The Tik Tok War

War images come to us on live streams and Tik Toks. Fractalized bits for our fractalized attentions.

I am writing this on Thursday, February 24th. Russia has begun its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, bombing major cities, and seeking to disable its major airports. Scores of people have already died. I learned all of this via a NYTimes pop up notifications last night. I was drinking with friends and we all felt the eery buzz of our phones, glancing down and then letting the words fall from us. “War.”

This was no way to learn of such news, but what is? The world pours in through our phones, our private text messages coming in with the same vibration as news of global chaos. The whole world, in all its horror and complexity, on the same device. The thought of this disturbed me, but nothing could prepare me for the sick sense I got the next morning when I scrolled through my Tik Tok.

Tik Took footage of Ukrainian forces assembling alongside comments

As I began scrolling through my daily binge of algorithmically assembled content on Tik Tok, I was jarred to see a variety of videos depicting and reflecting upon the crisis: a live stream of a woman walking around Kyiv, its streets ominously empty, a news clip of a CNN reporter in Ukraine stopping his coverage midway to duck down for fear of bomb debris, the Kenyan ambassador to the UN making a moving and prescient plea for the world to learn the lessons of post-colonial Africa. And then there was the bullshit: a young American posing in front of the camera with text that read “i’m ready for World War 3,” jokes about if queers will have to go to war because INSERT NICHE CULTURAL REFERENCE, layers of irony heaped onto material reality without a moment to spare. “Oh god,” I thought. “We’re living through a Tik Tok war.”

sigh

Vietnam was the first television war. Americans for the first time saw, in semi-current time, moving images that depicted the human suffering and chaos that the US inflicted. In Walter Cronkite’s nightly news show, a narrative was depicted and constructed, not just via speech, but with images that brought with them a sense of live accounting and irrefutability. It was these depictions of war, along with Cronkite’s added refrain that the war was “mired in stalemate” that helped shift public opinion towards opposing the war.

Since then, the war on terror has been streamed in our living rooms. With time, those grainy images of Vietnamese jungles blasted by American bombs morphed into HD images of other distant locales. Drone images entered the visual vernacular, their spectral green becoming yet another piece of the horrific mosaic. And then social media videos, self authored by terrorist organizations like ISIS and innocent bystanders documenting horror with their shaky smart phones.

Maybe it was always going to be this way; we were always going to move towards a decentralized media. Where we are both the journalists and citizens. Where we sideline the dubiously constructed official narratives of government and elite, corporate media conglomerates and let truth flow from our collective effort. Piece by piece, post by post, we summarize the truth.

There is so much hand-wringing these days about dis and misinformation. So much concern about what information can do when placed in the wrong minds. And so much of that, I believe, is informed by a deeply pessimistic view of humanity, a cynical take on a human sense of agency. “If these people hear this, they will surely harm themselves and others.” But to me, the question of what misinformation does to society is far less important than a more meta question: how do the ways citizens receive information shift a society?

I am not necessarily concerned about the false constructions that will quickly flow through our Tik Tok feeds. American and Russian disinformation is here, and each country’s respective narratives will compete on our feeds, and we will all have to be discerning and curious with who and what we believe. Unlike so many others, I have at least some faith in human’s ability to question and grapple. But I am concerned with the how this onslaught will take place. If it’s partially on Tik Tok, as I’ve already seen, then we are in for a time of great psychic disequilibrium. We will be scrolling, watching content that pertains to our niche interests, and then all of a sudden: live streams of atrocity, new information with severe implications for geopolitics, jokes about it all. War will come to us as a montage, an assemblage of sensory stimuli, sights, sounds, text. We will piece together unthinkable terrors and complex global dynamics through quick bites of sensation.

a viral video of a movie set explosion was presented as being part of the war

What we will do when we encounter this confounding assemblage? Engage, comment and share? Our digital efforts giving us the sense that we’re part of some collective effort to peace? Will we grow numb to it and scroll past, making our algorithms learn that we are not interested in “this type” of content? Or will we simply watch? This news just yet another facet of the videos that bombard us every day: new music, new clothes, new wars.

I don’t have anything particularly deep or profound to say other than fuck, this is extremely weird. I suppose with time, I, and hopefully all of us, will grapple a bit with the technology that mediates our experience with the world, especially global conflict such as this, but at the very least, please stop turning this shit into content.

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