“What our ruling class has decided will be normal”: On how a digitized visual economy constructs,enables,and contests the Gaza genocide

Abstract

Images of the Gaza genocide spread rapidly through the communication networks that pervade our mediatized social world. Watching this atrocity unfold has been a globally shared experience and feels like, in the words of U.S. Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell before his livestreamed self-immolation, “what our ruling class has decided will be normal.” Despite the political urgency of these images, less clear is how their circulation in our media landscape contributes to granting this atrocity its (geo)political significance. Examining that question, we update Campbell's work on the visual economy of the Darfur genocide. We appraise changes to the visual economy of producing, circulating and consuming images, to examine how today's digitized visual economy shapes a political reality in which genocide can be popularly recognized, yet continue with Western backing. In a mediatized world awash with imagery, divergent social realities emerge, and the performative fiction of a rules-based order clashes with the impunity granted to Israel by an increasingly authoritarian ruling class supposed to enforce international law.