The Dress Rehearsal
In May 2021, something happened that had never happened before at scale: a war became a real-time global media event. Not in the sense that wars hadn't been covered before — they had. But the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis was the first major Gaza escalation in the social media era where ordinary people worldwide weren't watching edited dispatches at 11pm. They were watching live footage, in their feeds, between posts about their friends' dinners, hitting share or retweet in the same gesture they used for everything else.
4,360 rockets. 11 days. 12 Israeli and 129+ Palestinian civilians killed. And millions of people who had never thought much about the conflict suddenly choosing a side in real time.
The cultural rupture it produced was significant and underexamined. In diaspora communities, on university campuses, inside media institutions, the 2021 escalation drew lines — between people who had been in the same professional circles, the same friend groups, the same sense of shared values. The fault lines it revealed weren't new. But the mechanism for activating them globally, simultaneously, inside the same algorithmic containers that deliver cat videos and birthday wishes — that was new.
And then it stopped. There was a ceasefire. The feeds moved on. The fault lines stayed exactly where they were.
This is the thing about a dress rehearsal: its purpose is to reveal the problems before the actual performance. The costume that falls apart, the lighting cue that misfires, the stage direction that doesn't work under pressure — you find these things in the rehearsal so you can fix them before opening night.
The 2021 escalation was a dress rehearsal for the infrastructure of global witnessing. It showed us that this infrastructure had been built, that it was operational at scale, and that it had serious design flaws: the emotional valence of the footage overrode analysis; the algorithm's incentive to maximize engagement optimized for the most polarizing content; the pressure to perform a position publicly was indistinguishable from actually holding one; the machinery of solidarity and the machinery of outrage used exactly the same tools.
Nobody fixed the infrastructure. Nobody even really named the infrastructure as the problem.
October 7, 2023, was opening night. The fault lines the dress rehearsal had revealed were all still there, unrepaired, ready to fracture at higher stakes and much larger scale. The ruptures in friendships, workplaces, institutions, media organizations — they followed the exact same patterns as 2021, amplified by two years of accumulated pressure and multiplied by a tragedy of far greater magnitude.
Pattern recognition is the thing most people can do in retrospect. The point is to do it when the signal is still small enough to act on.
The dress rehearsal told you what would break. The question was whether anyone was watching closely enough to know that's what they were seeing.
i · sources
source · Wikipedia — 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis (May 10, 2021)
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