Our Age of Terror
Capitalism's terrorism through screens and elections is devouring humanity's present and future. Collective survival will require acting entirely differently.
My parents tell me we holidayed in Ibiza one September when I was around five. I was lucky then, as I am lucky now. That hotel room forms my earliest memory of anything particularly lush. We were surrounded by plants and enjoyed a wealth of natural light—rare for a hotel. But none of this is why I remember the room. I can still picture it because a tiny television screen was perched above every bed, something I haven’t seen since.
I would have long forgotten that hotel had I not woken up on a humid morning surrounded by those screens, all blaring the same channel and program simultaneously. It was like the screens, dominated by images of New York City’s World Trade Center in flames, had enveloped reality. If not for the footage of the planes colliding with the towers, unfurling in a hypnotic loop overlaid with rapid chyrons and the CNN logo, the world may have ceased to exist. The grotesque ballet of the second plane and the twin tower played repeatedly, interspersed with the exasperated rambling of anchors ill-equipped to make sense of the spectacle of a suddenly wounded empire—one that could never be assured of immortality again.
I was too young to understand the political or psychic complexity of what happened that day. Still, the momentous dread was natural, practically innate to my yet-young humanity. I was witnessing history. French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Spirit of Terrorism that “With the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, we might even be said to have before us the absolute event.” Even at five, I could sense the weight of the imagery, the way it sucked up all the world’s attention, provoking an affective storm of grief, fragility and fear perhaps not since matched or exceeded.
That first awakening to the power of violence through images and the absolute necessity of mass media, particularly live television, to the attack’s success stayed with me as I aged. In the same work, Baudrillard argues that 9/11 was designed to destroy physical structures symbolising global capitalism under American hegemony, inverting power dynamics by turning technology, media and communications—the height of ‘Western civilisation’—against the system imposing them worldwide. He observes, “The spectacle of terrorism forces the terrorism of spectacle upon us”.
This grim imagery and its representation by the dominant ideology was never neutral. The immediate, uninterrupted decades of Western propaganda and war against the Absolute Evil of ‘Islam[ic terror]’ that followed have delivered neither ‘freedom and democracy’ nor ‘peace and security’. In addition to killing millions of people to secure imperial interests in the so-called Middle East, the ‘forever wars’ served to obscure the hidden complicity between the United States and organisations like al-Qaeda that it once sponsored. But this goes deeper than the supply of arms trumpeted by 1988’s Rambo III. As put by another French philosopher, Alain Badiou, “both Bin Laden [...] and the American superpower [...] belong to the same world—nihilistic—of money, blind power and cynical rivalry, [...] of primary resources, of total scorn for the everyday lives of people, and of the arrogance of self-certitude based on the void.”
Later, as the 24/7 television news cycle transmuted and found algorithmic amplification, infinite duplication, and, for a brief time, decentralisation in the network of all networks, the internet, we were visited by ISIS beheading videos. The screens, now more ubiquitous and, importantly, mobile—carried everywhere by everyone, in our jean pockets and palms—again morphed into a horrific spectacle. Yes, mainstream television channels still obediently broadcast these images on behalf of the terrorists, but now in a censored and explicitly exploitative form designed to extend the justification for the ‘War on Terror’ paradigm that followed 9/11. Online, though, you were liable to witness the lurid gore of the obscenely, winkingly choreographed decapitations, whether you wished to or not. They went viral.
These memories, interwoven through time, feel connected, as though part of a disturbing evolution in terror. First, there was 9/11, with al-Qaeda executing “a terrorism of the rich”, collapsing symbols of Western power and spreading fear through live broadcasts that they did not directly control but knew would follow. Then, ISIS staging atrocities acerbically designed to offend Western sensibilities for both direct and diffuse dissemination online and distribution via television networks. And now the mass Israeli ‘pager’ terror attacks in Lebanon—a new “theatre of cruelty” also designed to arouse Western chauvinism, where the devices connecting people convert the communications network into a web of casualties. Of course, I learned of it through news media, much as I had experienced 9/11: another event that seemed incomprehensible, but its sadism and logic would soon be laid bare.
Where Western governments and media once responded to 9/11 by plunging society into an existential crisis of ‘civilisation’, the very same organs cheered Israel’s innovation in terror as if it was the latest ‘plucky, disruptive’ tech company. Outlet after outlet, including liberal publications such as The Guardian, breathlessly revelled in Israel’s “audacious and carefully planned” attack, which injured or maimed at least 3000 Lebanese people, killing 42, including two children. That the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated the obvious that this attack was indiscriminate, or that former CIA director Leon Panetta—hardly a friend to Arabs—described it as “a form of terrorism” did not feature in the pornographic, pop culture-infused fawning.
The dehumanisation of Arabs is nothing new. Still, media celebration of imperial atrocities strikes one as distinct from the Gulf War and ‘War on Terror’ playbook of omission and suppression of the reality of Western barbarism. Israel surely knew that coverage of this kind would restore their image of prestige as the region’s most “sophisticated” and capable military power. It calculated that Westerners would be awed by its technical prowess and ruthless anti-Islam savagery. But they also knew that executing this attack would stoke an insidious, inexorable form of fear amongst not only the Lebanese population but anyone who dares oppose American-Israeli mastery of the region.
Baudrillard quite rightly argued that terrorism and globalism are not opposed but are, in fact, mutually constitutive. Historically, “[terrorism as we understand it today] is contemporaneous with globalisation.” As such, the pager attack can be seen as the pinnacle of both globalisation and terrorism in the extraordinary synthesis it represents. It demonstrates that Israel’s violence is no longer limited to physical occupation and direct military actions; it can take the shape of the market itself by weaponising the infrastructure of capitalism in its globalised phase. In detonating Hezbollah’s communication devices, Israel sent a message: you may be our adversaries, but you still rely on the world system we, through our alliance with the United States, command.
The screen was the medium for this broadcast of Israeli supertechnological omnipotence and the American alliance’s hegemony over capitalism. Screens, too, are where Israeli soldiers plant their orgiastic celebrations of atrocities committed against Palestinians in Gaza. The screen emerges as a common instrument across vastly different forms of terror and between supposed enemies. Why? Baudrillard observed that screens induce a kind of immersion which, in its “infinite reproduction and involution”, creates an illusion of complete experience while subtly depriving us of genuine understanding. In other words, the constant informational and emotional flows from screens overload us, creating a perpetual state of reaction that dulls our capacity for clear thought and meaningful action.
This makes the screen a world-historic tool for “incorporating the entire population as extras in a great sentimental, demagogic groundswell of participation,” precluding coordinated action by keeping people spinning in individuated affective loops. When you pick up your phone, you are inundated with artificial experiences engineered to remove you from the world for as long as possible, leaving you with a poorer understanding of your surroundings and how to impact them. If terrorism means spreading fear and hatred, manipulating people’s actions through emotion, then the modern capitalist electoral spectacle is terrorism par excellence—and screens are its deadliest weapon.
Nowhere is this as blatant as in the United States, where the 2024 Presidential election affirmed Badiou’s diagnosis of contemporary campaigns as “the contradictory entanglement” of two types of fear. For months, if not years, the American and global populations were locked into an overwhelmingly screen-based spectacle of profound negativity. And while there has been no shortage of attention on social industry monopolies since Trump’s initial 2016 campaign, his 2024 victory represents a consummation of the longstanding electoral fascist project to which social media platforms are indispensable.
In his 2021 book Capital Hates Everyone, Maurizio Lazzarato explains that “Bolsonaro and Trump have utilised all the available technologies of digital communication, but their victory doesn’t come from technology; it results from a political machine and a strategy that links a micropolitics of sad affects (frustration, hatred, envy, anxiety, fear) to the macropolitics of a new fascism that gives political consistency to the subjectivities devastated in the financialisation.” Through its unceasing emotional manipulation, the screen has become both battleground and munition, where politics, culture and individual subjects are endlessly shaped, reshaped and set against one another. In short, “the technical machine, in all its forms, is brought into the service of the strategy put in place by the neofascist social machine.”
The far-right does not benefit incidentally from algorithms gone awry. Fascists work hand in hand with the owners of virtual communications, such as Elon Musk, to pursue a deliberate political stratagem harnessing screens for emotive, discordant ends. This pays dividends in a world where affect is at least as influential as policy. As Lazzarato observes, these platforms “penetrate into the most intimate areas of everyday life, occupying subjectivities and their affects 24/7. By constantly soliciting one’s attention—giving rise to an activity as absurd as compulsively consulting one’s smartphone—they produce the apparatuses of the contemporary General Mobilization.” Today, the social industry is the apex of the screen regime, “tirelessly fabricat[ing] an information designed to affect subjectivities, circulating through billions of telephones, televisions, computers, tablets.”
In my review of The Meaning of Sarkozy, I emphasise Badiou’s argument that two conflicting fears are fundamental to the electoral process in late capitalism: the “essential fear”—the fear of privileged and crisis-stricken classes who, in the face of growing inequality and instability, feel their social position threatened—and the “derivative fear” of those uncomfortable with the violence and authoritarianism espoused by electoral fascists, but who lack a political vision for real opposition. Trump channels the essential fear, cultivating it into open hostility toward a growing list of ‘others’ making up “the enemy within”, whom he encourages the distressed classes to view as the source of their insecurity. The derivative fear is exemplified in the liberalism of the Democratic Party, which non-coincidentally now chiefly represents educated, higher income and mostly white layers of urban America.
In running Kamala Harris as a supposed foil to Trump, the Democrats relied solely on derivative fear—anxiety among liberals about Trump’s agenda of prosecuting essential fear—without a commitment to systemic change. The Democrats, as Badiou suggests of the “moderate profiteers” in capitalist democracies, masked the chronic inequality and violence underpinning their policies with platitudes of opportunity and inclusivity while swinging toward reproducing Trumpism in all but name. The Harris campaign and the Biden administration from which it was drawn bowed to Trumpism by codifying and extending rabid Trumpist policies, including intensified border torture and war-baiting with China, while promising to prolong the intolerable status quo of neoliberal economics and retreating from even feigned notions of climate and social justice.
Any assessment must conclude, therefore, that Trumpism, much like Badiou’s analysis of French Le Penism, represents only “the extreme end of the parliamentary system, and this is precisely why he brings shame on the ‘democratic’ voters.” Trump, like Le Pen, is not rejected by liberals because they oppose the evil he represents in a principled fashion but because his garishness around racial and gendered violence exposes the “hideous spectacle of what one is oneself, but taken to its extreme.” Harris and Democrats perform outrage against Trump’s hate, obscuring the reality that they too are enemies of migrants, the working poor and racially oppressed—and of any radical change.
This mutual commitment to maintaining capitalism in all its barbarity is nowhere more evident than in U.S. foreign policy, where the Democrats’ opposition to Trumpism unravels entirely. Beneath the rhetoric of defending democracy and human rights lies a consistent, ruthless support for an imperial policy that the world has watched openly obliterate the lives of Palestinians. The now multiyear genocide in Palestine remains the starkest evidence of the inhuman conspiracy between both sides of capitalist politics and the inability of liberal democracy to address even the most flagrant depravities.
Across successive administrations, from Obama to Trump to Biden, U.S. policy toward Israel has remained unwaveringly supportive, even as the Zionist state carries out policies widely condemned by relevant independent authorities as ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. The unmovable and uncritical bipartisan support for Israel underscores an allegiance to American empire that transcends ostensible differences.
In fact, Biden-Harris, perhaps more than Trump, view Israel as a vital node in their geopolitical vision, integral to sustaining American domination of the Middle East and bolstering reactionary alliances in a region that only a decade ago underwent a revolutionary wave. Yet, despite Trump’s potentially flippant attitude, the policy result is indistinguishable: unlimited backing of Israeli aggression, from the exterminatory bombing of Gaza to the ethnic cleansing of its north, while Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank face further constriction.
The bipartisan genocide regime across the West reveals the limitless liberal commitment to empire, where the just Palestinian struggle is drowned in blood as an inconvenient obstacle to economic and military goals. Even as Biden’s administration heralded the “rules-based order”, it developed the policies of Trump’s first administration, maintaining its embassy in Occupied Jerusalem, ignoring settlements, shielding Israel from accountability, and advancing ties with dictatorships. For those imagining that electing Democrats would be a superior moral result, the reality of Palestine ought to puncture this delusion. The Democratic Party’s facilitation of Israeli genocide is a continuation of an implacable imperial agenda that relishes Palestinian suffering as much as the most hawkish right-wing racists do.
Liberals have decided to keep their heads down and hope no one directly questions their judgement that a genocide regime can represent a ‘lesser evil’. Their insistence on mourning the Biden-Harris administration is itself a trivialisation of genocide. If morality is to exist, there should be no apologism for a system of “choice” where the entire political spectrum upholds and funds violence of untold scale against the Palestinian people. Electoral politics is not simply ineffective but complicit, and participating necessarily rewards the same structures that produce atrocities. The issue is not party policy but liberal democracy itself, where capitalist interests and geopolitical might usurp humanity.
Palestine is an indelible reminder that genocidal violence is not anomalous to capitalism but its concomitant, accepted and ignored whenever convenient. For Palestinians who have watched each U.S. administration further entrench their displacement, the concept of our elections offering relief is not just implausible—it is absurd, and they tell us as much. We would be wise to listen.
We must be clear that Western democratic elections, “the last sacred cow of our pleasantly nihilistic countries,” are, in fact, meticulous enforcers of ideological conformity, functioning as instruments of capitalist control rather than as vehicles for change. Badiou’s militant critique and Baudrillard’s analysis of spectacle and terrorism offer an indispensable view of elections as a form of terror: not the overt violence of bombs—although this is, at the bottom, all they represent in the global context—but a subtler, pervasive force that dominates through the manipulative amplification of emotions like fear, hate and humiliation. Through cycles of mass and now social media, the screen regime enacts a spectacle of democratic terror that reinforces suffocating limits to what is thinkable and possible.
The terror generated through elections, epitomised by the battle of fears shaping the 2024 Presidential election, is neither entirely organic nor histrionic. It is consistent with the innate sense of dread I experienced as a child waking up to 9/11. Millions of ordinary people are rightly concerned about the rise of electoral fascism and hope to preserve hard-fought gains in areas such as reproductive healthcare. But how liberal forces like the Democrats groom their desperate supporters to vest the preservation of their personal safety, identity and ideals in a structure essentially hostile to progress and increasingly ripe for fascisation is uniquely perverse.
After instructing supporters for years that Trump is an existential threat to democracy and dearly-held freedoms, Democrats work to assist a “peaceful transfer of power” mere days after terming him a “fascist” dictator in waiting. That emaciated liberals meekly hand the reins to someone they made out to be the ultimate danger encapsulates perfectly that the formal collusion inherent to capitalist elections “presuppose[s] that the adversary isn’t an adversary to the extent that one would block their road by taking even minimally serious measures.”
Once abandoned by the politicians and parties that command it, where is this enormous storm of understandable fear to go? There is no possible outcome but widespread despair and even greater fears and resentments—this mass demoralisation and aggravation has already begun again. Workers, women, migrants and other oppressed groups are reduced to mere props in the theatre of liberal ‘resistance’ to fascism, left to pick up the pieces of their shattered psyche and potentially safeguard their bodily integrity.
Is this not perpetualised psychological terror without end? With every election, it should become yet more clear that elections themselves are a kind of state terrorism. Conducted through highly sophisticated technospectacular means, each screen-era election attacks the mass of humanity, subjecting us to a cycle of opposing affects that, rather than producing real political opposition, renews a crisis-ridden structure through sheer force of process, delivering only deepening catastrophe.
It is solely by escaping the “organised disorientation” of capitalist elections that those who wish to defeat rising electoral fascisms can begin that work. This task is monumental—human civilisation’s future and our earth depend on it. Liberals constantly betrayed, disappointed and increasingly resigned to the political wilderness are faced with a choice. Suppose everyone continues in the demonstrably exhausted hope of voting as a mechanism for advancing or defending social progress; further empowerment of electoral fascist movements seems likely. To avoid this, we must organise as broad a divestment from the delusion that elections are the ultimate expression of democratic power as possible.
This means recognising that electoral victories for figures like Trump are not aberrations but rather the logical conclusion of a system that empowers reaction, relies on violent repression and enforces spectacle over substance. As philosopher Jason Read mused, “it may be that every appeal to market rationality relies on a populist division between the rational, competitive, and autonomous individuals who make up the nation, and the various deviant and dependent collectives that distort it.” Put simply, the ‘others’ that Trump mines support by railing against emerge directly from logic inherent to the status quo of capitalist governance.
Thus, Trump’s success in realigning American politics rests not only on the essential fear promoted by far-right populism but on a structural reality: the bourgeois electoral system and media are designed to absorb, redirect and neutralise progressive impulses, leaving millions dependent on a defeated and untenable liberalism as the (false) opposition to fascism. There is no readily apparent path to a sustainable liberal restoration—elections may be won here and there when far-right regimes disgrace themselves, but politics will continue creeping rightward.
An alternative on the radical left is required to interrupt the unarrested spiral of ruptures toward the radical right, and we are the people who must build it. For Badiou, this means doing “real politics” by creating spaces free from the terrorism of the capitalist state—the state’s coercive hold over political imagination and its ability to enforce compliance through dependency and screen-elections. In practical terms, this can mean building local activist collectives and community alliances that operate independently of the electoral cycle and are oriented toward achievable but substantive goals.
Real politics could begin with planting gardens to counteract food deserts in low-income neighbourhoods, growing independent left media to counter the right’s monopoly on narrative, or developing class struggle through rank-and-file worker networks. Each of these elements and countless more we can imagine and commence will not turn the tide alone, but it is farcical to fall back on cruxes like ‘we just need to rebuild the unions’ when reality shows that work and life have changed. That activism is community-based is no reason for it to be narrow or isolated from broader, politically coherent organisations.
Mao Zedong wrote while fighting the Chinese Civil War, “When the enemy advances, we retreat.” Our enemy has made unprecedented gains while we have been seduced onto the terrain of electoralism. But retreating is not tantamount to surrender. Unlike elections, which bind participants to the spectacle of simulated conflict between competing wings of capital, real politics must engage with material struggles on the ground. We should aim to draw individuals and communities into direct action and resistance, develop self-confidence and break the ideological duopoly of crumbling liberalism and nascent fascism, which limit politics to the state. A strategic retreat from elections would entail the opposite of abandoning key fights like the one for reproductive freedom, which the voting form alone is equivalent to doing. It looks like more people becoming abortion doulas and developing guerrilla networks for the delivery of safe reproductive healthcare. “When the enemy retreats, we pursue.”
Robust opposition must be built outside of, and in defiance of, the capitalist state’s institutions, which found the very divisions and inequalities that fascist movements exploit. For those seeking to arrest fascist momentum, divestment from the screen regime of electoral politics is not merely an idealistic gesture but an intellectual necessity. For his part, Lazzarato evaluates that “These technical machines are very effective when it comes to isolated, desolidarised, fear-ridden individuals, subjected to capitalist processing and placed in relation solely by the apparatuses of media democracy. But, confronted by a socialisation, a taking of sides, and collective expressions of rupture, fascist or not, they suddenly become powerless.” We should test this theory with diverse and experimental attempts at creating real politics.
In rejecting the electoral charade and creating spaces for active resistance and anti-systemic ideological development, we might begin to see politics unbound from the screen regime’s “terrorism of spectacle” and, instead, oriented toward radical transformation. This would mean reviving the collective political imagination through defiant insistence on the possibility of a world that does not conform to superficially distinct images of society married to the state—a structure fewer and fewer people trust, for good reason.
By inventing, joining and doing real politics, we might finally begin to offer our fellow human beings a genuine alternative that can gradually drain the appeal of the magical pseudo-alternative that Trump and his ilk are selling in our absence from the political scene. Friends, let this be the final attack of electoralism that terrorises you. The more of us who remain static and hesitant, the longer we are forced to drink the poison. The problem is that once you drink enough poison, you’re dead.
Props to you for providing hope at the end here - a fierce antidote to the liberal defeatism we’ve seen since the election.