worms falling off flat-earth.

every lever needs a fulcrum.

Mr. Beast is the most popular Youtuber, one of the biggest influencers in the world, with 278 million subscribers. Yet despite the dominance of Mr. Beast on Youtube, he does not have the most followers on social media.

He has less followers than Ronaldo (773M), Messi (500M), Selena Gomez (554M), Kylie Jenner (495M), The Rock (488M), Ariana Grande (425M), Kim Kardashian (448M), Justin Bieber (431M), Taylor Swift (402M), and Katy Perry (320M).

All of these people are influencers. But how influential are they, in the deepest sense of the word? Do they change the world, or do they merely appeal to the status quo? What does it mean to change the world?

one thousand islands.

There are two ways to measure change: qualitative and quantitative.

Imagine a first case: A single lonely island in the Pacific, hundreds of miles from anything else. A ship arrives on this island carrying a few hundred hunter-gatherers from a similar climate. They are dropped off, and the hunter-gatherers immediately resume their traditional way of life of hunting and gathering. 10,000 years later, the ship returns, and finds them in exactly the same condition that they were left: hunting and gathering. Nothing has changed.

Now imagine a second case: from that first case, each year, 10% of the population is kidnapped and brought to a series of thousands of islands stretching across the Pacific, hundreds of miles from each other. On each of these islands, a ship arrives, drops off a load of people, and sails away. All of these people derive from the same primitive hunter-gatherer culture of the single lonely island. Each island population immediately falls into a familiar pattern of hunting and gathering. 10,000 years later, the ships return to inspect the progress of these populations. To their surprise, the populations exist exactly as they did 10,000 years prior: hunting, gathering, without much variation. Even their languages are the same. Nothing has changed.

In the first case, the island population totaled maybe 500 people. In the second case, 1,000 islands were populated, and the total population of all of them, added together, came out to 500,000 people. This is a huge quantitative difference. Yet qualitatively, not much changed.

Such uniformity seems unlikely at first. Surely, random “cultural mutations” would arise among different islands, eventually resulting in the invention of technology.

Yet what if we change the thought experiment? What if instead of humans, we imagined colonies of crocodiles? Crocodiles and alligators are two species of reptile which have remained remarkably stable over 150 million years. They are extremely well adapted to a particular environment. If these reptiles were placed on islands with the types of rivers, swamps, or ponds that are similar to their typical environments, it is not unreasonable to expect that they would remain exactly as they are today.

speciation.

It is important to note that part of the “typical environment” includes other species. Otherwise, the reptiles would speciate to fulfill various niches, as mammals did 65 million years ago. Each environment, almost Platonically, has a series of “forms” available to fill. The triceratops, a reptile, resembles the rhinoceros, a mammal. If certain niches are not fulfilled (large, small, fast, slow, flying, swimming, burrowing, and so on) then random mutations will lead to speciation and divergence.

hand-power.

Human beings are unique in the history of Earth in our combination of traits. The most obvious is our intelligence. However, a brain in a vat cannot accomplish much. If the brain of a human was transported, somehow, into an oak tree, and given enough oxygen, water, and calories to survive, it wouldn’t be able to do much. It could somehow “direct” the tree to grow, but it could not fashion tools, produce fire, smelt ores, mix chemicals, or any of the other processes which lead to technological development.

Opposable thumbs are used to fashion the most basic external tools, and they are freed for use by the upright posture of bipedalism. Very few other animals are bipedal. The ostrich is one, but it has wings instead of arms. The Tyrannosaurus had arms, but they were proportionately small and could not be used to make stone tools given their short distance from the body.

Every invention of mankind proceeds from the fact that we are able to fashion tools. Our fingers are large and strong enough to break stone with stone, but small and nimble enough to make fine and precise movements.

parasitism.

These qualities allow for a human population to radically change the world in a way that is simply not possible for any other animal species. It is also not enough to say that humans “evolve” or “change culturally,” if this change is not subject to any scrutiny. Bacteria evolve continuously on a yearly basis, which is why vaccines must be continuously changed. Yet the impact of bacteria is only secondary.

By this, I mean that bacteria, disease, viruses, and all sorts of microscopic pathogens can have the greatest effect in terms of the rise and fall of civilizations, by wiping out one culture and allowing another to rise. But in the absence of humans, these diseases would merely facilitate the rise of one animal over another. Agents of disease are, by definition, parasites.

Influencers can also take on this role. In the same way that a disease can spread throughout a population, influencers enter into the “body” of culture, and insert themselves like an interchangeable part in an assembly line. For example, sports culture. Each sport has a set of predefined rules, and the ability to follow those rules and satisfy those preconditions makes a great athlete. But by becoming a great athlete, and gaining the acclaim of millions, is anything changed?

Athletes often become very wealthy, and can go on to have a “second life” in other pursuits. Bruce Jenner, now Caitlyn, has attempted to become a politician. Jenner’s original skill, athleticism, was ultimately leveraged to gain access to reality TV, which was then leveraged to gain access to politics. Most athletes are unable to do this, and in general, athleticism, although it creates significant wealth and popularity, does not have a lasting qualitative ability to change the world.

what is power?

Power is the ability to change the world. It typically expressed itself through one of three forms: media, military, or money. The issue with the third category, money, is that money in itself has no value. A stack of gold bars on a desert island is worthless. Money is only power to the extent that it can be exchanged for real goods or services. When we take this to the logical conclusion, then money is always exchanged for a form of media or military power, far enough down the line.

Throughout history, the most influential people have often been military leaders. Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, George Washington, and Mohammed all changed the course of history because of their military victories. The greatest empires of world history were built by military conquest, and no state has ever been founded or maintained itself without a great military.

At the same time, it could be said that no military has ever been assembled without “media” power. The term “media” is used here in the broadest possible sense. As McLuhan said, “the medium is the message,” and therefore, media refers to any and all forms of communication: art, religion, music, song, theater, ritual, non-reproductive sexuality, dance, writing, poetry, literature, bureaucracy, and law.

Operating within the rules of a sport and succeeding at becoming a great athlete is one form of power. Creating an entirely new sport with new rules is another level of power. Changing the way in which all sports are spectated, by building huge stadiums, is another level of power. Using the printing press to deliver daily news on sports around the country adds another level, and broadcasting the news via radio and television is an even further level of power.

The invention of new technologies which enhance not just the size of the audience, but also the level of detail and sensuality of an experience, is one of the most powerful trends in the world. In this sense, Mr. Beast, or any other influencer, is merely a player of the “e-celeb” sport, or the “entertainer” sport, or the “musician” sport. Supposedly, the masses, in some kind of grand “free market,” are the ones inventing the rules of the game.

Yet this is clearly not true. Platforms regularly ban, censor, shadowban, de-boost, and manipulate the members of their platforms. Hollywood has been doing this since its inception. As Stalin said, it matters not who votes, but who counts the votes. In the same way, “organic popularity” is only one component of the game. Who controls the platform is decisive.

Rumble and X have had a decisive impact on the political landscape and will likely lead to a Trump victory in 2024. The question then is this: is Trump powerful, or are the platforms who support him powerful? Can Trump exist without the platforms which support him? The answer, although painful and perhaps frightening, is no. If Trump doesn’t exist without these platforms, then do any of us exist without these platforms? The answer is obvious, but even more painful and frightening to our fragile egos.

Platforms act as environments onto which we project ourselves as organisms. The earth, or any environment within it, can be thought of as a physical platform. No physical organism can exist without a physical platform. At the bare minimum, every organism needs a matrix of water, sunlight, heat, carbon, atmosphere, and other minerals to maintain itself and reproduce.

The Earth, physically, is a spherical object, but metaphorically, the image of a flat-earth is more accurate. This metaphor can then be extended to internet platforms: Youtube, X, Rumble, Substack. These are all platforms in which people can exist. Mark Zuckerberg’s experiments with virtual reality is taking this metaphor even further, to the extent that people will be able to have such a realistic and totalistic experience in the meta-verse that they will have difficulty distinguishing between reality and the “game.”

While all of this may seem dramatically new and original, the idea of creating a fake world, or a simulation, is very clearly laid out in Plato. Plato, as inventive as he was, was only revealing something which had already been in practice perhaps for thousands of years. As the atheist slogan goes, “everyone is an atheist about the other guy’s gods.” As much as we might strongly believe in our own versions of religion, it is clear that someone, somewhere, must be getting duped.

Despite Pascal’s wager simplifying religious faith into a binary (Jesus or not Jesus), there are so many different, contradictory doctrines that the vast majority of them, by the laws of logic, must be false. Who is coming up with all these false religions, and for what purpose?

Plato spells out the intentions clearly: false doctrines are created for cynical and practical reasons. The state can only be maintained if the will of the individual is subordinated to the will of the state, and lies are the only means by which to accomplish this. After the fact, Locke and Hobbes invented a “social contract theory” of the state. For all of its flaws, elements of the far left have seen through this mythology. Jared Diamond, for example, states that it would be impossible for hunter-gatherers to be “argued” or “persuaded” to put their faith in a state, something they had never seen before, to sacrifice their way of life in order to obtain some unseen future benefit.

Instead of argument and persuasion, hunter-gatherers were brainwashed, deceived, enslaved, and subjected to propaganda. The threat of heaven and hell is what compelled their obedience to the state. Atheists call this behavior irrational, but humans are not the only ones to behave superstitiously. Drop a cucumber in front of a cat, and it reacts instinctually, as if the cucumber were a snake.

The difference between the jumping cat and the praying human is that the cat's fear of snakes is in-born, whereas the human’s fear of god is instilled. The mind itself is a platform in which thoughts exist. As much as we can dismiss the internet as “not real,” as has become fashionable, the reality of the internet is no less substantial than the reality of thoughts in the mind. In other words, thoughts, religions, and internet phenomena are all of the highest importance and cannot be dismissed.

It is fashionable to dismiss the internet as fake, insignificant, irrelevant, or puerile. The internet is compared to highschool, with its petty gossip. Someday, supposedly, we will collectively “grow up” and put childish things away. The internet will be no more, and we will move on to bigger and better things, in the “real world.”

A viral video from a conservative influencer bemoans the dominance of “theater kids” over society. With the internet growing in its influence and power over our lives, it is unlikely that “theater kids,” the tech billionaires she is referring to, will lose power any time soon. It is however possible that technology could advance to the point that all of this “theater” comes to a close. Mr. Beast can only exist within a stable society. Sports themselves are a sublimation of the practice of war. If technology sufficiently destabilizes the current order, then the flat-earth will turn sideways, with the influencers tumbling down into the abyss.