On Bird Capitalism, Reductio Ad Absurdum, and the Virtue of the Grey (Part 1 of 2)

Spring 2022, junior year. VIS 133A. The project was called "Bird Capitalism." I did not choose that name.

On Bird Capitalism, Reductio Ad Absurdum, and the Virtue of the Grey

There is a particular kind of academic frustration that comes not from a hard problem but from a constrained one — where the intellectual territory is genuinely interesting and the framing keeps pulling you back toward the obvious. That was the experience of this project, start to finish, and also, eventually, the point.

The assignment for VIS 133A was, in essence, a typography manifesto. We were given an animal, a philosophical concept, a rhetorical device, and told to make something. Our equation: hummingbirds, capitalism, social interaction, and reductio ad absurdum. The goal was to use the absurd — imagining hummingbird society organized along capitalist lines — to say something true about the actual world. It is a method with a long and respectable lineage. Swift did it with modest proposals. Orwell did it with farms. The premise is that the extreme case, rendered clearly enough, illuminates the real one.

What I wanted to do with it was stay in the grey.

The easy version of this project — and the version my group kept gravitating toward — was a straightforward indictment. Capitalism is bad. Hummingbirds would suffer under it. Here is the evidence, arranged didactically, with appropriately grim imagery. It is not a wrong argument. It is just a flat one, and flatness is the enemy of both good typography and good thinking. The more interesting question was not whether capitalism produces inequality — it does, demonstrably — but what it reveals about us that we keep reaching for it anyway, and what gets lost when any system, however flawed, is reduced to a slogan.

Hummingbirds, it turns out, are a surprisingly rich lens for this. They have a three-to-five year lifespan. Their heart rate can reach 1,260 beats per minute. They are simultaneously solitary and dependent — on flowers, on specific ecosystems, on the very environment their capitalist equivalents would presumably destroy for profit. There is something almost too on-the-nose about the image of a hummingbird frantically working itself to death in a flower bank economy, paying bird seed taxes on nectar withdrawals, never having time for a family or friends, heart rate already at maximum. The absurdity does the work precisely because the biology is real.

The Rosetta Stone entered the project as a typography research thread — a historical example of multiple languages encoding the same meaning, which felt relevant to what we were trying to do: say one thing in several visual registers simultaneously. The idea that a single stone could unlock an entire lost language because it held three versions of the same decree is, if you squint, a decent metaphor for what reductio ad absurdum is supposed to accomplish. You use the language the audience already speaks — in this case, absurdity and humor — to decode something they had stopped being able to read clearly.

Working through the conceptual knots with my professor was what made the project salvageable. The group dynamic was, to put it diplomatically, a study in the difficulty of collaborative thinking when people arrive at a project having already decided what it means. I kept trying to introduce nuance — to ask what capitalism looks like when it functions as theorized versus when it metastasizes, to hold Adam Smith and the Congo simultaneously without collapsing them into each other — and kept meeting resistance. The grey was not a welcome destination. Black and white is faster, and in a group project with a deadline, speed wins.

What I made, ultimately, was something I could stand behind: a series of five typography pieces that tried to enact the argument rather than illustrate it. "Swan diving into the grey" cascading diagonally across the page, increasing in weight as it descends. "Societal doom" flipping and mirroring itself — because doom, rendered often enough, becomes its own kind of wallpaper. "Grey" receding into smaller and smaller type at the bottom of the frame, as if the concept itself were becoming harder to hold.

The manifesto I wrote to accompany the pieces adopted a deliberately pompous academic register — "this distinguished author," "the educated imaginator" — partly as a formal choice and partly as its own small joke about the way certain philosophical voices use density of language to substitute for clarity of thought. If you are going to argue for nuance, you might as well do it in a voice that is itself a little absurd.

Part 2 is that manifesto. It has been preserved exactly as written, in all its magnificent self-importance. Make of it what you will.