In the 2010s there used to be a very silly show called Nathan For You airing on Comedy Central. It was a reality show/docu-series that, despite its absurdity, was also actually fairly sharp satire, and each episode featured the titular Nathan, who posed as a self-proclaimed “business expert” who gave outlandish advice to businesses to see how willing owners were to take it. One of his schemes for example involved suggesting to a frozen yogurt shop that they introduce a new shit-flavoured yogurt because of how “attention-grabbing” it would be. That kind of thing.
In one episode, Nathan’s client was a coffee shop hoping to drum up more business. Nathan’s plan was to coach the client into rebranding his shop to look exactly like Starbucks, with the identical layout and colour scheme and everything. He also instructed the client to re-register his business as an “art gallery” and add the word “Dumb” to the name to avoid the well-founded accusation of copyright violation. The client agreed, and the “art gallery” was renamed Dumb Starbucks.
The subject of this article doesn’t really have anything to do with Dumb Starbucks, but I bring it up as the phrase popped into my head the other day when I was reading about the Starbucks boycotts and trying to think of a way to describe this strange, pivotal time we’re in, where everyone’s kind of unhappy and governments will not really admit to the possibility of major financial collapse and everyone is trying to win a propaganda war on a million different platforms. We’re not technically at war, but it also kind of feels like we are, and there’s also an ongoing genocide and a ton of mass deaths across the globe while people are also posting memes on Tiktok about Nanalan and “Who the Fuck Did I Marry.”
Since we’re not officially at war, it’s not technically World War Three.
But it looks so similar, and feels so similar.
And it’s dumb, so perhaps, more accurately, it’s Dumb World War Three.
In Dumb World War Three, our war doesn’t look the way we’d always imagined it would. It has the cadence of war, but it’s not, and it’s extremely tragic, but also dumb.
When we imagined a WWIII in the past, we thought it would be heroic and dignified. We thought it would be former “Allies” standing up for freedom against totalitarianism and genocide and propaganda, paralleling the narrative the West crafted after the 1940s. But instead, though neoAllies attempt to regain control of the narrative, the West have been revealed to actually be on the pro-genocide side, which calls into question the entire narrative they have been trying to sell us for the past hundred years.
In Dumb World War Three, our war doesn’t look the way we’d always imagined it would. It has the cadence of war, but it’s not, and it’s extremely tragic, but also dumb.
Dumb WWIII is full of contradictions. It involves doom scrolling through your Tiktok feed to see harrowing videos of gaunt children starving to death in Gaza, interspersed with scenes from characters from Love is Blind arguing about who is and isn’t a “girl’s girl.” It consists of Western governments telling us that they’re protecting us from sinister, censorious dictatorships, while rebranding their own censorship as “eliminating misinformation,” and involves media organizations asserting that no financial collapse is happening while families are evicted from their homes I can’t find a bottle of olive oil for less than $20.
In Dumb WWIII, too, Tiktokers and not “real journalists” challenge and disprove major claims by powerful governments, and we receive news from talking fish online before anything ever appears on CNN or the BBC.
We sit on the precipice of huge consciousness shifts. But we continue on as normal, because we are children of peace. We have always thought of history as something that lives in the past, and does not continue on into our present and future.
We try to pretend it’s still the 2010s. We go out to craft breweries and talk about the Oscars and pretend we are still basking in the hopeful glow of Obama’s initial election, where the only “villains” we could conceive of were Russia and China and Bush-era Republicans. But now we are villains too, realizing we have walked around in a haze of awful lies for decades, and overlooked Western governments’ actions that have led to countless deaths in the Middle East and a drop in Western happiness.
We thought history was in the past. But unlike the times of Dumb Starbucks, it is no longer the 2010s. Now it is truly the 2020s, and we live and breathe in the time of Dumb World War Three.
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Some Writers and Articles I’ve Been Reading on Substack:
“Greater Israel” Then and Now: The Zionist Plan for the Middle East by Michel Chossudovsky
What Will it Take for Our Political Class to Use the Word Genocide? by Ricky of Council Estate Media
Is Honest Writing the Next New Thing in Journalism? by Ted Gioia
My Depression is More Depressing Than Your Depression by Kev Fitzsimons
Let's make 2024 the year of saying no to productivity culture by Kirsten Powers