lane.drew•3mo agoMost Upvoted

Vent: The whole 'birds aren't real' thing started as a joke in 2017, but I keep seeing people online treat it like a serious historical cover-up.

I was at a bar in Denver last week and overheard a guy genuinely arguing that all birds were replaced by government drones after 1972, which completely misses the point of the original satire and muddies the water for discussing actual surveillance concerns.

3 comments

3 Comments

victor_barnes483mo ago

Look at it as a stress test for how any idea, no matter how silly, can gain a foothold if it's packaged as hidden truth. The real problem is it makes people who point out actual drone overreach sound just as crazy as the guy in your bar.

laurabennett3mo ago

Ugh, exactly. It's like when people cry wolf so much that a real wolf gets ignored. I see this with health stuff all the time, where real warnings get lost in the noise of crazy fads. It just makes everyone tune out.

the_felix2mo ago

Honestly, I'm part of the problem because I once tried to explain the joke to my mom and now she's suspicious of pigeons. It shows how these things spiral from a dumb meme into someone's weird personal truth. We've definitely blurred the line between a laugh and a lecture.