A distant vibration of war

When I read that a Tomahawk missile had killed 168 people at a girls' school in Iran, I subconsciously attributed it to some error in the artificial intelligence that is increasingly used to designate military targets. Perhaps I thought this because, with the assassinations and captures we've seen in the last year, from Maduro to Khomeini, many analysts speculate that the success and surgical precision of these forceful operations must be related to new developments in AI: historically, the leaders of these entrenched regimes managed to slip away. But, whether this is ultimately proven or not, what has unnerved me is noticing how a psychological automatism downplays the severity of the war. Even more so: however much it all started with Ukraine, I believe it is in this conflict with Iran that the word drone It has become firmly established in our vocabulary as a strange, normalizing "tel." Technology is adding another layer between us and the violence of war, obscuring the political content of warfare in favor of the elites.

Let me tell you about the trolley problem, one of the most debated thought experiments in contemporary moral philosophy. The initial version can be formulated like this: "There's an out-of-control trolley moving down a track where five people are strapped in. They will be killed if it runs over them. Imagine you're in a control room and you can divert the trolley onto a siding by pressing a button, but then another person strapped in will be killed. Should you press the button?" Think about that for a second, and now I'll tell you the second version: "The trolley will kill the five people on the track, but now you're not in a control room, but on a bridge over the track, next to a very fat man. You know for a fact that if you push the fat man, it will stop the trolley and he will die, but the five people will be killed, but the other five ... The literature on this experiment is close to infinity, but the summary that interests me is that, although the tally of lives lost and saved is the same in both cases, most people respond that they would press the button, but that they would not push the fat man.

I think new technologies are emotionally disconnecting us from the war, and that every time a radio announcer utters the word droneA subtle mechanism is activated within our brains to provide us with relief, and technological mediation makes our moral imagination identify much more with the guy in the control room in the minecart experiment than with the individual next to the fat man. And what I find especially relevant about this new way of waging war is that the distancing between citizens and the war reinforces a distancing between elites and citizens, although, naturally, those who pay the price for war are not the ones shuffling the cherries. One of the most significant changes between the Iraq War and this one is that leaders around the world are not making any serious effort to persuade the population. From Trump to Merz, but also Pedro Sánchez, there is a widespread feeling that no leader is making much of an effort to explain, whether to justify or condemn. This has been going on for days now, and there are no memorable speeches or clear ideas, but rather a sense of tactical maneuvering, frivolity, and paternalism. If in the era of human pilots and spies traditional media served politicians to manufacture public consent; in times of drones, AI and social networks it seems that it is not necessary to convince people of anything because war seems as distant to us as those at the top playing Risk among themselves.

Leaving aside the moral implications, what I find most relevant about this disconnection is that it reflects a new material reality. As the economist John Rapley explained in his history of the rise and fall of empires, which he calls "Icarus economics," the West's economic growth no longer depends on domestic industries producing increasingly better products and increasingly efficient factories for skilled domestic workers, with commensurate wages, but rather on dominating an architecture that extracts rents from the entire global system. In other words, for Silicon Valley to remain the economic engine, the needs and opinions of American citizens are more of a hindrance than a help. Similarly, for Europe to remain protected by the American military umbrella and to be able to grab a few crumbs, the further removed its people are from geopolitical affairs, the better.

In this new phase of imperialism, based more on rent extraction than on increasing productivity and the well-being of each nation-state's internal population, war must be based on diffuse emotional vibrations and bloodless epic narratives like video games—something that has more to do with pressing buttons and imagining abs calculations while pushing another human being. Rapley speaks of an Icarusian economy because he believes that this global capitalism, blinded by success and unlimited growth, will rise beyond its material and social limits until it self-destructs, like Icarus when he flies too close to the sun. But if, instead of wings, Icarus had made himself a virtual reality helmet, perhaps the story would have ended differently. I mean, we can dream that hubris will end this unsustainable model and open opportunities for change, but the reality is that, for now, the control mechanisms are working.