Ian Beacock wrote an article for The New Republic titled Birds Aren’t Real: The Prank That Turned Misinformation on Its Head (28 May 2024). « Calling itself Birds Aren’t Real, this group of primarily Gen Z truthers… explain that the U.S. government secretly ran a “mass bird genocide” starting in the late 1950s, replacing the real avian population with sophisticated surveillance-drone look-alikes. Bird-watching now goes both ways. »
« Cosplaying the paranoid fringe, Birds Aren’t Real delivers a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking »
« Birds Aren’t Real had its first dose of major mainstream attention in late 2021, thanks to a surreal New York Times feature by Taylor Lorenz. Now, the group’s two leaders, Peter McIndoe and Connor Gaydos, have published their manifesto in book form. Over nearly 300 pages, they reveal how the bird genocide plot was hatched by notorious CIA director Allen Dulles »
« Birds Aren’t Real is the perfect conspiracy theory, built on an astute understanding of how they work and what makes them so compelling. »
« struggle of absolute good over fathomless evil. »
« Birds Aren’t Real offers, first of all, a “theory of everything”—a way for people to make sense of the world’s complexity and contradictions, to tie up all the loose ends… Airtight logical systems are created in many conspiracies, like QAnon. They appeal to people who prefer certainty over ambiguity, who see “I don’t know” as a discomforting answer. Psychologists call this the need for cognitive closure, and have found it associated with anxiety, authoritarianism, and conspiratorial thinking. »
« Bird truthers are also masters of what we might call argument by adjacency. Related credible facts are adduced as proof of wilder claims, offering just enough truth to make you wonder … The United States did spend the Cold War running a range of secret operations, from coups to surveillance of civil rights leaders to attempts at drug-induced brainwashing. Birds Aren’t Real observes that these are “not conspiracy theories, but conspiracy facts,” proving that Washington “does indeed conspire behind the scenes to do insane and illegal things.” It’s widely accepted, too, that we are ensnared in a form of surveillance capitalism in which technology companies closely track our behavior as a means of astronomical profit. And isn’t it suspicious that “animal-free” eggs are now for sale on grocery store shelves? In a world where these things are incontrovertibly true, an elaborate system of secret bird-drone surveillance makes a certain logical sense. »
« McIndoe is not a conspiracy theorist himself. »
« The explicit purpose of Birds Aren’t Real, McIndoe told The New York Times in 2021, is about “holding a mirror to America in the internet age.” He and his peers have grown up in a world of dopamine hits and deepfakes and endless scrolling, where what happens on social media is just as real as what happens offline… One organizer has called it “fighting lunacy with lunacy.” »
« How to fix it is less obvious. One paradigm puts the onus on government to force social media companies to remove false information from their platforms, or make algorithms less likely to amplify conspiracies. The Supreme Court will soon tell us how directly the government can be involved in content moderation (a ruling is imminent in Murthy v. Missouri), but the failure of government agencies to meaningfully regulate Big Tech firms in the United States means that most experts are focused instead on getting individual people wiser to fake news. »
« Misinformation experts are currently working out three different approaches. The oldest and most familiar is information literacy. This field focuses on arming citizens with the critical thinking skills they need to identify false or poorly sourced claims, overheated rhetoric, or opinions playing as facts. People are inclined to be rational, in this view, but need the right education and training in order to do so. »
« In a study I co-wrote last year, for instance, we learned first of all that Gen Zers tend to digest information together with others: in group chats with family and friends, on Reddits and Discord servers, and in the comments sections beneath TikTok and YouTube videos. The value of that information is often social, too. »
« McIndoe and his Dadaist troupe of bird truthers are raising this deeper and more troubling challenge, inviting us to wonder if the crusade against misinformation—focusing on truth and accuracy and critical reasoning—hasn’t somehow missed the point. What’s appealing about Birds Aren’t Real and QAnon, McIndoe has suggested, isn’t the promise of truth so much as the feeling of community… Identity, purpose, meaning, a sense of agency and recognition and solidarity. The rise of conspiracism and misinformation is not a crisis of belief, observe the bird truthers, but belonging. »
« Rationality’s greatest weakness, perhaps, is that it is a procedure more than a commitment. »
Articles of Interest 