Brooke Gladstone: This is the On the Media midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, the website for Enron, yes, that Enron, the disgraced, fraudulent energy company that went bankrupt in 2001, came back online.

Connor Gaydos: We're rolling. Awesome. What does being the new CEO of Enron mean to me? How much time do we have?

Brooke Gladstone: On Monday, the new CEO introduced himself.

Connor Gaydos: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Connor Gaydos seems to have resurrected the company to poke fun at corporate America.

Correspondent: The finer print gives us the answer we've been looking for. The information on the website is First Amendment protection parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only. Phew.

Brooke Gladstone: And sell a few hoodies.

Correspondent: There's a company store, selling Enron merch for as little as $118. Holiday gift, anyone?

Brooke Gladstone: It so happens that Gaydos is a source of another satirical piece of news.

[news clip plays]

Crowd: Birds aren’t real, birds aren’t real.

Newscaster: The 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--

Connor Gaydos: The United States government replaced them with robot replicas that look like, mimic, and act like real birds in every single way.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Gaydos 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 Gaydos. The vast following they've amassed along the way found something satisfying in what critic Ian Beacock has called "cosplaying the paranoid fringe." In a conversation that we aired earlier this year, I asked Beacock to trace the beginning of the movement, beginning with Peter.

Ian Beacock: He's described himself as having been seen as kind of a black sheep among his friends at high school.

Brooke Gladstone: Ian Beacock.

Ian Beacock: Because he questioned 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 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.

Peter McIndoe: I brought you here today to protest the demon abomination that is the Duolingo bird.

Ian Beacock: Peter has also given media interviews on Fox News.

Brooke Gladstone: When he goes on Fox News, is he taken seriously?

Ian Beacock: 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 Watters, and he's entirely in character, and Watters asks at one point, "Is this a bit?"

Jesse Watters: Is this a schtick? Do you really, in your heart?

Peter McIndoe: Why would it be a schtick?

Jesse Watters: Because there are birds everywhere.

Peter McIndoe: You report on UFOs in a show, yes?

Jesse Watters: I could 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.

Peter McIndoe: Every, every bird, every bird, and every pigeon here in New York City.

Ian Beacock: It's a piece of performance art, really.

Brooke Gladstone: The followers of this movement, they know it's fake, right?

Ian Beacock: My overall impression is that, yes, the young people involved are in on the joke.

Brooke Gladstone: Their new book was written entirely in character. What does it contain?

Ian Beacock: 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 parts, and I that resonate with many of us, to hummingbirds, which are used for assassinations.

Brooke Gladstone: Allen Dulles, the first civilian CIA director, apparently hatched the plot to exterminate all the birds and replace them. That was the reason for Kennedy's assassination?

Ian Beacock: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: And the US invasion of Vietnam?

Ian Beacock: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay, so you've mentioned in passing the theory of everything.

Ian Beacock: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Ian Beacock: 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. For instance, the authors of the book invite you to do your own research into the bird genocide plot. What you find is that, of course, the US 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Successful conspiracies, you say, perform a psychic alchemy for their followers. What do you mean by that?

Ian Beacock: There's a psychic bargain in 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. 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, none of this is innocent.

In fact, they describe eating turkey at Christmas and Thanksgiving as ritualized bird worship, with an elaborate propaganda effort by the US government to inure us to the bird surveillance. On the one hand, pleasure is drained out of everyday life, but that's replaced by a heroism that is offered to followers.

Brooke Gladstone: You have an important role to play to help bring back real birds to America.

Ian Beacock: To raise awareness, and in some cases, to use magnets to take down surveillance drones and deactivate them.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Ian Beacock: Yes, 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.

Brooke Gladstone: He hasn't.

Ian Beacock: 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.

Peter McIndoe: 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 to see if the media would believe what we were saying.

Ian Beacock: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Yes. You say that another crucial component of any thriving conspiracy is despair.

Ian Beacock: Writing this piece, I looked at wonderful books by Will Sommer at The Washington Post and Mike Rothschild on QAnon. 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. When you look at 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 psychic dynamics where young people today have grown up entirely online. Many of them have gone to high school and college during a very isolating pandemic experience where everything was remote. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: You mentioned a concept that Francis Fukuyama wrote in his much-maligned bestseller, 1992, The End of History and the Last Man.

Ian Beacock: 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. He talks about this concept of thymos, T-H-Y-M-O-S, which he describes as recognition, the desire to be understood and valued. I think we have 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.

Brooke Gladstone: When McIndoe gave that TED Talk back in 2023, he said he wanted to give young people a way to respond to chaos. He described it as trying to build an igloo in a snowstorm.

Ian Beacock: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: He's a smart kid. [laughs]

Ian Beacock: He is. He is worth listening to, I think.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Ian Beacock: 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.

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 what do I think about this? What does that say about me? What does that say about the community that I'm part of? The purpose of consuming information in many cases is social.

Brooke Gladstone: In your piece, you cited historian Richard Hofstadter's famous essay in the mid-'60s about the paranoid style in American politics. He said, "The paranoid mind is nothing if not scholarly in technique."

Ian Beacock: 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, we put a lot of effort into information literacy and teaching critical thinking, and 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 argument is the easy part, it's much harder to establish and defend the shared values that reason is meant to serve. 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.

Ian Beacock: 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. One of the things that has changed since 2017 when Peter McIndoe began this, we had the Trump presidency, we had COVID, 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 deep fake videos or text. It's almost impossible now to tell the difference. Technology companies are looking at watermarks and these other ways of helping us differentiate. We're going to run to limits when we focus on teaching skills just because the technology has evolved. Focusing on 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.

Brooke Gladstone: And so much harder.

Ian Beacock: And so much harder.

Brooke Gladstone: One last question. How do the Birds Aren't Real Movement reconcile the abundance of pigeon guano?

Ian Beacock: They do have an answer for that. That's in fact a way of tracking human targets by the US government. It's a way of signaling whether it falls on a person or on their car, that they're, in fact, a person of interest. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: I'll say. Ian, thank you so much.

Ian Beacock: This was such a pleasure, Brooke. Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Ian Beacock is a writer and critic and frequent contributor to The New Republic.

[music]

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

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