IT has been a month since the US and its Zionist outpost started dropping bombs on Iran. The imperial war machine has since killed thousands of Iranians and devastated one of the world’s oldest civilisations. Yet Iran still wages its own air war against the Gulf banana republics and Israel.
Tehran’s defiance has the backing of the vast majority of the world’s people. It may sustain an asymmetrical conflict with the biggest military force in history for the foreseeable future, especially if it retains control over the Strait of Hormuz. But whatever the outcome, this war confirms that we are hurtling fast towards an increasingly digitalised and dystopic abyss.
The very first bombs dropped by the US on Iran, which killed almost 200 schoolchildren in the south of the country, included those deployed through an AI system that integrated Anthropic’s Claude chatbot and Palantir’s Maven tool. We now know that the Trump administration appropriated the use of these AI products in contravention of US copyright and other domestic laws.
Of course, ‘law’ has basically become a meaningless word at the mercy of the US, Zionist, and many other military establishments all over the world. But outrage aside, many of us are unwittingly becoming party to the digitalisation of war, especially on ubiquitous social media platforms.
Take, for example, what happened in the subcontinent during the brief military conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025. That exchange between India and Pakistan was also largely an air war featuring the contrasting fortunes of both countries’ foreign-made fighter jets. But man-less surveillance drones sent deep into opposing territory also played a big role, generating mass frenzy about attacks on civilian populations.
We are hurtling fast towards an increasingly dystopic abyss.
TV media upped the ante further, and most prominent of all were the hundreds of millions of ordinary people effectively acting as state propagandists on social media. Given India’s huge size advantage, the echo chambers on that side of the border were far bigger, but the effect across the nation-state divide was similar.
More recently, the residents of the twin cities of Islamabad-Rawalpindi heard a loud bang, which was later confirmed to be the shooting down of a drone sent from across the Afghan border.
The news of its interception served to ratchet up already heightened anti-Afghan sentiment — prompting further policing of Afghan refugees in the country.
Today, the physical war on Iran is paralleled by all sorts of information manipulations playing out in more or less confusing ways. While the Gulf kingdoms are clearly aligned against Iran, there is also reason to believe that Tel Aviv has tried to deepen the divide between Tehran and Gulf capitals to serve its own endless war-making objectives. On the other hand, many well-meaning people in Pakistan and beyond continue to insist on projecting the idea a ‘Muslim ummah’ that doesn’t actually exist in practice, therefore inadvertently providing more fodder for narratives in the ‘clash of civilisations’ mould that ultimately benefits Trump, Netanyahu and even strongmen in our own countries.
The role of social media in and around the Palestinian genocide is also worth noting here; while pro-Palestinian voices in the digital space did all they could to expose war crimes and facilitate on-ground mobilisation after Oct 7, 2023, algorithmic manipulations on platforms owned by Zionist supporters — such as Elon Musk’s X — ensured that real and fake accounts that toed a pro-Israel line dominated the information war.
The larger point, however, is that one doesn’t have to be a white or Zionist supremacist to fall prey to the wider logics of digitalisation, including the way in which it is promoting the glorification of war. We already live in an age where exceptionally young children play gory video games where the objective is to shoot to kill. Drone warfare is eerily similar to a video game, with someone sitting far away operating a joystick or directing an AI chatbot to do target practice on real people. In an age of deepfakes and extreme emotive triggers on social media platforms, the conflation of real and virtual war games is a very real danger.
There are many wars beyond our own echo chambers in which AI, drones and other cutting-edge digital technology are increasingly being mobilised to wreak havoc against long-suffering populations. Think the Darfur region of western Sudan or Yemen. Or our own war-ravaged peripheries. If we are willing and able to see through the fog of digitalised war in Iran, then we have a responsibility to do so everywhere.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, March 27th, 2026
