From climate anxiety to nuclear dread — how global politics and media algorithms are quietly rewriting the fears that define our age
Simon Says…from this moment on, start being afraid of nuclear war and slowly but surely, start developing yet another anxiety that will be generously fed to your little grey cells by the algorithm of your devices “12 hours of your awake time”.
And just like that, like in a jukebox, an old vinyl record with tunes that constantly warn about the environmental apocalypse, listened to, even before, but intensively from the end of the 80s to practically yesterday, when the “US too” decided to “dust” their nuclear weapons following the “brushing up” and testing of various mass destruction weapons from “other countries”, is being replaced by another digital vinyl record helping us develop the “FONW” – Fear of nuclear war.
To spice it all up, the audience is, strangely enough in this very moment when, after 33 years, the US military starts testing nuclear weapons again and after US President Donald Trump gave that order to the Pentagon because of, as he said, “testing programs of other countries” – also served with movies like “A House of Dynamite,” which is now streaming on Netflix, depicting a situation “when a single, unattributed missile is launched at the United States, a race begins to determine who is responsible and how to respond.”
Last night, in a TV show “The Eye” on the Radio Television of Serbia, a university professor, Vladimir Ajzenhamer, PhD Professor (Associate) – Head of Department of Strategic and Defence Studies at the University of Belgrade – Faculty of Security Studies, spoke about the above mentioned movie and about his Gen Z students who, when asked if they were afraid of nuclear war unison answered no, while at the same time, almost all were terrified of the environmental catastrophe.
It is just a matter of time until Netflix, and the ” juice of the algorithms” from other conventional or digital media platforms, “make sure” that one fear and anxiety is replaced by another.
The seed of a new fear is planted, the message is conveyed but it reaches the people much faster compared with the ancient times when leaders conveyed important message to people by sending a drummer to the main square in a village and employing so called ‘repeaters’ – men who stood on boxes and repeated the message through the crowd making for a slow ripple of a speech as the sentences reached the edge of the crowd.
In the end, let me remind you of the movie “The Day After,” a 1983 American television film directed by Nicholas Meyer. The war film postulates a fictional conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact over Germany that rapidly escalates into a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 100 million people, in nearly 39 million households, watched the film when it first aired on November 20, 1983, on the ABC television network. President Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that the 1983 film The Day After “left me greatly depressed” and that it changed his mind on the policy on nuclear war.
One more movie master piece might be something to watch during the holiday weekend – namely a movie from the late 50s, called “On the Beach”, an American apocalyptic science fiction drama film, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins. Produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, the movie is based on Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel of the same title, depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war.
An elementary school pupil’s conclusion:
Conveying the message using modern media is much faster nowadays, and we are now much more informed, hence we should be thankful that we can … develop our fears faster.
