Last fall, I wrote an article about the then-escalating tensions between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. In that piece, I critiqued the “both sides are equally bad!” stance that many centrist liberals tended to align themselves with at the time. Four months have passed since then, and we’ve reached what seems to be the entropic endstate of genocidal conflict in the online era: judges watching TikToks at The International Court of Justice.

In a spur of morbid curiosity, I sought out these online videos, and what I discovered can only be described as soul-rotting horror: grainy footage of IDF soldiers ogling the left-behind underwear of Palestinian women. Shaky video of a Palestinian hospital without electricity. Clips of supply trucks being set aflame; and all the while, American pop music blares discordantly in the background, and advertisements pop in and out of frame. The gag-inducing disgust I felt is, to my estimation, the inexorable cost of social media — and perhaps the internet as a whole. This is the pound of flesh that we *all* collectively pay. But what have we received in return? 

Well, it’s hard to say. I’m not sure if the society-destroying capacity of the social internet is worth any of this, but think; if we relied solely on traditional American news for information on the Palestinian genocide, we would know *nothing*. In fact, we’d know less than nothing; we’d walk away from every state-sanctioned news broadcast assured that our allies are fighting off an inhuman horde, and that all is right in the world. This is not to say that non-mainstream journalism is impossible without the internet, but the paradigm has clearly shifted; with the power of online communication, the voices of the Palestinians (and all oppressed peoples, for that matter) cannot be drowned out. The oppressed may now speak freely [for themselves] on the international stage; a fact that the hyperonline generation has taken notice of. 

The oppressor class, too, has noticed. Throughout late autumn last year, conscious efforts were made by the Israeli government to shut down internet access in Gaza. This act itself was (and is) an omen for times to come; it is a reactionary attempt to stanch the flow of online information coming from suffering Palestinians, and to curb the growing pressure for external investigation and demands for a ceasefire. Fortunately, these efforts are limited by the unfamiliarity of the older generation (which, in this case, are those in power) with the novel internet, giving the youth the benefit of being a few steps ahead by birthright. For instance, this particular blackout effort was partially curtailed by an organized eSIM distribution campaign (eSIMS are digital keys that enable Palestinians to bypass internet blackouts) that went viral online. The capability to use the internet as a tool of liberative activism has entered collective Western online consciousness; a reality that, by its very essence, would be unthinkable in the pre-internet/social media world, and, luckily, has not yet been “figured out” by those in power, which itself can be observed in the collective failure of the West to control the narrative, or, in simpler terms, counter-propagandize. The decentralized nature of this era of online social movement, chaotic and impotent as it may be, does imbibe us with some perks.

 Further, my own awareness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been largely shaped by “being online”. Without independent journalism from the internet, I would be wholly blind to all facets of injustice occurring in Palestine. And yet, the same internet that has created a narrative of humanization for the Palestinian people simultaneously emboldens the IDF soldiers to post their proud TikTok videos in the first place. What is to be gleaned from this? 

 I don’t know. The internet defies simple metaphors — it is amorphous, haunting, and all-encompassing; it is a reflective ghost that possesses us all. It’s tarantism of the soul. A prescient parable among the non-online is simply: “The internet brings out the worst in people”. This statement is observably true, though its rhetorical purpose is typically as a condemnation of the internet as a whole. I disagree with this conclusion. What if this singular, corrosive trait has taught us something new? What if, through showing us the worst tendencies of the oppressor, it has torn away the mask of normality, and illuminated the nightmarish face of colonialist genocide in its full, outre horror?