It’s an absurdist Reddit sub, with my guess is thousands of people that enjoy the absurdity of it for every person that may have an unsound reasoning process. Currently there are greater than 387,000 subscribers to that Reddit thread, and looking around I don’t see an true disbelievers, that isn’t to say there are not a few people that believe in some sort of bird based surveillance.
My guess is that it was partly spawned by the Peter Serafinowicz bit below, “But what is water? It’s a difficult question because water is impossible to describe. One might ask the same about **birds, what are birds? We just will never know.”
Source: from: *Look Around You : season 1, (2001/2 pilot episode?), clip found on YouTube, posted by user FlatFootHero on 2011 08 12, see also Birds Arn’t Real, Boingboing, 2019 09 12 by Rob Beschizza
Before you dismiss this as one reason that Birds Arn’t Real started, in the same episode of Look Around You, they thank ants. Many a happy mutant here has said or at least thought, “Thants.”
It is interesting that the same BoingBoing topic, written by two different authors, separated by just a few years has such a different tone, but that is to be expected in this post QAnon world. We have to worry about the nutters. (It would have been a better article if the author had referenced and contrasted the previous BoingBoing article.)
Fear of robot birds or spy birds is real:
- Israeli vulture detained in Lebanon on suspicion of being a spy, CNN, 2016 01 27
- Egyptian authorities detain suspected ‘spy’ bird, AP, 2013 08 31
- Pakistani villager urges India to return ‘spy’ pigeon, BBC, 2020 05 27
- Russia’s new drone looks like a snowy owl, and it has a deadly purpose, Business Insider, 2019 06 25
- China takes surveillance to new heights with flock of robotic Doves, but do they come in peace?, South China Morning Post, 2018 06 24
There are so many more news stories and articles about spy birds, robotic birds, etc…, so people with poor critical thinking skills could gravitate towards an absurdist idea like this, but I still think that it is by in large. And, like BoingBoing, there is even BirdsAren’tReal.com merch (no affiliate link); the site takes it’s self seriously in the history section, but for me it reads as satire and parody.
Then again, I could be part of the disinformation campaign.
Note: to the secret totally competent yet somehow incompetent overlords, I am still waiting for my chem trail, area 51, and Birds Arn’t Real checks- seriously, checking sources and posting takes time.
