The Spectacle of War and the Struggle to Protest
A few days into the war in Iran, I found myself in a long text exchange with a friend, taking note of which public figures had come out strongly against the U.S. invasion, and which had not. The list included some politicians, but we were mostly focussed on the pundits of the short-form-video class: Tucker Carlson, the military commentator Shawn Ryan, and so on. For those following news about the war on social media, this affinity network—all these different figures with their own little tribes—has been quickly replacing images of the war with commentary on it. Instead of seeing yet another bombed-out building, we were seeing these faces and listening to incendiary thirty-second clips from their respective shows. My friend and I were just idly chatting, really, but as I thought about all this coverage I was struck by how social it felt. It was like talking about sports.
In 1967, the theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord described a phenomenon that he called “the spectacle,” writing that it “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by the images.” What he meant was that life had become increasingly representational, captured through television and advertising. The ties that bound us together through work and through communal, lived experiences had been severed and replaced with a mere phantasm of connection. He was, in an aphoristic and admittedly melodramatic way, predicting the rise of social media.
One of the abiding contradictions I’ve tried to think through during the past few years goes something like this: we see everything now—the slaughter of children, the assassinations of political figures, the killings of unarmed people by police officers—but all of that witnessing has produced little in the way of clarity or effective political resistance. War is no longer sanitized in the manner that it was during the first Gulf War, which, as I’ve written in the past, was presented to American viewers as a “clean military-technology show,” and yet the ubiquity, these days, of violent and deeply upsetting footage hasn’t made war feel any more real.
This unreality, in which we believe that we’re going through history together by staring at the same things on our handheld screens, seems to infect everything. Consider the No Kings protests that reappeared this past weekend across the country. The generic and essentially uncontroversial slogan of “No Kings” has rallied a population itching for real connection with other human beings, specific differences be damned. But the gulf between that urge and political change suggests that the separation Debord wrote about is far deeper than we might want to imagine. “The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate,” he wrote. Modern forms of dissent, even when they entail real-world gatherings, rely on a feeling of connection through social media, which is why the urgency of such dissent often seems to dissipate even as the marching is taking place. We can still become collectively enraged at the sight of someone dying on our screens or at the flagrantly illegal actions of the Trump Administration, but once we find ourselves in the streets under a widely acceptable slogan, we discover that the years of being online have given us an image of political protest but little more than that. We feel a needed catharsis and connection but also the limits of what is possible in a separated and alienated population.
October 7th, and the decimation of Gaza, brought unshakeable images to screens around the world—of hang gliders, brutalized women in the backs of trucks, mangled children, flattened city blocks. The spectacle produced by the war in Iran has been, for distant viewers, comparatively familiar, almost generic. Similar images have appeared so many times that it’s become nearly impossible for many of us to know if we are looking at rubble in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Syria, Tel Aviv. The sameness of what we’re seeing has, in America, lowered the political stakes of war. Much of the public is still outraged about what’s happening, but I fear that two and a half years of images from Gaza may have built up a public immunity to the sight of smashed concrete and blown-up humans.
What happens when the spectacle of war no longer captivates the public? What happens when we can’t even muster the illusions of shared separation?
Strangely, as social media has moved from the text of status updates and tweets to short video, verbal commentary has actually grown more prominent and more viral. This is what led my friend and me to our idle accounting of new-media punditry. What’s shoved on our feeds is, increasingly, tight shots of people’s faces as they angrily decry one thing or another.
On this well-lit but warped stage, the act of politics changes, although not always perceptibly. Recently, Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, who resigned earlier this month in opposition to the war, went on Tucker Carlson’s show. Antiwar liberals, who might not agree with much of anything that Kent has said in the past, might still happen upon clips of that interview on social media and find themselves hoping that Kent acquits himself well, so that he might provide a convincing counternarrative to his fellow-travellers on the right to oppose further military action. This, in turn, one might imagine, could help pressure lawmakers to turn on Trump.
What’s striking about this train of thought, which is quite common among the terminally online—a population that is growing every day—is that it involves no actual agency on the part of the person tracking this Rube Goldberg political process. The viral talkers have become the measure and the expression of the public’s outrage, mediated through the algorithms of social media.
These are horrible conditions for meaningful dissent. Trump’s party controls all three branches of the government, but I suspect that another reason Trump and his Administration feel like they can do whatever they want without consulting popular opinion—or even really informing the public—is that they recognize, consciously or otherwise, that the American people, alienated and addicted to their phones, are currently incapable of organizing themselves toward significant political action. “The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn,” Debord wrote. “From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of ‘lonely crowds.’ The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.”
One could easily characterize the No Kings actions as simply more spectacle—drone shots of big crowds to feed the social-media machine. But I feel sure that most of the millions who marched this past weekend were not only looking for more capital within the viral economy; they were looking for other faces and voices that would remind them they’re not alone. This may be all that the protests can presently accomplish. But nothing is more important than remembering there’s life outside the spectacle. ♦