Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria

Shooting a Revolution

Digital Barricades:

Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics

Series editors:

Professor Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Dr Joss Hands, Newcastle University

Professor Tim Jordan, University of Sussex

Also available:

Cyber-Proletariat:

Global Labour in the Digital Vortex

Nick Dyer-Witheford

Gadget Consciousness:

Collective Thought, Will and Action in the Age of Social Media

Joss Hands

Information Politics:

Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society

Tim Jordan

Unreal Objects:

Digital Materialities, Technoscientific Projects and Political Realities

Kate O’Riordan

Shooting a Revolution

Visual Media and Warfare in Syria

Donatella Della Ratta

First published 2018 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Donatella Della Ratta 2018

The right of Donatella Della Ratta to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Preface

Acknowledgements

A Note on Transliteration

Glossary

Introduction

1   Making Media, Making the Nation: Syria’s Tanwir in Neoliberal Times

2   The Whisper Strategy

3   The Death of Tanwir in Real-Time Drama

4   The People’s ‘Raised Hands’

5   Fear and Loathing on the Internet: The Paradoxes of Arab Networked Activism

6   Screen Fighters: Filming and Killing in Contemporary Syria

7   Syria’s Image-Makers: Daesh Militants and Non-Violent Activists

8   Notes on a Theory of Violence and the Visual in the Networked Age

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

1.1   Advertising billboard in Damascus, late 2010. ‘He’s got a house’

1.2   Construction site of a new housing and working complex in the area of Baramke station, Damascus, late 2010. ‘Together we build’

2.1   With the actors on the filming location for Bab al-hara, May 2010

2.2   A set of a musalsal in the city centre of Damascus, 2010

3.1   Actor Maxim Khalil on the set of Ghadan Naltaqi (‘We Will Meet Tomorrow’), Beirut 2015

3.2   Director Hatem Ali on the set of ‘The Godfather’ (al-’Arrab), Beirut, 2016

4.1   ‘I am with the law’ campaign, Damascus, Spring 2011

4.2   Remixes of the ‘I am with the law’ campaign

4.3   ‘I am with Syria’ campaign, Damascus, Spring 2011

4.4   ‘I am detained’, remix

5.1   ‘The Retired Activist’, 2014

5.2   ‘Bassel’

6.1   ‘Quintessentially social’ advertisement campaign, Damascus, March 2011

6.2   ‘No to sectarian division’ advertising campaign, Damascus, Spring 2011

7.1   Syrian activist Basil al-Sayed’s camera

7.2   ‘Media Man You are a Fighter, Too’

8.1   The Damascene Village, May 2010

8.2   Palmyra remix

Series Preface

Crisis and conflict open up opportunities for liberation. In the early twenty-first century, these moments are marked by struggles enacted over and across the boundaries of the virtual, the digital, the actual, and the real. Digital cultures and politics connect people even as they simultaneously place them under surveillance and allow their lives to be mined for advertising. This series aims to intervene in such cultural and political conjunctures. It will feature critical explorations of the new terrains and practices of resistance, producing critical and informed explorations of the possibilities for revolt and liberation.

Emerging research on digital cultures and politics investigates the effects of the widespread digitisation of increasing numbers of cultural objects, the new channels of communication swirling around us and the changing means of producing, remixing and distributing digital objects. This research tends to oscillate between agendas of hope, that make remarkable claims for increased participation, and agendas of fear, that assume expanded repression and commodification. To avoid the opposites of hope and fear, the books in this series aggregate around the idea of the barricade. As sources of enclosure as well as defences for liberated space, barricades are erected where struggles are fierce and the stakes are high. They are necessarily partisan divides, different politicizations and deployments of a common surface. In this sense, new media objects, their networked circuits and settings, as well as their material, informational, and biological carriers all act as digital barricades.

Jodi Dean, Joss Hands and Tim Jordan

Acknowledgements

This work sums up so many years of my personal and professional life that the list of people and networks to be thanked is a long one. Please bear with me, and my sincerest apologies if going back with my memory I have forgotten someone.

I wish to thank the University of Copenhagen, Professor Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen and colleagues and friends at TORS (Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies) for the generous material and human support without which my PhD research on Syria would never ever have seen the light of day. I thank The Danish Institute in Damascus, its former director Hans Christian Korsholm Nielsen and his wife Sibba, its latest director Anders Hastrup, and all its staff. It was thanks to the Institute’s welcoming atmosphere, to the people who lived and worked there, to the engaging discussions we used to have in the stunning courtyard of the most beautiful Damascene house, that it was possible for me to conduct part of the research that led to this book. It breaks my heart to think about it emptied of all of this, although I am told it has become a shelter for many internally displaced families in Syria.

I owe my appreciation to Ole Wæver and all the amazing researchers and staff at CRIC (Center for Resolution of International Conflicts), who, once Syria had become inaccessible to me, provided me with another shelter to think, discuss and develop my research further in the framework of my postdoctoral fellowship. I am grateful to Marwan M. Kraidy, Marina Krikorian and friends and colleagues at CARG (Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication) at The Annenberg School for Communication, where I’ve also had the chance, unfortunately too short for personal reasons, to spend a wonderful period as a Postdoctoral Fellow. My gratitude goes also to Lisa Wedeen and Michael C. Dawson at the University of Chicago for hosting me for a short fellowship at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, during which I had the chance to enjoy fruitful and passionate scholarly discussions.

There are no words to express how deep and life-changing my experience of working at Creative Commons has been. I met Joi Ito, at the time chairman of the organization, at a TV market in Cannes. I asked him how I might be involved in Creative Commons. He said: ‘drop the champagne and join the community meetings’. Since that day, I have experienced unforgettable moments with the wonderful people working with the organization, from the headquarters in San Francisco to the wider community across the globe. It is because of Creative Commons that I have met the most wonderful Arab youths, women and men, techies, bloggers, activists, artists, educators, all passionate about sharing, all staunchly working to create a better future for the region. It is because of Creative Commons that I met Bassel Safadi, my beloved friend whom I have lost in the battle for knowledge, dignity and freedom. The memories I have shared with this fantastic human being, his crazy ‘Fabricatorz’ friend Jon Philips, and the Creative Commons’ folks hanging out in the Middle East, travelling many kilometres by car, sometimes being stuck at shady borders and having to queue for hours while someone engaged in yoga exercises to avoid being overwhelmed by the local chaos, will always make me smile, despite what the Middle East has since become. I would like to express my infinite intellectual and professional gratitude to Joi Ito, and to Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, for having helped me gain insights into this global community of talented and inspiring human beings. But I would also like to thank them at a human level, as dear friends who have taught me important life lessons and constantly inspired me with their passion. This book offers a critical reflection on the values we have shared and believed in, which does not mean that these values were not genuine. The dark side of sharing and participatory cultures that Syria confronts us with should be taken as an incentive to push our reflection – and action – further, beyond the sad status quo that today’s networks have set up and forced us into.

I can’t forget the people who opened the doors of Syrian TV drama to me and helped me in pursuing my PhD studies. I am grateful to all the musalsalat workers – actors and actresses, directors, producers, advertisers, broadcasters, journalists, researchers – in Syria, and across the Arab region, who helped me navigate the complexity of this topic, granting me access to film locations, meeting rooms, parties, conferences and marketplaces. It is impossible to thank all of them but I want to remember here those I have bothered the most: Hassan Abbas, Najdat Anzour, Samer Baraqawi, Hikmet Daoud, Badih Fattouh, Laith Hajjo, Haytham Hakki, Fadi Ismail, Ibrahim al-Jabin, Khaled Khalifa, Adib Kheir (RIP), Iyad Krayem, Bassam and Mou‘min al-Malla, Maher Mansour, Mohamed Mansour, Najeeb Nseir, Ali Safar, Seif Eddine Sbei and Wafiq al-Zaiym (RIP).

I wish to thank the Syrian filmmakers Omar Amiralay (RIP), Nabil Maleh (RIP), Mohammad Malas and Osama Mohammed. And a new generation of Syrian filmmakers whose films have deeply inspired my scholarly reflection, particularly the work of: Ammar al-Beik, Sara Fattahi and Avo Kaprealian, the ‘new wave’ of Syria which I hope to see growing more and more. Thanks to Ali al-Atassi and his Bidayyat for giving a home to Syrian emerging talents in such troubled times. Thank you Orwa al-Mokdad: you have multiple talents, you are an amazing filmmaker and writer but, most of all, you are a dear friend, I will never forget our days at Aikilab with Bassel. Thank you Noura Ghazi Safadi: every time I see you I am humbled by your strength and passion for life, habibti.

I have great respect for the Syrian people who made me feel at home, opened the door of their culture to me, and shared with me their private lives, their concerns, their aspirations for the future. Thanks to Bernar, Nasser Dumairieh, Bassel A., Dahnun, Abed and all those I have lost track of because of the war. Thanks to Khaled Abdulwahed, Ziad Kalthoum, Zaher Omareen, Rafat al-Zakout and all those who have engaged with me in discussing their works. Thanks to those who have helped me and wish to stay anonymous. Some of them have lost their houses or jobs, some are in exile, others are in jail. I pay tribute to their courage and their humanity: thank you for the lessons you have taught me during these years, and that you still teach me every day.

Thanks to Enrico De Angelis, Mohamed Dibo, Yazan Badran, Katia al-Jbrail, Rula Ali, Waseem Hasan and all those who have worked with SyriaUntold over the years: I am proud to be part of a project that has managed to survive, after so many years and all the problems that have occurred, and happy that we are a family of humans, above all.

My scholarly work has been deeply enriched over the years by comments and feedback from, among many others, Kay Dickinson, Osama Esber, Malu Halasa, Marwan M. Kraidy, Anna Leander, Dina Matar, Thomas Poell, Philp Rizk, Naomi Sakr, Christa Salamandra, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Rebecca Stein, Tiziana Terranova, Lisa Wedeen, Maxa Zoller; last but not least, David Weinberger and the greatly inspiring community at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I owe a special thanks to Jodi Dean, who has thoroughly commented on this manuscript, and whose work has deeply inspired my reflection on the networks throughout the years.

This book would never have come to fruition without the passionate intellectual and friendly support of Geert Lovink. Our discussions via email, Skype and in greatly inspiring face to face meetings have not only provided me with theoretical insights to carry my work forward, but have also prevented me from descending into deep depression when friends were lost. Thanks for reminding me that hope should always be an aspiration, if not an inspiration.

Last but not least, I wish to thank all the ‘families’ who have surrounded me during the restless but amazingly enriching past years of travel: my Danish family (Helle, Anders, Albert, Jakob and Sille, Camilla, Marie S., Ole and Marie, Tia, Sune, Ehab, Lise, Charlotte, Michael and the IMS folks), my American family (Margo and Anthony, Alia, Hazami Hannah, Marwan, Nour, Omar, Lisa and Don, Osama and Maha, Khalil), my Italian family (my family of origin, my newly acquired academic family at John Cabot University in Rome, and all my friends, in particular Paola, Jonida, Marco S., Sara, Veronica, Gianluca C., Gianluca T., Alessia, Andrea, Laura, Kay, Francesca C., Maria G., Fouad, the ‘Immagine Sparita’ team, Chiara, and Clarita). Something which I cannot just express with a ‘thank you’ goes to Lorenzo, for loving me as I am. Without him, I could have never managed to sit down and write, and also, occasionally, smile, during the toughest days of the ongoing tragedy in Syria.

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of Mariapia Meloni, Bassel Safadi and Massimo Fichera, who have all left too early, too soon after the ‘Spring’.

To the energy and passion of 2011. Nothing is lost, everything is transformed.

A Note on Transliteration

The transliteration method used in this study aims at combining accuracy with simplicity for those who have no knowledge of Arabic. It is primarily based on the system adopted by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), except for those Arabic names that have widely recognized Anglicized variants, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser. Diacritical marks for long vowels and emphatic consonants have been omitted. Names of the people featured in this book (directors, actors, activists, etc.) appear according to the conventional way they present themselves, and not following the IJMES rules. The terrorist organization ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ is referred to using its Arabic acronym in its Anglicized variant: ‘Daesh’.

I wish to thank my friend Gennaro Gervasio from Università Roma Tre for his precious help in revising the Arabic transliteration.

Glossary

ana: I, first person pronoun

Daesh: Arabic acronym for ‘al-Dawla al-islamiyya fi-’l-Iraq wal-Sham’ (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL or ISIS)

fida‘yyin (pl.): translated as ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘guerrilla combatants’, the term is widely used in the context of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation

fitna: Quranic word evoking sectarian divisions

hara: neighbourhood

hurriyya: freedom

iftar: the first meal that breaks the fast after sunset during the Islamic month of Ramadan

karama: dignity

mujahid (sing.) mujahidun/mujahidin (pl.): fighter(s); widely used by terrorist groups such as Daesh to refer to their militants

mukhabarat: the Arabic term for ‘intelligence agency’ often has a negative connotation, hinting at a secret police that has absolute power and exercises arbitrary control over the life of citizens, regardless of the rule of law

musalsal (sing.) musalsalat (pl.): a TV series usually developed in 30 episodes of 30–45 minutes each

al-Qasr: the Palace, referring to Bashar al-Asad and his inner circle of seemingly reform-minded collaborators

shabbiha: an informal pro-regime militia made up of Alawites

sulta (sing.) sultat (pl.): power; here used mostly in its plural form to refer to the system of multiple, loosely connected powers that contribute to shaping Syria’s regime

tanfis: literally ‘letting off steam’, referring here to a technique employed since Hafiz al-Asad’s times, whereby seemingly progressive media and oppositional cultural production are used as tools for venting and conveying frustrations that might otherwise find a political expression

tanwir (noun) tanwiri (adj.): a process of enlightenment inspiring a modernist ideology of progress and development through mass education and edifying media products

al-watan: the nation, the homeland

wilayat (pl.): administrative provinces, here referring to the first-level administrative divisions through which Daesh is organized both on the ground and in its media units

Introduction

In Syria, every day, YouTubers film then die. Others kill then film. (Osama Mohammed, co-director of Ma‘a al-fidda [‘Silvered Water: Syria’s Self-Portrait’], 2014)

Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic sense … Never before has a period known so little about itself. (Kracauer 2005: 58)

The shot opens with heavy shootings. We see buildings burning in the distance, smoke rising. More shootings, an ambulance siren, a live-chat message notification are all heard in the background. The camera moves slowly towards a group of armed men dressed in black, probably police or security forces. The male voice behind the camera screams ‘peaceful, peaceful’, while the sound of the shootings gets closer. ‘No, no, I am peaceful, peaceful’, the voice insists. More shootings. The camera shakes, yet the man does not leave or stop filming. ‘The world must see!’, he shouts. We hear another male voice in the background, worried, probably trying to get the man behind the camera out of there: ‘Iyad, Iyad!’ The man filming screams even louder, addressing the armed men: ‘Shoot at me, shoot at me! The world must see what is happening.’

This video was allegedly shot in Daraa, a city in southwestern Syria where a popular anti-regime uprising sparked in March 2011.1 The anonymous filmer – Iyad? – embraces the camera to document the violence that unknown armed men are likely to inflict on his body, and no doubt on other disarmed bodies too. Yet the invisible man behind the camera would not move – like thousands of other anonymous citizens who have silently, fiercely, defiantly filmed the Syrian uprising. They would stand still, hiding behind the camera, shooting while being shot at, like in Iyad’s video.

In March 2011 Syrian protesters found themselves in this unprecedented situation of being simultaneously victims and heroes. Victims, as they faced repression with bare hands, at the mercy of the armed killers’ absolute will; heroes, as they bravely turned into first-person narrators of their own history, regaining agency through the self-documentation of the events they participated in, even when they took a violent, dangerous form. A defiant, extreme act of filming regardless, that pushed us as spectators to wonder why these anonymous filmers didn’t throw their cameras on the floor and run away when facing death in the shape of a sniper, a militia man, or a police officer. Such a gesture should not be dismissed as the psychotic, narcissistic behaviour of few isolated individuals, but rather understood as a collective endeavour with a large-scale dimension.

The act of filming has become so inherently connected to Syria’s post-2011 everyday life that it was appropriated by a wide spectrum of the country’s citizenry, including its violent components. Security agents, armed groups, torturers, jihadis, all indifferently turned into image-makers, employing the camera to live-document their brutal acts, while also producing the most extreme and obscene forms of violence for the sake of the camera. Every day, everyone films and is filmed in Syria, a country where the visual form has been turned into a device to perform violence, and the quintessential tool to resist it.

The parallel, dramatically intertwined movements of shooting and being shot at, of filming and killing, of filming to kill and killing to film, lie at the core of this book. Shooting while being shot at is the gesture of capturing life events on camera while dying live in front of it and for the sake of it, so as to grant an extension to existence in the immortal form of witnessing and crystalizing the self in the historical document. Meanwhile, it is also the fascination for violence, the pursuit of an ideal visual form for its enactment on the ground. For shooting as in killing shares with shooting as in filming a concern for the aesthetic performance, a preoccupation with the (re)presentation of the act, a compulsive attraction to any visual format offering visibility to the violence, whether in the spontaneous form of shaky pixels generated in moments of anxiety and fear – like in Iyad’s video – or in the orchestrated, cruel beauty of a static, surveillance-like shot properly fixed before the enactment of torture. Yet when filming disappears into everything and into the everydayness, becoming just another life activity among others, framing the question of the image around the aesthetic dichotomy between revolutionary, low-resolution, seemingly naive pixels and the self-declared objective form of ‘caught-on-camera’ torture videos risks diverting attention from the material conditions that allow these visual media to emerge, and from the power struggles they conceal.

Let us not be distracted, entrapped, mesmerized by the ‘pixelated revolution’2 or by the ‘cinema of the murderer’.3 For as Ernst Jünger noticed already in the aftermath of the First World War, the production of the visual in the context of warfare relates much more to labour than to a mere narration or aesthetic representation.4 This is apparent, more than ever, in post-2011 Syria, where the parallel dynamics of shooting and being shot at, of filming and killing, of making images to preserve life and destroying life for the sake of the image, have invaded the domain of the ordinary and been converted into mundane forms of digital labour on networked communications technologies. The latter have added an unprecedented layer of complexity to the production of the visual and the violent in Syria, as the variety of immaterial labour – paid, unpaid, underpaid, volunteer – involved in generating, assembling and distributing content has fused with the plethora of material subjects – armed and peaceful, pro- and anti-regime, local, regional and international – engaged in the fight on the ground.

Never before in history have these dynamics of violence and visibility been so dramatically entangled, jointly captured and domesticated in the form of routine labour on the networks. Never before have forms of military conduct and forms of visual (re)presentation been equally rendered visible, shareable and ‘likeable’ for the sake of global circulation and consumption. Never before has the seemingly endless multiplication of media and its makers in the networked environment matched so astonishingly with the explosion and consequent disruption of subjects and meanings on the ground: a hyper-fragmentation of digital ‘me’ versions of national belonging and identity that mixes up and confounds with the raw materiality of the armed conflict.

To be sure, reflecting on the material conditions in which visual media are generated as commodities in a time of conflict, and on the continuity between technologies of (re)presentation and mass mediation and the military apparatus of violence, is not new to the scholarship. Susan Sontag speculated on the inner violence concealed in the act of visual reproduction – conceived as an interference, an invasion – in the context of the Vietnam war.5 Discussing the conflict in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, Thomas Keenan has hinted at the dimension of danger brought to surface by the sheer amount of visual production that emerged, generating confusion and a loss of authority, principles and meaning, causing inaction, indifference and indetermination as a result of ‘the war of live death’.6 In 1991, the Gulf War was so quintessentially mediated that it is hard for anyone to remember anything other than a pixelated screen with green missiles falling from the sky and hitting invisible targets, as in a video-game simulation – which led Baudrillard to state provocatively that the war never took place.7 Conversely, the 2003 invasion of Iraq carried the highest degree of visuality, material-izing the alleged triumph of the neo-colonial power in the iconic image of a US marine covering Saddam Hussein’s statue with the American flag, or in the (in)famous imperial spectacles offered by the Abu Ghraib pictures, where orientalized bodies were co-opted into the rawest and most organic forms of violence, including sodomy and sexual abuse.8

Yet those conflicts – and the scholarly reflections they inspired – all lacked a networked dimension, since the participatory aspect9 became a wide-scale popular feature of communications technologies only post-2003, after social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had been launched. In contrast, the non-violent Syrian uprising that turned into an armed conflict was born digital and networked from the very moment an unarmed activist used a smartphone camera to shoot while an armed man raised his gun to shoot at him. Suddenly, the performance of violence had become visible, shareable, reproducible, remixable, likeable.

This book maintains that is no longer possible to approach the question of image-making (shooting) or the question of violence (being shot at) in Syria – and more generally in contemporary warfare – without taking into consideration the technological and human infrastructure of the networked environment, where the ‘visuality’10 of the conflict gets produced and reproduced as labour. Syria is the first fully developed networked battleground in which the technological infrastructure supporting practices of uploading, sharing and remixing, together with the human network of individuals engaged in those practices, have become dramatically implicated in the production and reproduction of violence. The entanglement of visual regimes of representation and modes of media production with warfare and modes of destruction has exploited and prospered from the participatory dimension of networked communications technologies. The networks have granted the utmost visibility and shareability to the most extreme violence, finally merging the physical annihilation of places with their endless online regeneration, producing a sort of onlife which gets renewed every time content is manipulated, re-uploaded, re-posted and shared, as meanings are combined and recombined in different, clashing versions.

I call this process ‘expansion’.11 Expansion brings to the surface the dark side of peer-production, sharing economies, remixing and participation, suggesting that these networked practices, as well as enabling creativity and self-empowerment, can also multiply terror and fear. Expansion hints at the participatory dimension of violence that thrives on networked subjects who are both the anonymous, grassroots users celebrated by cultural convergence and remix cultures,12 and the political and armed subjectivities active in the conflict – each probably overlapping with the other. The plethora of actors, local and international, military and civilian, peaceful and armed, involved in producing the conflict on the ground, is also the social workforce engaged (and exploited) in its reproduction on the networks, with military factions ultimately rendered into multiple forms of digital labour, and vice versa.

The explosion of personalized ‘me’ media, enabled by platforms deemed quintessentially progressive by techno-utopias and digital democracy frameworks, has been matched by an explosion of violence and the expansion of warfare. Everybody seems to claim a right to create and re-manipulate on the networks, as much as the freedom to conquer, occupy and destroy on the ground. Everybody is an active maker, an empowered subject, at the level of both creation and destruction, contributing to reproducing that very destruction for the sake of networked circulation. If it’s dead, it spreads – so Syria’s networked environment seems to tragically suggest, in a bitter remix of Henry Jenkins’ famous motto.13

The counter-movement to this process of expansion, yet directly following from it, is the fragmentation of media – and, in parallel, of civil society. The latter has been even more disruptive in Syria as it emerged from a context where, for decades, the authoritarian power had carefully crafted messages aimed at providing citizens with a shared idea of national identity and belonging. At the core of this mediated process of nation-building was the popular form of musalsalat (TV series), used since Bashar al-Asad’s seizure of power – by elite cultural producers employing what I call ‘the whisper strategy’14 – to engineer seemingly reformist content directed at educating the public on issues of gender, religion, political rights and citizenship. Networked communications technologies have contributed to disrupting and undoing these concepts constructed through TV drama, dispersing the elite-sanctioned idea of nationhood into a plethora of ‘me’ versions of the country’s identity and future which parallels, at a media level, the clashing (armed) subjectivities active in the making of conflict. However phony the once-shared idea of the nation was, it no longer exists in Syria, neither in the media nor on the ground.

As media production accelerates – with more remixes, more sharing platforms, and the accumulation of layers in a permanent mode of circulation – so does war also accelerate and degenerate, involving more actors and interests at local, regional and global levels, expanding in time and space with no end apparently in sight. The mediated mimics the military, and vice versa. In the networked environment, media messages circulate rather than communicate, embracing a status of ‘constant emulsion’:15 a permanent, entropic, circular movement that dramatically mirrors the ceaseless bombings, sieges, chemical attacks and humanitarian crises that have unfolded in Syria since 2011. We are far from the abstract media spectacles offered to international publics during the 1991 Gulf conflict: the ‘perfect’