Did the Ukraine war flop?

Ah, welcome to the digital arena, where everyone has an opinion, especially about Israel and Hamas. It’s as if our keyboards transform into battlefields, and each post becomes a missile launched into the ether. And amidst these digital skirmishes, what happened to the war in Ukraine? Did it “flop”? Was it eclipsed by the ever-changing spotlight that shifts as quickly as our scattered attention?

As you swipe your finger across the screen, partaking in this frenzy, how much have you spent on impulse online shopping? Between a tweet advocating for Israel or Hamas and an Instagram post where you distill your certainties as if they were universal truths, have you ever paused to consider the cost of it all?

I don’t just mean the financial toll of those impulse online buys, but the human and intellectual cost. The erosion of critical thought and empathy happens as we chase likes and followers, forgetting that the conflicts we treat so lightly have real consequences—lives lost, stories shattered.

Social media may have amplified our voice, but it has also magnified our stupidity and indifference. It turns us into emperors of empires of fools, oblivious that true wisdom begins with the acknowledgment of our own ignorance.

The real tragedy is not merely that the war in Ukraine has “flopped” in our collective consciousness. The true tragedy is that we’ve become so engrossed in our own narratives that we forget to question the price we’re truly paying. And that price is steep, measured not in clicks and likes, but in the degradation of our humanity and our increasing disconnect from reality.

As Giuliano da Empoli mentions in “Engineers of Chaos,” this digital landscape serves as a breeding ground for disseminating hatred, fear, and influencing outcomes far beyond elections. We are all, knowingly or unknowingly, participants in this chaotic engineering, forgetting that some costs are too high, even if they can’t be measured by our screens.