The Feed Cuts

And so the bombs are falling. Great. The bombs always fall. We're very good at that part. We are historically, world-historically good at dropping things on people from the sky. No one does it better. Gold medal, every time. And for a few weeks that feels like it's enough. The aircraft carriers are in the Gulf, the B-2s are flying out of Diego Garcia or wherever the fuck they fly out of, and cable news has the graphics package ready, the ones with the glowing green night-vision footage and the retired generals drawing arrows on maps with telestrators like it's Monday Night Football. And for a few weeks you can almost convince yourself that this is going to be an air war. That we'll just bomb them into submission and never have to touch the ground. That's what they told you about Afghanistan. That's what they told you about Libya. It never works but it always sounds like it will because dropping bombs is the one thing we're so good at that it feels like it should be enough.

But it's not enough. It's never enough. Because you can't hold territory from the air. You can't secure oil infrastructure from the air. You can't install a new government from the air. And you definitely cannot stop the Strait of Hormuz from being closed from the air because the missiles that close it are mobile launchers hidden in mountains on the Iranian coastline and you'd have to physically go find them. Every single one. In a country three times the size of Iraq. With mountain ranges that make the Hindu Kush look like speed bumps. And the guys operating those launchers have been training for this specific scenario. The scenario where America bombs the shit out of everything and then has to decide whether to come down to the ground. For forty-five years. Iran have been drilling this since before we’ve all been born.

So the ground war starts. It has to. Because the air campaign doesn't reopen the Strait and the Strait has to reopen because the entire global economy is seizing up and gas is at nine dollars a gallon and the president's approval rating is falling through the floor and somebody in the Situation Room says the magic words: we need boots on the ground to secure the coastal launch sites. Just the coastal launch sites. Just a limited operation. Surgical. In and out. We've heard those words before. We heard them about Vietnam. We heard them about Iraq. We heard them about Afghanistan. It's never in and out. It's never limited. It's never surgical. But they always say it and we always believe it because the alternative is admitting that we've started something we can't finish, and America does not admit that. Not until the body bags make it impossible to say anything else.

And so now you've got American ground troops in Iran. In the mountains. In terrain that has swallowed armies for three thousand years. Ask the Greeks,ask the Mongols, ask the British, ask the Soviets who learned this lesson next door in Afghanistan. And across from them are not just the Iranian regular army. It's the IRGC. It's the Basij. It's a whole society that has been told since 1979 that this day was coming and now it's here and they were right. Every Friday sermon, every revolutionary anniversary, every mural on every wall in Tehran showing American flags burning it was all building to this. And now it's real. And these people fight. We know they fight because they fought Iraq for eight years in conditions that would have broken most armies on earth. Human wave attacks. Trench warfare that looked like World War I. Chemical weapons. And they kept going. They sent fourteen-year-olds with plastic keys around their necks keys to paradise to walk through minefields to clear the way. You are not going to shock a society that did that to itself. You are not going to awe them. They have already absorbed more than you are prepared to inflict.

And this is where it gets real in a way that no amount of cable news graphics can prepare you for. Because this isn't going to look like Iraq. Iraq had flat desert and highways and a military that largely surrendered or melted away. This is mountains and cities and a military that's staying and a population that supports them. And every single engagement is going to be filmed. Not by CNN. Not by embedded journalists. By the drones themselves. And by the way we've already seen this. We already know what this looks like. We've been watching it for three years on our phones. The Ukraine war.

People have been watching drone footage from Ukraine the way they watch fucking nature documentaries. There's entire accounts dedicated to it. Compilation videos. A drone finds a guy in a trench and you watch as it drops on him and he's gone. Or it doesn't drop right away. Sometimes it hovers. Sometimes it just sits there three feet from the guy's face while he figures out what's about to happen. And people watched that. Hundreds of thousands of people watched those compilation videos and then went and made dinner. And the comments are like sports commentary. Oh he almost made it to the tree line. Oh that was a direct hit. People are doing play-by-play on a human being getting turned into nothing. And nobody thinks that's weird because the feed has already decided it's equivalent to everything else. It's between a clip of somebody's cat and a political argument and a trailer for a show you're notgoing to watch. It's just stuff. It's just content. The flattening has already happened.

So now apply that to Iran. Apply that to American kids. Because that's what's coming. Some kid from Midland, Texas, twenty years old, signed up because there was nothing else in his town no jobs, no future, just the recruiter and the signing bonus that was less than a used car and he's in some valley in the Zagros Mountains and there's a drone in front of him. And the Iranians know how to do this. They've been building these things for years. They supplied them to Russia. They watched what worked in Ukraine and they learned. Everybody learned except us apparently.

And this happens every day. It's not one video. It's a feed of them. Every day a new valley, a new drone, a new set of last words that nobody's going to remember because tomorrow there's another set. And each one lands a little softer than the last because that's what the feed does it doesn't censor, it doesn't suppress, it drowns. It buries each one under the next one until they're all equivalent, until a boy saying something to a drone and a recipe for banana bread have the same weight on your screen.

Vietnam had the napalm girl and it meant something. One photograph and it cracked the country open because it existed in a world that could still be shocked. There was a distance between the image and the viewer where horror could sit in your chest and grow into something that got you off your ass. We don't live in that world. We live in a world where a thousand napalm girls hit the feed every day and each one gets three seconds before the thumb moves. And the platforms that serve you the footage are owned by the same people who built the cloud infrastructure the military runs on, who built the AI that targeted the Iranian generals whose assassination started this whole thing, who are making money on every single link in the chain from the decision to the content.

The AI that said we can kill their entire leadership in one night that ran on American tech infrastructure. The military logistics that put These kid in that valley hosted on AWS. And now the footage of his death generates engagement on platforms that report to the same investor class that built the tools that started the war. They didn't build the drone that killed him. They built the system that put him in front of it. And then they monetized the footage. He's a logistics input on one spreadsheet and an engagement metric on another and both spreadsheets are in the same building.That's the war the techno-feudal state produces. Not a war you oppose. Not a war you support. A war you scroll past. Until you can't.

And then it finds you. Not because you went looking for it. You didn't go looking for it. You were never going to go looking for it. You were going to do what everyone does, you were going to keep texting his wife and getting nothing back and telling yourself that means nothing, that means the phones are down, that means the communications are disrupted, that means a hundred things that aren't the thing. You were going to keep doing that for as long as you could because as long as you don't know you can still be wrong.

But the algorithm knows. The algorithm has known for three days. It's been watching you. It saw you search his name at 2 AM. It saw you search it again at 5. It saw you type his wife's name into the search bar and delete it and type it again and delete it. It's seen the messages you sent that say "have you heard anything" and it's seen the ones that came back that just say "no." It has a model of your grief that's more accurate than your own because it doesn't have any of the self-protective delusions that you have. It doesn't hope. It doesn't bargain. It just processes inputs and serves outputs. And right now you are an input and it has an output for you.

And it serves it to you the way it serves you everything. The way it serves you a shoe ad because you looked at shoes last week. The way it serves you a recipe because you searched for chicken thighs on Tuesday. With that same absolute serene indifference. No hesitation. No preamble. No chaplain at the door with his hat in his hands. No telegram. No phone call where you can hear it in their voice before they say the words and you already know and you're already falling. None of that. Just there it is. Between a meme and somebody's dunk about X. Autoplay. Already rolling before you've decided to watch it.

And it's him. And you knew it was going to be him before you pressed play because some part of you has known for three days but now you know and there's no unknowing it. And he's in the dirt and there's a drone right there… right there, three feet from his face, and you can see the cut on his forehead and the stupid little scar he got playing baseball in tenth grade and it's him, it's definitely him, there's no mistaking it, there's no telling yourself it's someone who looks like him, it's him. And he's saying…. he's saying

"please, please, I have a… I got a little girl, she's two, her name is Lily, I promised her I'd… I told her I was gonna take her fishing when I got back, I promised, please, I just… she's waiting for me, I told her we were gonna go fishing, she's never been, she's never… please, she's waiting for me, she's…"

And then the feed cuts.