including the latest events.
I do not know the reasons and methods, but the information I found was ignored.
After reviewing notes and data summaries, I discovered an event called “Ground Floor – References ”, a“ movement ” that I ’ ve heard has made waves among people, but I never thought it would become a theme for our department.
The illusion of this idea is obvious, especially for those who have good judgment and personal experience of our planet from the perspective of outer space.
I was a bit confused and didn ’ t know if I should read a few pages of summaries about the ground floor.
I went to Lieutenant Nikola and asked him about it.
He told me that the information came from the operations department of another SRI division, an acronym for the Romanian Intelligence Agency, which has the status of a second level notice.
The lieutenant made it clear that the only reason this information reached our department was because it triggered an abnormal "phenomenon" in the world, but in our country, the number of "followers" is relatively small and the proportion is reasonable, and the level seems to be the "gold rush" of our time. It makes you speechless, even in a state of “shock. ”
I can understand that the paranoia and other obscure interests of hundreds of years ago amplify the lack of knowledge, which may occupy the minds of a relatively small number of people, but it is unreasonable to allow it to develop to the level of the international movement of the 21st century.
From a heavenly point of view, I wonder if human stupidity can rise above that level, but I don ’ t quite believe in that prospect.
However, even the most bizarre phenomena must be taken into account, at least taking into account the crowd and their opinions, which is one of the Secret Service's tasks.
I did read the summary, which revealed the main points of the problem very clearly, but did not give any conclusions.
Severe retrogression into the Middle Ages
On the same night, I took advantage of Cesar ’ s free time and shared the ground level problem with him, more as a social case than a research direction.
Cesar laughed loudly, talked about the topic for a while, and then suddenly turned to some very interesting questions.
He told me that three or four years ago, the issue was introduced to him and discussed with other colleagues in the intelligence department because there were signs that the idea was trending toward a consensus.
Out of respect for readers, I don ’ t usually include such a discussion in my series.
It requires only a little wisdom and minimal scientific training to understand, and arguments in support of this theory are tantamount to ignorance and fanaticism.
Beyond this, however, Cesar reveals some psychological cues that seem to be of some importance to general knowledge and social experience.
When discussing topping with Cesar, the first point involves a large number of followers.
“The mechanism for this strange theory of increased follower numbers is related to human isolation, ” says Cesar.
“It ’ s as if the population is divided into two distinct categories, but this separation is actually based on each person ’ s level of consciousness, which is directly related to their vibration frequency. ”
“But, ” I replied,“ I don ’ t know what caused this outbreak, and more and more people are insisting on these ‘ arguments ’ without meaning. ”
It's more like a stupid virus. "
“This major shift in thinking patterns is not at the same wavelength as what is commonly understood in the world today.
In other words, such new ideas have nothing to do with the knowledge of our time.
This is an effective method, because the earth is flat, and the idea is strongly supported by mystical factors, as well as by those who are keen to see things stagnant and not progressing.
This is the best way to control it: take people away from reality, let them dream nonsense, support their fantasies, and encourage them to project.
Therefore, it is controlled by imposing on the masses what they want.
Followers of earth thought, firmly believing in it, will seek to meet others, gather, and even separate themselves from others, because they will see others as fools deceived by lies.
In other words, they will be convinced that they are the ones who “discovered ” the truth. While it is sad to hear the news, unfortunately, the situation is quite real. ”
“Although I have this report under my nose, I can ’ t believe it has reached this point.
I feel like this is an ugly dream, as if some people in the world have voluntarily gone back hundreds of years.
That's how I feel.
Incredibly, people ’ s minds today are still influenced by delusions that defy not only decent intelligence but also scientific reasoning, making everything frenzied.
Look at the results! ”
I showed Cesar ’ s estimated numbers and charts.
"I know.
We've talked to other colleagues, "he said.
“Your surprise is evidenced by the huge difference in conceptualization and vibration frequency that people are beginning to feel.
This is a reality that has become increasingly prominent over time and cannot be ignored.
This is part of the isolation I told you about.
In principle, people interact with those who are evolving and those who prefer to stay in purely physical, crude or involuntary groups.
Those in the first category perfect themselves, recognize the changes that are taking place on Earth, and experience certain emotional states and specific sensations.
That ’ s why it ’ s incredible for some people to think about problems in a medieval way, such as followers of the Earth Theory. ”
Cesar saw the astonishment on my face and hurried to prove what he said again.
“Yes, I ’ m not exaggerating.
This is a return to the Middle Ages, because these people cannot evolve; instead, they return to a more archaic state of consciousness, closer to their true level of consciousness. ”
“Why can ’ t they evolve? ” I asked in surprise.
Of course, I know the answer, but it ’ s always a pleasure to capture Cesar ’ s explanation.
In addition, there is always a new element that can enrich my knowledge.
“Because the current state of things they attract has nothing to do with the higher vibrations of the Earth, this feature is becoming more and more apparent. ”
“For the followers of the Earth Plane, their consolation lies in the frenzy of these primitive ideas, which are maintained as free spirits and ideas are blocked.
The same was true during the Inquisition: a set of foolish and erroneous ideas was raised into law, and any violation of those ideas was enforced. ”
When I think about it all, I hope I ’ m wrong.
“Are we back in the Middle Ages? History has set off a wave of extreme ideas.
Ancient people already knew that the earth was round, but the situation deteriorated in the Middle Ages, when there was a revival of modern science, but was this only to take us back to the Middle Ages now? ” (The author undoubtedly refers to the knowledge shared by Pythagoras and Aristotle, who both asserted that the earth is round, and the argument made by Eratonius in ancient Alexandria.)
Cesar calmly replied, “We don ’ t; but for the part that has degraded, yes. ”
Several factors contributed to this.
Followers of the Earth ’ s theory are indignant at their opinionated views, their refusal to think logically or rationally on the basis of real arguments and evidence, their denial of evidence, and their deceitful defense of their position.
In general, this is a kind of missionary covering up fanaticism.
The psychological factor of the earth level, the mind pulls people's distance
We note that whenever fanaticism prevails, society is confronted with a lack of insight and the limitations of personal freedom.
Cesar gave me an example that better explains how this dilemma can be achieved in the context of a relatively developed civilization.
"This phenomenon is the same as in quantum physics.
If there is enough energy, the electrons can jump into higher orbits.
If there is not enough energy, it can be kept at a slightly higher level and relatively stable; but at some point, the remaining energy will be released in the form of photons, and the electron will return to the orbit where it was originally found, back to where it started.
In quantum physics, this is the basic orbit of electrons.
In other words, electrons with these characteristics will return to the level where they have a safe orbit. ” I interjected, clinging to the subject.
“I know that throughout human history, the idea that the earth is flat has long existed in some religions.
Modern astronomy has developed extensively since then.
Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have only been discovered for about two hundred years.
In this sense, the ground floor is actually not very old, its memory is still fresh.
Perhaps that is why some humans return to the state they once knew. "
“This is another factor, ” Cesar acknowledged,“ in any case, human society is changing from ‘ possessiveness ’ to ‘ feeling ’, that sense of possession, egoism, competition, and violence tends to be gradually replaced by pure and positive emotions and feelings, which are fundamental to love, altruism, and compassion. ”
I have some doubts.
“It ’ s hard to believe, because almost all of us are seeing the spread of these negative manifestations. ”
“At first glance, it might be so.
Remember, however, that most people on Earth are uneducated, and they ‘ resort ’ to this illusion of competition, money, commerce, and lack of spirituality.
A large number of people who are addicted to this dream, tend to oppose those who are guided only by spiritual values and seek a pure life with a clear meaning, and have achieved a balance at this point.
This is what we call isolation. "
In fact, what Cesar wanted to say is that everyone is invited to participate in the great spiritual transformation of humanity and our planet, with the desire and dignity to demand that his life be the germ of light, spirituality and hope that we can enter a bright future.
This is an excellent ideal, but so far too few people have followed this ideal.
Book Introduction
This excerpt is from The Lost Earth Truth 1: The Hidden History of Holographic Time Travel, published by Daxi Culture.
Written by Radu Cinamar
Translated by: Sandra
• momo online bookstore
• Enter TNL83 at Pubu E-Bookstore checkout to enjoy 83% off sitewide (excluding some items, such as physical, adult and designated items, cannot be combined with other offers)
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Radu Cinamar became famous after revealing an unprecedented and mysterious collaboration between the US and Romanian militaries.
American and Romanian troops have made an expedition under the Romanian Sphinx in the Bucegi Mountains and discovered the greatest archaeological discovery of all time: a mysterious chamber about 50,000 years old, containing a holographic record of human history of the Earth, biological resonance imaging technology, and three mysterious tunnels that lead to secrets deep in the heart of the earth.
Despite the political intrigue, confusion, and restrictions surrounding this great discovery, the expedition leader allowed Radu Sinamar to visit and explore the artifacts.
Since then, Radu ’ s life has been a labyrinthine adventure, filled with strange events, secret connections, and unusual people and things.
This book delves into ancient history in an unprecedented way, through the interaction of advanced technology ’ s “heterogeneous helmets ” with the author ’ s cerebral cortex and intuition, presenting more than 70 stunning images of the scene, the result of which is holographic projection, explaining and illustrating the DNA changes that took place over thousands of years and how humans evolved into what they are today.
Reveals the mystery of how multiple alien civilizations influenced and guided human DNA to evolve to a higher level.
Some of the hot spots in human history, which in the past either remained unknown or were only considered from a mythological point of view, include: Atlantis, Troy, Shambhala, and Huppelburia.
Disrupting the myths of the past, this book provides rich and accurate communications from the actual scene of holographic technology, combining esoteric knowledge and some scientific factors.
Special emphasis is placed on the "intersection" between the physical dimension and the etheric dimension and on the cracks or entrances between the dimensions.
In addition to revealing the ancient history of mankind, this fascinating work also describes a time out to see the origins of humanity and its hope for the future.
Book Features
Time-lapse decoding! The beginning of important human change
Through the multi-dimensional advanced high-tech "heterogeneous meta-helmet", scientists learned that the earth is full of four-dimensional entrances, the third dimension of the material plane and the fourth dimension of the etheric plane are originally "twins".
And you can see the "cosmic record" in the holographic image!
You can also overlook the cross-section of the earth, covering the deep human genetic technology and high-dimensional cosmic civilization, and no book in its amazing history has been exposed so far!
Editor-in-Chief: Weng Shihang
Editor-in-chief: Bohan Pan
Tags:

It revives an ancient disproven idea that Earth is flat; this concept was conclusively refuted millennia ago by scholars such as Pythagoras, Eratosthenes, and Al-Biruni through geometric and astronomical measurements.

Title:

Content: How did Muslim scholars refute the flat Earth theory a thousand years ago?
The flat earth is currently one of the most famous scientific myths widespread in the Arab world, and has private groups on social media met by supporters from all over, and in recent days has been controversial because of statements by the Egyptian artist Mohamed Sobhy.
There are two histories to this theory, not one; the first is ancient and the second is modern.
A number of Greek philosophers believed that the earth was flat, and the ancient Scandinavian and German peoples also believed that the earth was flat and surrounded by oceans, and the common belief in ancient China was that the earth was square and flat while the sky was spherical.
But it ’ s really surprising to know that early astronomers assumed its sphericity, and they were from almost every culture: Pythagoras, who lived about 2,500 years ago, proposed the sphericity of the Earth based on his observations of the moon during the eclipse.
Pythagorean's observations are still evidence of a refutation of the flat Earth theory: Pythagorean observed that the shadow that the Earth casts on the Moon during the eclipse is always round.
Regardless of the moon-facing part of the planet, eclipses occur everywhere in the world.
The idea of a lunar eclipse is simple: put a big lamp in the middle of your room and turn off the rest of the lights, stand at a distance of one meter from it, now turn around while you reach your hands in front of you with a tennis ball, when you give your back to the lamp and pass the tennis ball in the shadow extended in front of you because of your body, this is the eclipse.
To Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes, born 276 BC, was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth using a simple method involving the angle of the Sun at different locations.
Eratosthenes was astonished to read that the columns in the ancient Egyptian temples of Aswan on the afternoon of June 21 of each year did not leave a shadow under them, and the mystery of the wonder was that the columns in Alexandria left a shadow under them on the afternoon of the same day.
Eratosthenes came to the conclusion that the earth must be convex and not flat, otherwise the columns in Alexandria would appear shadowless, and then after reflection Eratosthenes came to the clever idea that we could measure the length of the shadow in Aswan which is zero, and its length in Alexandria, and then measure the distance between Alexandria and Aswan, and infer the circumference of the earth.
The story goes that he sent a man to measure the distance, so that with some simple geometry he could measure the circumference of the Earth, which he concluded was about 39,348 kilometers.
Eratosthenes' account was transferred to the Arabs from among the sciences they translated.
According to Carlo Nelino in his book "Astronomy: A History of the Arabs in the Middle Ages", the Caliph al-Ma'mun al-Abbasi (who ruled from 813 to 833 AD) asked two teams of astronomers to test these calculations and come up with the most accurate measurement of the Earth's circumference....
The safe astronomer.
The method adopted by the Arabs is to go out into a perfectly flat desert, and then rely on the inclination of the polar star in the sky.
The ancients realized that the position of stars in the sky is affected by your place on Earth, the further you travel south, the lower the polar star in the sky until it disappears completely after the equator, and the more you travel north, the higher the polar star sky until it became above your head in the North Pole, which means that the Earth is round, otherwise the position of stars in the sky changes with your place on it.
The height of the polar star (and all other stars) is measured in degrees, and it is like to put a protractor in front of your eyes, the horizon is at zero, and then look at the protractor from the side to find at what degree the polar star stands, and this is something you can do exactly as the ancients did, and now astronomical software is easily available.
Al-Ma'mun astronomers measured the height of the polar star, then moved north once and south once, until the amount of inclination of the polar star changes by one degree, and then measured the distance north and south, and this measured distance is one degree from the circumference of the Earth's circle, and it can know the rest of the circumference of the Earth, because the Earth is a ball, and like any ball, rotation around it requires 360 degrees.
The first team of Al-Ma ’ mun astronomers went out to the Sinjar desert, a small city in northwestern Iraq today, and the second team to the Palmyra desert in eastern Syria, and carried out the same experiments in both places. In the Sinjar desert, for example, the height of the polar star was about 35 degrees. south of the wedge site until the measurement dropped by a degree.
According to al-Ma ’ mun ’ s astronomers, the scale of one degree was about 56 parsecs and two-thirds parsecs, which Nalino calculated — according to Edward Kennedy of the American University of Beirut in a paper published in the Encyclopedia of the History of Arab Sciences — to be 111.8 kilometers, a value used by later researchers such as al-Biruni and al-Toussi.
Calculating the circumference of the Earth in this experiment, it turned out to be about 410,248 km, which was close to modern measurements (40075 km) in the most accurate way at the time.
Note that the difference between the two measurements is about 1,100 years, and the reason for the difference is not related to the same method but to the ellipse of the Earth, as the distance between the two latitudes increases slightly as we head north.
Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni
The second attempt was by Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, born in September 973 AD, who used the best and easiest formula to calculate the circumference of the Earth in his time.
The Al-Biruni method is based on triangulation, where the sunset is observed from the top of a high mountain overlooking flat ground to the horizon, the astrolabe measures the angle the sun descends relative to the observer on the top of the mountain, where the line connecting the observer on the top of the mountain and the horizon makes the sunset clock touch the planet Earth.
It is known that the tangent of a circle perpendicular to its diameter, and then we have a right-angled triangle at the horizon, and we can measure the radius of the Earth by knowing the height of the mountain, which is mathematically easy.
Currently, the same calculations can be applied by high school students, for example, in all countries of the Arab world, who have a good amount of trigonometry study.
In a study published in the International Journal of Sciences, an Italian team repeated al-Biruni ’ s experiment and concluded that its results for the radius of the Earth are equal to 3,928.77 English miles, which compares favorably, being 2% different, with the average reference radius at the measurement latitude, which is 3,847.80 miles.
Pakistani physicist Mazhar Mahmood Qureshi, in his book An Introduction to Muslim Contributions to Science and Technology, points out that al-Biruni ’ s experience in what is now Nandana Fort in the mountains of northern Pakistan is a typical example of the use of experimental scientific methods.
The most important book of al-Biruni astronomical is "The Law of Masoudi", in which al-Biruni collected all the astronomical problems of his time, and the way of al-Biruni was to present the origins of the matter and the views of the Indian, Greek and Arab astronomers and then weighted between them.
Modern history of flat earth
But at that point, you might ask yourself: if the sphericity of the Earth was obvious to Muslim scholars and their comrades in other parts of the world in ancient times, why did it come back?
In 1849, the English writer Samuel Rowbotham published a pamphlet entitled "Oil Astronomy" (from the Greek letter zeta, not oil), in which he defended the theory of the flat earth, and followed this with another entitled "The Instability of Modern Astronomy and its opposition to the Bible".
In 1883, Rowbotham founded oil societies in England and New York, shipping thousands of copies of his books to talk about flat earth.
Meanwhile, William Carpenter, a printer and native of Greenwich, England, supported Rowbotham and advocated his theory, learning it from John Jasper and preaching to more people than any cleric of his generation in the southern United States. Once.
From here the myth began to branch again in the United States, and then to Europe, and then to the Arab world and the rest of the world, but in this context it was mixed with conspiracy theories concerning secret groups trying to control the world by deluding people that the earth is round.
The proof of the sphericity of the earth is not new, and has a long history in which Muslim scholars have made an influential contribution, but because the “flat earth ” has been transformed from ignorance of the nature of science into a conspiracy theory it has been imported along with other famous theories into our Arab world.
Source: Al Jazeera + Websites

The modern resurgence of flat Earth ideology commenced in the 19th century with figures like Samuel Rowbotham, who framed flat Earth claims within conspiracy theories opposing mainstream scientific authority.

Organizations Promoting Flat Earth Beliefs
The flat Earth movement today is fragmented, with several organizations active primarily in English-speaking countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom.

Notable groups include:
- Flat Earth Society (US/UK): Founded originally in the 1950s, it experienced a revival through digital platforms, operating online forums and producing flat Earth content.
- Other smaller international groups and online communities, which tend to operate independently with varying interpretations of flat Earth theory but without unified global leadership.

Public Figures and Celebrities Supporting Flat Earth Ideas

While no major mainstream celebrities publicly endorse the flat Earth theory, several internet personalities with niche followings are known to promote these ideas.

Examples include:
- Eric Dubay:

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TECH WORLD

Stewart Brand Saw the Future

In his journey from hippie sage to global business consultant, the Whole Earth Catalog founder embodied the shifting spirit of Silicon Valley.

You may have heard the just-so story about environmentalism as we know it. On Christmas Eve 1968, an astronaut aboard NASA’s Apollo 8 spacecraft took a photograph of the faraway surface of a green-and-blue, cloud-marbled planet known to its English-speaking inhabitants as Earth. Published less than a week later on the front page of The New York Times, the image set off a general ecological awakening. The lesson was: Behold the fragile jewel that is your one possession and cherish it accordingly. “Within two years of this picture being taken, the modern environmental movement was born,” Al Gore explained in the book version of An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Gore is one of many to tell the tale, which I most recently encountered in a book by the economist Diane Coyle on the statistical measure known as GDP: “Seeing the earth from space had given us a vivid new perspective,” prompting “concerns about the effect of economic growth on the environment and the planet as a whole.”

Such claims invite skepticism. Can a photo really induce instantaneous enlightenment? As it turns out, climate change and resource depletion have accelerated, not slowed, since publication of the “Earthrise” photograph. Nor has the basic ambiguity of the image been noted often enough: The photo may have encouraged new environmental commitments, but to take it at all entailed leaving the planet behind—much as tech billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, with their fantasies of colonizing space, now imagine humanity doing on a more permanent basis. In this way, an ostensible portal to ecological salvation contains a different implication—in which Earth is, Eurydice-like, glimpsed only to be lost and abandoned. But to enter these objections may be to pitch criticism of the “Earthrise”-as-Eureka meme at too high a level. Prior to 1968, it was by no means unheard-of to encounter mounted globes of the planet, in classrooms and elsewhere. Spin one of these and you can see the whole terrain, as isn’t the case with a photo.

The notion that a revolution in consciousness ought to follow from whole-Earth imagery is most closely associated with Stewart Brand, the Bay Area networker, publisher, booster, and impresario who, toward the end of the 1960s, launched the countercultural handbook the Whole Earth Catalog and, almost two decades later, founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), an important precursor to the internet. As veteran tech journalist John Markoff recounts in his biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, a vision came to Brand after he took LSD on a San Francisco rooftop in 1966. Floating up over the city, in his acidulated imagination, and then beyond the atmosphere, Brand felt a light bulb the size of the globe switch on: “Seeing Earth from space would transform the way we view our planet and ourselves.” All was one and everything was connected. Brand would soon put together a plywood sandwich board emblazoned with the vaguely paranoid query WHY HAVEN’T WE SEEN A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WHOLE EARTH YET? in Day-Glo letters, and wear it, along with a white jumpsuit and feathered top hat, to college campuses.

It was Brand who, in the fall of 1968, scooping The New York Times by several months, put a NASA satellite photo of the planet on the cover of his first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. In tones of somehow giddy responsibility, an early editorial note suggested that human beings held the planet in their hands: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” More practically, Brand’s semiannual catalog would function as a sort of Sears-Roebuck resource for hippie homesteaders, enabling them to set up their lives after their own fashion, beyond the administered patterns of bureaucracy and suburbia.

Yet this vision of an interconnected planet ultimately led Brand, now in his eighties, beyond the 1960s idyll. As a hippie sage, he’d proposed a DIY counterculture as the logical expression of a properly planetary point of view. Later on, his enthusiasm for the burgeoning internet suggested to fans such as Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos that, in fact, it was a global network of communication and commerce that best embodied the truth that the world is a single entity made up of interconnected inhabitants. The title of Fred Turner’s 2006 study, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism, neatly captures the arc of Brand’s singular career. It also poses the question of whether the cyberculture of the 1980s and beyond should be seen as a betrayal or, instead, a fulfillment of the counterculture of the 1960s. In both periods, Brand insisted on placing the relevant “tools”—whether psychedelic drugs or personal computers—in the hands of individuals. And in both cases, he hoped the result might be a world of newfound individual satisfaction and collective responsibility.

Born in 1938, Stewart Brand preceded by more than half a dozen years the earliest of the baby boomers. If the boomers were a generation whose outlook and trajectory he often seemed to anticipate—from early countercultural forays, to a later embrace of PCs and the internet, to a final accommodation with big business—it must have helped that in relationship to them he possessed the confidence and sophistication of an older brother, without ever projecting the authority of a parent.

Brand’s hometown, Rockford, Illinois, furnished the subject of a 1949 photo essay in Life, because the magazine’s editors judged it the most typical city in the country. And the Brand household does seem a distillate of postwar America. Brand’s father was a partner in a local advertising firm—much as Brand himself would later operate as a publicist for countercultural ideas and products. In the father’s ham-radio hobby, it’s also possible to spy the son’s future embrace of the personalized, as opposed to bureaucratic, employment of technology. As for Mrs. Brand, a Vassar-educated homemaker and “space fanatic,” her passion for exploration of the New Frontier recurs throughout her son Stewart’s life, from his boyhood attachment to a book called The Conquest of Space onward. In recent years, Brand traveled with Jeff Bezos through the Western United States to find a site for Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company.

The brightest thread running from Brand’s youth to his later years may be the individualism he articulated in a diary entry from 1957, when he was still a teenager. Should the United States and the USSR come to blows, he told himself, “I will not fight for America, nor for home, nor for President Eisenhower, nor for capitalism, nor even for democracy. I will fight for individualism and personal liberty.” Such Cold War self-reliance was complicated, however, by Brand’s classes at Stanford, where he majored in biology: “At long last,” he wrote his parents, “I’m getting what I was looking for in biology: ecology, ‘the interrelation between living organisms and their environment ...’ This is the ‘living whole, not the dead parts.’” Much of the organizing tension of Brand’s life—as a promoter of environment and community, on the one hand, and of technologically equipped personal freedom, on the other—comes from his efforts to square his youthful individualism with the ecologically minded holism he discovered in college. The Whole Earth Catalog would call for planetary life to be seen as one integrated system and, at the same time, seek to release its readers into splendid isolation, through “access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” as early copy had it. The question has always been whether these two aims were complementary, as the Catalog suggested without really stating as much, or contradictory.

In June 1960, Brand, the future icon of the counterculture, attended Stanford’s commencement ceremony in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps dress uniform. Little about the next two years he spent in the Army appealed to him, besides the opportunity to take photographs from a C-123 transport plane. According to Markoff, he passed the bulk of his time at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, attempting, without success, to use “his skills with a camera and typewriter” to secure a new posting in Europe, as a military photographer or public affairs officer. Unsurprisingly, Army life chafed against Brand’s individualism. Drawing on several dozen interviews with its subject over four years, Whole Earth comes across as something like a third-person memoir, and here as elsewhere Markoff sticks to Brand’s point of view: “Right here in America [Brand] was experiencing regimentation, pettiness, and institutionalized stupidity—all the attributes he hated about communism.” Granted early release from the Army to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brand packed up his VW bus and, in August 1962, lit out for the Bay Area.

Within a few months, the former second lieutenant was regularly ingesting considerable quantities of LSD under the auspices of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park. As Brand, who would take acid throughout the ’60s, wrote to a friend: “I vote Yes on drugs. Yes with huge capital letters that spill over into everything else.” Less rhapsodically, he also defended psychedelics in a letter to his concerned parents back in Illinois, who, in spite of their misgivings, continued to subsidize Stewart’s bohemian lifestyle: cheap San Francisco lodgings; hallucinogenic socializing; and a more or less stalled journalistic career, consisting in large part of failed pitches to The New York Times.

Like many people in his Bay Area milieu, Brand associated psychedelics with the possibility of a new kind of society lying beyond the staid, salaried, hierarchical variety he’d inherited as a child of the postwar Midwest. After a friend who had participated in enough indigenous peyote sessions to acquire the title of a “roadman,” or leader of peyote meetings, introduced Brand to the drug, he ate peyote buttons in the company of Navajos in Arizona and New Mexico. The experience fortified Brand’s penchant for big-picture consciousness, ratifying “his conclusion,” as Markoff puts it, “that for whites, time was a rapid sequence, whereas Indian life was land time. It was geological and astronomical.” Brand soon requested and received admission into the Native American Church, complete with membership card.

In 1964, Brand’s attraction to indigenous society converged with his training as a photographer to produce a portable multimedia spectacle or “ambitious traveling sensorium,” in Markoff’s words, called America Needs Indians! In miscellaneous venues around the Bay Area (a courtyard, a nightspot, an architect’s studio ...), Brand would project on a pair of screens photos he’d taken on Indian reservations, as well as images of middle American life, to a soundtrack of chanting and drumming. “One of the first multimedia exhibitions defining an emerging American counterculture,” in Markoff’s description, America Needs Indians! was screened at one of the Bay Area psychedelic parties that Ken Kesey called his Acid Tests. The work’s message seems to have been that the audience might learn to emulate the Indians’ communal, rooted, ecstatic life. “To many of us—white kids who had grown up watching Westerns in the fifties—these revelations struck like lightning bolts,” recalled Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead, house band for the Acid Tests. Before long, Brand, with his talent for networking, was helping Kesey to organize a successor happening, the Trips Festival, at San Francisco’s Longshoremen’s Hall.

Brand and Lois Jennings, the half-Ottawa mathematician who would become his first wife, promoted the Trips parties wearing what Markoff calls “Native American regalia.” Revolutions, whether real or merely would-be, typically present themselves as reviving the spirit of some previous historical period, and, during the ’60s and ’70s, the real or would-be cultural revolution that came to be called the counterculture often liked to invoke pre–Wounded Knee Indian societies for this purpose. The geographical shift of the counterculture, circa 1970, away from cities and college towns and toward rural communes, only reinforced this tendency, for the obvious reason that the indigenous peoples of North America (at least after the abandonment of cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan) lived on the land rather than in conurbations.

No publication flattered this back-to-the-land shift more than the Whole Earth Catalog, started in 1968 with the decisive assistance of an inheritance from Brand’s adman father. Consisting of information “continually revised according to the experience and suggestions of CATALOG users and staff,” the publication turned its readers on to how to order farm implements and carpentry tools, Volkswagen repair manuals and Carlos Castañeda novels, bamboo flutes, calculators, Army surplus jackets, and potters’ wheels, as well as larger “tools” like canoes and geodesic domes, all with the idea of facilitating a hazily indigenous rural self-sufficiency, along somehow modern lines. In this, it drew inspiration from Aquarian settlements in rural Colorado, New Mexico, and elsewhere, with names like Drop City, Libre, and the Lama Foundation, which promised to bring communitarian self-sufficiency and environmental stewardship into harmony. The idea appealed to many more counterculturalists than those who actually decamped to the countryside, as a vision of the good life—good for you and good for the planet, too—they might one day realize.

A contradiction inhabited the heart of the project. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner writes that the back-to-the-landers who “embraced the notion that small-scale technologies could transform the individual consciousness and, with it, the nature of community” also “celebrated imagery of the American frontier. Many communards saw themselves as latter-day cowboys and Indians, moving out onto the open plains to find a better life.” Much as Brand and the readers of his Whole Earth Catalog did, the passage confounds settler colonialists with the indigenous people they displaced, as if these antagonistic parties were one and the same. In retrospect, the back-to-the-land movement consisted of cowboys (in the sense of transient settlers, with an unsustainable relationship to the earth) who liked to imagine themselves as Indians (in the sense of a rooted and symbiotic relationship to nonhuman life). The movement’s rural communes almost all succumbed to bankruptcy or strife before the 1970s were out, and expired. By that time, Brand himself had noticed that compact cities made for a more efficient use of energy and materials anyway.

Brand has been a compulsive founder of new institutions—from the Whole Earth Catalog’s more intellectual heir, CoEvolution Quarterly (1974); to the digital community known as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (1985); to a corporate consultancy, the Global Business Network (1987); and, finally, to something called the Long Now Foundation (1996). In the fall 1975 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand ran 25 pages of stories on “space colonies”: “Practical, Desirable, Profitable, Ready in 15 years,” announced the cover. The physicist Gerard K. O’Neill insisted that “Space Colonies show promise of being able to solve, in order, the Energy Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Arms Race, and the Population Problem.” Such extraterrestrial environmentalism provoked indignant responses from many of Brand’s readers. It was clearly less the gesture of a self-created Indian than that of a cowboy, with a taste for new frontiers.

Brand had imagined the Whole Earth Catalog not only as a clearinghouse for information on useful commodities but, through the publication of letters and product reviews from its readers, as host to a geographically diffuse, nonhierarchical community. In this sense, the Catalog can be seen as a sluggish, analog anticipation of the internet: In 2005, Steve Jobs, who often invoked Brand as an inspiration, described it as “Google before Google.” Living among the computer programmers of the Bay Area, Brand was well-placed to hail the emerging cyberculture of the last quarter of the twentieth century, and in a 1972 article for Rolling Stone he’d already announced: “Ready or not, computers are coming for the people.” As a magazine publisher familiar with the travails of manual typesetting and longhand bookkeeping, the Brand of the early 1980s found word processors and spreadsheets the most immediately mind-blowing feature of PCs. More astutely, he also perceived that a web of networked personal computers could—like the Whole Earth Catalog, but at a different scale and speed—bring into being specialized and temporary communities of far-flung people, united by shared interests: the sort of thing familiar to us today as Reddit forums or Facebook groups.

In the early ’80s, Brand joined the faculty at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, which pioneered “the use of teleconferencing,” as Markoff says, to bring together scholars in various related fields. This experience led to Brand’s establishment of the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, which charged its users’ credit cards a few dollars each month so that from their separate terminals they might participate in digital “newsgroups” on whatever subjects interested them. For reasons of both personal liberty and legal liability, WELL users retained title to their own content (“you own your own words”). In practice, they didn’t discuss ecology or geopolitics or even technology so much as the Grateful Dead, a band beloved by hippies and programmers alike.

The savvy Brand also gave tech journalists access for free. The idea was that an amorphous, leaderless, nonhierarchical flock of discussants of anything and everything would shepherd one another toward a continuously better-informed state of mind. “On the one hand,” Brand stood up and said at a Hackers Conference in 1984, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.... On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower all the time.” Both aspects of the statement proved prescient: Here was a casual prophecy of the expensive IP (vaccine recipes; superhero franchises ...) and cheap posting habits of our own digital culture. It’s less easy today to endorse what Brand told a San Francisco journalist around the same time: “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.” Angels must delight in bandying about ill-tempered fallacies more than theologians had suspected.

Over recent decades, Brand has become less a prophet than a consultant. Through his Global Business Network, “THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT,” as a Fortune profile called him, has counseled corporate boards on flexibility, adaptiveness, and learning. Here were the familiar precepts of neoliberal capital—a regime ever more spontaneous as to organization, and ever more unequal as to money and power—in Brand’s preferred idioms of biological evolution, systems theory, and self-education. Markoff writes that GBN “rose to prominence based on several big ideas: that globalization would change everything, computer networks would change everything, and the internet would change everything.” These two or three ideas are also, in another way, none. To predict that everything will change is not to identify the differential components of transformation and persistence that make any emergent phenomenon, including global capitalism, legible at all. At most, pointing hectically to globalization indicates the setting—Brand’s whole Earth again—of the titanic development.

Stewart Brand is an earnest and serious-minded person. Nevertheless, one of his moments of illumination, as related by Markoff, caused me to laugh out loud. Here Markoff recounts the courtship of Brand and Patty Phelan, his second wife, in the 1970s: “Brand and Phelan lay on a hillside in the late afternoon sun. He had taken off his shirt, and he suddenly realized that she had taken off hers as well. Phelan, who was living with someone else at the time, had fallen for Brand head over heels, and it would soon be apparent that he had finally found his great love.” It’s as if the baring of Phelan’s breasts unveils, at one fell swoop, a destined and enduring love.

Everyone knows that breasts lie under women’s clothing in much the way that everyone knows that Earth is a frail blue dot zooming through space: These things are always the case, only mostly you don’t see as much. Nothing is so hippieish about Brand as his sense that radical improvements to life as we know it derive naturally, or at any rate ought to, from sudden, flashing revelations of the already known, glimpsed as if for the first time. The principal undertaking of Brand’s Long Now Foundation, the main preoccupation of his later years, has been to build, with funding from Jeff Bezos, an enormous clock that chimes only once a century, with the aim of promoting “long-term THINKING” of the kind otherwise in short supply in the twenty-first–century United States. Like the planet in its entirety, deep time is always there, and often overlooked.

Brand has surely been right in believing that to register the full dimensions of Earth, and the whole span of historical and evolutionary time, would be the start of wisdom. The trouble is that this enthusiast of new beginnings so often mistook such preliminary awareness for a meaningful conclusion. The revolution in consciousness promoted by Brand forever toggled between two vastly different scales: the planetary, and the individual. Its great shortcoming was that it never learned, or seriously studied, how best to integrate the two scales—that of the liberated individual, on the one hand, and the imperiled planet, on the other—through human institutions on an intermediate scale. There was only the dead end of the commune, or the default of the corporation. And so a kind of smog of dissipated insight hangs over Brand’s life and that of the boomers. You might even say it covers the earth.

A prominent YouTube personality widely recognized for his flat Earth videos and conspiracy content.
- Mark Sargent: Another influential figure who gained popularity through YouTube documentaries and live streams promoting flat Earth beliefs.

These individuals have amassed sizable audiences, using digital platforms to question conventional scientific understandings and promote alternative narratives involving hidden knowledge and conspiratorial control.

Common Flat Earth Arguments
Flat Earth proponents typically deploy core arguments challenging established scientific evidence, including:
- Denial of photographic and satellite imagery depicting Earth’s curvature, claiming such images are fabricated.

What scientific evidence do "flat earthers" reject?

- Assertion that horizons and water surfaces look flat to direct observation, contradicting the spherical Earth model.
- Claims that governments, space agencies, and scientists deliberately deceive the public to conceal Earth's true shape.

What does Tunisian journalist believe in?

- Selective or misinterpreted physical experiments, such as airplane flight paths or water surface behavior, presented as evidence of flatness.

- Emphasis on personal observation, intuition, and mistrust of expert knowledge, often framed as a healthy "question everything" stance.

These arguments rely more on conspiracy and mysticism than on empirical evidence, routinely dismissing scientific methodologies and research.

Reasons for the Resurgence in the Internet Era
The flat Earth movement’s revival is propelled by psychological and sociological factors amplified by the Internet and social media:
- Mistrust of institutions and scientific authorities fueled by broader societal polarization and conspiracy culture.
- Social alienation, leading individuals to seek identity and belonging within contrarian groups.
-

The Internet’s facilitation of rapid peer-to-peer information exchange, community building, and reinforcement of conspiratorial narratives.

- An emotional appeal to insider status with supposed secret knowledge opposing mainstream dogma.
- Algorithmic amplification on social platforms exposing susceptible individuals to fringe ideas.

Together, these factors create a feedback loop resembling a "gold rush," whereby growing follower numbers reinforce each other’s beliefs and societal identity in the flat Earth community.

Demographics and Characteristics of Flat Earth Believers
Studies indicate flat Earth adherents often share these traits:
- Social or intellectual isolation.
- General skepticism or opposition toward mainstream scientific accounts.
- High susceptibility to conspiracy theories.

- Preference for simplified or alternative explanations for complex realities.

- Engagement with online communities that validate their worldview and provide social belonging.

Typically younger adults or teens, though ages vary, flat Earthers identify as truth seekers rejecting what they consider a deceptive mainstream.

Risk Assessment: Misinformation versus Danger
The flat Earth movement is essentially a pseudoscientific subculture propagating misinformation that distorts basic scientific understanding.

It currently shows no strong ties to violent extremism or coordinated political radicalism.

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Content: LiveNunn
“The dam. ”
Violence and Dictatorship in Visual Symbolism
Israa Al Radaida – “The Sadd ” is the first feature film by Lebanese director Ali Shri, a Beirut-born visual artist and filmmaker based in Paris, a symbolic and quilted film, which depicts a construction worker building, in his spare time, a muddy beast with rhetoric in northern Sudan.
The film is symbolic, but sometimes the symbolism is as obscure as the toil of Maher (Maher al-Khair) at the muddy Merowe Dam.
We're in Sudan near the Merowe Dam.
Maher works in a brick factory fed by Nile water.
Every night, he secretly walks through the desert to build a mysterious mud monster.
As the Sudanese people demand freedom, his work is slowly coming to life.
The film was screened in the official competition of the 44th Cairo International Film Festival and won the Best Actor Award: Maher El Khair for “The Sadd ”, directed by Ali Shri, and Mahmoud Bakri for“ Flag ”, directed by Firas Khoury. Kaya and scars.
The film is part of a larger project dedicated to what Shri calls the “geography of violence ” or“ landscapes of violence, ” and is the third part of the series he is working on, raising the slogan “Earth, ” but the first two films were short:“ Anxiety ” and “The Digger. ”
The Merowe Dam is located north of Khartoum, a hydroelectric dam built by the Chinese and, according to the justification provided by the Sudanese authorities, was to be a carrier of progress, providing electricity and facilitating irrigation work for farmers.
However, the project was met with strong opposition from environmentalists who advocated the impoverishment of the land, for fear of retaining the silt that fertilizes the banks of the Nile, but also, more generally, from the scientific community, which fears the escalation of diseases due to stagnant water, not to mention the social consequences for the population that will have to be relocated to cities. The dam project embodies the brutality of the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, President of Sudan from 1989 to 2019.
As in all of his work, Sherry ’ s approach is to understand and make concrete the inclusion of political, social, and geopolitical events in their particular contexts.
Today, Meroe is a beautiful and calm lake, but its waters hide violent incidents that speak of death and destruction, because the violence we are talking about is invisible.
In his film The Dam, Shri wanted to show how violence becomes invisible, how it inhabits our world and how difficult it is to convey and share what we have suffered.
This comes from my own history, where violence exists, in corpses and landscapes, outside of explicit monuments, ruins and wounds – visible scars.
The Sudanese revolution fed the film.
It was also clear from the beginning that the film would have a political interest in the dam, but the way this political dimension would appear was unexpected.
She appears in the film by focusing on the workers of the brick yard: they are aware of what is happening.
They watch on radio and television, but they don ’ t participate, they live on the fringes of the world.
Most of the crew were Sudanese and were of the same age as the workers.
They have been heavily involved emotionally but also on social networks, while construction workers, who are also Sudanese, do not consider themselves citizens.
They have largely internalized the sense of political impotence.
All of them are under the age of 30; they were born after Bashir took power in 1989.
They lived under a dictatorial regime.
The film also shows this effect on their behavior.
At first, the film seems to be on safer and more common ground.
We see Africans working hard under the scorching sun.
The landscape crosses a dusty road that navigates between beautiful rocks and magnificent vistas endlessly.
Here, men work hard.
The camera is spread between the corpses and the bricks, which appear to be one.
The film shows in detail the number of ground bricks formed.
It is a great teamwork, but nothing, or almost nothing, shows that it knows what is being made and why.
The sun moves from east to west.
At the end of the day, men bathe in the river water.
At that point, Sherry turned his attention to a man, skilled.
He's on the phone.
This is one of the rare moments when this isolated Earth seems to be receiving a signal.
However, in this modern and globalized world, the influence of the butterfly flapping its wings elsewhere is still felt.
On the radio, news reports evoke revolts and demonstrations against the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted after the 2019 coup.
Once the call is over, Maher refuses to swim with his colleagues and jumps on a borrowed motorcycle.
His journey is like a painting in which each frame can be cut and displayed in an art gallery.
However, when the film reaches its destination, it begins to emerge about man ’ s place in the universe and the return of control to Earth by nature.
The film shows how human action pushes nature to respond.
When the show is suppressed, the words uttered by this strange mixture of computer images seem to change and prompt Maher to take his fate into his own hands.
He also wants a revolution, but he also wants to escape this slave labor.
Without other means at his disposal, violence seems to be his only option.
He suggests that Maher should open the ban.
He suggests that Maher should open the dam inside him metaphorically and physically in the outside world.
However, the film ’ s message is so vague that it leaves room for many explanations, namely the dam ’ s strength and weakness.
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However, its social impact includes eroding trust in science and educational authorities, which may undermine critical thinking and informed decision-making.

Emotional and cognitive manipulation in online flat Earth communities raises concerns about psychological effects but does not equate to direct physical harm or extremist behavior.

Clear distinctions must be made between spreading falsehoods and incitement to violence or hate.

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Content: Last Chance To Dance! 2022 Sundance Film Festival Coming To A Close

Posted by Larry Gleeson

2022 Sundance Film Festival Awards Announcement, Satellite Screenings, & Final Day on the New Frontier Spaceship Top Highlights of the Ninth Day of Festival Programming

PARK CITY, UT (January 29, 2022) – Sundance Film Festival welcomed audiences to its ninth day of screenings and conversations featuring some of the most notable visionaries in independent film, new media, and culture-at-large.

The festival announced the Audience Awards alongside Grand Jury and Special Jury Prizes for films in the U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Dramatic, and World Documentary Competitions, NEXT, and the Short Film program. Winners included Nanny (U.S. Dramatic), The Exiles (U.S. Documentary), All That Breathes (World Cinema Documentary), Utama (World Cinema Dramatic), Cha Cha Real Smooth (Audience Award, U.S. Dramatic) and Navalny (Audience Award, U.S. Documentary; Festival Favorite Award). All winners are detailed here. Screenings of the award-winning films will play online all weekend long.

The New Frontier Spaceship also celebrated its last day in orbit with Artist Spotlights and an open discussion hosted by Amelia Winger-Bearskin and Jesse Damiani on NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and the rapid proliferation of decentralized, autonomous organizations (DAOs).

The festival’s Satellite Screens kicked off yesterday as well. From Maryland to California, eight feature films from the 2022 lineup are playing this weekend at seven partner locations around the country where they are celebrating independent film and supporting like-minded arthouse theaters.

Each year, Sundance serves as a cultural launchpad, helping to expand audience horizons through film and the conversations that occur the minute that credits roll. Continuing to foster this spirit of discussion into 2022, Sundance Film Festival programs a series of panels across discipline and topics to keep the conversation going.

DAY NINE HIGHLIGHTS

  • 2022 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL AWARDS
    • U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic: Nikyatu Jusu for Nanny
    • U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Ben Klein and Violet Columbus for The Exiles
    • World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic: Alejandro Loayza Grisi for Utama
    • World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Shaunak Sen for All That Breathes
    • Audience Award: U.S. Documentary: Navalny
    • Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic: Cha Cha Real Smooth
    • Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic: Girl Picture
    • Audience Award: World Cinema Documentary: The Territory
    • Audience Award: NEXT: Framing Agnes
    • Festival Favorite Award: Navalny
    • Directing Award: U.S. Documentary: Reid Davenport for I Didn’t See You There
    • Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic: Jamie Dack for Palm Trees and Power Lines
    • World Cinema Documentary: Simon Lereng Wilmont for A House Made Of Splinters
    • Directing Award: World Cinema Dramatic: Maryna Er Gorbach for KLONDIKE
    • Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic: K.D. Dávila for Emergency
    • Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: U.S. Documentary: Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput for Fire Of Love
    • U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award: Uncompromising Artistic Vision: Bradley Rust Gray for blood
    • U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award: Ensemble Cast: John Boyega, Nicole Beharie, Selenis Leyva, Connie Britton, Olivia Washington, London Covington, and Michael K Williams for 892
    • U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change: Aftershock
    • U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Creative Vision: Descendant
    • World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Documentary Craft: The Territory
    • World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award: Excellence In Verité Filmmaking: Midwives
    • World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award: Innovative Spirit: Leonor Will Never Die
    • World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award: Acting: Teresa Sánchez for Dos Estaciones
    • NEXT Innovator Award presented by Adobe: Framing Agnes
    • Short Film Grand Jury Prize: The Headhunter’s Daughter
    • Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction: IF I GO WILL THEY MISS ME
    • Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction: Dania Bdeir for Warsha
    • Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction: Samir Karahoda for Displaced
    • Short Film Jury Award: Animation: Joe Hsieh for Night Bus
    • Short Film Special Jury Award: Ensemble Cast: Zélia Duncan, Bruna Linzmeyer, Camila Rocha, Clarissa Ribeiro, and Lorre Motta for A wild patience has taken me here
    • Short Film Special Jury Award: Screenwriting: Sara Driver for Stranger Than Rotterdam with Sara Driver
    • Previously announced:
      • 2022 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize: After Yang
      • Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producers Award for Nonfiction: Su Kim for Free Chol Soo Lee
      • Sundance Institute | Amazon Studios Producers Award for Fiction: Amanda Marshall God’s Country
      • Sundance Institute | Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Nonfiction: Toby Shimin
      • Sundance Institute | Adobe Mentorship Award for Editing Fiction: Dody Dorn
      • Sundance Institute | NHK Award: Hasan Hadi for The President’s Cake
  • NEW FRONTIER ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
    • FLAT EARTH VR
      • Lucas Rizzotto (Lead Artist) shared insight on how the project started as a joke in response to the idea that VR is an “empathy machine,” and asked whether that is still the case when the premise is entirely delusional.
      • Lucas discussed how he actually consulted flat Earthers in designing the experience and learned that ultimately, “flat Earthers are not united by their belief, but by their disbelief.” There is no singular coherent flat Earth theory and everyone has different ideas of what a flat Earth means and looks like.
      • Lucas also expressed concern about VR propaganda, and how XR creators could use their work to spread misinformation and emotionally manipulate and control audiences in showing them a “reality” regardless of whether or not it’s based in truth. He urged XR creators to be mindful of the impact their work could have and how it may be used by others in a way they might not have intended.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE

The Festival takes place digitally via our enhanced online platform at Festival.Sundance.org, on the New Frontier Spaceship, a bespoke immersive platform allowing festival-goers to gather virtually, and in-person at seven Satellite Screens venues around the country during the Festival’s second weekend. Additional programming includes a daily talk show (“How to Fest: Daily”), and Satellite Screen conversations as well as partner offerings in the Festival Village.To note, all talks are available online via live stream or posted later on festival.sundance.org to view globally. Sign up for an account at festival.sundance.org to access online. All times are U.S. Mountain Time.

ABOUT SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

The Sundance Film Festival has introduced global audiences to some of the most groundbreaking films of the past three decades, including Flee, CODA, Passing, Summer Of Soul (…or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Clemency, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Zola, On The Record, Boys State, The Farewell, Honeyland, One Child Nation, The Souvenir, The Infiltrators, Sorry to Bother You, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Hereditary, Call Me By Your Name, Get Out, The Big Sick, Mudbound, Fruitvale Station, Whiplash, Brooklyn, Precious, The Cove, Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, Napoleon Dynamite, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Reservoir Dogs and sex, lies, and videotape.

The Festival is a program of the non-profit Sundance Institute. 2022 Festival sponsors include: Presenting Sponsors – Acura, AMC+, Chase Sapphire, Adobe; Leadership Sponsors – Amazon Studios, DIRECTV, DoorDash, Dropbox, Netflix, Omnicom Group, WarnerMedia, XRM Media; Sustaining Sponsors – Aflac, Audible, Canada Goose, Canon U.S.A., Inc., Dell Technologies, IMDbPro, Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold, Rabbit Hole Bourbon & Rye, Unity Technologies, University of Utah Health, White Claw Hard Seltzer; Media Sponsors – The Atlantic, IndieWire, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Shadow and Act, Variety, Vulture. Sundance Institute recognizes critical support from the State of Utah as Festival Host State. The support of these organizations helps offset the Festival’s costs and sustain the Institute’s year-round programs for independent artists. Visit sundance.org/festival for more.

Summary for Concerned Parents
For parents worried about teenagers affiliating with flat Earth believers, the situation is generally non-threatening physically or socially.

The movement:
- Constitutes a fringe ideological group rooted in conspiracy theories rather than rigorous inquiry.
- May promote skepticism toward education, science, and institutions, potentially impeding critical reasoning.

- Operates mainly online, offering identity and social connection to members.

Parents are advised to maintain open, respectful dialogue fostering critical evaluation of information and scientific literacy.

Awareness of the movement's nature will assist teenagers in thoughtfully navigating related interactions without alienating peers.

In conclusion, the contemporary flat Earth movement is a loosely organized, mostly Internet-based phenomenon driven by conspiracy and mistrust of science.

It is propagated by known organizations such as the Flat Earth Society (US/UK) and notable internet personalities including Eric Dubay and Mark Sargent.

While not directly linked to extremism, it spreads misinformation that can influence cognition and social perspectives, especially among vulnerable populations .