In The Convergence of the Twain, Thomas Hardy’s 1912 poem on the loss of the Titanic, the great liner and the iceberg are presented as predestined to meet in their fatal embrace: “Alien they seemed to be/ No mortal eye could see/The intimate welding of their later history/ Or sign that they were bent/By paths coincident/On being anon twin halves of one august event.” Yet each, from their construction in a Belfast shipyard and glacial formation thousands of years ago, were destined to meet in this fateful moment, technology and cold, pitiless nature brought together in consummation of a greater whole.

A similar case can surely be made for war and social media. In an essay written before the Ukraine war, I argued that the conjunction of social media with high quality drone footage from the wars in Syria and Karabakh had created a fusion of online enthusiasts with technology, so that “Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground”. The Syrian war, like the Spanish Civil War before World War Two, can be considered an armed rehearsal for the Ukraine war, a rough draft of processes and technologies that would later reach their full, terrible potential. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the conjunction of brutal drone footage with social media, and of mass deaths with vigorous online fandoms.