“Teenagers understand it, they don’t need footnotes,” McIndoe says. The younger you are, the quicker you get it. It’s no surprise that it first gained popularity among high schoolers. At first, I thought: ‘This is crazy,’ but then I wondered: ‘What is making this resonate with people?’” “I remember seeing videos of people chanting: ‘Birds aren’t real,’ at high-school football games and seeing graffiti of birds aren’t real. 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”.īirds Aren’t Real didn’t stay in Memphis – in a sequence reminiscent of the Winklevoss scene in The Social Network, when they realise just how big Facebook has become, McIndoe recalls being back at college, five hours away from Memphis. 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 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. ![]() 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. Or is it a movement? You could call it a situationist spectacle, a piece of rolling performance art or a collective satire. 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. Photograph: Madeline Houston/courtesy of Birds Aren’t Real Rewards given to high ranked teams.The movement has enough satirical flags that generation Z recognises immediately what is going on. Player take on a number of computer teams in an ever-increasing spiral of difficulty.
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