“Birds Aren’t Real” read massive billboards in Memphis and Los Angeles.
On TikTok, the satirical Gen Z meta-conspiracy movement says birds are
drones. The US government has killed all the birds, replacing them with
bio-replicas that spy on its citizens. The movement’s followers know that
birds are, in fact, real. The social parody is meant to satirize a post-truth world in which online conspiracy theories dominate. But it conceals the following dystopian facts: US researchers have designed a functioning
prototype for a drone using a taxidermy bird, while the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently launched a new program to develop autonomous bird-of-prey drones.2 These are just the most recent developments in the long history of avian instrumentalization in human warfare.
Dubé, Joëlle. Fulton, Gwynne. “Birds at War.” Espace: Birds n°137 (05 2024)