The politics of self-definition during a time of war are the real historical stakes we're sorting out on social media with disinformation, I’d argue, and more broadly with social media in general.
War doesn't make that any different, because war has always been there, at least as far as most people can remember; the rise of social media in the last fifteen years has also been a period of unbroken war in Iraq and Afghanistan. At some level, we don’t know what social media looks like without a constant war to distract from.
What's changed since the more-or-less unacknowledged end of the global war on terror is the self-denial in how we answer the most basic questions of how we present ourselves and conduct ourselves and make our way through an increasingly digitally intermediated social world.
It's a question we all have to answer on a daily basis: what am I going to bring to the conversation? What value am I going to provide to people in my life? What does that make me, and what effect does that have on people around me?
To a degree that people of the 20th century would find completely foreign, it's a question that people are answering online, and it's a social question, even if we don't think of it as such: more like "what am I going to bring to the potluck today", even if you don't post or tweet or say anything and all that you bring is yourself.
It doesn't seem 'nerdy' or contrived or odd anymore to care what strangers say about you on the Internet; it seems increasingly life-or-death to a broad range of people.
For the past twenty-two years this has been a fairly easy-to-answer, even over-determined question. There are relatively few attitudinal givens in American life, but they are there.
We are a country borne in war, constantly at war, if we include the forms of military intervention short of declared war that we are constantly involved in - Yemen, Qatar, Niger, Somalia, the Philippines, the little wars that barely make page 2 news.
Did you know that Biden approved a plan to send troops back into Somalia two days ago? I barely noticed. It says something minor but interesting about how the attention cycle these days is compressed by war for people.
The kind of space I'm in lately, my second thought (after “why the hell are we sending troops to Somalia again?”) when I heard it on NPR was "oh, well, they're probably sanctioned, no use looking too hard at that."
This is ordinary for an American. Think about how extraordinary it would be for a Ugandan right now; for a Nicaraguan, or even a Ukrainian person, to know that your government just sent a bunch of people to a place you can barely find on a map (it's the far right tip of Africa, FYI).
Part of that means, for the past twenty-two years, a relatively easy, general assumption that you could make about people in America was, we all "supported the troops".
The war on terror had the effect of bringing liberals into the fold somewhat, because back in 2001, 2002, Al Qaeda didn't care whether you were a Democratic or a Republican American; whoever Daniel Pearl voted for in elections wasn't why Al Qaeda killed him.
It does something to know that there are people who will kill you, as we all had to acknowledge back during the early days of post-9/11 trauma. It's not so much a form of trauma to acknowledge as it is a fundamental aspect of all trauma, the deeply-absorbed and somewhat pessimistic realization that the world is occasionally shockingly indifferent, even hostile, to your very existence. It makes you feel small; it makes the world feel vast, uncaring and cold, like a larger, worse place to be in.
How you react to that feeling, I think, determines a lot about the overall healthiness of person's response to trauma.
I think you saw American entertainment change, and our statements on social media, and the way that we talked to each other, and the kinds of people we became; the kinds of people we presented ourselves as, to each other. And it wasn't always healthy, either.
The modern form of news - 24-hour, always-on, constant - wasn't always so, and even when it existed in its early forms - as Bloomberg, as CNN in the 1990s - it didn't have the kind of urgency and centrality in the conversation that it does today. It's fearsploitation, definitely; but I think it's also some level of institutionalized hyper-vigilance that we all engrained into ourselves, when Gen X and millennials and basically everyone conscious and somewhat aware of things on 9/11 realized that life-changing traumatic events could come from the TV screen.
I think there's a reason why you see body armor and tactical gear as fashion, as culture, even explicitly as 'high fashion' in a few instances during the past twenty years.
For that matter, I think that's where "tactical chic" in general came from, and the multi-billion-dollar a year industry of bespoke gun parts, gun optics, gun accessories, tactical gear and, well... guns... that serves the American market.
The thing is, that war is basically over - permanent presence to fight Al Shabaab notwithstanding (we're only talking a few hundred special operations personnel). I'd argue it really started to "feel" over for people when American forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
Now... when was the last time you can recall seeing Afghanistan in the news?
The people fighting the war that matters right now, in the non-kinetic, hybrid-war way of things now, those aren't the guys with guns that cost as much as cars, wearing body armor and velcro and baseball caps in Instagram videos.
Like, I don't see General Nakasone palling around with people at a FOB somewhere. I'm not seeing Army Special Forces or Navy DEVGRU or Marine Raiders as the key players in the war that we have right now.
The people on the frontlines right now aren't so much the multicam and velcro set (despite visual codes for valor and service on the “frontlines” being what they are from the Global War on Terror) as they are the people behind the computer screens, invisible to the attention- and self-production economy of social media.
As I see it, the people making a difference in the war, the way things are now, aren't posting Instagram videos from war zones, or ostentatiously acting put-upon and busy and heroic; that's for people from second-tier militaries and countries that aren't world hegemons.
"Quiet professional" is a somewhat overloaded phrase that has an unfortunately contrived, "tryhard" connotation these days (like "gray man"), but it's fairly apt for the people of this new form of war.
I don't think anyone is going to get a victory parade out of this when all is said and done, but perhaps that's for the best, all things considered.