Posted in

The First Alt-War: Online Fantasy vs. Reality in the Iran Campaign

While commentators trade in familiar fears, events on the ground point to a far more decisive outcome than the online debate suggests.

A commentator in (mirabile dictu) The Washington Post made an excellent point about how the war in Iran is being understood. “We are living through the first alt-war,” the Tel Aviv University scholar Jen Brick Murtazashvili wrote. On the one hand, we have the war as it is fought online. On the other, we have the war as it is fought in reality, on the ground. The two “have diverged so completely,” Murtazashvili noted, “that they might as well be happening on different planets. It’s not that people lack information; it’s more that they are constructing an entirely different alternate reality—one that confirms what they already believe.”

The white liberal woman’s war

Share