02 Oct Wired for Connection
We were stopped at a red light when Emma pointed to the birds lined up on a power line. She grinned and said, “They’re recharging.” I must have looked confused, because she explained that her class had watched a video called The Birds Aren’t Real. It was a parody, a mock conspiracy built on the claim that the government had killed 12 billion birds and replaced them with drones to spy on Americans.
The next afternoon I watched Peter McIndoe’s TED talk. Back in 2017, as a college student, he scrawled Birds Aren’t Real on a piece of cardboard and stepped into a protest crowd. From there, he became dedicated to playing the role of conspiracy theorist as convincingly as he could. For four years he lived in character—driving a van plastered with decals, meeting with supporters, putting up billboards, and even leading rallies in New York City demanding that mayors shut down every pigeon in the city. He offered elaborate explanations with a straight face, like insisting the reason birds sit on power lines is to recharge their batteries. The satire grew so large it often looked, from the outside, indistinguishable from the real movements it was parodying.
In the TED talk, the audience laughed as he recounted these details. But then he told a different part of the story, and the room fell silent.
He described what it was like to defend the conspiracy in character while strangers jeered at him. They called him uneducated and foolish and crazy, brushed him aside with contempt. What surprised him was how deeply it landed. He knew he didn’t believe what he was saying. He knew it was a performance. Yet it still stung. He felt himself pushed to the margins, treated as though he didn’t belong. And that experience stayed with him: even when the belief was invented, the pain of being othered was real.
That moment reveals something true about all of us. When people feel dismissed, they don’t lean closer to listen. They close down. They look for safety in others who are like-minded. They cling more tightly to their ideas, not because those ideas are stronger, but because their worth feels questioned. The harder we push, the farther they move from the truth we hope they’ll see.
Belonging isn’t about everyone thinking alike. It’s about remembering to be human enough to stay curious even when we don’t. Acceptance is not agreement, but it is what keeps the conversation alive. Without it, facts rarely land. With it, people stay open.
And this matters far beyond conspiracy theories. It matters in families and friendships, in workplaces and communities. We don’t have to share the same beliefs to share our humanity. What softens defenses isn’t contempt, but connection.
As I write this, a power line stretches in the distance outside the window of a coffee shop, birds perched shoulder to shoulder. It feels like its own small reminder: belonging always comes first.
The joke may be that the birds are not real. The truth is that our need for one another always is.