From Lego Meme War to Meme Tsunami
When I first started writing about the pro-Iran Lego war videos, they seemed like an odd but revealing sideshow of digital conflict: brightly coloured AI animations showing missile strikes, humiliated leaders, and military reversals, all delivered through toy figures, rap soundtracks, and meme logic. They looked absurd. Yet they were also politically effective in ways that more conventional propaganda often is not.
Since then, the phenomenon has grown far beyond its original setting. What once appeared as a niche stream of Iran-linked content now looks more like the front edge of a wider transformation. Similar forms are emerging across countries, causes, and political movements. AI-generated clips, parody songs, synthetic battle scenes, animated leaders, and rapid-response meme videos now move across platforms in huge volumes. What began as a meme war increasingly resembles a meme tsunami.
That shift matters because it suggests that propaganda itself is changing.
The people associated with Explosive Media, the group linked to many of the original Lego videos, reportedly dislike the term propaganda. When I spoke with them, they preferred phrases such as “Narrative Media” or “Narratainment.” That preference is analytically useful. It tells us something about how contemporary influence operations increasingly understand themselves.
Propaganda is an old word, and it carries the weight of older media systems: state broadcasts, posters, speeches, censorship, ideological instruction. It implies a clear sender, a target audience, and an attempt to persuade. But much of today’s political media does not work in that linear fashion. It often does not seek belief in any straightforward sense. It seeks circulation.
That was the central argument of my earlier paper on the Lego videos: they mattered less because they persuaded than because they moved. Their force lay in speed, repetition, recognisability, and platform fit. A short clip showing an enemy embarrassed or defeated may change nobody’s ideology, but if it appears millions of times across feeds, chats, repost chains, and recommendation systems, it still acquires political force. Visibility begins to matter more than verification. Presence matters more than persuasion.
This is why the terms proposed by Explosive Media are worth taking seriously, even if not uncritically. “Narrative Media” captures something important: the shift from argument to story. Political claims now frequently arrive embedded in mini-dramas, recurring characters, jokes, reversals, and emotionally legible scenes. “Narratainment” may be sharper still. It recognises that in digital environments politics increasingly travels through the same channels and forms as entertainment.
The Lego aesthetic was never incidental. It solved a media problem. Real war is slow, morally difficult, and often visually unbearable. Lego war is colourful, compressed, rhythmic, and strangely consumable. It turns destruction into sequence, conflict into spectacle, and geopolitics into shareable form. What might once have appeared to trivialise violence is better understood as a mechanism for circulation. Gravity slows movement; playfulness accelerates it.
This helps explain why fact-checking alone struggles with such content. Much of its impact does not depend on explicit falsehoods. A mocking animation, a rhythmic accusation, or a stylised reversal may contain little that can be neatly disproven. Its effect lies elsewhere: tone, repetition, humiliation, symbolic inversion, emotional satisfaction. By the time a correction appears, the clip has already done its work by moving.
The wider significance, however, lies in scale. Generative AI has lowered the threshold for producing persuasive-looking media to an extraordinary degree. What once required teams of editors, animators, designers, and distribution networks can now be approximated by small groups using prompts, templates, editing tools, and platform metrics. Political content can be generated rapidly, tested instantly, refined through engagement data, and redeployed in near real time.
This is why the metaphor of tsunami now seems more appropriate than war. A war suggests two sides contesting ground. A tsunami suggests overwhelming volume. Today’s information environment is increasingly flooded with synthetic political media: AI songs, fake battlefield footage, leader parodies, animated conspiracies, stylised retaliation clips, instant meme responses to unfolding events. Some of it is state-backed, some commercial, some ironic, some opportunistic. Much of it is difficult to classify. Yet together it changes the atmosphere in which politics is encountered.
Entertainment has become the delivery system. The same traits that help sell trainers, cosmetics, or music now shape political communication: brevity, rhythm, recognisable characters, emotional intensity, replayability. Governments, activists, propagandists, influencers, and opportunists all compete in the same attention market, under the same platform incentives. The message that wins may simply be the one with better pacing.
There is also an economic dimension that should not be ignored. Viral political content can generate streams, ad revenue, followers, subscriptions, and secondary markets. Under those conditions, outrage and escalation are not only ideological outputs but monetisable assets. Conflict becomes content, and content becomes income.
Whatever one thinks of their politics, the creators behind Explosive Media appear to have grasped this earlier than many official institutions. People increasingly do not encounter politics through speeches, policy documents, or traditional broadcasts. They encounter it through clips, songs, memes, loops, and recurring online characters. That is why they resist the word propaganda. It belongs to a previous communications order.
We should probably expect more of this rather than less. Future election campaigns may be fought through AI meme universes. Wars may be narrated through recurring animated franchises. Leaders may become algorithmically managed characters, endlessly remixed for different audiences. Political struggle will not leave behind speeches and journalism altogether, but it will increasingly be shaped by those who can dominate narrative circulation.
The original Lego videos now look less like an anomaly than an early signal. They pointed toward a world in which persuasion becomes optional, entertainment becomes political infrastructure, and visibility becomes a form of power.
That is why the real story was never Lego.
It was the future that Lego happened to reveal.
Academic paper:
Circulatory Propaganda and the Rhythms of Digital Conflict in AI-Generated War Media – is currently Version 1 – version 2 should be available soon once it is moderated (it has some new content) Circulatory Propaganda, Narrative Media, and the Rhythms of Digital Conflict
The full paper here: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3k9mj_v1
