The Ukraine war as mass entertainment

A speculum on the spectacle pt. 3

The war has truly become a media commodity. A diversion, a spectator sport.

For the first time in history, we can sit on our asses and watch poor kids bleed to death in real time. Just pick the right Telegram channel. Or browse TikTok. The latter is apparently flooded with clips from Ukraine, memes and jokes blending seamlessly with disaster footage and corpses.

Real good clickbait. Viewcounts are bound to grow. The general framing of the media barrage also allows for an incredible amount of ostensibly righteous indignation and virtue signalling. A professor in my network expressed how she “for the first time really desired a coup”, and everyone and his dog sports these little Ukrainan flags on their profile pictures to show that they’re rooting for the correct team.

The rendering of military action into amusement and diversion is not something entirely novel, however. Vietnam is considered the “first TV war”, with combat footage being broadcast to American homes every day of the week during the late 60s.

… and once again—in our living room, or was it at the Yale Club bar, or lying on the deck of the grand yacht Fatima with a Sony portable TV upon our belly?—we were watching, a bit numbly perhaps (we have watched it so often), real men get shot at, real men (our surrogates, in fact) get killed and wounded. At one point in the film, a mortar round fell near the cameraman, and for a couple of seconds the film spun crazily until it (and he) got straightened out again, and then we were looking, through the camera, at a young man—a boy, surely no more than nineteen or twenty—square-jawed, handsome, All-American, poised there on the side of the hill, rifle held in close to him, waiting on the side of the hill for the signal to move up to where the shooting was, and afraid. (Michael J. Arlen (1967), “Watching Vietnam on TV”, The New Yorker.)

Many argue that the pervasive and insufficiently controlled war reporting in this context played an important role in undermining public support for the US military adventure, galvanizing the resistance that eventually made the entire project untenable. This is probably true to some extent, the mass-marketing and spectacular commodification of war was more or less in its infancy back then, consisting of little else than a couple of hundred movies being produced from the 30s onward, a process which conspicuously grinds to a halt around 1965 or so.

This is not to say that journalism fifty or sixty years ago was relatively free from propaganda or active psyops. Far from it. Modern propaganda and mass media are two peas in a pod, and really historically inseparable. Several congressionally authorized US agencies were actively exploring and developing overt propaganda operations in relation to public communications back in the 1940s, beginning with the US Office of International Information, and most of the academic media and mass communications research was from the very beginning related to the intelligence services.

Yet journalism in the 60s wasn’t entirely captured by the culture industry, intelligence or the then-ascendant media conglomerates. While heavily compromised on all fronts, centralized control and complete narrative dominance were in no way feasible, so a lot of stuff got through for reasons other than profit or intelligence priorities. Seymour Hersh even got the Pulitzer for revealing the Mỹ Lai massacre (rather than the kangaroo trial and solitary confinement he’d have faced today).

The war reporting on Vietnam was a lucrative product, yet only superficially commodified. It wasn’t integrated into the media spectacle on the many levels we see in later years, where every aspect from content to commentary, framing and even media format works in a much more efficient synergy. By the time of the Gulf War in the early 1990s, many lessons had been learned, as Wikipedia enthusiastically reports:

The Persian Gulf War was a heavily televised war. New technologies, such as satellite technology, allowed for a new type of war coverage. The media also had access to military innovations, such as the imagery obtained from "camera-equipped high-tech weaponry directed against Iraqi targets", according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications. For the first time, people all over the world were able to watch live pictures of missiles hitting their targets and fighters taking off from aircraft carriers from the actual perspective of the machinery. The images of precise land bombing and use of night vision equipment gave the reporting a futuristic spin which was said to resemble video game imagery and encourage the "war drama".

In 1990, CNN provided around-the-clock coverage with all the necessary resources and informational infrastructure prepared beforehand, with “… the reporters, satellite, linkups, the engineers, the producers and expert commentators in place or on standby (ibid.)". One key source makes for efficient narrative control. Tactical framing of the media narrative into an entertaining jingoistic spectacle at a comfortable distance was also a better PR-decision than the unfiltered piping of dying American soldiers into people’s living rooms.

Now the tech-media platforms and the algos are performing the very same function, with immediate synergistic integration into the output of legacy media gigants.

Compare Hershs in-depth exposition above to a 15-second TikTok video clip. It’s not easy to glean useful information from the latter. You can’t really critically parse it or ask questions to it. And what’s more - you will tend to approach it in the same way as you “consume entertainment”. Can’t do much else with it. Look at it, feel it, experience it, forget about it. Hersh’s article provided information and arguments, and ended in tangible conclusions that implied actual liability. A clip of burning tanks, dead bodies, or flashes of light on the night sky gives us neither, except for a false, decontextualized sense of being where the action is. Of having control, of being in the immediate know.

“Now ... this” is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly—for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening—that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, “Now ... this.” The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985).

The very media format as such tends to reshape the content into theatre geared to the emotions, that due to its incompleteness inevitably will be supplanted by “authoritative” explanations from the headlines of the legacy mass media. This is a neat trick taking place in the very experience of reception by the “consumer” through the mode of entertainment. It leaves behind a sort of vacuum devoid of explanation or interpretation which will tend to be filled by the dominant media narratives, and opens us to receive and respond to any sort of content, no matter how disjointed, incoherent or irrelevant to (a largely absent) rational discourse it might be.

Of course. We accept what we’re being fed. We do not generally critically engage with it in terms of intelligible information, or draw any coherent conclusions, so we’ll happily receive almost whatever else comes down the media pike.

And this particular Hate Week we happen to be at war with Eurasia.

The "Hate Week", or the actualization of an already established enemy image at this particular time, can plausibly be considered a response to the development of potentially destabilizing dissent in relation to the pandemic politics, the vaccine roll out and its consequences, and the economic repercussions of the Reset issue. These forms of dissent will be projected onto the Russian menace, and will likely be associated with right-wing populism and their common “attack on democracy”.

(Greta Thunberg outside the Russian embassy in Stockholm on the 25th)

Divide and conquer. Polarize. Expect a broader projection of all sorts of actual dissent on the enemy image, so that everything from criticism of Covid politics to "climate change skepticism" or (traditional left-wing) criticism of economic globalization can be funneled into the character of the populist Russia-friendly deplorable. This also has clear precedent in contemporary media discourse.

The broadly painted enemy will likely be marketed as "domestic terrorists" in Western media, in concert with Western intelligence’s framing of disinformation as terrorism.

The narrative also allows for a further recuperation and disarming of the dissident left in portraying the corporate state as an ally in combatting this "attack on democracy", particularly as traditional left-wing critiques, e.g. of the media and of neoliberal policies, are now increasingly associated with the radical and populist right, while the ostensible left is relegated to reformism and identity politics.

(“Vaush”, a well-known youtubing “libertarian socialist/antifascist” volunteering with DIY ads for the NATO war machine)

Expect that the horrors and evils of Russia, the right-wing deplorables, and their terrible cyber attacks will be the pretext for a continued rollout of the digital ID. It's to protect you from Russian trolls and bots, you see.

Try and take a deep breath and think. What’s currently happening where they don’t want you to look?