( Middle East Monitor ) – In an age where our phones glow with the endless stream of breaking news, short videos, and curated feeds, genocide itself has been transformed into consumable content. We live not simply in an era of wars but in what might be called the Netflix era of war, where livestreamed destruction from Gaza, Sudan, and Congo is not only witnessed but folded seamlessly into a global economy of images. Bombed hospitals, starving children, razed neighbourhoods, the visual proof of atrocity circulates instantly, yet instead of piercing the conscience of the world, it is flattened into “scroll culture,” where the endless feed ensures that everything, no matter how catastrophic, competes for the same fleeting seconds of attention as celebrity gossip, football highlights, or the launch of a new iPhone. Violence becomes entertainment, atrocity becomes trend, and genocide becomes spectacle.
The Palestinian thinker Ghassan Hage once noted that in the global order, some lives are lived in what he called “existential waiting,” suspended between recognition and erasure, visible enough to be known but not valued enough to provoke transformation. This framing resonates powerfully with the Palestinian condition, but also extends to those in Darfur, Khartoum, or Goma. Their deaths are not hidden, they are everywhere, yet they are presented in such abundance and repetition that they risk dissolving into background noise. The camera phone, the live feed, the viral clip: each should serve as evidence of horror, but instead they become pieces of content, watched, liked, and scrolled past, almost as if war itself had been drafted into the genre of bingeable series.
To call this the Netflix era of war is not to trivialize its stakes but to recognize the profound mutation of how violence is mediated. Once, the atrocity photograph, like the naked girl fleeing napalm in Vietnam, could ignite protest across continents. Today, there are hundreds of such images every hour. They do not mobilize the public; they anesthetize it. Susan Sontag, writing on the pain of others, warned that photographs can awaken compassion but also produce fatigue. The digital platforms of our time accelerate this fatigue into a permanent condition: what begins as outrage slips into numbness, and numbness into a normal state of affairs.
This new condition of witnessing genocide raises a deep moral paradox. The very visibility of violence, the instant accessibility of images from Gaza’s rubble or Darfur’s displacement camps, ought to provoke action. But instead, the machinery of global platforms turns visibility into consumption, and consumption into passivity. What was once a demand to “bear witness” has been recoded as a habit of “watching.” The global audience watches, but does not respond. The moral weight of witnessing has been hollowed out by the addictive compulsion of scrolling.
One must ask: why is it that livestreamed genocide, visible to millions in real time, has failed to generate the collective outrage that previous generations of political violence sometimes did? Part of the answer lies in the sheer saturation of violence in the digital age. Every day presents multiple crises: Gaza’s siege, Sudan’s civil collapse, Congo’s forgotten wars, alongside Ukraine, Myanmar, Yemen. Each demands attention, and yet attention is finite. The platforms force them into competition, producing a hierarchy of suffering. Some atrocities become viral, others remain invisible. And even those that trend are quickly displaced by the next trending crisis, the next viral clip.
But the problem runs deeper than fatigue. The Netflix era of war produces not just indifference but a dangerous sense of spectatorship, where atrocity is encountered as “content” rather than as a call to conscience. Viewers are not asked to intervene, only to watch, react, maybe repost. Violence becomes something to “engage” with online, not to resist politically. This shift is subtle but devastating. It transforms citizens into audiences, moral actors into consumers. As Achille Mbembe has argued in Necropolitics, modern power is about the management of death, who may live, who may die, and how their deaths are staged. In our moment, the staging of death is not only the task of states but of platforms. The sovereign right to kill is now entangled with the algorithmic logic of what will be seen, what will be amplified, what will trend.
Consider Gaza, where children’s bodies pulled from rubble circulate within minutes on Instagram or TikTok. These images are undeniable evidence of Israeli brutality, yet they circulate without changing the structures of impunity that sustain the violence. Israel counts on this. It knows that in the era of endless content, visibility does not equal accountability. The very livestreaming of war functions as a shield: as long as atrocities are seen as part of the “flow” of global media, they are unlikely to provoke sustained outrage that could shift power. The public is disoriented by excess information, incapable of distinguishing one massacre from the next.
And yet, to call this merely indifference would be too easy. There is also complicity. To watch genocide as content is to participate, however unwillingly, in the spectacle of domination. The scrolling subject is not outside the structure of power but woven into it: every click, every view, every repost becomes part of a data economy that thrives on outrage without ever allowing it to mature into action. This is what makes our condition so insidious. We are not passive witnesses; we are active consumers of atrocity. The suffering of others sustains the circuits of attention on which the platforms profit.
There are those who argue that visibility, even as content, still matters, that without these livestreamed images, atrocities would be denied altogether. They point out that Palestinians under siege, or Sudanese civilians under fire, often insist on documenting their own devastation, not because they believe it will save them, but because to remain unseen is to be erased entirely. This is a powerful counterpoint, and it cannot be dismissed. Indeed, the act of recording is itself a form of resistance, a refusal to vanish silently. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once wrote that to narrate one’s death is to defy annihilation. In this sense, the videos from Gaza are both testimony and rebellion.
But the question remains: does testimony that circulates as content retain its force, or does it risk being dissolved into the ocean of images where atrocity competes with distraction? The answer may depend on whether audiences remain content with watching, or whether they can transform watching into acting. Here lies the unfinished task: to reclaim the images of genocide from the logics of entertainment and reinvest them with political urgency.
The deeper issue is not just what is seen, but how it is framed. The Netflix era of war treats every clip as equal, flattened into the same aesthetic of the feed. It is this flattening that robs atrocity of its singular gravity. To undo this, we must resist the culture of scrolling itself. We must learn again to dwell with an image, to let it pierce rather than glide, to allow horror to move us into solidarity rather than distraction. This is not a nostalgic call to return to some mythical past where conscience was intact, but a recognition that the digital infrastructures of our time are designed precisely to fragment, disperse, and neutralize moral energy. To resist genocide in this era requires resisting the platforms that turn it into spectacle.
Ghassan Hage reminds us that the real struggle is not simply over land or sovereignty but over “the capacity to imagine otherwise.” If genocide as spectacle teaches us to imagine violence as inevitable and resistance as futile, then the counter-task is to insist on other imaginations: of solidarity that cannot be scrolled past, of collective action that does not fade with the next viral trend, of moral conscience that cannot be absorbed into content. This requires not only individual will but the building of new infrastructures of attention, where atrocity is not watched but confronted, where testimony does not vanish into feeds but becomes the basis of mobilization.
The Netflix era of war is thus a challenge to our moral imagination. It reveals that the greatest danger today is not only the bombs or bullets but the quiet anesthesia of watching. Genocide unfolds before our eyes, but unless we resist the transformation of horror into entertainment, we risk becoming spectators of our own moral collapse. The choice is stark: either to scroll past, or to allow the images to wound us into responsibility. To be human in this era is no longer simply to bear witness. It is to refuse to let witnessing be reduced to watching.
Edward Said (from “Permission to Narrate”):
“Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them. To withhold the right to narrate is to annihilate a people twice—first in reality, and then in memory.”
References:
Hage, G. (2009). Waiting. Melbourne University Publishing.
Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Duke University Press. (Original work published 2003)
Said, E. W. (1984). Permission to narrate. Journal of Palestine Studies, 13(3), 27–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/2536688
Sontag, S. (2003). Regarding the pain of others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Darwish, M. (2007). The butterfly’s burden (F. Joudah, Trans.). Copper Canyon Press.
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