TWar with Iran is not real, even though it is spreading and destabilizing the Middle East and the global economy. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. War is a video game, a spectator sport, and a social media dunk fest. The architects of this war have created virtue out of stupidity, supported by an incredible information ecosystem. The conflict initiated by the United States feels like the first of its kind in modern times, and is clearly remote and completely ignorant.
A week after the war began, the White House uploaded a clip to its social media channels featuring a montage of “Top Gun,” “Braveheart” and “Breaking Bad,” with the caption “Justice the American way.” This itself is a repurposing of Superman’s motto. Another video, titled Touchdown, shows NFL players tackling each other, making a thud as they make contact, and footage of strike explosions tagged “unclassified.” SpongeBob also appears, asks “Would you like to do it again?”, and then explodes. In another example, Operation Epic Fury is rendered as a Nintendo Wii game.
“We’re just here doing banger memes,” a senior White House official told Politico. “There’s an element of entertainment in what we’re doing.” It’s pure Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters, for whom everything is a competition, not just a game. In domestic and international politics, it is important to score points, win, and humiliate your opponent. To make competition fun, it needs to be portrayed in the least risky way possible. War, therefore, is not about death, destruction, and dire economic and geopolitical consequences, but about booms, points, and fist pumps. The clip begins with the phrase “Wake up, Daddy’s home.” The Trump administration is like a gamer in a dark basement drinking beer, deeply anxious, busy soothing himself with the colors and noises on the big screen. Maximum hits, minimum effort.
But apart from sublimated masculine anxieties, the Trump machine’s depiction of this war serves a political purpose, eliminating the need for complex narratives or justifications. Trump and his administration are incapable of coming up with any sophisticated reasoning for war because they are incapable of dealing with this situation intellectually. But it was also because the war was difficult from the beginning. The original objective of creating conditions for regime change was not achieved. Iran has attacked Gulf states and Israel with drones and missiles and closed the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off the flow of oil, gas and everyday goods, quickly causing energy costs to soar. What should have been a quick win has turned into a quagmire, so we have to simplify everything for the sake of viral dopamine and turn it into a win.
Deepening unreality is a remote cause of conflict. Never before has such a devastating and far-reaching war been waged with such physical separation. AI is being deployed at an unprecedented scale. In a video posted in mid-March by the Centcom commander of Operation Epic Fury, Adm. Brad Cooper summarized that AI played a key role in more than 5,500 strikes against Iran. “Humans will always make the final decisions about what to photograph, what not to photograph, and when to photograph it, but advanced AI tools can reduce processes that previously took hours or even days to seconds,” he said.
This process, frighteningly known as “streamlining the kill chain,” reduces the effort of monitoring, gathering intelligence, and selecting targets. In this respect, war is an actual video game, with yet another layer of human intimacy with ground-level details removed and consigned to code. There are no boots on the ground, no one to see the whites of the eyes of those killed, no sense of a huge intrusion into the lives and lands of the people on the other side of the bombs and missiles. There were very few casualties on the American and Israeli sides compared to the scale of the attack. The dangers that were evident when Iraq was invaded, such as the in-your-face killing of civilians, the torture at places like Abu Ghraib, and the death toll of American and European soldiers themselves, do not exist. There is only a faceless enemy, and victory or defeat can only be measured in terms of whether it boosts or hurts America’s ego.
War also lands on an information ecosystem already poised for grotesque isolation. Long gone are the days when wars were covered only by the traveling coverage of CNN and the BBC, with a handful of correspondents and cameramen on the ground relaying events to viewers, and newspaper reporters filing investigations. All events, from the mundane to the high-octane, are flattened into your feed. On Instagram, TikTok, and X, you can switch between recipes, influencers, White House videos, and scenes of smoke rising from Tehran, Doha, and Dubai. Many of us have become dulled by too much life, by reflexively scrolling or by simply looking but not absorbing. YouTube and streaming sites are flooded with takes, shitposts, AI-generated fake footage, and a million talking heads and podcasters.
I have lost count of the number of “breaking news” posts and videos about the war on social media, but upon closer inspection, they were all composed of authoritative accounts seeking engagement. Nothing feels real when truth and falsehood are constantly pushed together in a slipstream of content. Entire businesses were set up to benefit from this. The stakes on Polymarket, an online prediction platform that allows users to bet on any outcome, including disputes, have become so complex and large that earlier this month a reporter received death threats from users who had lost bets as a result of reporting.
In the midst of these swirling forces, it is extremely difficult to maintain empathy, follow a moral compass, and understand that thousands of innocent people have died, homes have been destroyed, and a nation has been destabilized for a generation. And we have a duty to them, and that duty can be fulfilled by putting pressure on those who have caused their suffering. This is the challenge of this war, and indeed of our entire era. It is about preserving and asserting our humanity in the face of the political leaders who profit from eliminating war and the platform owners who profit from it.
