War in the Age of the Online “Information Bomb”

On TikTok, the war against Iran began with a series of videos from influencer types in Dubai, Doha, and elsewhere in the Middle East. They sat on restaurant patios or on hotel-room balconies and pointed their phone cameras skyward to document missiles flying through the air of their respective cities, then disappearing into puffs of smoke as they were shot down. Once you’d watched one video—say, a poolside clip from the British fitness influencer Will Bailey, narrating a nearby explosion over the beat of house music—more followed in an algorithmic deluge. After footage of the airborne violence came video diaries of travellers scrambling to exit various countries and recording frustrated monologues at jammed airports amid cancelled flights. Next, the lucky ones who got out posted relieved dispatches from the air en route elsewhere. This is war as professionalized social content: well-lit selfie videos, shot skillfully while casually driving a car or riding a horse, recounting pilates classes, matcha in hand—only this time in the middle of air-strike zones. Global conflict has played out over social media for many years now, dating back to the Twitter-based organizing of the Arab Spring, but the current warfare in the Middle East marks a new level of saturation. Personal footage mingles with official releases from state militaries that are now proficient in the language of the internet. Any clear hierarchy of trustworthy information remains elusive as on-the-ground videos come from all directions, and government agencies are as likely to post memes as anonymous online trolls. The White House X account posts a montage that splices video-game simulations of warfare with seemingly unclassified footage of real-life missile strikes in Iran. The Israel Defense Forces X account publishes a clip of fighter jets in the air with the caption “On our way to make history ✈️” set to strains of “Fortunate Son,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. (Never mind that the song was an anthem of opposition to the Vietnam War.) It took days for footage from more traditional news outlets to emerge, showing black rain falling from the sky in the aftermath of strikes on oil depots. Even that looked bizarre and surreal—a nightmare generated by A.I.? Each new video encountered online requires a moment’s scanning for signs of fakery. Many of the fragments spreading through the digital panopticon comprise real footage of real events, but their cumulative effect is far from a cogent portrait. Instead, it’s something like what the French philosopher Paul Virilio, in his 1998 book “The Information Bomb,” labelled a coming “visual crash”: a “real-time globalization of telecommunications” in which any significant event in the world is live-streamed and broadcast, and the overflow of detail causes a “defeat of facts” and a “disorientation of our relation to reality.” Virilio was writing at the turn of the century, when the globalization of financial markets had created a risk of sudden, worldwide economic collapse. Witnessing the Asian financial crisis of 1997, during which sinking Thai currency prices kicked off a contagious decline in economic confidence across the continent, Virilio foresaw a similar phenomenon in globalized media—a bankrupting of our trust in the information we receive. Virilio was making observations during the era of television and the early internet, before social media, MAGA lies, and A.I. further undermined the authority of the media ecosystem. The current feeling of incoherence is intensified by President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to explain his military campaign, and Republicans’ mealy-mouthed acquiescence: “We’re not at war right now,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. This week, Trump has both proclaimed that the war is “very complete” and declared that “important targets” remain. (A post on X on March 9th from the Department of War promised “no mercy.”) We can find the conflict everywhere on the internet, but no accompanying theory of the case. Virilio’s information-bomb concept applies beyond warfare. Online, every day, we are inundated with evidence of emergencies, crimes, and conspiracies that seem to elude comprehension. A driverless Waymo vehicle blocks an ambulance headed to the site of a mass shooting in Austin. Bill Clinton seems to laugh while paging through documents during his recent deposition on the Jeffrey Epstein files. Meanwhile, anyone online can browse Epstein’s correspondence on Jmail, a site that emulates the experience of browsing his Gmail inbox. Early this month, zoomed-in press cameras captured a creeping rash on President Trump’s neck, adding to a growing archive of his unexplained medical symptoms or injuries. Once the information bomb has detonated, even reality takes on the feeling of conspiracy. Just a few years ago, social media still brought an aura of authenticity to battlefield dispatches. In 2022, I wrote about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as the world’s “first TikTok war”; at that point, personal video footage from the victims of international warfare were relative novelties, and TikTok vlogs filmed from bomb shelters made some Ukrainian refugees famous. Now after four years of ongoing horrors in Ukraine, and more than two years of watching slaughter and suffering in Gaza, the latest war filling our feeds is just another numbing form of content, a digital arena in which competing forces try to assert conflicting viewpoints. The wider Iranian conflict is particularly well documented, in part because Dubai has openly courted influencers and content creators to boost its image as an international business hub and travel destination. Now that same group is apparently being mobilized to publish agitprop. On March 1st, the right-wing online agitator Ian Miles Cheong posted a video from a Dubai club where uniformed employees danced with sparklers and liquor bottles. It was presumably meant to land defiantly—a little regional war wasn’t going to stop the party—but it instead went viral for its ostentatious apathy. Around the same time, creators in the United Arab Emirates were posting coördinated videos saying that they were not scared of air strikes because they “trust” the U.A.E. and know that its ruling sheikhs, who are featured in adulatory clips, “protect” them. As the pro-Trump armies that thrive on Elon Musk’s X have likewise proved again and again, propaganda can now be crowdsourced just as easily as air-strike footage. As American journalistic institutions are consolidated and politicized by tech billionaires seeking to dominate the industry, those who consume news on the internet are increasingly left to assemble the disparate pieces on their own. Thankfully, there’s a meme to describe that, too: “Monitoring the situation,” an ironic phrase popularized on X and elsewhere during Trump’s strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It describes the social-media user’s manic scramble to follow every update at once, as if each of us might have a role to play in shaping outcomes, if only we knew enough about what was going on. We monitor the situation out of a deluded belief that we are more than just passive, confused bystanders to a spray of digital shrapnel. Musk recently embraced the phrase with a meme of eyes reddened from the intoxicating exhaustion of situation monitoring—a recreation more stimulating, the joke goes, than any chemical substance. Earlier this year, a Lebanese music-streaming executive named Elie Habib built a kind of D.I.Y. online situation room called World Monitor, which uses A.I. to display news of the latest international military strikes, internet outages, and fluctuating commodity prices. It’s the perfect place to track dozens of feeds at once—television channels, webcams, prediction markets wagering on war. But it only looks as though it holds answers. ♦