It's still amusing how modern warfare has turned out. In the past, for those in the rear, it remained something disturbing but still distant—periodically reminding itself through funerals in the neighborhood or disabled people missing arms and legs encountered on the street. But over the last hundred years, everything has changed dramatically. War, previously heard only in eyewitness accounts and firsthand experiences, now shouts its presence in newspaper headlines, thunders through radio bulletins from information bureaus, appears on television screens, and finally—in smartphones. Everyone has it in their pocket. It's close, pocket-sized, almost safe.
Now we know far more about war. We understand modern weapons systems. We track the front lines using interactive maps. We watch videos of combat operations. We observe war online. We almost participate in it—albeit in the same sense that a fan participates in a football match, filling their own helplessness with emotions. And war provides us with these emotions: excitement and disappointment, empathy and hatred, anxiety and glee, pain and joy. The media and the internet have long since turned war into a media product—a grand reality show that entertains us alongside romantic comedies and horror films.
The Holding Company quickly realized this. While government officials reap geopolitical gains from war, and the military-industrial complex multiplies profits by producing weapons, our employers extract the most valuable, popular, and mass-produced essence from war—the content.