In Dubai, war is a trend
From the rooftop pool to the hotel garage. Perhaps the worst that social media has ever offered in recent years is coming from Dubai. Influencers – but also tourists and tourism operators, entrepreneurs, various and possible – who have transformed into war reporters, between alarmism and farce.
Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, the updated view of skyscrapers – with Lamborghinis whizzing by below – is trending. Since Iran’s first missile attack, which arrived as a response to the bombing of the USA and Israel – which began last Saturday -, videos of improvised ‘correspondents’ have begun to proliferate, who are keen to keep the enormous audience informed – who, in many cases, they find themselves in front of for the first time – of what is happening and how they are experiencing.
The news, however, is schizophrenic. On the one hand there are terrified Italians, stuck in the Gulf due to the closure of the airspace, who publish videos from the hotel garages, where they have been invited to take refuge, on the other hand there are those who proudly show a daily life that has never stopped. There are those who cry at the sound of fighter jets overhead, those who go for a jog in the park and mock those who are afraid, those who remain locked in their homes reassuring their followers that they have supplies of food and water, those who recover happy and carefree with their family under the Burj Khalifa waiting for a flight to return, those who document the escape in an SUV with the family towards safer locations, those who enjoy the extension of the holiday in the beach resort, almost hoping for another couple of drones to neutralize. And obviously there are those who joke about it, turning everything into a cheap carnival (I quote: “The Qatari government pays for the resort until they reopen the airspace and invites us to stay protected, I’m sunbathing with the 50”). Everyone, everyone, moved by an irrepressible personal urgency to be seen there, between narration and self-celebration, to clock in for the trend. The perfect photograph of the disconnect with the reality that is now part of these times: the missiles in the air, the explosions, the people dying on the other side of the sea and the phone in your hand pointed at yourself.
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The war on social media
An out of control story, which takes reality to extremes on both sides. Personal perceptions, of course, but up to a certain point, because this exasperation is jarring in such a dramatic moment. How jarring is the avalanche of spiteful comments from Italy wishing the worst to their compatriots who have chosen to live there, demonstrating that social envy can be equally violent.
And while the war is being waged through engagement on social media, with the USA and Israel publishing reels of the military attack to the tune of the “Macarena” and “Danza Kuduro”, in Iran – where there is no internet because the regime has disconnected it – more than a thousand have already died.
