The War in Ukraine Is Not Taking Place

The global media spectacle has overtaken reality

The Ghost of Kyiv via Wikimedia Commons.

The following essay comes from an anonymous Twitter user who calls himself Christopher Lasch's Angry Ghost. Follow him @ghostofchristo1.

In the pre-dawn dark on December 9, 1992, a small echelon of American Marines and Navy SEALs came ashore near Mogadishu and immediately found themselves besieged by a mass of waiting media personnel. Camera crews followed the elite reconnaissance teams into the surrounding dunes, the whole tableau lit up by TV floodlights. Live CNN footage showed a small cluster of bemused-looking Marines crouched amid the coastal scrub, encircled by a ring of TV camera operators and photographers dipping in and out to get their shots.

The Pentagon had encouraged media coverage of the operation, which was ostensibly aimed at securing the beach and subduing any resistance from local militias as part of the United Nations-mandated humanitarian mission in Somalia. TV networks were informed in advance where and when the insertion would take place and even advised on where to set up their cameras. No one, however, had evidently anticipated the absurdity of the spectacle that would unfold live on TV, as Navy SEALs were filmed hastily rebuffing journalists’ attempts to interview them, still intent on accomplishing what was by then an all too obviously superfluous set of mission objectives. Joking at a press conference after the fact, a Pentagon spokesman quipped, “We probably should have inserted the public affairs officers first.”

In fact, far from being an obstacle, cable television and its real-time global audience were the mission. As the British journalist Ben Macintyre observed in The Times the day afterwards:

Television is not part of the process, it is the entire process: The decision to send troops to Somalia was born out of the emotive footage of starving people and armed bandits, and the grand humanitarian gesture thus launched will be played out for and in front of the cameras.

Although it appeared that the soldiers and journalists in the dunes were operating from different scripts, the event was permeated by the logic of live TV and by what the American historian Daniel J. Boorstin termed a “pseudo-event”—an attempt to “make” rather than simply “report” the news. The first landings lined up neatly with prime-time evening viewing in the eastern United States. The live feed, meanwhile, gave journalists the chance to place themselves front and center, filming the media scrum that formed around the marines as if it were itself the event. Trying with evident desperation to manufacture a momentary sense of danger for its live viewers, CNN at one point crossed to night-vision footage of glowing dots passing near one of the operation’s supporting helicopters and suggested it might be “taking fire,” to which a military spokesperson replied that the dots were just flying insects picked up by the camera’s infrared sensors.

The scenes outside Mogadishu indicated how developed and pervasive the logic of what French theorist Guy Debord called “the spectacle” had become by the early 1990s. By at least the early 20th century, communications media already possessed the ability to synchronize the attention of mass audiences. News percolated through urban communities according to the daily rhythms of the morning and evening newspapers. Submarine telegraph cables carried press-agency stories from one continent to another with near instantaneity. Later, radio and television broadcasts greatly intensified this process of synchronization, bringing viewers and listeners together to focus on the same media events and programming and stamping them, in real time, with a standardized set of views, impressions, and memories.

Combining the powers of the mass media, politics, the military apparatus, and consumer capitalism into one nexus, the spectacle absorbed global citizens through viewership and market participation. Even the postmodern excesses and extravagances of the spectacle—seen here in the farcical collision of military and media agendas on the beach and the admission by news anchors that the media might, perhaps, have gone “too far” this time in their quest for compelling images—simply testified to its power and global reach.

As omnipresent as the 24-hour cable news cycle might have seemed in 1992, its economies of production and reception were still fundamentally limited in space and time. CNN’s news broadcasts relied on bulky camera units and the trained operators and crews who could wield them, while its broadcasts were seen only by cable subscribers (or the transitory audiences exposed to them in bars, hotel receptions, and airport departure lounges). The contrast between those broadcasts and the way both still and moving images from Ukraine have been transmitted worldwide since the February 2022 Russian invasion shows how much more completely and intimately the logic of the spectacle has integrated itself into daily life (and personal consciousness) in the 30 years since 1992. Smartphone screens provide billions of individuals with their own personalized portals into the spectacle, through which they receive images of Ukrainian battlefields and besieged towns and cities (along with their human and material wreckage) anywhere, instantly, and in real time. Moreover, these images are ostensibly unfiltered, uploaded directly from the recording devices of combatants or civilian witnesses onto social media networks rather than being mediated through the editorial slants or agendas of news networks.

Like combatants in the Syrian civil war, military personnel in Ukraine have been wearing GoPro cameras (and fitting them to tanks and armored vehicles) since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Streamed GoPro footage from Syria and Ukraine combines the visual aesthetics of first-person shooter video games with the immediacy and authenticity associated with real combat, producing a layered, gamified experience for viewers. Snippets of combat footage edited to produce the mini narratives conducive to sharing and virality—helicopter shootdowns, tank ambushes, and their aftermaths—circulate on social media platforms, attracting comments, upvotes, and favorites according to the communicative logic of the platforms to which they are posted.

The instantaneity and directness resulting from the smartphone-social media ecology evokes a powerful sense of what the French media theorist Paul Virilio calls “tele-objectivity.” What is seen gains the status of an absolute truth, outside of any guiding narrative or mode of representation. The fidelity of the images on the smartphone screen, along with the visual logic of the social media “stream” or news feed, creates the illusion that the viewer is within—synchronously connected to, in fact—an immersive, constantly self-updating reality. The distant scenes of battle or atrocity come to seem more real, more immediate, than whatever domestic spaces they happen to be consumed in.

The Biden administration was mocked in some corners when, in March 2022, it gave a White House briefing to TikTok influencers about the war in Ukraine. This briefing was, however, a recognition of an inescapable new media reality. Social media platforms short-circuit the establishment news providers, placing “news creation” and curation either in the hands of smartphone- or GoPro-equipped witnesses in the field or social media influencers. These outside intermediaries might add their own layers of interpretation or advocacy to the information or, like Twitter user Rob Lee (@RALee85), use their accounts to aggregate video clips, news stories, and images from Ukraine. Lee, a former U.S. Marine, has turned his Twitter feed into an information clearinghouse on the war in Ukraine, supplanting the role played by legacy media outlets while becoming an expert source for their coverage.

News production thus becomes a form of shadow work performed on a voluntary basis by amateurs who are “paid” in the currency of social recognition or “clout” available via platform metrics and reputation economies (likes, retweets, follower numbers) rather than with purely economic reward.

The synchronizations we have witnessed around the Ukrainian invasion have not, however, been limited to simultaneous spectatorship. Ukraine has also involved an unprecedented degree of what Virilio calls “emotional synchronization.” As Virilio describes them, mass spectatorship events reported across national borders by electronic media have the power to synchronize our emotional states as well as our gazes, leading to what he calls “the globalization of affects.” In The Great Accelerator, Virilio provides the example of one French news anchor whose constant exposure to the 24-hour news cycle produced a sense of ongoing emotional burnout or, as she put it, “mummification.” This state of contagion, Virilio suggests, applies as much to the news’ billions of viewers as to its few presenters. News coverage of the Ukrainian conflict since February 2022—via traditional broadcasting networks as well as social media—has involved a similar degree of omnipresence and synchronous emotional transfer.

Berlin protest against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by Matthias Berg.

In the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, businesses, websites, and institutions worldwide simultaneously posted statements of support for Ukraine. Public information screens at libraries and universities that had (only days or weeks before) conveyed information about COVID-19 were now emblazoned in the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag, accompanied by new institutional statements on the conflict. The Brave Ukraine campaign, financed in part by the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, rented electronic signage in prominent global locations, such as St Pancras railway station in London and Times Square, New York. Visitors to the associated website can download a range of signaling devices by which to convey their messages of support: T-shirt transfers, posters to display in homes or offices, and inspirational videos and images to post online. Just as they had done for COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, millions of social media users simultaneously edited their profiles to reflect their new emotional states. COVID-19-related hashtags and emojis of masked faces or vaccination needles were succeeded by displays of the Ukrainian colors. The sense of moral emergency evoked by this messaging quickly found expression in the physical realm. Spontaneous demonstrations in support of a NATO-enforced “no fly zone” over Ukraine manifested in cities across Europe and the United States in March 2022.

Virilio identifies the first global mass media-enabled emotional synchronization event as the 1969 moon landing. Media produced by the Apollo missions (such as the famous “Earthrise” photograph) made humanity visible to itself as a single organism, floating in space. This sense of emotional recognition had radical political implications during the height of Cold War political division. Other moments of national or global emotional synchronization since 1969 have involved similar feelings of intense emotional recognition or perspective shifts for participants. Footage of the giant piles of flowers left as improvised memorial offerings for Princess Diana in 1997 arguably gave viewers permission to share in an effusive collective grieving ritual. The millions of participants in this outpouring showed their willingness to abandon older norms of national emotional culture—traditional British reserve—that seemed old-fashioned in an increasingly globalizing world. Kony 2012 and the worldwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Summer 2020 involved similar forms of social recognition and transformation. These synchronized media events allow their participants to see themselves as a properly global mass, unified in a common cause, and, in return for participating, to feel a sense of intense, collective recognition.

Writing about the 2020 protests in Europe for Damage magazine, Alex Hochuli noted that one of their most remarkable features was their linguistic dimension. Despite taking place in continental Europe, these demonstrations’ signs, slogans, and hashtags were typically written in English. Being composed, essentially, for cross-border digital reception, they acknowledged a global, American-led collective audience of social media onlookers and witnesses. English signage displayed in “no fly zone” protests in Europe in March 2022 functioned similarly. Each of these events showed a global crowd making itself visible and transparent to the medium that made it possible—the globalized internet consciousness—via slogans, hashtags, and shared language taken from the network and in turn receiving recognition from digital spectators in a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism.

This developing form of consciousness is also visible in the ways that, beginning in 2020, televised sporting spectacles have marketed themselves as stewards of correct political opinion. Traditionally organized around the collective rituals of neighborhood, city, or nation, football games in Britain and Europe, like their NFL counterpart in the United States, now increasingly promote ideological statements and gestures—climate change pledges, anti-fascist hashtags, and (more recently) statements of support for Ukraine—in a mingling of hyper-politics and sporting spectacle. Like the improvised social rituals of the COVID-19 period, such as “clapping for carers,” these events-within-events enable networks to inject whatever moral or political cause is current across the flattened digital landscape into proceedings that once catered to more parochial interests.

Much as social media is now a primary site where the “news” is produced, so too do the critical efforts to analyze media phenomena come from Twitter users who are outside the journalism industry and, in many cases, anonymous. Skeptical commentators on Twitter have used a range of metaphors to disparage the synchronized displays of mass behavior and emotional commitment found on the platform. One such metaphor is the NPC (non-player character), which borrows a label applied to the interchangeable stock characters from video games to suggest that participants in these movements lack individual agency—that they are like insects within a swarm, responding to digital messaging in the same way that ants respond to pheromones. The metaphors of the “current thing” or the “software update” evoke a similar sense of the contingent and time-limited nature of these mass waves of morality and emotion. Like a phone updated overnight to run a new version of its operating system, participants in these movements are imagined losing all memory of what came before the latest “current thing,” their minds overwritten with new information that obliterates previous messaging. Underneath their political cynicism, these memes evoke the psychological uncanniness involved in both seeing others swept up in mass emotions that you yourself feel unmoved by—and wondering why you alone seem immune to their emotional pull.

While useful as short-hand descriptions for mass emotional spectacles, the “current thing” and “software update” memes make blunt instruments for untangling the more subtle structures of feeling within them. Simply mocking the artificiality and passivity of the mindless herd profoundly underplays both the reach of these media spectacles, which affect even the most discerning media consumers online, and their power to transform reality.

In his 1940 short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges describes how an invented world achieves a concrete reality, at first slowly and then all at once. Beginning as an elaborate bibliographical hoax, the “fake” accents of Tlön soon can be heard in school playgrounds. As word of the invented history spreads, the vision of the “current thing” obliterates the real (less magical, less enchanting) world it happened to emerge into. All memory of what came before ceases to have any meaning. It is ultimately of no consequence that the world of Tlön is utterly imaginary—when a mass of the population decides to believe in it, the imaginary is made real. Tlon, it should be noted, is also the name of the corporation founded by the political philosopher and computer engineer Curtis Yarvin.

We may tell ourselves that what happens on social media is an inconsequential game best to simply ignore. But these games have a way of leaking into the real world. When a critical mass of people stops believing that there is any distinction between the spectacle and the reality of their lives, the world can be remade in the screen’s image.

@ghostofchristo1 is an anonymous Twitter poster.