Mediatized war hyperreality enables real mass death rather than obscuring it

Evidence

Aliens was the moment in which a new mode of the military-industrialentertainment-complex became visible. Virilio argued that Aliens’ privileging of military hardware “could only lead in the end to the extinction of the talking film, its complete replacement by film trailers for hardened militarists”. In fact, the talking film has been replaced by the shoot-em-up videogame whose picnoleptic delirium is flat with the prosecution of the Sega-Sony-CNN war. “Realists” who attacked Baudrillard and Virilio for their insistence upon the fact that war is now constitutively mediatised missed the point that hyperrealisation is precisely what permits the production of very real deaths on a mass scale. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1452

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the essay collection’s recurring theme and to contemporary discussions of drone warfare and videogame aesthetics of real conflict. — connects to: Media hyperrealisation enables rather than cancels real mass deaths — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1452; Hyperreality is the cinema converging on both the real and itself — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 168; Reductive mechanism’s emotional distance normalises modern warfare and machine-economy harms — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 448 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Media hyperrealisation enables rather than cancels real mass deaths #corroborates (1.00) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1452
• The Gulf War’s virtual immediacy masked its slow environmental and epidemiological aftermath #exemplifies (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 593
• Reductive mechanism’s emotional distance normalises modern warfare and machine-economy harms #expands (0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 448
• Hyperreality is the cinema converging on both the real and itself #expands (0.70) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 168
• Destroying terrorists creates replayable atrocity images that amplify terror #exemplifies (0.70) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1454