First person shooters

Roger Stahl (2006) brings us up to the post-9/11 decade of the 2000s in this week's other recommended reading. Early on, he summarizes the increasing blurring in America of the idea of the distinction between a "home front" (away from the action) and the scene of conflict where the death actually occurs, overseas somewhere - usually some place most Americans have never been. During the two World Wars, the U.S. had managed to maintain its isolation from the devastation of the combat; it had fought and helped to win the conflicts away from its own shores (the attack on Pearl Harbor being the one, and obviously key, exception - though Hawaii was not yet a state at the time).

Non-military Americans have thus, in the 20th century, had a hyperreal experience of war. They would read about it, they heard about it on the news, they were told about it by American soldiers who had experienced it overseas, but civilians did not experience it directly. War was absent from American soil. Unlike the citizens of Europe and Japan and other countries that had been involved in World War II, America experienced war mainly through the media.

The medium of televison seemed to give citizens a real look at war. Starting with the Vietnam war in the 1960s, if the people of the nation need not go to the war, the war could now come to them - meaning they could see it on tv. It was and - with the important exception of 9/11 - continues to be, a virtual war that American civilians experienced, a mediated war (a war experienced via screens), what was sometimes call the "living room war." Stahl summarizes how this generally undeclared war was presented to the American public on tv, from the Cold War of the 1950s to the War on Terror at the beginning of the 2000s - the threat of America's destruction is an anxious undercurrent to the news as well as the entertainment media:

The post-WWII nuclear threat brought forth a "cold war" that would further implicate the civilian population ideologically and through threat of annihilation. Here, the collapse of physical space would give way to the collapse of psychic space. Television made possible the idea of the "living room war" during the Vietnam conflict, coupled with a domestic "war for public opinion" (Hallin, 1989). Pentagon media management, at home and abroad, continued to gain in military importance through various U.S. excursions in Granada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, when Americans began to associate Central Command (CENTCOM) not with logistics, but with the wartime organization of journalists and press briefings (Carruthers, 2000). The managed televised spectacle of Desert Storm would pave the way for new lexicons of "war" that would finally take shape as the so-called "War on Terror." In this never-ending, metaphorical war every aspect of civilian life takes the appearance of a battlefield and every tool the appearance of a weapon. The centrality of media in this new kind of war is reflected in a rhetoric that borrows the language of the new communication technologies of terrorist "networks" and "cells." (Stahl, 113-114)

In the second half of the 20th century, war became a virtualized "presence" in American homes: tv news, movies, tv shows, video games - all showed Americans at war, though most of the time there was no actual declared war going on in reality, and certainly none on American soil. Stahl's article continues the story of Americans becoming "virtually embattled" that had started in the Cold War. Americans can always feel vaguely at war and at risk while generally experiencing only domestic peace (at least in terms of conflict with other nations). The American public at home has experienced conflicts in which America takes part increasingly in terms of "The Spectacle," in other words - that is, as a show (like a tv show, as when the Vietnam war was "brought into Americans' living rooms" to compete with the Ed Sullivan Show and Gilligan's Island), and later increasingly as something more like an interactive gameplay video.

I can still remember watching CNN coverage during the Gulf War (1990-91), with generals explaining the smart bombs and watching on a monitor as a bomb went down a chimney to take out its "carefully targeted" victims. It was a doubly-virtualized, doubly-hyperreal experience, as we watched the generals on our screen watching the bomb on their screens do its deadly thing. It looked a lot like they were playing a video game. Neither the generals nor we television viewers saw the carnage that the bomb created. We saw a TV show or a video game.

I encourage you to read the Stahl article, despite its density and length. As I waded upstream through Stahl's devastating avalanche of findings about how the military has partnered with big business to create a new "military-industrial-entertainment complex," I began to understand how gruesomely easy the hyperreality of war has become for those of us who have never experienced it directly.

The PBS documentary Digital Nation (2010) includes segments on the U.S. military using video games in recruiting centres and the way in which drone pilots can live outside Las Vegas, go to work and "pilot" drones in real attack missions actually taking place in the Middle East or Afghanistan, and still be home in time for dinner and TV with their families. I encourage you to watch this five minute except:

Perhaps the most important thrust of Stahl's exposé is that not just the American military and arms industry but now also companies like Sega and Sony have welcomed the confusion that the average American can feel between real warfare and a video game. The gamification of war aids in recruitment and also makes it easier to "embed" non-combat citizens in the (imaginary version of the) latest American military exploit. One of the downsides of videogame virtual reality (as compared to the earlier print culture VR) is that there is often no time for thought or reflection, and thus turning foreign wars into videogame spectacles leaves the average American focused on the "how" of the killing, rather than the "why" of it, and subconciously implicated in the warfare through the seeming "interactivity" of the video/videogame experience.

The "skill-thinking" discussed by Peeples in his article on the Cold War comes down to a supposed American openness to the "substitution of instruments for policies" (Stanley Hoffman's phrase, quoted in Peeples, 56). This has been precisely the attitude encouraged by the military-industrial-entertainment complex as it focused couch-bound Americans' attention on the "how" and not the "why" of every military action. We saw this in the 90s and 00s above all, with the "War on Terror." It is possible that the military-industrial-entertainment complex is losing ground since then, as America came in the 2010s to focus again on its own internal battles more that a military threat from outside its borders.

The virtual citizen-soldier

Stahl wants to suggest that the hyperreal threat of war encouraged by the media, movies, games, and government propaganda desensitized American citizens to the reality of warfare, but made them ready to endorse huge budgets and (counter-)terror activities on the part of their government because they think war is something America always needs to be at somewhere - but somewhere else - perhaps covert CIA operations in the Latin American "war on drugs," perhaps declared conflicts like the Gulf War, but all of it hyperrealized by the buffer of an ocean and a screen. Americans have thus gradually become more and more ready to see all state violence acted out overseas as both necessary and at the same time somewhat unreal.

The ideal behind a liberal democracy like the United States (or Canada) supposes a responsible, informed citizen who participates rationally in the decision making of their government through representative democracy (we'll be returning to this). This is a print-culture vision of the human being - people with the time and desire to inform themselves privately and spend effort thinking personally and responsibly about government policy, and then influence that policy by voting, and by other democratic means (writing to your representative, protesting, education, etc). Stahl believes that - from a foreign policy point of view above all - this kind of citizen was gradually replaced in the 90s and 00s by what he ironically calls a "virtual citizen-soldier," a person simultaneously removed from the violence as though in a video game, but who nevertheless feels a bit like a battle-rattled combatant in a never-ending cold "War on Terror." And the typical American of the nineties and noughties was encouraged to focus more on the "how" than on the "why" of this war. This marks a change in how citizens viewed themselves - they now always see themsleves as potential targets. But almost always potential. The Cold War saw few citizen deaths; terrorism originating outside the U.S. is sporadic and unpredicatble. Citizens in fear give up their rights, lose touch with the real people who are mostly far away and not understood clearly. They cling to their technology to protect them from these mostly vague, possibly unreal threats.

The War on Terror was a kind of continuation of the Cold War by other means, and the Spectacle moved from television to the computer screen. If Stahl is right, then in the process, the feeling of citizen responsibility deteriorated further from the reflective mindset of peacetime to a focus on the "how" of winning or keeping one's family safe from attack, as opposed to the "why" of any conflict. The result has been a willingness to dispense with democratic process and reflective domestic and foreign-policy legislation because "we are at war, dammit!" - even though there is rarely actually any declared war going on. Like the citizens of Oceania in Orwell's 1984, Americans of the 90s and 00s were simply always at war, always at risk, and the war was more terrifying because it was essentially imaginary; it was not right there in front of them, but mainly a part of their daily "spectacle." During the heyday of "the War on Terror" the average American was arguably too scared to question the abandonment of human rights in things like "The Patriot Act" or Guantanamo Bay. We have gotten so used to this now that Stahl probably almost sounds naive to us when he reminds us that this is a terrible betrayal of the democratic ideal: "The very efficacy of the citizen in participatory democracy resides in a critical space that allows for public deliberation about important political matters. Perhaps the ultimate object of civic deliberation is the deployment of state violence" (Stahl, 125). Such deliberation was rarely demanded by most American citizens after 9/11.

The social and strategic necessity for immediate and effective action in a video game is the perfect virtual reality to invite the citizen into if you want a populace that feels it has no time to think, and no choice but to "play along" with a war that is fought elsewhere and without significant or salient losses on the home front, indeed with a minimization of the reality of even the American losses abroad, let alone those of the enemy, military or civilian.

Stahl suggests that the Pentagon, in collaboration with Sony and other corporate partners, created a new kind of anti-democratic person, the "virtual citizen-soldier," a person who both felt perpetually at war even when no specific war had been declared (only the "War on Terror") and at the same time felt as though the war is "unreal" (or hyperreal) and that it has human consequences that are perhaps as hard to take seriously as the piggy casualties in Angry Birds:

The virtual citizen-soldier, whether playing Kuma/War [a video game] or following an embedded reporter on MSNBC, fights a war largely without human consequence. The virtual citizen-soldier has intimate knowledge of the whir that the $3,000 night vision goggles make when he or she virtually flips the switch, as this was meticulously reproduced for America's Army [the Army's free promotional recruiting game], but he or she does not see through those goggles ‘‘little girls with smashed up faces,'' as one commentator from the Ottawa Citizen observes (Kennedy, 2003, p. E3). The virtual citizen-soldier's integration into a sanitized fantasy of war is a seduction whose pleasures are felt at the expense of the capacity for critical engagement in matters of military might. (Stahl, 126)

The fully-conscious, responsible, and engaged citizen of the liberal democratic ideal is thus replaced by a terrorized, paranoid, but technologically reassured, "citizen-soldier" couch potato who can't step back and think because on the one hand they are "at war," need protection, and need to follow orders, and on the other hand they are part of a seemingly unreal game on a screen whose roles and possibilities are largely manufactured by the media (and the military and the videogame developers), so it barely seems real.

There is often little space, no time, in first person shooter games for pausing and discussing, rationally and calmly, the reasons for the dispute, the rights and wrongs of things, possible peaceful resolutions. Similarly, there was no place in the virtual reality of the U.S. War on Terror for deliberation, understanding, or diplomacy. In a triumph of "skill-thinking," technology takes the place of policy, the "how of killing" takes the place of the "why."

The 2010s and the triumph of the Internet over television may have brought changes to this situation. There is certainly more questioning of American foreign policy in the American media now than there has been since the Vietnam War. We don't just have CNN now, showing us cool videos of generals deploying smartbombs. We now have the media of those on the ground overseas, not just news agencies, but ordinary people. We can check out coverage from Al Jazeera, not just Fox News. Without a stable threat from outside (apart from immigration and the economic threat of China and other players), America, as I mentioned, has gone to war with itself in the second half of the 2010s. One of the possible advantages of globalized capitalism and the power of money and technology superseding the power of weaponry, whatever else I think about those things, is that wars between major powers may no longer be worth the expense, as Yuval Harari seems to be arguing in his chapter on War in 21 Lessons. But Harari ends his lesson with the caution that we should never underestimate human stupidity, especially the stupidity of childish men, I would say.

Can Americans get back in touch with the democratic ideals of deliberation about the wars (some would just say "state terrorism") carried out by their government? Can they think outside of, question, the untold combined power of the military, giant arms manufacturers, and - most powerful of all for most of them - the entertainment industry?