A Dutch user wrote an absurd piece purporting to prove that the Earth is flat, mockingly dismantling physics, engineering and the video-game industry along the way. Most commenters missed the joke. This is an X-ray of a debate that never really happened.

(Staff: The Netherlands / Digital Culture & Society)

The internet is a wonderful place. It gives us access to humanity’s accumulated knowledge, the history of civilizations and scientific theories that have changed the course of history. Yet sometimes one of its most compelling forms of entertainment is watching people completely miss a joke. Recently, a post by a Dutch user named Maarten attracted tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments. Why? He appeared to argue, with a straight face, that the Earth had been “100% proven flat” and that all modern science was a hoax.

The art of dismantling gravity with a joke

Maarten’s post is a masterclass in reductio ad absurdum. He does not merely claim that the Earth is flat; he follows the supposed consequences through to their logical extreme. If the Earth were flat, he argues, Newton’s laws of gravity—which explain why sufficiently massive bodies become spherical—would be invalid. And if gravity collapses, everything else collapses with it. Einstein must go, too. High-school physics becomes “100% nonsense” and should be abolished. Chemistry, at least in part. Geography, obviously.

Maarten does not stop there. He goes after one of the most revered institutions of the twenty-first century: engineering. Calculations for bridges, dikes and buildings rely on gravity, he says, so all these structures must now be unsafe. Finally, in a stroke of comic genius, he takes aim at the video-game industry: every first-person shooter supposedly uses the wrong mathematics. “I don’t know which mathematics is correct; it still needs to be developed. But it is clear that the current one is simply wrong,” he writes. His conclusion? Leave our homes, built on faulty calculations, and move into a cave for safety.

The comments section: a graveyard of humour

If Maarten’s post is excellent satire, the comments section is a tragedy. Humour dies there in spectacular fashion, while fact and fiction become almost surrealistically entangled. A few commenters immediately understood the point. Ton Spies joked, “Not a cave that’s too deep, or you’ll fall through the Earth.” Nolo85 tried to rescue the conversation: “Everyone in these comments is so stupid they can’t see this post is sarcasm.”

But most responses were deadly serious. Some asked which psychiatric institution Maarten had escaped from. Others told him to take his pills, while joking that “recent studies have proved that the pills aren’t real either.” Roger Verhelst advised everyone to stop reading “this nonsense” and do something more interesting. Another commenter tried to refute the post with a genuine scientific question: “Why doesn’t sunrise happen at the same time everywhere in the world?”

The mirror of a society that has forgotten how to read between the lines

This is not an isolated incident. It reflects a deeper problem in digital spaces: the loss of context. In an age when information travels at lightning speed and algorithms reward emotional reactions over nuance, satire becomes collateral damage. People no longer read a post as a whole. They skim the opening lines, get angry and start typing.

The ultimate irony is that the commenters who rushed to defend science and the spherical Earth did so with an intensity not so different from the arguments between flat-Earth believers and their opponents. They were just as dogmatic and just as inattentive to context. They saw the keyword “the Earth is flat” and hit the panic button, missing the fact that the post was a hilarious demolition of the very obsession they were reacting to.

Conclusion

Maarten wanted to show, through absurdity, how fragile logic becomes when it is stripped of context. He succeeded, though perhaps not in the way he expected. The internet is a place where satire can be a double-edged sword. You can write a brilliant parody, but if your audience reads only the headline before commenting, the joke turns against you. The Earth remains round. Gravity still works. And the comments section remains one of the best places to watch humanity lose its sense of humour, one spiteful comment at a time.