Birds aren't real! They are drones, part of a decades-long government program designed to keep a watchful eye over us. You might be thinking, that's preposterous! How would robot birds possibly power themselves? Well, the genius is that the government has specially set up poles carrying wires of electricity, and all the birds have to do is land on them and let inductive charging do its magic.
Or so goes a deliciously satirical conspiracy theory taking hold of Gen Z. As its founder described in a recent New York Times interview, "Birds Aren't Real" has served as an igloo in a snowstorm, where many people have taken refuge with one another as they struggle to live with the chaotic, seemingly senseless world around them. The humor is disarming, and the eloquent simplicity and genius of birds surveilling us just makes sense, and is a perfect distillation of how society at large tries to make sense of a nonsensical world.1
The "Birds Aren't Real" movement reminds me of Lacan's notion of the Other with a capital "O" (sometimes called "Big Other" for clarity). For Lacan, the Other represents the social substance, the rules, the regulations, the language, the everyone else that we as members of a large interconnected society have to deal with.2 The Other can also represent the greater natural world that we are embedded in. Interestingly, the Other in our minds often takes the form of an avatar. In short, the Other is our symbolic personification of the complex world around us. This personification turns the complicated world into a familiar, tangible being that we can have a relationship and dialogue with. And by thinking about how to interact with this personified being we gain a template for how to interact with and manage our situation with the world. The Other effectively provides a model for how we can have agency in the world, and we are so used to it that we treat it as a real being even if intellectually we know it is only a model (and sometimes the Other can feel so real we think that it's not just a model, but the ultimate Truth).
However, as the world has gotten more interconnected and complex, we find that the Other in our minds comes into conflict with the Other that our fellow beings hold in their own minds.3 We further find that the Other that we can conceive of and have grown up dialoging with is disintegrating before our eyes, and is oftentimes practically inefficacious in our daily lives, providing no tangible hooks or actions that allow us to change the world. And so the seemingly simplest solution is oftentimes to posit an "Other of the Other," another Other hidden behind the immediate (but inefficacious) Other, the ultimate Other who actually pulls the strings. And perhaps, if we can interact with this "Other of the Other", sometimes by bringing it down and other times by supporting it, we hope we can put our fingers on those very strings controlling the world.
This notion of the Other touches on several scientific observations. The first is that our human brains are limited, and evolved in societies with only a few hundred beings.4 As society grew, it became only natural that we use symbolic "Others" as stand-ins for all the people and cultural norms that we can't individually interact with. Recent debates and research examine the co-evolution of "big gods" and "complex societies."5 In many ways, monotheistic religions are as simple as you can get: a single ultimate "Other" in control of everything. Even if the "Other" doesn't take the shape of gods it can take the form of other monolithic evil-mastermind entities, e.g. "Big Government" or "Big Money." It is graspable complexity. It is the ineffable, effed. It is the most native way our human brains know of to make sense of the world.6
In another approach, science tries to let go of the natural human urge to personify everything, and relies on trying to describe the physical world as it is received, via a disembodied collection of observations and self-consistent predictive models. However, in its attempt to faithfully mirror nature's complexity, science is itself becoming complex and its entirety is ungraspable in a single human mind. Worse yet, science uses its own language, and is usually just as silent as nature as to the deepest problems and decisions facing us every day.
Hence, for most people science can not function as the symbolic big Other that they so desperately want to have a relationship with. Sometimes people personify science with a lower case “s”, that collection of specific instances and facts, into a "Science" with a capital "S" that they can imbue with ulterior motives. But this personification, this reification of science into an Other is not an inherent property of the science itself. It is again a way (though admittedly psychologically useful way) to posit the possibility of agency and mastery over the vast complex web of science with a lowercase "s" (and indirectly the world around us).
Importantly, followers of the movement have found community with one another. They have also staged protests that are like performance art: protesting the bird logo of Twitter, or absurdist co-protests that have upstaged and defused anti-abortion protests. It started off as a spur-of-the moment act of trying to hold a mirror to the counter-protesters of the women's march protesters.
This is in contrast to the "other" with a lower case "o", which are concrete instances of other people we interact with.
We all have to construct our own (heavily culturally influenced) "Other" and one may wonder if this ultimately leads us to cultural relativism where all notions of the "Other" are equal(ly true). However, different "Other"s have different lived consequences and implications, thus offering a potential way to distinguish Others from one another. It is probable these consequences are context-dependent, effectively rendering some "Others" more useful in certain domains than in others. In this sense, it may not even make sense to talk about which "Other" is more "true"/consistent/actionable without first delineating the context in which we are judging them. The "Other" also has an interesting property in that to the extent that they are shared by and govern how many people choose to co-interact, they can take on a life and reality in themselves.
Dunbar's number is commonly referred to as a caricature of the number of relationships an individual can effectively maintain. Almost invariably one can't pin down a precise number valid for everyone, but it is clear that the limit is probably around 50-250, and almost certainly less than 1000.
For some of this hotly contested research between “Moralizing Gods” and societal complexity, see Beheim et al. and Whitehouse et al. and Turchin et al. While the causality is debated, at the very least the co-evolution seems reasonable.
We seem to want to invest everything with intention. I imagine it’s because, if something has intention, it is free to change and perhaps can be persuaded or bargained with. In a certain sense, I suppose we could tautologically define and give “intention” to inanimate objects and the Other in general, in the sense that they can change. But redefined as such we’d have to learn the appropriate language to speak to said “intention.” In this sense, the tragedy of trying to use eloquent rhetoric to implore a bullet not to perforate you lies not in the investment of intention in the bullet, but in assuming that it speaks our language.