Mass Affect: War and the Global Synchronisation of Emotions

Or, what's wrong with The Current Thing?

US marines photographed near Mogadishu, Somalia, 9 December 1992 (Image credit: Associated Press/Denis Paquin)

In the pre-dawn dark of 9 December 1992, a small echelon of American marines and Navy special forces came ashore near Mogadishu, Somalia. Ostensibly tasked with securing the beach and subduing any resistance from local militia as part of Operation Restore Hope, the soldiers instead found themselves besieged by a mass of waiting media personnel. Camera crews followed the reconnaissance teams into the surrounding dunes, the whole tableau lit up by TV floodlights and flash photography. Beamed back live to the US and around the world, CNN footage showed a small cluster of bemused-looking marines crouched amid the coastal scrub, encircled by a moving ring of TV camera operators and photographers, each dipping in and out of the circle to get their shots. In the days leading up to the landing, the Pentagon had encouraged media coverage of the operation, informing TV networks where and when the insertion would take place and even advising them on where best 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 curtly rebuffing attempts to interview them, intent on what was—by now—an all too obviously superfluous set of mission objectives. Joking at a press conference after the fact, a Pentagon spokesperson quipped, “We probably should have inserted the public affairs officers first.”¹

While the cameras were clearly an unforeseen and embarrassing obstacle for the soldiers on the beach, cable television and its real-time global audience were integral to what was taking place. 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.²

Although the marines and SEALs had perfectly plausible-looking orders, the suspicion was that the flashy amphibious landing was a deliberate attempt to create a media spectacle. Perilously close to what Daniel J. Boorstin termed a “pseudo-event”—an attempt to “make,” rather than to simply “report,” the news—the televised beach landing near Mogadishu airport was the result of a close collaboration between the military and the mass media.³ Although it appeared that the soldiers and journalists in the dunes were operating from different scripts, the entire event was thoroughly permeated by the logic of live TV. The first landings corresponded neatly with primetime evening viewing in the eastern United States. The live feed, meanwhile, gave journalists the chance to place themselves at front and centre, filming the usually “backstage” media scrum that formed around the marines as if it were itself “the event,” with an element of postmodern metanarrative emerging as rival network anchors on location started blaming each other’s crews for letting things spiral out of control.⁴ Trying 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, suggesting portentously that it might be “taking fire,” before being informed by a military spokesperson that the dots were just flying insects picked up by the camera’s infra-red sensors.

Communications media had the ability to temporarily synchronise the attention of large audiences for many decades prior to the late twentieth century. News percolated through early twentieth-century 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 (by the standards of the time) near instantaneity. Later, radio and television broadcasts greatly intensified this process of temporal synchronisation. Radio receivers and television sets in kitchens and living rooms brought viewers and listeners together to focus on the same media events and programming at the same time, each simultaneously receiving a set of standardised views, impressions, and media memories. The scenes outside Mogadishu, however, indicated how developed and globally distributed the logic of what Guy Debord called “the spectacle” had become by the early 1990s. Combining the powers of the mass media, politics, the military apparatus, and consumer capitalism into one nexus, the spectacle (as Debord put it) “moulded” global citizens “to its laws” 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.⁵

§

As omnipresent as the 24-hour cable news cycle may have seemed to the relatively prosperous media consumers tuned into it in 1992, its economies of production and reception were still fundamentally limited in space and time.⁶ CNN’s news broadcasts relied on a set number of bulky camera units and the trained operators and crews who could wield them, while their images were relayed only to cable subscribers (or the transitory audiences exposed to the CNN feed in bars, hotel receptions, or airport departure lounges). The contrast with the way both still and moving images from Ukraine have been transmitted worldwide since the February 2022 invasion shows how much more intimately the logic of the spectacle has integrated itself into daily life (and personal consciousness) in the thirty years since 1992. The proliferation of screens enabled by pervasive smartphone ownership allows consumers to 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 apparently unfiltered—uploaded directly from the recording devices of combatants or civilian witnesses onto social media networks rather than being mediated through the editorial slants and agendas of news networks.

Combatant and civilian access to digital and wearable camera technology has brought about a step-change in real-time warzone visibility. Like combatants in the Syrian civil war, military personnel in Ukraine have been wearing GoPro cameras (and fitting them to tanks and armoured vehicles) since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Streamed GoPro footage from Syria and Ukraine combines a visual aesthetics resembling those of first-person shooter video games with the sense of immersion and authenticity associated with real-time combat, producing a layered, gamified experience for viewers.⁷ Decontextualised snippets of combat footage edited to produce the mini-narratives conducive to sharing and virality—helicopter shootdowns, tank and armoured column ambushes and their aftermaths, infantry stragglers being targeted by artillery support after becoming separated from their units—circulate on social media platforms, attracting approving or mocking comments, upvotes, downvotes, and favourites according to the gamified communicative logics of the platforms to which they are posted.⁸

The instantaneity and directness resulting from the smartphone/social media ecology can evoke 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 sense of mediation.⁹ The fidelity of the images on the smartphone screen, along with the visual logic of the social media “stream” or feed, create the illusion that the viewer is within—synchronously connected to—an immersive, constantly self-updating reality. Real-time “information” (and its visual and emotional intensities) have a way of “short-circuiting” the older knowledge regimes of historical consciousness or memory.¹⁰ The intellectual postures associated with a former way of knowing—epistemological caution, or a sense of critical distance or disinterestedness—are thus supplanted by a real-time compulsion to demonstrate to one’s online peers that one is “up-to-date,” “savvy,” and morally “engaged.” In this kind of information economy, the distant scenes of battle or atrocity can come to seem more real, more immediate, than the incidental outlines and surfaces of whatever domestic spaces they happen to be consumed in. The seemingly gapless access to the “distant” provided by instantaneous smartphone communication makes the merely physically “near” recede from view.¹¹ Reality and its urgent imperatives alway seem to lie elsewhere.¹² Under these media conditions, we become, as Virilio puts it, “a new kind of provisional society,” primed to respond in real time to “this or that signal”, existing in a “permanent state of alarm” or apprehension.¹³

In an age preoccupied with the idea of “fake news,” epistemic polarisation, and the “deep fake,” reality itself has come to seem increasingly contested. By contrast, images of battle, atrocity, or victimhood can embody heightened, seemingly uncontested versions of the “real,” shining forth with a particular kind of urgent moral clarity. As Jean Baudrillard observed with respect to the Balkan Wars of the early 1990s, we are to some extent able to “retrieve a reality for ourselves where the bleeding is.”¹⁴ The state of existential emergency exemplified by the human rights crisis enables the moral order to reassert itself via the mechanism of its own violation. The “real” seems to have its “revenge”—seeks to make its return—at moments like these.¹⁵ We could see the aid corridors through which the West attempts to make its humanitarian contributions, Baudrillard argues, as operating something like in reverse. They are “corridors of distress through which we import” (as “allies”) the “force” and “energy” of geopolitical victims, drawing vampirically on the spectacle of their plight to reinvigorate our own moral institutions and sense of the real.¹⁶

The Biden administration was mocked in some quarters when, in March 2022, it gave a White House briefing to TikTok influencers about the war in Ukraine.¹⁷ This briefing was, however, simply a recognition of an inescapable new media reality. Social media platforms supplant or 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 those of social media influencers. These outside intermediaries might add their own layers of interpretation or advocacy to the information, or use their accounts to aggregate video clips, news stories, and images from Ukraine into information clearing houses for their followers. News production thus becomes a form of “shadow work” performed on a voluntary basis by amateurs, one reimbursed by the forms of social recognition or “clout” available via platform metrics and reputation economies (likes, retweets, follower numbers) rather than (necessarily) purely economic reward.¹⁸ Traditional reporting in this kind of temporally accelerated news economy often takes the form of digital “catch-up” or scavenging, with time-poor journalists picking over what has already appeared in their social media feeds to repurpose for stories or quotes according to the always belated time-scales of the establishment media.

§

The synchronisations we have witnessed around the Ukrainian invasion have not, however, been limited to simultaneous spectatorship. The Ukraine emergency has also involved an unprecedented degree of what Virilio calls “emotional synchronisation.” As Virilio describes them, mass spectatorship events reported across national borders have the power to synchronise our emotional states as well as our gazes, leading to what he termed “the globalisation of affects.”¹⁹ 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.” “Current affairs,” she observed, “are forever wearing us down,” a state of affective abrasion that Virilio suggests now applies as much to the news’s global audiences as to its presenters.²⁰

The increasingly affective nature of real-time communication reflects the fact that, as Byung-Chul Han observes, “emotions” travel faster and ramify more effectively than simple “rationality.” As communication via digital networks becomes ever more “accelerated,” it stands to reason that it would become increasingly “emotionalised,” leading (under conditions of perfect transmission) to what Han calls a general “dictatorship of emotion.”²¹ In the same way as therapeutic fashions circulate globally via mass media, it seems that the networks are now capable of transmitting pure emotionality itself instantaneously across borders, imbuing millions with near-identical affective states due to their simultaneous uptake, in real time, of the same waves of morally charged information.²²

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. In the days immediately after the invasion, governments, businesses, websites, and institutions worldwide simultaneously posted statements of support for Ukraine. Information screens at libraries and universities that had (only weeks, or sometimes days, before) conveyed information about the latest COVID protocols were updated to display instead the yellow and blue colours 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 like St Pancras railway station in London and Times Square, New York. Primed by this messaging to participate in their own acts of volunteer “guerrilla marketing,” visitors to the associated website can download a range of signalling 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 in 2020 and 2021, millions of social media users simultaneously edited their profiles to reflect their new emotional states. COVID-related hashtags and emojis of masked faces or vaccination needles were swiftly supplanted (or supplemented) by displays of the Ukrainian colours or the nation’s flag emoji. The sense of moral emergency evoked by this kind of 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.

Sceptical online observers have lately employed a range of metaphors to disparage these synchronised displays of “mass individualism” and shared emotional commitment. The NPC (non-player character) meme conveys a suspicion that participants in these movements lack individual agency—that they are like interchangeable 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.

The Current Thing/NPC meme (Ukraine invasion update). Source: Twitter, 2022

These metaphors convey a sense of the uncanniness involved in seeing others swept up in mass emotions that you yourself feel unmoved by—watching impassioned crowds assemble, feeling no impetus to join them, and wondering why you alone seem immune to their emotional pull. At the same time, this critical metaphorics remains wedded to the media and digital realms it ostensibly critiques, echoing as it does both video game aesthetics and the mediatised representations of popular hyperreality in late ’90s and early ’00s films, such as the Matrix trilogy (1999-2003) and Dark City (1998). To repurpose Baudrillard’s own takedown of the Matrix movies, “the current thing” is the kind of critique of “the current thing” that “the current thing” itself “would have been able to produce.”²³ It represents an ultimately naïve understanding of one’s own oppositional stance, underwritten by a fantasy of being situated somehow “outside” or above the system, as though one’s own affects, emotions, and beliefs were not subject to the same platform pressures and conformist logics as those of the rest of the digital multitude.   

Useful as they might be as short-hand descriptions for mass emotional spectacles, the elements of derision and mockery baked into the “current thing” and “software update” metaphors make them blunt instruments for untangling the more subtle structures of feeling within them.²⁴ Virilio identifies the first global, mass media-enabled emotional synchronisation event as the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969.²⁵ Media produced by the Apollo missions (such as the famous “Earthrise” photograph) made humanity visible to itself as a single collective organism, floating in space. This sense of emotional recognition had radical political implications during the height of Cold War geopolitical division. Other moments of national or global emotional synchronisation since 1969 have involved similarly intense feelings—involving, perhaps, a kind of collective moral perspective shift or sense of “conversion”—for participants.

Footage of the giant piles of flowers left as improvised memorial offerings for Princess Diana after her death in August 1997 arguably gave viewers permission to share in the excessive collective emotions on display. Adding to them (or even just watching the footage interpassively on television) enabled British participants to signal their collective willingness to leave behind an older, nationally distinct form of emotional culture—traditional British reserve or emotional discretion—that now seemed old-fashioned in (and out-of-sync with) an increasingly “spectacular” globalising world. The Kony 2012 social media campaign against the recruitment and abuse of child soldiers in Africa and the worldwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the Summer of 2020 involved similar forms of social recognition. What these heavily mediatised emotional synchronisation events have in common is that they allowed their participants to see themselves as properly global, outward-facing collectives brought together in common cause and feel a sense of intense, collective belonging in return.

Writing about the Summer 2020 protests in Europe for Damage Magazine while they were still ongoing, Alex Hochuli observed that one of their most notable features was their linguistic dimension. Despite taking place in continental Europe, these demonstrations’ signs, slogans, and hashtags were often written in English. Being composed, essentially, for real-time, cross-border digital consumption via the social media stream, they gestured towards a global collective audience of social media followers and witnesses who could be relied on to understand, relay, and amplify the message.²⁶ English signage displayed in “no-fly zone” protests in continental Europe in March 2022 functioned similarly. Slogans, hashtags, and the stilted, modish lexicon and phraseology of contemporary “internet language” constitute a new global lingua franca.²⁷ They provide a means for the digitally enabled multitude to make itself visible and transparent to the medium that made it possible, the globalised internet consciousness. Combined with the recognition and feedback received in turn (via the amplifications and gamified reward systems of social media), these transmissions exist within a powerful, self-reinforcing feedback mechanism.

This developing form of global consciousness is, as Alfie Bown has recently observed in Sublation Magazine, also visible in the ways televised sporting spectacles have repackaged themselves to encourage new forms of politically engaged spectatorship since the global protest movements and public health emergencies of 2020.²⁸ Traditionally organised around the collective memory systems of city, region, or nation, the preambles and build-up to—the ritual “frames” surrounding—football, rugby, and cricket games in Britain and elsewhere now increasingly make room for overtly political statements and gestures. The old ways of signifying group belonging at sporting events (such as standing for the national anthem) are now accompanied by a proliferating range of newer signals—climate change pledges, the display or recitation of anti-racist or anti-fascist statements and hash-tags, and (more recently) statements of support for Ukraine—in a thorough mingling of politics, morality, and sporting spectacle.

Like the initially improvised (but then rapidly institutionally endorsed) social rituals of the early COVID period, such as “clapping for carers,” these events-within-events act essentially as screens, enabling networks and transmitters of all kinds to project “current” moral or political causes and ideologies into proceedings. They effectively “replace,” as Bown puts it, an old-fashioned “nationalist ideology” with the new, networked and globalised “content of the moment.” An aestheticised, constantly self-updating version of politics is now transmitted worldwide via live broadcasting and the stream in the same way musical subcultural aesthetics were by twentieth- and early twenty-first-century broadcast media (and, perhaps, fills something of the same role). We find ourselves situated within an increasingly “dense” and inescapable present, one constituted by the continual flurry of informatised “current events,” and the compulsion to endlessly consume and respond to them in real time.²⁹

§

In his 1940 short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges describes how an elaborate bibliographical hoax—the imaginary world of Tlön, at first an in-joke among a small coterie of scholarly collaborators and correspondents—comes to achieve a totalising concrete reality in the external, “real” world. Once Tlön escapes its bibliographical constraints, the accents of its invented language can be heard echoing across every school playground, its invented histories “obliterating” those of that other (now increasingly incidental) world it happened to emerge into. All memory of what was there before ceases to have any meaning or value.³⁰ This is the ultimate realisation of the “current thing” and the “software update”—a manmade “egregore” that assumes autonomous power via sheer social belief and the contagious psychic commitment of its adherents.³¹ In the story, it is of no consequence that Tlön was (initially) wholly made up. When the mass of the population decides to believe in it, the illusory customs and objects of Tlön’s “fantastic world” duly manifest themselves in what was formerly the “real world,” rapidly overwriting it with its own cultural logic.³²

While we could decide to ignore what happens on social media, it too has a way of leaking out into and reconstituting the real world. This leakage indicates that the relativism, atomisation, and desocialisation associated with the digital are not necessarily final states. The digital can also bring about abrupt “phase transitions” and radical new configurations—the emergence of new social patterns and collectives, or novel kinds of moral absolutism and fundamentalism, that resolve out of the fragments of previous social relations and quickly transcend the old, bounded forms of class or nation. When a critical mass of people ceases to believe that there is any distinction between the online and offline realms—that the world beyond the screen should naturally conform to what is on screen—the world can be rapidly reforged in the screen’s image.

Note: This is an expanded version of an essay that first appeared under the title, “The War in Ukraine Is Not Taking Place,” on The Daily Scroll (11 July 2022). Many thanks to Jacob Siegel for commissioning the original piece.

1. Michael R. Gordon, “TV Army on the Beach Took U.S. by Surprise," New York Times, 10 December 1992.

2. Ben Macintyre, “The Networks Have Landed," The Times, 10 December 1992, p. 18.

3. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (1961; New York: Vintage, 1992).

4. James Barron, “Live, and in Great Numbers: It’s Somalia Tonight With Tom, Ted and Dan," New York Times, 9 December 1992.

5. Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, translated by Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 6–7.

6. For reflections on the differences between the media regimes of the 1980s and ‘90s and those of the current digital age, see the recent conversation between Geoff Shullenberger and Jon Askonas on the Outsider Theory podcast, “RIP Reality with Jon Askonas,” 18 July 2022.

7. John Martino, Drumbeat: New Media and the Radicalization and Militarization of Young People (New York: Routledge, 2021).

8. Katherine Dee, “How the Ukraine War Took Over TikTok,” UnHerd (3 March 2022).

9. Paul Virilio, The University of Disaster, translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), pp. 19; 27–8.

10. Jean Baudrillard, Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 4; 29.

11. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, translated by Julie Rose (London: Verso: 2008), p. 20.

12. Mary Gaitskill, “The Deracination of Literature,” UnHerd (16 June 2022).

13. Paul Virilio, The Great Accelerator, translated by Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), p. 35.

14. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, translated by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2008), p. 134.

15. See, for instance, Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real (London: Verso, 2021).

16. Baudrillard, Perfect Crime, p. 134.

17. For an account, see Kahlil Greene, “I Was At The White House TikTok Briefing,” Newsweek (4 April 2022).

18. Cf. Geoff Shullenberger, “The Corruption of the Best: On Ivan Illich,” American Affairs, 6:2 (2022), 208–24.

19. Virilio, University of Disaster, pp. 22–3.

20. Virilio, Great Accelerator, pp. 33–4.

21. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, translated by Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2017), p. 46.

22. See Ashley Frawley, “Self-esteem, Happiness and the Therapeutic Fad Cycle,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures, edited by Daniel Nehring, Ole Jacob Madsen, Edgar Cabanas, China Mills, and Dylan Kerrigan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), pp. 139–52.

23. Jean Baudrillard, “The Matrix Decoded,” in Jean Baudrillard: From Hyperreality to Disappearance: Uncollected Interviews, edited by Richard G. Smith and David B. Clarke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), p. 180.

24. Under this heading, we could also place “techno-primitivist” critiques of the digital that fail to fully acknowledge the allure and attractions of online identity creation, insisting instead on a rigid interpretive framework of addiction, compulsion, or youthful conditioning. See, for instance, Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (London: Verso, 2022), pp. 39-42.

25. Virilio, University of Disaster, p. 23.

26. Alex Hochuli, “The Triumph of American Idealism,” Damage Magazine (17 June 2020).

27. Cf. Crary, Scorched Earth, p. 40.

28. Alfie Bown, “Against Anti-Fascist Football,” Sublation Magazine (18 May 2022).

29. François J. Bonnet, After Death, translated by Amy Ireland and Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2020), p. 29.

30. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 24.

31. Mark Stavish, Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2018), p. 3.

32. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” p. 22.