Hello.
Another
war. Without congressional authorization (New York Times). Without a strategy (The Economist). Without a political objective (Brookings). I am running on espresso flow (Pashanim) while trying to wrap my head around yet another war under the postdigital condition where memes, vibes, and brainrot materialize in outrageous digital artifacts in the era of AI-powered bombing (The Guardian).
The 2026 CogWars
Back in December 2025 NATO published a Chief Scientist’s Report on Cognitive Warfare (love the short form: CogWar). CogWar builds up, but is distinct, from older concepts like psychological operations or information warfare.
CogWar basically seeks to “exploit facets of cognition to disrupt, undermine, influence, or modify human decision-making by altering human behaviour and cognition through any means and technological advances.” It uses military and non-military tactics, targeting both military operators and civilian populations. Yeah, that is us.
It is worth mentioning that every party to this war — the US, Israel, Iran — and a couple of others appear to be running their own information operations simultaneously. The polluted, disordered information spaces we are in are currently extra-loaded.
All of us are right now being subjected to competing cognitive influence campaigns from multiple directions, making it genuinely difficult to form a clear picture of what is actually happening. Here are just two random examples of war related content on TikTok’s For You these days.
Under postdigital conditions, the efficacy of any strategic intervention is increasingly determined by its alignment with the algorithmic, affective, participatory and synthetic logics of the infrastructural environment rather than by the quality of its arguments or the accuracy of its claims. This perspective helps understand videos like this one, posted by the official White House TikTok account on March, 5, 2026.
While U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed scores of children on Saturday (Reuters) the White House posted a video utilizing the Lizard Lizard Lizard Meme (Know Your Meme), one of the top trending memes on Google of 2025.
Just as with the Nihilistic Penguin (#150) there are several layers to understanding this meme. The meme comes from a post-credits teaser released at the end of the 2025 Disney film Elio to promote the 2026 Disney Pixar film Hoppers. Jokes on TikTok typically revolve around doing a repetitive and annoying task, put here in the context of launching rockets.
While the dominating war aesthetic used to be coined by computer games, we are witnessing another iteration of mimetic cutification. Compare the ribbon emoji (”often used to indicate something is pretty, cute, or special. Also used of various content concerning baby girls“) on the B2-bomber above. The Lizard has a Pixar aesthetic, compare that to the IDFs or Trump administrations usage of the Ghibli filter.
Obviously there are other potential layer to the Lizard. I just point you to this NBC article: Like QAnon’s Capitol rioters, the Nashville bomber’s lizard people theory is deadly serious Bonkers? Sure. Harmless? Definitely not. Trump has signaled affinity with QAnon followers in social media post, at rallies before (CBS).
Coming back to CogWars: It is not the deciding question wether the White House is signaling to QAnon here, but that they could and would. It isn’t just about messaging. It is how people process information. Videos like these do not serve a single target or outcome as CogWar can be designed simply to create confusion. Or for the LOLz, the vibes, the giggles, the shrugging, the outrage. Flooding the zone. Feeding the algorithms.
Now what? We can immerse ourselves in endless streams of horrendous videos or try to increase our resistance in order to being better equipped to withstand, recover, and continue functioning somewhat clearly despite the cognitive assaults.
Postdigital Propaganda
I have two new papers out (Open Access). Both analyse aspects of postdigital propaganda. I am in the midst of tying them and two more together under the umbrella term.
Bösch, M. (2026). TikTok edits, vibes, audio memes: Participatory propaganda in the 2025 German federal election campaign. Media and Communication, 14. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.11755
Bösch, M., & Divon, T. (2026). Dancing in Uniform: The Role of Thirst Trap Propaganda in Military Image Wars on TikTok. Platforms & Society
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