by The Fauxy Reports That Indian Gen Z Is Tired Of The War And Wants A Different War, Which Is Either Deeply Cynical Or Profoundly Humanist Depending On Your Reading
NEW DELHI / MUMBAI – Indian satirical site The Fauxy reports that Gen Z has begun protesting the Iran-Israel-US war, “saying they are bored now and are demanding to see something new.” The report is satire. The satire is about the specific relationship between a generation that has grown up with news as a content format and a geopolitical crisis that has, in its fourth week, lost the narrative freshness that characterised its first week. Whether “I am bored of this war” is an anti-war position or a consumer-preference statement about conflict as content is a question that The Fauxy, admirably, does not attempt to resolve.
For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. London satirical journalism has been covering the British public’s relationship with ongoing military conflicts since at least the Boer War, and can confirm: the point at which a war becomes boring to the domestic population is both a moral failing and a political fact, and the satirist’s job is to note both simultaneously.
The News-As-Content Problem
The satire identifies a real phenomenon: in a media environment where news is experienced as content, ongoing events without narrative development lose audience share. The Iran war has been in its current phase for approximately four weeks. Four weeks is approximately three weeks past the point at which the average social media news consumer has developed a new content interest. The people cooking food on gas cylinders that have not been refilled are not bored of the war. They are very much engaged with it. The gap between the two experiences is the thing The Fauxy is actually describing.
The Oldest Anti-War Position
The oldest anti-war position, per political theorists from Erasmus onward, is not “this war is wrong” but “this war is stupid and I have better things to do”. Gen Z’s version of this position, as satirised by The Fauxy, is “this war is boring and I want to see something new.” The position has ancient roots. The meme format is new. The Indian satirists, whose accounts are being blocked while they document all of this, are keeping notes.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/ | More: The Poke
