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In the early 1990s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published a notorious hot take on Iraq: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. The title was designed to scandalize. But Baudrillard was not denying that there had been a conflict, or that people died. He was challenging how that reality was conveyed to people watching. As the introduction put it: it was "not a question of being for or against the war," but of being "for or against the reality of the war."
That argument stemmed from the fact the Gulf War was also the first great television war. Broadcasts were saturated by clips of then-novel precision weapons hitting targets in Baghdad. Indeed, on January 17, 1991, CNN was the only outlet broadcasting live voice reports from the Iraqi capital and reported explosions and anti-aircraft fire, beating the Pentagon's announcement that hostilities had begun by 27 minutes.
Before the war, in 1986, Baudrillard had another line: "The scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network." It anticipated war live on television. It also applies to a more modern development now moving at a dizzying pace.
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At an Nvidia conference this week, Jensen Huang, CEO of the tech giant, unveiled an innovation called DLSS 5 and called it the "GPT moment for graphics." The breakthrough is an AI layer that can change a videogame's lighting, effects and even how its characters are portrayed in real time. There was an immediate backlash from gamers, who said it was flattening creativity into uncanny AI slop. They argued the "reality" of a video game was being refined by a machine before anyone sees the original, human-inspired version.
How does that relate to the current war in Iran? More closely than you might think.
The White House has repeatedly intercut real explosions from the war with clips from Braveheart, Superman, Top Gun, Breaking Bad, Tropic Thunder and Iron Man, plus, revealingly, footage from the video games Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Halo, and even SpongeBob asking: "You wanna see me do it again?"
Iran's government-imposed internet blackout and stringent restrictions on most foreign reporters have made it nearly impossible to show what's happening inside the country. The result is not unreality. It is something else: a real war that reaches much of the outside world first not as live TV, but as a pre-rendered experience. This is a new phase of the unreality of wars, both real and virtual.
Common Knowledge
Critics on the left have seized on how the Trump administration has framed the war. Vox said that the administration was not merely fighting a war but "doing war for the chat," reducing violence to a spectacle. Nick Cull, a USC propaganda scholar, told the outlet that earlier administrations tended to speak of military action carefully and regretfully, whereas this White House reduces it to "team talk."
Others weighed in. Ben Stiller, star of Tropic Thunder, said he had "no interest" in joining the White House "propaganda machine" and added: "War is not a movie." Steve Downes, the voice of Master Chief in the Halo series, called the clips "disgusting and juvenile war porn." Cardinal Blase Cupich said it was "sickening" to watch real suffering treated like a video game.
The administration describes Operation Epic Fury as a "precise, overwhelming military campaign" against a nuclear and missile threat, and says the videos are proof that American force is working. Spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that the White House would continue showing Iranian missiles, production facilities and nuclear ambitions being destroyed "in real time."
Yet even on the right, the consensus has cracked. Joe Kent, the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned over the war, calling it unjust and saying Iran posed "no imminent threat" to the United States. His departure exposed the split inside the Trump movement between those who think Iraq taught the right to distrust foreign wars and hawks pushing for more aggressive action in places like Iran.
Uncommon Knowledge
Official war footage now does indeed sometimes look like a video game trailer. Baudrillard’s diagnosis has become literal. In his introduction to The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Paul Patton says Baudrillard was trying to describe a "qualitatively different type of war," one shaped by the media and abstraction. In 1991 that meant briefings, television, simulation and a peculiar distance between event and experience. Today it means something more: machines increasingly add to and standardize the image before the viewer has even seen it.
This is where Nvidia comes in. Objections to DLSS 5 were not that it looked fake in some crude deepfake sense, but that it seemed to overwrite character art with machine assumptions, giving faces fuller lips, sharper cheekbones and what critics described as AI "beauty standards." Nvidia's answer was that developers retain "artistic control." That may be true. But the anxiety is cultural.
Old propaganda selected, cropped and narrated reality. It worked after the fact. The new image culture does not simply tell you what to think about the image; it helps decide what the image should look like before any argument begins. The public reaction to DLSS 5 picked up this distinction instinctively. Gamers were not mainly worried that the technology would lie, but that it would converge.
That alarm is already blaring. Consider the White House's Iran videos. They feature movie clips, shooter-game footage, sports highlights, bombastic music, and celebratory captions. They are not the old Pentagon briefings with a little patriotic lacquer. They are edited in an unmistakable visual convention: fast cuts, emotional complexity removed, gamer references and recycled memes. They compete not only with enemy propaganda, but with TikTok attention spans.
Iran makes this especially potent because the war is unfolding in a severe reporting vacuum. The Associated Press reported on March 18 that the blackout in Iran had made it "nearly impossible" to reliably survey opinion from inside the country, even as searches such as "why are we at war with iran" rose 3,000 percent in the first week of March. Human Rights Watch says internet traffic in Iran dropped by 98 percent on February 28. Since the war began, two journalists have been killed, six have been assaulted, threatened or harassed, eight media outlets have been damaged in airstrikes, four journalists have been detained or questioned, and six have been obstructed while reporting.
The administration has form for altering reality. In January the White House posted a digitally altered image of the arrest of civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong that made her appear to be crying. When challenged, the administration’s answer was not denial but defiance: "The memes will continue." That is a telling position. It dares critics to sound humorless. Once that is normalized, the question is not what happened, but what version of what happened will travel best, including a doctored arrest image, an AI-rendered character and an official war montage.
And the public seems to understand this. Pew says 52 percent of Americans are now more concerned than excited about AI in daily life, while only 10 percent are more excited than concerned. Another Pew report found that 76 percent say it is very or extremely important to be able to tell whether pictures, videos and text were made by AI or by people, yet 53 percent are not confident they can. Ipsos reports that nearly three in four Americans want government action to prevent AI-driven job loss, and that more than half think increased AI use will lead to greater polarization.
The Iran war is taking place. But for much of the outside world, and especially for someone encountering it through social media a phone, it often arrives first as something rendered. The first Gulf War taught America how to televise war. The Iran war suggests the next step.
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