Enron is Back, and Birds Aren't Real
17:03 Share

This is the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Last week, the website for Enron, yeah, that Enron, the disgraced fraudulent energy company that went bankrupt in 2001, came back online. We're rolling? Awesome. What does being the new CEO of Enron mean to me? How much time do we have? And on Monday, the new CEO introduced himself. When I was a child, my father would renovate houses. And something that he would tell me was, "Son, all that really matters is to have a strong foundation."

He called it good bones. Well, I believe that Enron has good bones. I believe that Enron has a strong foundation. - Conor Gaydos seems to have resurrected the company to poke fun at corporate America. - The finer print gives us the answer we've been looking for. The information on the website is First Amendment protected parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only.

Phew. And sell a few hoodies. There's a company store selling Enron merch for as little as $118. Call it a gift, anyone? And it so happens that Gaydos is a source of another satirical piece of news. Birds are real!

Birds Aren't Real movement marched through downtown Springfield today to give one message. Birds are not real. The group believes all the birds in the United States have been killed by the government. The United States government replaced them with robot replicas that look like, mimic, and act like real birds in every single way.

That's Gatos in 2023, giving a TED Talk alongside his compatriot Peter McIndoe, who founded the Birds Aren't Real movement in 2017. It was a joke, but he rarely broke character and later published a book with Gatos. The vast following they've amassed along the way found something satisfying in what critic Ian Becock has called cosplaying the paranoid fringe.

In a conversation that we aired earlier this year, I asked Becock to trace the beginning of the movement, beginning with Peter. He's described himself as having been seen as kind of a black sheep among his friends at high school. Ian Becock. Because he questioned, you know, beliefs that, for instance, President Obama was the Antichrist or that vaccines were part of a surveillance conspiracy.

He was 17 or 18, I believe, in 2017. And he was in Memphis with his friends for a women's march. And on a whim, he scrawled these three words, birds aren't real, on a piece of cardboard as a kind of mock protest sign. Somebody took a video of it and uploaded it to social media.

And it rapidly went viral, especially among teens in the South. From there, he built it out into a full-blown online movement. They show up in comment sections. They post infographics. A recent video that they posted was of a number of bird truthers at the Duolingo headquarters, the language learning app. I brought you here today to protest the demon abomination that is the Duolingo bird!

Peter has also given media interviews on Fox News. When he goes on Fox News, is he taken seriously? In all of his media interviews, with one notable exception, he is entirely in character. When he's on Fox News, there's an interview he does with Jesse Waters, and he's entirely in character. And Waters asks at one point, is this a bit? Is this a schtick? Do you really in your heart, why would it be a schtick?

Because there are birds everywhere. You report on UFOs in the show, yes? I can see the government using some birds maybe as drones to disguise them, but you're saying all birds, the pigeons here in New York City. Every, every bird, every bird in every pigeon here in New York City. I mean, it's a piece of performance art, really. The followers of this movement, they know it's fake, right?

My overall impression is that, yes, the young people involved are in on the joke. So their new book was written entirely in character. What does it contain? A revisionist history of the second half of the 20th century in the United States, purportedly drawing on stolen confidential documents with descriptions of how presidents all the way through up until Joe Biden have been involved in perpetuating this plot.

You can find diagrams of all the different kinds of bird surveillance drones, from geese, which are supposedly used for crowd control in parks, and I think that resonates with many of us, to hummingbirds, which are used for assassinations. Alan Dulles, the first civilian CIA director, apparently hatched the plot to exterminate all the birds and replace them, and that was the reason for Kennedy's assassination? Yes.

Yes, when John F. Kennedy becomes president and learns about this project and starts digging into it a little bit, they have a fake memo from Dulles to JFK saying, we do a number of things and not one of them is your business. Go fiddle around with your little space program and leave the big things to us. The suggestion in the book is that JFK was killed by a modified hummingbird surveillance drone.

And the US invasion of Vietnam? Part of the theory of everything that is offered by the bird conspiracy. So the invasion of Vietnam in this case is explained as a search for bauxite, a rare earth mineral that is important for building bird drones. Okay. So you've mentioned in passing the theory of everything. The theory of everything is where there are these airtight logical systems that are produced in which everything can be explained either away or as part of the system.

And psychologists have found this need for cognitive closure associated with conspiratorial thinking as well as anxiety and even authoritarianism. There's another quality of conspiracy that you've observed in real life and in The Birds Aren't Real conspiracy, and it's called the argument by adjacency.

We see this a lot around COVID skepticism and QAnon, the selection and elevation of facts that are in fact generally accepted and presenting them as proof of much wilder claims. So for instance, the authors of the book invite you to do your own research into the bird genocide plot.

And what you find is that, of course, the U.S. did spend the Cold War running a number of secret operations around the world and at home, from coups abroad to surveillance of civil rights leaders. They also point out that we live in a moment in which all of our personal data is online and is being harvested for profit or for surveillance purposes.

And so if these things are true, it seems not that implausible that an elaborate system of bird drone surveillance might have evolved as part of this as well. Successful conspiracies, you say, perform a kind of psychic alchemy for their followers. What do you mean by that?

So there's a kind of psychic bargain with conspiracy theories. On the one hand, they often have the effect of draining pleasure from everyday life. Because everything is encompassed within this elaborate plot, nothing can be innocent anymore. The stakes are too high. So what we find with QAnon supporters is that they pull away from friends and family where they are convinced that the people that they love have become cultists and enemies.

You see this in Birds Aren't Real as well, where taking a nature walk, bird watching, you know, none of this is innocent. In fact, they describe eating turkey at Christmas and Thanksgiving as ritualized bird worship, an elaborate propaganda effort by the U.S. government to inure us to the bird surveillance.

So on the one hand, you know, pleasure is drained out of everyday life, but that's replaced by a kind of heroism that is offered to followers. You have an important role to play to help bring back real birds to America. To raise awareness and in some cases to use magnets to take down surveillance drones and deactivate them. They take this joke really seriously and yet.

You've observed that the progenitor of this has recently dropped character, clarified that it's a joke, and expressed concern about the risk of doing stuff like this, that it can lead people down the rabbit hole.

Yeah, so if you look on the social media accounts of Birds Aren't Real at the moment, you will find claims that in fact birds are real, that the founder of the movement, Peter McIndoe, has died. But he hasn't. He hasn't, not to my knowledge. With the publication of the book, it seems online like the movement is sort of bringing the chapter to an end. But in 2023, Peter McIndoe gave a TED Talk where he dropped character and explained what he was trying to achieve.

I do not actually believe that birds are robots. This is a character that I played for four years, the leader of a fake movement with fake evidence and a fake history. Our goal was to convince the public that our satirical movement was a real one.

and see if the media would believe what we were saying. But he's also explained it is to offer a more complicated understanding of who believes in movements like this and why, and to recognize it not so much as a problem of truth and belief, but a problem of belonging. Yeah, you say that...

Another crucial component of any thriving conspiracy is despair. Writing this piece, I looked at wonderful books by Will Sommer at the Washington Post and Mike Rothschild on QAnon. And what really struck me reading these descriptions and interviews with people who were very involved in the QAnon movement is just the profound sense of despair and in some cases isolation in their lives. And folks who have issues with debt or medical problems in their family and really feeling abandoned

And when you look at, you know, Trump rallies or COVID protests, these are clearly fun for people who are attending them. There's a real sense of enthusiasm and exuberance. And I think what you see with Birds Aren't Real, of course, there's the language that this is a heroic group effort to reveal the truth about birds. But you can also find in interviews of young people who are part of the movement, a description of the same kind of psychic dynamics where young people today have

grown up entirely online, and many of them have gone to high school and college during a very isolating pandemic experience where everything was remote. And so the ability to be part of something online, to come to rallies, has also given that sense of meaning and community, even though it is a joke. You mentioned a concept that Francis Fukuyama wrote in his much maligned bestseller, 1992, The End of History and the Last Man.

One of the claims he makes in the book is that political and social change is actually driven not by economic conditions, but actually by psychological motivations. And he talks about this concept of thumos, T-H-Y-M-O-S, which he describes as recognition, the desire to be understood and valued.

I mean, I think we've seen that towards the end of the 20th century and in the last couple of decades, that this desire to be recognized and feel like life is meaningful can continue to drive political change, even in the absence of grand ideology. When McIndoo gave that TED Talk back in 2023, he said he wanted to give young people a way to respond to chaos.

and he described it as trying to build an igloo in a snowstorm.

to, as he put it, create shelter out of the same type of material that's causing the chaos and give people a sheltered, safe, protected space to process all of this misinformation and chaos around them rather than succumbing to it. It's a response to the criticism that the movement has faced, which is that this might be contributing to the problem. Yet another conspiracy theory online

yet another pathway into this kind of thinking. But he has suggested, I think quite persuasively, that it's this collaborative effort to take the pieces of this problem and turn them into something more constructive. He's a smart kid. He is. He's worth listening to, I think.

What does the movement tell us about the ways we can go about fighting misinformation? I know one of them is information literacy, teaching critical thinking skills. I think all of these rational efforts to fight misinformation are necessary but not sufficient. From my own research into misinformation, among Gen Zers in particular, we find, first of all, it's not a single person sitting down and confronting a single piece of information and trying to decide if it's true or not.

Very often what's happening is that this information is being encountered socially, whether that's in comment sections or on TikTok or Instagram, in full view of other people, in conversation with friends. So like all of us, sometimes we consume information and we try to decide whether it's true or not. But there are many other times when we look at the news or engage with information and we're trying to decide, you know, what do I think about this? What does that say about me? What does that say about the community that I'm part of?

And so the purpose of consuming information in many cases is social. In your piece, you cited historian Richard Hofstadter's famous essay in the mid-60s about the paranoid style in American politics. And he said, the paranoid mind is nothing if not scholarly in technique.

You know, one of the most impressive things about the paranoid style is what he calls the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. That sounds very familiar to me. And when you think of the work by Crystal Lee at MIT writing about how COVID deniers online are teaching one another how to read statistics and produce visualizations, you know, we put a lot of effort into information literacy and teaching critical thinking. I think it's really essential.

But this just suggests to me that it's not quite enough because it's kind of value neutral. It can be used for different purposes and to take you down different directions. You mused that perhaps rationality's greatest weakness is that it is a procedure more than a commitment. That teaching people critical thinking and rational arguments the easy part, it's much harder to establish and defend the shared values that reason is meant to serve.

And you said that the Birds Aren't Real movement tapped into the broader challenge that we face when our shared reality and consensus are unraveling.

The fact that this is not purely a question of rationality and belief. What we learn here from Birds Aren't Real is that addressing these underlying psychological dimensions of social and political life are just as important as giving people the skills to decipher fact from fiction. You know, one of the things that has changed since 2017 when Peter McIndoo began this, I mean, we had the Trump presidency, we had COVID, but

But we've also had the emergence now of AI and large language models, which is having profound implications for online misinformation. The capabilities of AI to produce deepfake videos or text, it's almost impossible now to tell the difference. And so technology companies are looking at watermarks and these other ways of helping us differentiate information.

We're going to run to limits when we focus on teaching skills just because the technology has evolved. And so focusing on, you know, what does it mean to give people a sense of purpose and community and respond to isolation and loneliness feels to me just as important and maybe relevant now as the focus on teaching skills and rationality. And so much harder. And so much harder. Yeah.

One last question. How did the Birds Aren't Real movement reconcile the abundance of pigeon guano? They do have an answer for that.

That's, in fact, a way of tracking human targets by the U.S. government. And it's a way of signaling, whether it falls on a person or on their car, that they are, in fact, a person of interest. And so that, too, is bound up in the theory of everything that Birds Aren't Real is able to offer. It's quite an impressive achievement, in fact. I'll say. Ian, thank you so much. This was such a pleasure, Brooke. Thank you. Ian Peacock is a writer and critic and frequent contributor to The New Republic.

Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. Check back on Friday when we post the big show, which deals in part with the memification of murder and a very big industry.

This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the Science Friday team has been reporting high-quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies.

Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost. With important news, they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.