Baudrillard in the Age of Drone Strikes
Adam Tooze, the Columbia historian best known for his sweeping economic narratives, does something unusual in this Chartbook edition. He sets aside the charts entirely. Instead, Tooze sits with Jean Baudrillard's 1970 text The Consumer Society, written during the Vietnam War, and reads it against the weekend news of a major military strike in the Middle East. The result is less an essay than a provocation: does the theoretical machinery that once explained how Western publics consumed war still function in 2026?
The Consumed Vertigo
Baudrillard's central insight, as Tooze presents it, concerns the strange alchemy by which real events become signs to be consumed from a safe distance. The French theorist argued that media transforms catastrophe into a kind of domestic furnishing:
The TV image, like a window turned outside-in, opens initially on to a room and, in that room, the cruel exteriority of the world becomes something intimate and warm - warm with a perverse warmth.
This is the core of what Baudrillard called "the consumed vertigo of catastrophe." Violence serves a psychological function for the viewer. It ratifies the safety of private life. It makes banality feel earned rather than merely passive.
The violence and inhumanity of the outside world are needed not just so that security may be experienced more deeply as security, but also so that it should be felt justifiable at every moment as an option.
Tooze draws the connection immediately to Gaza. "The profound pleasure of not being there," he writes. "Think of Gaza." Two sentences that do more work than most op-ed columns manage in a thousand words.
Signs Conjuring and Conjuring Away
The Baudrillard passages Tooze selects are remarkably precise about how media consumption operates as a double movement. Signs both summon and dismiss reality at once:
The usage of signs is always ambivalent. Its function is always a conjuring - both a conjuring up and a conjuring away: causing something to emerge in order to capture it in signs and evoking something in order to deny and repress it.
There is something genuinely unsettling about reading this passage in an era of infinite scroll. Baudrillard wrote about television and Paris-Match magazine. The mechanism he described has only intensified. Social media does not merely present events at a distance. It fragments them into algorithmic feed items, each one stripped of context, each consumed in the same flat register as the post before and after it.
Tooze highlights Baudrillard's description of this flattening effect:
All political, historical and cultural information is received in the same - at once anodyne and miraculous - form of the news item. It is entirely actualized - i.e. dramatized in the spectacular mode - and entirely deactualized - i.e. distanced by the communication medium and reduced to signs.
The word "deactualized" deserves attention. It captures something that "desensitized" does not. The consumer of news is not numb. They are actively engaged in a ritual of participation-without-presence.
The Encircled Jerusalem
Baudrillard's punchline is devastating. Consumer society imagines itself as a besieged city, rich and under threat. The external danger justifies the internal comfort:
The consumer society sees itself as an encircled Jerusalem, rich and threatened. That is its ideology.
Written in 1970, this reads like prophecy in 2026. But Tooze is too careful a historian to let the analogy rest undisturbed. His real question is whether this framework still applies at all.
Beyond Baudrillard?
The most interesting move in the piece comes at the end, where Tooze turns skeptical of his own source material. Baudrillard's model was essentially functional. It explained how a system held together. Violence on television served consumer society's need for self-justification. The spectacle of war legitimated domestic passivity. Everything cohered.
But Tooze observes that the current moment may have broken that circuit. Citing Stephen Wertheim, he notes that there was "zero preparation of the American public" for the military action against Iran. No media buildup. No manufactured consent. No consumed vertigo at all.
What is by any stretch of the imagination a major military action seems entirely divorced from American politics in any conventional sense.
This is a genuinely sharp observation. If Baudrillard explained how publics were brought along for war through the machinery of spectacle, what happens when the spectacle simply is not produced? When the state acts without bothering to construct the media ritual that once accompanied and justified military force?
Tooze contrasts this with the Venezuela action, which fit neatly into the existing media cycle around immigration enforcement and ICE. That operation had its spectacle. Iran, apparently, did not.
A Counterpoint Worth Noting
There is, however, a gap in Tooze's argument worth pressing on. He asks whether anyone is even watching, but the evidence might point in a different direction. The consumed vertigo has not disappeared. It has migrated. It lives on TikTok and Telegram and X, in formats Baudrillard could not have anticipated but whose logic he described with eerie precision. The state may not be manufacturing consent through traditional media, but that does not mean the population has stopped consuming violence as spectacle. It may simply mean the consumption has become decentralized, unmanaged, operating without the functional coherence Baudrillard assumed. The system no longer needs to cohere for the individual psychological mechanism to persist.
Tooze's framing of Trump as "the Baudrillardian President" also deserves a second look. It is a striking phrase, but it may concede too much to the idea that Trump's politics operate primarily at the level of signs and spectacle. The deportation flights, the tariffs, the military strikes -- these have material consequences that resist absorption into simulation theory. Baudrillard's framework risks becoming an alibi of its own: a way of intellectualizing events that demand a more direct political response.
Bottom Line
Tooze has written a genuinely disorienting piece. He takes a 56-year-old French theory of consumer psychology, holds it up to the weekend's news, and finds that it fits uncomfortably well in some places and not at all in others. The question he lands on -- whether we have moved beyond Baudrillard, into a political reality where the spectacle of war is no longer even necessary -- is the right question. It suggests something darker than what Baudrillard described. In the consumer society, violence was at least consumed, processed, integrated into a system of meaning. In whatever comes after, it may simply happen, unwitnessed and unjustified, while the scroll continues.