Trump's Video Game War: AI, Memes, and a Simplistic Narrative

The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity, and have been supported in that by a stupefying information ecosystem. The conflict waged by the US feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.

A week into the war, the White House uploaded a clip on its social media channels featuring montages of Top Gun, Braveheart and Breaking Bad, with the caption "Justice the American way" – itself a repurposing of a Superman motto. In another, entitled Touchdown, NFL players tackle each other and upon contact, boom, footage of a strike explosion tagged "unclassified". SpongeBob SquarePants also makes an appearance, asking, "Wanna see me do it again?", and then, an explosion. In another, Operation Epic Fury is rendered as a Nintendo Wii game.

What was supposed to be a quick win has become a quagmire, so it now must be reduced to a dopamine hit. The war is being portrayed as a video game, a social media spectacle, and a simplistic narrative that flattens the complex realities of the conflict. The Trump administration has leveraged AI and memes to create a distorted and detached representation of the war, one that is more concerned with creating a viral sensation than addressing the real-world implications.

This approach has the effect of trivialising the conflict and desensitising the public to the gravity of the situation. By reducing the war to a series of memes and digital snippets, the administration has created a sense of distance and disconnect, making it easier to justify and prolong the conflict without considering the full human toll.

The simplistic narrative and video game-like presentation of the war also serve to obscure the complex geopolitical factors at play, the historical context, and the potential for long-term instability and humanitarian crises. This flattened portrayal of the conflict reinforces the administration's oversimplified and potentially dangerous view of the situation, one that is more concerned with creating a spectacle than addressing the underlying issues.

In the age of social media and AI-driven information ecosystems, the Trump administration has found a new way to wage war – one that is more akin to a video game than a real-world conflict. By leveraging memes, viral content, and a simplistic narrative, they have managed to create a detached and distorted representation of the war, one that serves to justify their actions and maintain public support, even as the situation on the ground continues to deteriorate.