15 May, 09:55
For a long time, the worst thing imaginable about war was that it could become routine. It turns out the worse thing is that it can become content.
Look at what is happening right now, this very year. The market for military technology is growing faster than any other sector of the global economy. Anduril, Palantir, Helsing, Shield AI — companies nobody had heard of five years ago — are now valued in the tens of billions of dollars. Venture capital, which once held the defense industry at arm’s length, is now pouring into autonomous weapons with enthusiasm and precision. The smart money has figured out something straightforward: civilian AI is a lottery ticket with an unknowable payoff horizon, while military AI comes with a guaranteed customer in the form of a state that pays without negotiating. The Pentagon does not ask about unit economics. It asks when delivery will arrive.
In parallel, a deeper transformation is underway. War is being systematically extracted from the human body. Gunpowder relieved it of the need for muscular force. Aviation severed its connection to the nervous system by removing the soldier from the immediate horror of the battlefield. We are now witnessing the final stage: the dissolution of responsibility through machine autonomy. When an operator thousands of kilometers away watches death unfold through a monitor, the technological distance becomes so vast that guilt evaporates somewhere along the way to the target. In a world where code makes the decision, morality is replaced by computation, and the human factor becomes a redundant component.
And it is here that the most interesting part begins.
Throughout human history, war has always carried one built-in overheat sensor: the suffering of specific families. The death notice was the impulse that triggered the chain reaction of protest. The fate of Vietnam was not decided on the battlefields but in the living rooms of provincial America. The Soviet adventure in Afghanistan was destroyed not by the mountains but by thousands of sealed coffins flowing into small provincial towns. This worked as a natural thermoregulator: when the price in blood became unbearable, the people forced the state to put out the fire. Today, that mechanism has been switched off. War without names and bodies allows the system to operate at any intensity, replacing real losses with convenient statistics in quarterly reports.
The first full-scale rehearsal of such a war has already taken place — and it took place so quietly that it was almost missed. I am talking about the United States drone campaign that unfolded under the Obama presidency between 2009 and 2016 and continued under his successors. Roughly five hundred and forty strikes by Predator and Reaper drones, targeting Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — officially outside any declared theater of war, without congressional authorization, without American soldiers on the ground. Between 3,800 and 4,700 people were killed, of whom between 380 and 800 were civilians, children included. In one notorious episode in Yemen in 2013, a drone struck a wedding convoy, killing twelve guests. In Kunduz in 2015, it struck a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital. In Waziristan, strikes were carried out under what was known as “signature strike” doctrine: without identifying specific individuals, based solely on behavioral patterns that an algorithm deemed suspicious. And all of this — ten years, seven countries, thousands of corpses — failed to provoke any meaningful anti-war movement in America. There was no Woodstock. There were no Bob Dylan songs. There were no mothers marching on the Capitol. The taxpaying citizen in Kansas barely noticed that his country was conducting continuous military operations half a world away from his home. Because there were no death notices. Machines flew themselves, operators lived at home, content about murdered wedding guests did not make prime time. Sterile war. War-as-a-service. SaaS-killing.
Now imagine a symmetrical scenario. Imagine that on the other side of the front line, there are no people either — only machines. One algorithm hunts another algorithm. A missile battery conducts a duel with another missile battery while operators on both sides drink coffee in their offices. In this war there are no dead — only decommissioned units of equipment. Journalists broadcast live from strategic dashboards, and analysts discuss casualty percentages on Bloomberg as if reporting a corporate quarterly. This is gamification — not in the metaphorical sense of “war that resembles a game,” but in the structural sense. War absorbs the operational logic of the video game. Equipment respawns. Algorithms level up. Weapons systems receive seasonal updates. Servers crash. Combat operations are streamed with live commentators. Viewers donate to crowdfund the next autonomous drone swarm. And the viewer settled comfortably on the couch feels he is participating — because he is watching, because he is liking, because he is empathizing.
This is the point at which we have to stop and think, because it is the most important moment in the entire argument.
The twentieth century was the great age of humanization: it expended an immense civilizational resource to infect the masses with empathy. It was a deliberate program. Television showed starving children in Africa, cinema documented genocides, newspapers exposed everything that had once been buried in silence. The assumption was that the human being who sees suffering will translate that seeing into action — into donation, into voting, into marching, into revolution. But something else happened. The human being learned to experience suffering as a finished product. He watched the segment, he wept, he tapped a sad emoji. Empathy became a form of consumption rather than a form of action. The reflex of centuries — “I saw, I intervened” — gradually mutated into the reflex of “I saw, I felt, I scrolled on.”
This is not an indictment of viewers. It is an engineering observation. The media ecosystem is built so that every emotion finds its termination within the bounds of the same media ecosystem. You sympathize, you are shown another segment, you sympathize again, advertisement, another segment. The loop is closed. Intervention in the external world is not part of the design specification. As Guy Debord once put it, the spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image. To which we may add: an image accumulated to such a degree of perfection that it replaces its object entirely.
Now let us assemble the components.
We have: an economic engine entering a new accumulation cycle through military AI. We have: the technological capacity to wage war without political cost to the metropole. We have: a population trained to experience the suffering of others as a self-contained emotional act requiring no further action. And we have: a media infrastructure perfectly engineered for the continuous delivery of such content.
Combine these four factors and you obtain something human history has never known before: a war that is simultaneously a maximally profitable business, a minimally politically costly decision, a technologically autonomous process, and a massively popular entertainment product. War-as-stream. War-as-series. War-by-subscription.
And here the central point comes into focus. This is the ideal model for investors in the economics of loss. The state will spend the taxpayer’s money under the pretext of supreme necessity, of existential threat, of the defense of values — instead of investing it in infrastructure, in schools, in hospitals, in science. And the transnational corporations that manufacture autonomous weapons, AI targeting systems, drone swarms, and decision-making algorithms will grow fantastically rich on every cycle of destruction. The more is destroyed, the more must be produced. The more is produced, the higher the capitalization. The higher the capitalization, the fatter the lobby. The fatter the lobby, the more wars. It is a self-reinforcing loop in which loss is built into the engine as primary fuel. An economy that feeds on ruins and produces ruins. And all of it under the applause of viewers who sincerely believe they are sympathizing with the victims while consuming their suffering as premium content.
The objections are obvious. Let us begin with the most obvious. “This will not happen, because robots do not fight alone — someone still dies somewhere.” Correct. But this is precisely where the mechanism hides. People die, but not where the viewer sits. They die on the periphery — in Gaza, in Yemen, in Ukrainian trenches, in African safaris run by private military contractors. The metropole watches; the periphery pays in blood. The imperial center consumes the suffering of the periphery as premium content without leaving its comfort zone. This is not a side effect — it is the configuration being sought. Gamified war is not for everyone. Gamified war is the privilege of those who invested in the right stocks.
The second objection: “People are not so indifferent. They will still take to the streets.” Perhaps they will. But the question is not whether they will, but whether it will matter. Contemporary protest is embedded in the media cycle as just another genre of content. They wept, they stood, they dispersed. The infrastructure of influence over actual decisions has long since ceased to run through the street — it runs through lobbies, through capital, through closed-door arrangements with Pentagon contractors. You may go out; it is just another stream. Different genre.
The third objection: “This is dystopia, you are exaggerating.” Perhaps. Only every point — economic, technological, anthropological — is confirmed not by future but by current data. The capitalization of defense startups. The doctrine of “human-out-of-the-loop.” The behavioral patterns in social media regarding Gaza. This is not a forecast. This is a description of what is already operational. The only question is the speed and completeness of the rollout.
And here we arrive at the most uncomfortable part.
The gamification of war is not humanity’s betrayal of itself. It is the logical conclusion of a particular civilizational trajectory. A trajectory that began the moment it was decided that feeling matters more than acting, that contemplation equals participation, that compassion is already a moral act. This is the humanitarian turn of the second half of the twentieth century carried through to its own opposite. They wished to cultivate the sensitive human being — they cultivated the convenient viewer. They wished to make war impossible through total visibility — they made it endless through total spectacularity.
But the root is deeper. The entire Dream Factory industry has spent a century working to issue the proletarian an ersatz-life in place of a real one. He lives in poverty, on a double shift, under credit, in a micro-apartment — but he agonizes over the fate of billionaires in a series, weeps over the romance of on-screen lovers, follows the adventures of superheroes who save an invented world. The possibility of living was taken from him; he was issued the possibility of empathizing with those who live on the screen. This is the primary product of the civilization of the spectacle: not entertainment, but substitution. Not leisure, but a prosthesis of existence. And he feels good about it — there is something to talk about with colleagues, someone to root for, something to be glad and sorry about. His own life is reduced to the minimum of biological function, but the emotional reservoir is filled to the brim — only filled with imported experiences rather than his own.
War, within this construction, is simply the new season. Another show to live through. With heroes and antagonists, with plot twists and climaxes, with teams to root for, with maps to study like tournament brackets. The viewer accustomed to living instead of himself through the fates of fictional characters will easily transfer this habit to an entirely real war, where people die in earnest but for him it does not differ from another season of Game of Thrones. He does not even need to adapt — the infrastructure of empathy is already installed, the protocols are debugged, the reflexes are wired. War slots into the prepared niche.
And this, perhaps, is the most precise diagnosis of what is happening. Not “people have become indifferent” — on the contrary, they are more emotionally available than ever, their feelings churn. Only those feelings are no longer connected to their own lives and their own capacity to act. They are connected to content. And content is a commodity produced for profit. War gamified to the level of premium serial drama is the most profitable content imaginable, because it is financed simultaneously from three sources: the viewer through subscription, the state through the military budget, and the investor through the market capitalization of the manufacturers of death.
This is not the end of humanity. It is not even the end of humanism. It is a point on the route from which several forks are visible at once — and it is unclear which will be taken.
The interesting question is not the catastrophic perspective but the moral-ethical transition that has already begun and has not yet received either a name or a philosophical apparatus. Classical ethics rested on the assumption that the chain between an acting subject and the consequence of action is short: I pressed, I saw, I am responsible. Contemporary systems break that chain into hundreds of intermediate decisions scattered across continents and devices. A programmer in California writes the algorithm. A product manager in Virginia signs the specification. A senator in Washington votes on the budget. An operator in Nevada launches the system. An algorithm in the cloud selects the target. A drone in Yemen kills a wedding. Which of them is the murderer? Under classical ethics: no one and everyone. In practice: no one, because responsibility has been dissolved into the chain of delegations.
This is a new condition for which we do not yet have concepts. What will the conscience of a person look like whose labor is a fragment of an algorithm that somewhere, sometime, in combination with other fragments, may possibly kill someone? What will citizenship look like when political participation has been reduced to subscribing to news streams about wars waged in your name but without your real voice? What will empathy look like when it becomes definitively a commodity, packaged in an interface and delivered to the consumer through a recommendation algorithm?
We do not know. And it is in this “we do not know” that the entire unplayed scenario hides.
Perhaps humanity will arrive at a new ethical contour in which concepts of distributed culpability and collective responsibility for the operation of algorithms will emerge — something on the order of a new Nuremberg for the developers of autonomous weapons. Perhaps a countermovement will arise — crafts, local communities, electoral campaigns — that returns the human being to the contour of real decisions. Perhaps the technological elite will outmaneuver itself, as has happened more than once in history, and the next generation of engineers will refuse to write code for systems of mass destruction. Perhaps something will emerge that we cannot even imagine now, because the language is missing.
Or perhaps none of this will happen, and humanity will indeed spend the coming decades on the couch while robots conduct several major campaigns on the periphery, after which the map of the world will be redrawn without a single act of popular will. That too is a scenario, and it is not the worst on the table.
What is interesting is something else. The abyss into which we are being drawn is not a catastrophe but a transformation. It does not destroy the human being — it rewrites the conditions of his existence. And the question no one has yet answered is whether the new human being will still be the same creature whom philosophers have been discussing for two and a half thousand years, from Aristotle to Levinas. Or whether he will be something other, something for the description of which we have neither language nor ethics nor even intuition.
Perhaps it is precisely here that the real philosophy of the twenty-first century begins. Not in the academies, but on that same couch, in front of that same screen, at the precise moment when the viewer suddenly catches himself thinking: what, exactly, am I doing here.
Oleh Cheslavskyi is an independent historian, publicist, and investigative journalist based in Kyiv. He is the author of “The Russian Myth” and “2034”, and is completing a trilogy titled “Myths of the Third Rome”.