Personally I am not worried that flat-earthers will turn all of us, so I am not uncomfortable, but I agree that such a regression would be quite unpalatable. R

Personally I am not worried that flat-earthers will turn all of us, so I am not uncomfortable, but I agree that such a regression would be quite unpalatable. Rather, I believe that the majority of people will continue to understand the earth as "round" and will be more likely to believe the (also minority) science pedants when they say "actually, it's more slightly egg-shaped" than they will the ravings of someone who does not believe in satellites. The beautiful trick of decentralization is not that it has any ability to prevent wrong-information from being disseminated, but that it ensures that correct-information will be disseminated regardless of any co-existing propaganda campaign to the contrary. In a centralized censorable system this guarantee cannot be met. I believe that as long as correct-information is available the majority of humans will eventually find consensus with it. I am not convinced that fringe ideas like flat-earthism are necessarily growing or that they would be doing so because of the web. It is likely that the web is just exposing, for the first time, the true extant of the population that is willing to accept fringe theories which while I agree is a disconcertingly large percentage, still does not seem to be the majority of people. That said, roughly half the people I talk to still seem to fully accept and believe in some sort of literal sky god and roughly a third still seem to take in earnest the existence of actual ghosts, luck, karma, or other such poorly supported meta-think as obvious truths. But I believe this number is way way down from 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago... I believe more people are finding consensus with actual truth due in large part to the awesome power of decentralized messaging systems we've built to date starting with language and so far culminating at the internet and the nascent social and technical overlays that are being built on-top of it.