As the US hyperimperialism gets overextended with US Israeli attacks in Iran and the assasination of its supreme leader (as well as numerous civilian victims) with the aquiescence of the majority of EU, and we are seeing the effects of both the imperial boomerang at home (ICE raids), the so-called Rules-Based Order turns out to be nothing else than an experssion of unilateral hegemonic rule, with various kidnappings in Venezuela, the siege of Cuba, shouts for “regime change”, it is high time we return to Baudrillard and his analysis of the war as a simulacrum during the first Gulf War.
I remember distinctly that tumultous period in my life, being still a teenager, just one year after the Romanian hyper-mediate, and hyper-televised cathode Ray Revolution (check Ujica’s and Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a A Revolution for a very apt take on that) you are glued to the screen for the night vision almost like old terminal greens and rockets without any connection to the actual events. This disconnect was already anticipated in the anti-terrorist craze during the 1989 revolution where everyone was suspecting either loyal securitate or arab/friendly Arab nations “terrorists” protecting CeauČ™escu from the wrath of the people and the army that switched sides. All the alliances with Saddam or other ex Socialist connections with the Arab world seemed suddenly forgotten in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And this was just the aperitif for the Shock and Awe.
These terrorists were mostly invisible, or some kind of scapegoats being nearly lynched or killed in friendly fire. So when US retaliated after Saddam’s bungled and sincerly self-defeating attack on Kuwait, Romania was already dreaming to be a base for the US army, seen as a liberatory democratic force back then, ideologically propped by lots of Rambo and Chuck Norris movies and the vision, before Orange Revolutions became a thing and ‘peaceful’ CIA coups sounded just what Eastern Europe needed. If you do not live on the moon you realize you and your family and your friends, and your friends friends and countless others are at the disposal, arbitrary violence and whim of one single element: the 800+ US bases around the globe and their trigger happy. And nothing can protect you.
I recommend listening to the discussion that revisits that controversial text and compares it with today’s ridiculous and cringe Dubai US influencer and troll-led reporting, as well as the constant feed of wilful destruction and blatant abandonment at any pretense of international rules. Adam Tooze also wrote in the Chartbook substack about the hyperreality of the US presidency, while (as some in the comments section sharply observed), there is no rupture with the previous brutal regime change style of the US hegemony. Whether you call it hyperimperialism or hyperreal, the hyper is hard to get rid of. The LIVE feed, the cine-verite is even more accute – when even the allies or the actual members of the public nor the staff were in the loop, no one gets notification of the last military campaign till the last minute or the “target” is eliminated.
For me, it is incredibly telling that the situation at the UN had a total reversal (who was the aggressor during the Cold War era Korean War) is today the one upholding these crumbling international rules, while in new institutions such as the so- called Board of Peace seem to make a total mockery of peace negotiations and the idea of diplomatic solutions.
So the war did take place but the constant race btw war reporting, media collusion and advertising, at the moment of complete US dominance, evacuated all the dirty and horrific side of it, transforming it into a sort of infomercial. Today with US the biggest military superpower bringing havoc, destabilizing, and uncertainty around the world – one can feel that this lack of plan is the plan. The only result seems to be further upping of speculative bets, rising oil prices and crypto profits in plain sight.
The war on Iran likely brings a new oil price shock and windfall profits.
So, who stands to win?
Our research shows: Last time around (2022), the US reaped the largest fossil fuel profits of any country ($377bn). 50% went to the top 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 pic.twitter.com/WPNmm0l3Hu
“In this episode, we revisit Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), a text that diagnosed the emergence of war as media event, non-event, and managed spectacle. Joining us is friend and returning guest Cameron Carsten, a graduate student in continental philosophy whose work explores the state, power, and the production of reality across Baudrillard and Deleuze. Rather than treating Baudrillard’s claims as prophetic or obsolete, the conversation puts them to work against the present—testing the fate of hyperreality in the age of Trump, AI-mediated images, and escalating political violence. What emerges is a question that now presses harder than ever: has the simulacrum collapsed, or has the real returned with a vengeance?”
And just in case you had any residual doubts of what the Board of Peace stands for.
“Hi. I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.”
If you ask me to name one movie that has continued to inspire and intrigue me and my friends, it is Sidney Lumet’s Network from 1976. To say it is just an excellent movie satire or a sharp movie critical of its time and age is to forget where we are and how we ended up where we ended up.
Network is the one movie that takes media theology to its limits, that performs the Mcluhanite mediasphere black mass without remorse. Network is relevant today because it reminds us that TV eschatology never left us. This movie prepares or anticipates within its own mediatic collapsology and technological convolutions some of today’s easiest society of control trappings, platform capitalism coordinates, and post-spectacle-drenched politics. If we blame TikTok, or today’s toxic antisocial platforms, we do that by forgetting how the society of the spectacle developed, how sensationalism became its lifeblood, and who its early (fictional) mad prophets were. To be part of the network and be a networker used to be such a rad cool thing – that is, till cultural critic and SF scholar Steven Shaviro wrote “Connected: Or What It Means to Live in a Networked Society”.
I watched and digested this artefact of the 1970s relatively late, but its tremors have been felt all around me. Its repeated viewing inexorably produced a kind of leitmotiv for our own understanding of politics, media, the spectacular, the performative and staged— and undoubtedly constitutes a sort of matricial mould for the ideas, practices, and post-spectacle tentacles that have arisen around the collaboration with Candidatura and CNDB dance center renegades (Bucharest Center for Contemporary Dance).
During the socialist era, the TV was a weird space, a sort of trimmed-down version of televisual reality. There were no late night shows, no reality shows, no horror movies, and even official news, weird ethno folkoric shows, commedy like Benny Hill, Norman Wisdom (very popular in Hoxa’s Albania I am told), Laurel and Hardy during theCascadorii Rasului (aka Stuntsmen of Laughter) shows, Telecinemateca (with artsy works by Ingrid Bergman, Felini etc.), Mapamond, or the science, culture, history and tech weekend Teleenciclopedia which I never missed and had the honor of being the longest running Romanian TV show – from 1965 till today. During the Ceausescu’s socialist TV withdrawl, the Network was happening elsewhere – while we were on a TV diet of marches, Daciada olympics and Nadia Comoneci laurels. First, Romanian color transmission was live during the celebration of the eliberation day of 23 August 1983 (“eliberation from the Fascist joke” lest we forget that Romania was an ally of Germany and a willing participant in the Holocaust). At the same time, all around the capitalist world, Rupert Murdoch (Fox Network) and Berlusconi’s Videocracy tabloidization was reshaping everything and changing the rules of the game.
After 1989, we all got free cable, and we got more networked and cabled than Western Europe (at least if you had a relative or a friend who could unsramble your pay-per-view signal). Alltogether, we, the famished semiperipheric “telespectators” of the East Bloc (the name for viewers and TV audiences in Romanian), were shaped by this media ascetism during socialism when we had only had a few daylight hours of TV in the 1980s. Of course, this ignores the videotapes and the semi-legal dubbed version of Western movies (Jackie Chan, Terminator, Rambo, Chuck Norris, and other Cannon Group bangers) that poured into the country during that time. All the aspirations about the West were partly influenced by a few selected morsels like the Dallas series that was legally screened during that time. Then, in 2000, a portal opened with OTV or Oglinda TV (translated as Mirror TV) where nothing was sacred and where everything para-normal became normal. The hypernormal and the new normal, 2012 apocalyptic messengers, Big Eartquake predictors, faith healers, disaster area survivors, they all got their 5 minutes of glory, they all manifested on this TV station founded by Dan Diaconescu (another presidential TV candidate).
Looking back, before 1989, even the official propaganda visits, official meetings, 23 August celebrations – the TV program were rationed, rationed like the high-calorie food at that time. Most of the illegal/semi-illegal animation, movies, and documentaries you got from the neighbouring more liberal countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and URSS during perestroika.
Foucault in a late 1983 comment on Kant’s reference to the French Revolution as a measure of whether humankind is actually progressing – in Conflict of the Faculties sounds vaguely as if it’s all about this Romanian Videodrome videogram of a 1989 (200 years from the French one!) Revolution that is being lived as spectatorship not a direct participant:
“What is significant is the way the Revolution exists as spectacle, the way in which it is greeted everywhere by spectators who are not participants, but observers, witnesses, and those who for better or worse, let themselves be cought up with it… What is important…is that all around the Revolution there is he [Kant] says, ‘sympathy of aspirations which borders on enthusiasm’ ‘.
And this was the feeling transmitted on Bulgarian TV, by a cohort of French journalists celebrating a French Revolution in Bucharest, Romanian Jewish immigrants to Israel wanting to enroll against the ‘terrorist’ threat etc. everyone joining tele-visually from afar. It’s also not about the material forces acting, or the messy antagonist and often irreconcilable situations on the ground but about how the Romanian revolution is being televised, recovered, recieved, how streaming the fall of Communism is galvanizing the viewer abroad and giving liberalism its new consumerist raison d’ĂŞtre to refashion the East, renewing these foreign spectators and enabling them to be transformed.
Network’s postmodern contribution was fundamental because you could understand in retrospect how one got to exploitative 24h/7 media massacre snuff splatter that the Nightcrawler makes de rigueur but also the Romanian Revolution a TV show. Probably only Antonioni’s Zabriskie Pointcould see far enough across the 1968 countercultural blast. Network talk about cathode ray prophets, live suicides of TV anchorheads, unusual but easy to monetize forbidden shows, ratings wars, and a general cynicism and malaise regarding the whole corporate planetary capitalist mediascape. It is a proto-cyberpunk movie, while there are no SF elements, but its worldview considers corporations as the new nation builders and imaginative communities (yet some of them exist only as historical, broken building blocks of monopoly capital, like who remembers IBM?!), these corps were the new statal formations supplanting the 19th c nation states. At least in theory. Network States anyone?
Network speaks with ease about employing extremists and terrorists to do their own TV reality show as part of the 1970s Network, the very anti-capitalist anarcho revolutionaries, subsuming all the fractal dispersion of far left groups and liberation movement shards into their televised feed. This almost comes close to 2000s Karlheinz Stockhausen naming the terrorist attacks as a masterpiece, or Boris Groys saying that Bin Laden after 9/11 was a video artist because he actually communicated via VHS tapes with a global audience.
This is the same strange, oppressive yet ecstatic techno-libertarian reconfiguration hailed by Snow Crash, without the technologically laden prophecies, the tech solutionism and the smoggy California ideology atmosphere that seems to fester nowadays.
Nor are there in Network, like in the later Videodrome, organically mutated manifestations of TV hybridization and snuff programming. Of course Network is not perfect and its gender politics is entirely fucked and predictably mysoginstic – with Faye Dunaway being the vixen femme fatale absolute machiavellian that aims to grow and use everything to rule the ratings. In a way CeauČ™escu lost the ratings and one could see it on TV during 1989. Writing about tys fateful year of 1989, Susan Buck-Morss remarked that television became all important throughout the events. Massive social transformations seemed gonbe a matter of gaining airtime and satellite TV was busy staging “revolutions”, and demonstrating that “we won” and that “the army is with us” (in Romania’s case). Storming the TV station was now equal to storming the Bastille of Winter Palace.
Maybe this is the first cinematic instance where “networking” (in its narrow sense as TV networks) is not the Matrix escapist VR, nor a technophiliac hollographic universe, but a Black Mirror transmedia world that you can only exit by entering, by jacking and hacking into. A sprawling, corporative, and inescapable tele-visual mediascape became the natural habitat of audio video speech acts.
TV upends the hegemony of image and cinema because, for Michel Chion, the difference between cinema and TV “…lies not so much in the visual specificity of their images, as in the different roles of sound in each.” For Chion, TV is simply put “illustrated radio” and images are reduced to mere add-ons. TV is a murmuring medium that is driven by sound, no signal/snow, speech, and music, a soundtrack in need of visual coverage. The sound is no longer supplemental, propping up images but the other way around, images need the authoritative voice of a newscaster, an expert, a celeb, a pundit or a YouTuber, a streamer to convey meaning, caustic wit, to announce meteorological freak events, plunging markets, comment on twitch about politics through video games, anchor rhythmic and wobbly music, or decode deep fakes and AI-generated video. One could look at the medical checkups of the dictatorial couple Elena and Nicolae CeauČ™escu before their trial amnd sentencing in silence, just trying to read their lips and facial expressions. The dead TV set is also a portal, an opening into another dimension and creepypasta non-existant TV shows as we know from Poltergeist (1982), Paranormal activity franchise (2007-), and the excellent Jane Schoenbrun I Saw the TV Glow (2024).
Instead of a conspiracy, we are immersed in the daily rituals of programming, screen & face time, streaming, franchising, notification for premieres, and next episode for your binge. But if there is also something ritualic and initiatic, tele-evangelizing prosperity gospel to Howard Beale’s appeal to the audience in his Pauline moment, that’s because it was already happening in the US (and with Radio – see Vatican as well as Hitler’s use of the medium), so Beale is struck down. In the end the new prophet of TV is being introduced into the inner chambers of corporate power and creed, and particularly into its capitalist worldview that is definitely post-ideological, post-political, post-historical (Fukuyama’s and Koyeve’s Last Man beckoning?), eminently transnational, post-democratic and deeply cynical about East/West blocs underlying arbitrary partitions. There is your business naturalism, where business is equated with the (Darwinistic?) Hobbesian forces of nature and where the only totality that exists is a financialized one. Who said this movie does not get better by the year?
You may be repelled by it, but its rhetoric force speaks of itself and even rings of the capitalism realism aptly identified by Mark Fisher later on. Thr more so because it’s not after thr fall of the Berlin Wall but a talk of the elites that basically made up their mind. With the caveat that this is still ideology but ideology shifts depending ok who’s doing the packaging and how – and believe me, yet I again, brutal IMF conditionalities included you still need an ideology and an ideology needed a voice, a receptacle, and TV channeling, the madder the better. It’s also pretty far from the messy reality of material forces on the ground, of actual Global South rebellions and anti colonial movements and somehow close to the Schmittian ‘political spirituality’ and cynism of today. It is also darkly funny because this last denouement is a tĂŞte-Ă -tĂŞte with power, something that we are maybe familiar with from the last Trump and Jelensky meeting. I will give you this monologue in full bc it is, without a doubt, one of the most incredible pieces of cinema writing:
Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?! You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen:Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.
TimeSpace Warps 