More missiles, memes, and the new resistance

Bangkok Post

18-07-2025

There was a time, not so long ago, when Walter Cronkite's sombre baritone could turn battlefield dispatches into moments of collective reckoning. Even the first "television war" of 1991, piped in grainy bursts from Baghdad, felt slow enough for shock to sink in. These days, the missiles that streak above Natanz or Esfahan arrive on TikTok between latte art tutorials and kittens sliding off sofas. The effect is less shock-and-awe, more scroll-and-shrug.
Last month's US strikes on Iran's nuclear bunkers should have rattled nerves. Instead, much of Gen Z greeted the spectacle with an arched eyebrow and a sardonic playlist. One clip looped "Another One Bites the Dust" over orange fireballs; another labelled the bombardment "Just another Tuesday" before pivoting to a dance challenge. Outrage, it seems, has gone the way of MySpace.
Call it apathy if you like -- I'd call it adaptation. This generation has been weaned on crisis: melting ice caps, school lockdown drills, pandemic graphs, brittle democracies. Catastrophe is no longer an interruption; it is the operating system. So when Washington crossed a carefully drawn red line in Iran, young viewers simply filed the incident alongside all the other background errors in the global code.
Older eyes see dangerous detachment. Algorithms deliver bite-sized adrenaline jolts until empathy wears thin, like a favourite song replayed to death. Psychologists dub it "compassion fatigue". I prefer "algorithmic anaesthesia".
Once, war arrived wrapped in solemn headlines; now it comes as jump-cut carnage set to distorted pop. Memes replace manifestos. Irony becomes armour. And if that feels like cheapening tragedy, we might ask who devalued it first. Two decades of "surgical strikes" and euphemisms -- collateral damage, regime change -- have taught the young the true market price of outrage, and it's been heavily discounted.
That armour can grow into apathy. But writing off TikTok cynicism as nihilism overlooks its rational core. This cohort grew up watching leaders tweet condolence emojis at dawn and forget them by dusk. They saw hashtags blaze, then fade before any law could change. For them, politics is churn: ritual sorrow followed by bipartisan amnesia.
If millennials flirted with ironic distance, Gen Z has said its vows. Placards become punch lines; rage becomes reaction videos. What emerges is a minimalist ethic: survive, stay sane, meme through the mayhem. Yet the story doesn't end there. Behind the screen, young people patch together decentralised lifelines -- raising bail on Twitch and routing donations faster than governments draft statements. They may skip street marches, but their silent networks can do more in an hour than a million retweets.
Perhaps, though, the mask of indifference hides a new emotional literacy -- a refusal to perform outrage on cue for institutions that have squandered trust. Their muted feed is a verdict: fix the system first, then we'll talk.
Detachment becomes a tactic. In an age when dissent is data-mined and sold back as targeted ads, withholding emotion is a small act of sabotage. Staying unreadable, even flippant, may be the last form of resistance that big tech cannot monetise.
And there is tenderness, too. Absurd memes in private chats morph into coping hymns; crowdfunding links outpace disaster diplomacy; gallows jokes cushion fragile psyches while redistributing small but vital resources. These micro-gestures, mostly invisible to legacy media, redraw the map of activism.
So, what do we older scribes advise? Chant louder? Feel harder? They tried that. The burden now rests with those in charge. If America's foreign policy insists on spectacle, it must also reckon with the quiet revolution growing in its shadow -- a generation that has stopped listening and started building elsewhere. Offer something tangible -- climate action, student-debt relief, gun-safety laws -- and watch sarcasm melt into attention. Until then, ballistic arcs will glide past on a timeline sound-tracked by sardonic remixes.
It is fashionable to scold the young for laughing at the apocalypse, yet gallows humour has long been history's pressure valve. Wilfred Owen once wrote of "a comedy of manners in hell". Today's TikTok jokes carry the same DNA -- lifeboats of wit in a sea of fire.
Missiles may fall faster than a feed can refresh, but somewhere between punchlines, a pulse still beats. If that rhythm turns into action, it could rattle the corridors of power more than any viral video -- but only if those in power are willing to listen before the scroll moves on, indefinitely.
Imran Khalid is a columnist on international affairs based in Karachi, Pakistan. He has been a regular contributor to publications such as 'Newsweek', 'The Hill', 'Nikkei Asia', 'The South China Morning Post' and Foreign Policy in Focus.