Flat Earth Society

Humanity had striven upwards in the great spires of cathedrals, we had Heaven come down to us in the domes of temples, and now is the time for Humans to be Flat Earthers; concerned only with the ground ‘neath us, the next day’s meal, and no more. Time to adjust your aspirations, citizens of the world!

Flat artwork

Jack introduced me to a twitter account focusing on this tepid style as it spreads in advertisement and the corporate world. @HumansOfFlat, a fever dream, noted the transition of a great deal of artwork from realistic portrayals of humans to cartoonish, and finally to construction paper cutouts donning the walls of third grade classrooms. Their faces are obliterated, their bodies reduced to blobs, and their identity to skin tone. This is both how the corporation sees you and how they want you to see yourself. An interchangeable blob, no different from anyone else with the exception of your particular HSL values.

Nothing was ever here

Flat hierarchy

"We're all on a first name basis, here. We're a flat company!" Bullshit. Any high functioning company will have a hierarchy explicit or implicit. It will take direction from a select few and people will organize underneath that to meet the goals being set. A competent company will accept ideas and feedback from all levels, discard the crap, and implement the good. They may even select you for promotion, or they might not because we know you rise to the level of your incompetence. You might call the CEO Bob, and he might call you Giuseppe, and you will absolutely 100% take his orders regardless of any faux lack of hierarchy. We pretend to be equal and we pretend that this playacting is meaningful, when, were it reality, it sets the board for chaos. Of course, the real bosses are HR, and they are going to kill you.

Flat humanity

In Europe today, and in the United States, we see that not all humans are created equal. Flat people everywhere, you see; economic units. Perhaps they are all equally worthwhile in the eyes of God, in the value of their soul, and that is not my concern. My concern is a functioning society and the peoples who inhabit it. Our elite have imported writhing masses of humanity to lower the cost of production and the cost of their meals prepared, their patios expanded, and their gardens evergreen. Well and good; when those masses're running through your local festivals raping and pillaging? You can't get a job to afford a place in the town you grew up because all the meat packing spots have a flood of Ethiopians they can work to death for cheap? Too bad. Your neighbor can't make ends meet because our betters are too stupid to do anything but take a poem on a piece of green metal as the highest good. They take green as the highest good, this is close enough.

Flat torque

The internal combustion motor, with all its glorious odor, raucousness, and inefficiencies stirs your viscera.  The utter revulsion an Inline 4 mated to a CVT inspires or the heart pounding in excitement as the cross plane crank engine winds out and pulls you into triple digits with enough alacrity you swear you’re about to pass into the arms of YHWH. They intend for it to be gone; not passing from this world of natural causes, they’re killing it with their fake green electric motors. Ah, serenity in transportation. Just get from A to B without all that fuss. An unchanging shove impels me. Never mind that they take the once ubiquitous and place it further out of reach of the average man. Never mind the blood of children that made it possible. A pleasant side effect.

Flat life

No highs or lows; stupendous SSRI dosage to even everyone out. Everything is convenient, delivered to your door by another fungible worker. They go home and they look at their anime collection proudly. They jack off into the same stained sock one last time before going to sleep with Netflix on after flicking through Tinder and repeating the cycle. They don’t know anything else and life is comfortable enough, why would they try to change it? There’s more danger in the cure than the disease. Babies are expensive, don’t you know? Another mouth to feed, another burden on mother earth. They would rather you not experience the uncertain dread as labor begins; blood pressure is high; the baby’s heart rate is plummeting with each contraction; the cord is wrapped around their neck and they’re not making it through the birth canal. The reversal – they pull your child out, free them of the coil around their throat, and you hear them cry. Life! Love! Tears of joy streaming down your face. That’s a lot of thick black blood pooling on the floor: at least no one is worried and they’re not rushing her out of the room. You look down at your belly later, and think “I need to get in shape so I can be here for more of this.” Your delivery driver had their dose changed. Hanged themselves. Your packages are still arriving. I didn’t notice.

Flat world

Why would anyone want borders, a nation? When you are free to flit from place to place as branch to branch without a care and partake of the finest everywhere has to offer? All over the world such revelry and merrymaking! We’re all the same, don’t you see? There’s no sense in what you want, no reason to put your neighbor before a youthful worker who just wants a chance. There was that little disruption around the globe, you heard of it, and there were some hiccups with supplies coming across oceans. Yes, we don’t make anything here, but the brand is what matters. What’s a cascade failure? I’m sorry, a selective what inhibitor? Those are going to be impacted?

Flattening

The end point, creeping over the horizon, of all this is not the elevation of mankind to greater heights. It is the leveling, the laying low of all but the select few who hope to insulate themselves from their own policies and the reality they are bringing to fruition. They want to tread upon the perfectly even, the same, the interchangeable, and they don’t want anyone to threaten their way of life. They will ply you with drugs, euphoria, lies, and grind you in the machine.

Welcome to the Flat Earth Society.