For all its creativity, Birds Aren’t Real quickly wears thin and drags in several parts ... As a movement, Birds Aren’t Real worked as a savvy device for social commentary. As a book, there’s just not enough meat — synthetically engineered or otherwise — to sustain it.
Cosplaying the paranoid fringe, Birds Aren’t Real delivers a knowing satire of American conspiratorial thinking in the century of QAnon. Beneath the collegiate humor, however, lies a profound grasp of conspiracism’s psychic appeal, and a valuable provocation.
The joke, which pokes fun at several things at once—unhinged conspiracy theorists, actual government malfeasance, and how genuinely weird birds are—begins here as a tongue-in-check history of the U.S. surveillance state ... A silly and winning spoof.
