Why not believe the deep state has replaced birds with surveillance drones?
“Paranoia strikes deep” goes back to 1967. Continuing on a theme from my post below, The Guardian profiles Peter McIndoe. As a prank on the weekend of the 2017 Women’s Marches, he brought to a right-wing counter-protest in Memphis an absurdist sign satirizing conspiracy thinking:
That statement was “birds aren’t real”. As he stood with the counterprotesters, and they asked what his sign meant, he improvised. He said he was part of a movement that had been around for 50 years, and was originally started to save American birds, but had failed. The “deep state” had destroyed them all, and replaced them with surveillance drones. Every bird you see is actually a tiny feathered robot watching you.
Someone was filming him and put it on Facebook; it went viral, and Memphis is still the centre of the Birds Aren’t Real movement. Or is it a movement? You could call it a situationist spectacle, a piece of rolling performance art or a collective satire. MSNBC called it a “mass coping mechanism” for generation Z, and as it has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, “mass”, at least, is on the money.
It’s the most perfect, playful distillation of where we are in relation to the media landscape we’ve built but can’t control, and which only half of us can find our way around. It’s a made-up conspiracy theory that is just realistic enough, as conspiracies go, to convince QAnon supporters that birds aren’t real, but has just enough satirical flags that generation Z recognises immediately what is going on. It’s a conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy, a little aneurysm of reality and mockery in the bloodstream of the mad pizzagate-style theories that animate the “alt-right”.
We’re gonna need a bigger rabbit hole.
Fortunately, high-schoolers get it almost immediately. But McIndoe, an Arkansas native and product of a “home-school environment,” is able to easily punk “sub-Rush Limbaugh local radio shock-jocks” into putting him on the air:
It’s a vivid dramatisation of how divisive conspiracy theories are; people who believe them live in another world, where any wild theory flies and even the most fleeting attempt to fact check it or test it against logic (if birds have been destroyed, who’s eating all the worms?) marks you out as a brainwashed liberal. People who don’t believe them cannot think themselves into the headspace of those who do. Then along comes a guy with a sign, and maybe he’s not bridging this implacable divide, but he’s certainly disrupting it.
Those who participate in “Birds Aren’t Real” for fun are engaged in “a collective role-playing experiment.” Those from the right who know it’s a prank “think that we are the CIA, we’re put out there as a weapon against conspiracy theorists.” Even knowing it’s a joke feeds their paranoia. It’s their God-given right in America to believe the unreal is real and to reject The Enlightenment. McIndoe fears “the lunacy is going to become more intense.”
People in an age of chaos are eager to find a single, simplifying theory for making sense of it. They reach for any explanation.
Again, that familiar Voltaire paraphrase about absurdities and atrocities here and here and here and here.
But of course, Voltaire worked for the CIA.
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