For theatre as we understand it, three things are necessary: actors who speak and perform, a conflict that must be resolved, and an audience emotionally invested in the story. The reality-TV momentum and social-media frenzy of wars have created a global audience—eyes locked on screens smaller than their faces, fidelity to ideals bigger than their patience.
Have we reached a point where choosing an egg for breakfast feels no different from wishing who should be bombed more when we unlock our phones in the morning? Or is media addiction draining catharsis from distant catastrophes?
The father of A.I. has a strange request for us post-reality humans: we need to make A.I. maternal so it does not fail us, Geoffrey Hinton remarked in an interview last year. His startling demand—that we lend machines the same maternal instinct we seem to have lost—comes at a time when smartphone dependency has eroded basic social instincts that once helped us survive.
We are told to extend empathy to the very agent that siphoned ours, to offer motherly affection to machines without first purging the cruelty they helped seed. Round-the-clock virtual presence, feeding off live-streamed wars, is a macabre role-play everyone gets to join. Studies show it takes as little as a week to shift people’s opinions towards the opposing party by manipulating algorithms and limiting exposure to antagonistic posts.
The 24/7 reality-show theatrics of this administration and its enemies’ belligerence play out for doomscrolling audiences everywhere. You switch platforms to access alternative facts that fortify your opinions, prove your point, and disseminate them to like-minded humans via agentics.
No Strait of Hormuz is needed to block a steady exchange of insults, misogyny, and delusional war promises, all flowing in directions preordained by the world’s richest man with extraterrestrial ambitions. The President of the United States, flanked by an assembly of right-wing allies, performs relentlessly for this audience. One day, America is winning so much it simply cannot anymore. Next, it is the Middle Ages, and thousands of crusaders are dispatched.
But those of us curating grief and outrage into shareable content are not looking at the stars. We are lying in the gutter, convinced the screen above us is the sky
World events unfolding between our fingers give us control over our narratives. The face behind the tiny screens collects more losses than wins, yet keeps returning to roll one last die. Someone, clearly, is winning.
Imagine smartphone Lilliputians strapping down the Mountain Man of human agency. Social-media chatbots (“ask me anything”) and short-video formats (“here’s a quick fact”) have depleted our desire to sit with an idea for longer than its screen life.
We want more, we want it fast, and we want it now. Markets and algorithms repackage our instinctive reactions to human suffering into content currency. We get the version of war we want. While theatre audiences willingly suspend disbelief, smartphone zealots crusade for ‘my people’ suffering at the hands of ‘your people’.
Anyone not frothing with anger is declared a passive bystander, a Zionist, or a co-conspirator.
Thumbs keep moving even when minds do not. Each thirty-second news breakdown, each A.I.-generated video, each vitriolic spat between public rivals reaffirms that offline reality is too messy and that the ‘real’ world, constructed through fragments, promises a cleaner, superior picture.
War’s cinematic acoustics on eleven-inch screens offer an immersive refuge, consuming our trust in cultural expressions of defiance and in constructive action aimed at real change. Those in power demand empathy for machines at a time when we struggle to extend it to someone outside our filter bubble.
Research for this piece involved hours of scrolling, AI-generated content, and social media reviews. The blunt admission belongs to Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” one of his characters confesses, lamenting how reflecting on good and bad has, for many, become a non-starter.
Human potential for inflicting misery has been on full display. But our faith in what lies beyond the gutter depends entirely on where we choose to look. For those inhaling war fumes in their own homes, the divide between online and offline is not a metaphor. They cannot doomscroll their own destruction.
But those of us curating grief and outrage into shareable content are not looking at the stars. We are lying in the gutter, convinced the screen above us is the sky.