What does telling a military story in the age of algorithmic design mean? The war narrative has moved beyond the battlefield and the broadcast. In its place, a new architecture of emotional targeting has emerged-one that does not rely on command or discipline but on synchrony, affective proximity, and algorithmic suggestion. Contemporary military communication no longer seeks mass mobilisation; it seeks intimate calibration. The aim is not to persuade overtly but to harmonise emotional currents between user and institution-to foster a sense of belonging that feels organic, not imposed (Hall, 2017; Nussbaum, 2001). Platforms are not merely channels of transmission but ecosystems of emotional orientation (Ahmed, 2014; Massumi, 2015). The line between strategic messaging and affective conditioning blurs within these digital environments. The logic of military communication is no longer built on slogans or imperative language but on gentle invitations, curated visuals, and loops of reinforcement that echo the user’s existing preferences (Bakir and McStay, 2018; Der Derian, 2009). Loyalty is not demanded-it is anticipated.

This is no longer the age of command-it is the age of affective compatibility.

This chapter investigates how military institutions and state-aligned actors adapt to this shift. From emotional targeting in recruitment videos to personalised messaging within social feeds, the military narrative is now encoded within a broader digital culture of subtle governance (Zuboff, 2019; Amoore, 2020). Here, war is not declared; it is formatted. Consent is not sought; it is silently shaped. The user is not told what to believe-she is made to feel aligned. As Jasanoff and Kim (2015) explain, sociotechnical imaginaries shape how power is rendered affectively persuasive ,fabricating desirable futures that feel intuitively aligned with the user’s emotional expectations.

To belong is no longer a decision-it is a preconfigured emotional response.

Stories That Feel Like Ours

The most enduring military narratives are not those that command but those that resemble. They do not instruct the user-they echo her. When digital platforms tell stories of war, they no longer raise flags; they offer mirrors. The message is not imposed but synchronised. It feels intimate, not strategic, familiar, not forceful. What appears as personal resonance is often algorithmic proximity. In this affective landscape, belief is not the goal-recognition is. The user is not persuaded; she is emotionally aligned. Consent is no longer requested. It is composed, calibrated, and softly inferred. These are not stories we choose to follow. They are stories that feel like ours before we realise they are not.

The silence between words is not absence but alignment. These are the soft geographies of narrative warfare-where story becomes structure, and recognition becomes loyalty. Through four interlinked sections, this chapter traces the contours of this transformation: how emotional targeting reframes strategic communication (6.1) (Gillespie, 2018); how digital recruitment becomes a form of identity engineering (6.2) (Coker, 2021); how geopolitical logics are microframed through personal feeds (6.3) (Couldry and Hepp, 2018); and how obedience becomes loyalty in the civil-military interface (6.4) (Ananny and Crawford, 2018). These are not evolutions in messaging style-they are structural mutations in the emotional architecture of contemporary power.

Emotional Targeting in Strategic Communication

In an age where attention is scarce and affect is currency, strategic military communication has shifted from imperative messaging to emotional targeting. Campaigns no longer address abstract citizens-they speak to emotionally profiled individuals. The language is soft, the visuals stylised, and the tone intimate. Where older forms of propaganda sought to mobilise through urgency and duty, today’s military narratives invite alignment through resonance. They do not demand sacrifice. They offer belonging.

War no longer speaks-it resonates.

Across contemporary platforms, military institutions use emotional design to format consent. Instagram posts depicting camaraderie, YouTube recruitment videos that center on personal growth and transformation, and podcasts featuring service members telling intimate stories all contribute to an emotional ecosystem that speaks not of war but of identity, purpose, and inclusion. These narratives function less as instruction than emotional cues, each calibrated to produce affective synchrony with the user.

Rather than articulating what one should do for their country, they ask the user to feel it. This emotional shift repositions the military not as a structure of command but as a community of care. As Stahl (2010) notes, the logic of militainment increasingly blurs the line between civic identity and martial aesthetics. What emerges is not a call to arms but a call to self-recognition. This shift is not accidental-it is engineered. Through datafied profiling and algorithmic segmentation, platforms allow for highly tailored messaging that reaches users not through demographic generalisations but through affective proximity. Emotional targeting functions as a soft weapon of engagement: the goal is not to convert sceptics but to reinforce existing emotional predispositions. Users are not persuaded; they are comforted. This is not seduction. It is synchronisation.

To feel aligned is to feel enlisted.

In this logic, the success of a military message is not measured in clicks but in emotional continuity. Bakir and McStay (2018) argue that contemporary communication environments favour emotion over argument, and platforms incentivise affective alignment. Military campaigns embedded within this logic no longer operate through ideology but through intimacy. The emotional resonance of these messages is further reinforced by their aesthetic: heroism is depicted in quiet, cinematic tones; duty is reframed as inner peace; and national service is presented not as an external obligation but as personal fulfilment. Platforms do not just distribute these messages-they optimise them for effective reach. The message does not demand belief; it expects reflection. Not loyalty in the name of the state, but self-worth in the name of the unit. This emotional infrastructure shapes what is said and how it is received. Emotional targeting becomes a method of pre-consensual engagement-where the user’s affective response is already anticipated and formatted. Communication is no longer strategic in the traditional sense. It is ambient. The affective tone of modern military messaging functions like background music: always there, always aligned.

Figure 14. The Emotional Funnel of Military Messaging

This diagram 14 illustrates how strategic military content moves from institutional narrative to emotional calibration. The funnel shows how general messaging is filtered through affective tone, platform affordances, and user preferences-ultimately producing personalised emotional impact. Loyalty is no longer a command at the top but a feeling at the bottom. The implications of this shift are subtle yet profound. Emotional targeting does not announce itself-it arrives disguised as care, meaning, and familiarity. In this environment, the platform is not a medium but a mood. Strategic messaging no longer relies on clarity of content but on the emotional latency it activates.

This resonates with Morozov’s (2013) critique of technological solutionism, where complex socio-political challenges are reframed as solvable through optimised, personalised messaging. In such a logic, the platform does not engage the citizen as a political agent but as a user whose emotions can be calibrated to simulate consent. Military institutions have recognised that loyalty cannot be demanded as it once was. It must now be felt, rehearsed, and re-experienced as a series of micro-affirmations within a user’s digital life. As Gillespie (2018) points out, platform governance operates not through rules alone but through the architecture of affective signals that structure what can be felt, when, and how. In this model, communication does not convince-it calibrates. It moves through attention, not argument.

Emotional targeting is thus not an add-on to strategy; it becomes the strategy itself. In the age of targeted consent, this transformation is not a loss of clarity but a gain in intimacy. Nevertheless, intimacy itself has become strategic. The military voice, once formal and directive, now mimics the proximity tone-delivering reassurance, familiarity, and even tenderness. In recruitment campaigns, emotional targeting no longer signals urgency; it stages understanding. The viewer is not a citizen needing mobilisation but a potential subject of care. Here, the affective logic does not heighten pressure-it softens resistance. This reframing of strategic communication rests on message delivery and emotional rhythm. As Massumi (2015) reminds us, affect moves faster than meaning-it conditions response before reflection takes form. Platforms exploit this latency by embedding military messaging within scrolling environments, where gesture precedes thought. The user does not stop to decode. She absorbs.

Within such a regime, strategic effect displaces strategic logic. Belonging is no longer argued-it is delivered as sentiment. Service is no longer framed through sacrifice but through self-discovery. Platforms speak not of what war is but of who the soldier becomes. The user is not asked to commit to a mission but to identify with a version of herself already imagined by the message. Identity, in this context, becomes the medium of persuasion. Moreover, this emotional design is not universal-it is responsive.

Algorithms tailor not only content but also the emotional curvature of that content. The same campaign will evoke duty for one, transformation for another, healing for a third. This is visible in the Croatian Ministry of Defence campaign Budi drugačiji, budi vojnik (“Be different, be a soldier”), where military service is portrayed through personal fulfilment, emotional resilience, and community care (Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Croatia, 2021). The message flexes, but the structure remains: it is always the military, seen through the lens of the self. Emotional targeting thus does not impose a collective identity-it modulates private resonance. In doing so, strategic communication is reconfigured as emotional choreography. What begins as an emotional invitation ends as an identity rehearsal. In the next section, we trace how digital recruitment no longer seeks to select but to shape.

The message no longer leads with purpose-it begins with you.

Digital Recruitment as Identity Engineering

Recruitment no longer functions as selection-it functions as transformation. In the digital age, military campaigns do not ask who you are. They propose who you might become. Identity is no longer a precondition of enlistment but a product of emotional design. Digital recruitment now operates within a grammar of possibility: it invites users not to serve but to be seen-as resilient, evolved, and self-fulfilled. Platforms are not used to inform but to initiate identification. On TikTok, recruitment videos stage vulnerability, personal growth, and heroic potential. YouTube campaigns blend cinematic aesthetics with real-life testimonies of transformation. Instagram Reels pair military life with emotional quotes, soft lighting, and self-reflective narratives. In each case, the user is not addressed as an external viewer but as a potential protagonist. This approach represents a shift from tactical to affective engineering. The target is no longer competence but coherence: Does the narrative feel like it could be yours? Recruitment becomes less about the mission and more about emotional proximity. The user is not recruited into a system; she is invited into a story.

In this logic, military institutions do not simply offer roles-they model journeys. Emotional engineering becomes a central recruitment strategy: the soldier is framed not as obedient but as awakened. As Coker (2021) argues, digital warfare reconfigures soldierhood through the aesthetics of agency, not authority. Recruitment becomes a personalised rite of passage, engineered not for reach alone but for emotional precision at scale. Algorithmic environments amplify this logic. Platforms do not only deliver content-they learn which narratives resonate most and amplify those that perform emotional engagement. The result is a feedback loop in which recruitment is optimised not around eligibility but around affective legibility. What matters is not background but alignment: the user must see herself in the message.

Figure 15. Identity Loop in Algorithmic Recruitment

This diagram visualises the logic of identity engineering within digital military recruitment campaigns. The central node-identity-is not a given but a construction. Around it orbit the key inputs: personal data, tailored content, algorithmic profiling, and multimodal media. Recruitment no longer seeks to find the right person. It aims to design the conditions in which a person feels “right” for the role. This is not alignment by information but alignment by feeling. The user becomes the site where identity is rendered recruitable. She is not asked to fit a profile-she is presented with one already shaped by her behaviour, preferences, and emotional feedback. The platform does not shout instructions. It whispers affinities. This recruitment logic does not override the user’s sense of agency but harmonizes it. The user is not coerced into military identification-she is guided to discover it within herself. This echoes Boellstorff’s (2015) observation that virtual environments do not simulate identity ; it instantiate it. In spaces like Second Life, subjectivity is not carried over but re-authored through digital immersion. Similarly, algorithmic platforms do not reflect users’ identities; they propose who they could become, emotionally and narratively.

This process reframes consent. What appears to be a choice is often the result of iterative nudges, optimised visuals, and micro-affirmations. Recruitment campaigns speak less of commitment and more of becoming. They do not demand a decision-they script resonance. In doing so, they transition from messaging into emotional modulation. Moreover, digital recruitment is not a moment-it is a mood. Campaigns extend beyond the screen into playlists, clothing styles, and hashtags that encode a broader affective culture. Identity engineering operates not only through exposure but also through repetition. Furthermore, as Krämer (2018) notes, repetition is not noise but memory made live. Recruitment becomes not a proposition but a tempo.

One does not enlist-they synchronise.

Becoming Before Believing

They no longer ask us who we are.
They show us who we could become-before we have decided.
Recruitment has shed its command. In its place stands recognition.
The offer is not to serve but to align.
Not to fight but to belong.
The story that once asked for sacrifice now whispers fulfilment.
You will not be summoned.
You will be mirrored.
What looks like the future may already be written in the tempo of your feed.

In this emotional economy, identity is no longer constructed through discourse alone but assembled through interaction. Digital recruitment becomes a site of emotional engineering, where the user is not merely exposed to institutional messaging but embedded within its affective logic. Consent is not extracted-it is cultivated. Through tailored visuals, rhythmical repetition, and algorithmic timing, the military is no longer something one joins. It is something one becomes-gradually, ritually, affectively-until the border between choice and choreography disappears.

Geopolitical Framing Through Personalised Media

In today’s algorithmic ecosystems, geopolitics no longer presents itself as policy or principle. It emerges as a mood. The world is not offered to the user through diplomatic discourse or historical depth but through a curated stream of reels, posts, and loops-each filtered, formatted, and emotionally primed. Conflict becomes aesthetic. Injustice becomes relatable. Complexity becomes scrollable. And solidarity becomes algorithmic. The user does not see the war. She sees the war as it is meant to feel. This is not misrepresentation. It is emotional framing. Platforms do not fabricate facts ; it fabricate feeling. As geopolitics dissolves into the digital feed, the boundaries between information, feeling, and allegiance blur. What we encounter is not the global but the personalised global: a version of world affairs adjusted to match our emotional grammar.
Here, personalisation does not simply tailor experience-it steers belief. A user’s feed may show the same war as resistance, devastation, or triumph-depending not on truth, but on traceable affective histories. Platforms act not as observers of international conflict but as invisible editors of geopolitical feeling. As Bonilla and Rosa (2015) observe in their analysis of #Ferguson, social media platforms do not merely distribute information but reframe events into affective narratives.
Hashtags become ethnographic sites where political struggle is voiced and emotionally experienced, often outside the frames of institutional discourse. The result is not fragmentation of knowledge but curation of sentiment. This is how geopolitics becomes intimate-not through argument but through recognition, ideology, and familiarity. As Couldry and Hepp (2018) note, media infrastructures are not neutral-they shape how reality is sensed. The global is no longer encountered at a distance but felt from within the rhythm of one’s feed. Belonging and opposition are not debated-they are scrolled into being. As Couldry and Mejias (2019) argue, such platform infrastructures exploit the user’s life as a resource, turning everyday scrolling into a form of geopolitical reproduction ,where consent is less deliberated than continuously extracted.

Figure 16. The Emotional Grid of Personalised Geopolitics

This grid maps the affective landscape through which users experience global conflict in personalised media environments. The vertical axis represents narrative types-resistance, resilience, trauma, threat, and belonging. The horizontal axis traces affective registers-pride, empathy, fatigue, and anger. What unfolds between these axes is not a neutral newsfeed but an emotional field, structured by algorithmic inference and platform logic. In this terrain, the user does not consume geopolitics. She feels it-curated, compressed, and choreographed. TikTok videos tagged #StandWithUkraine do not explain the war-they synchronize affect. Drone footage accompanied by melancholic piano music transforms destruction into cinematic compassion. In reels about conflict zones, trauma is reframed through the aesthetics of courage. These are not information flows-they are affective loops calibrated to reinforce emotional engagement. The same conflict appears differently depending on the viewer’s history of likes, pauses, and scrolls. As Amoore (2020) notes, the algorithm does not ask what the world is but what your version of the world should feel like.
Geopolitical framing becomes intimate not through truth but through tone. A meme can frame a nation as a victim. A song overlaid on military footage can frame a drone strike as righteous or redemptive. Even silence becomes a mode of alignment: the absence of specific conflicts from a user’s feed is not forgetfulness-it is omission by emotional irrelevance. The grid in Figure 16 is not static. It mutates. As the user shifts emotionally, so does her geopolitical orientation. The platform does not demand allegiance-it rehearses it. As Monahan (2010) argues, surveillance today must be understood not merely as observation but as a cultural practice that embeds normative behaviours through ambient routines. What begins as content preference evolves into worldview calibration. The user does not adopt a position-she scrolls until one feels right. In this affective architecture, geopolitics is no longer what you know. It is what you are shown, how often, and how it makes you feel.
In this configuration, the platform does not interpret geopolitics-it instrumentalises emotion to format geopolitical perception. As Massumi (2015) argues, affect precedes cognition; it frames what is possible to think before thinking begins. The user’s political understanding is not shaped by argument but by atmosphere. The scroll becomes a staging ground for sentiment, not scrutiny. In this space, the geopolitical self is not analytical but ambient-shaped less by ideological persuasion and more by aesthetic habituation. This aesthetic habituation refers to the algorithmic creation of an emotional “default setting” ,a patterned familiarity that conditions perception before interpretation. Drone aesthetics, for example, do not simply represent power-they aestheticise alignment. Harari (2018) writes that stories, not facts, hold society together. In digital feeds, these stories no longer require coherence-only resonance. Conflict footage is compressed into ten-second arcs of meaning. Pain becomes sharable. Heroism becomes loopable. War becomes a feeling you can double tap. As Danaher (2016) notes, algorithmic systems do not merely predict our preferences-they shape our political horizons. Emotional repetition structures not only mood but conviction. In this emotional infrastructure, belief is not adopted-it is iterated. The platform does not argue for a cause-it scripts conviction through recognition. 

The World as It Feels

You do not read the world.
You scroll through it.
And the world that scrolls back is not the one that happened-
-It is the one that suits your tempo.
The bomb is not denied.
It is slowed down, set to music, framed in dusk.
A reel remembers what the headlines forget.
The war is not distant.
It is intimate.
Not because it came closer-
-but because it came softly.
You are not informed.
You are aligned.

What emerges is not ignorance but affective overfitting-an illusion of clarity produced by emotional saturation. The user feels geopolitically engaged not because she understands the world but because the world has been formatted to match her. This is the paradox of geopolitical personalisation: the more intimate the frame, the less visible its frame-ness. Strategic narratives are not imposed-they are embedded. The user does not pledge allegiance-she develops affective compatibility. Geopolitics, in this context, is no longer a matter of diplomacy or doctrine. It becomes a choreography of digital feeling-scalable, iterable, and synchronised. The user does not witness history. She performs its sentiment.

In that performance, history no longer unfolds-it loops.

Obedience as Loyalty: The Civil-Military Interface

In the architecture of digital militarism, obedience no longer requires instruction. It becomes performative. Users do not await a command within algorithmically curated environments ; it enact alignment. Loyalty is not articulated but inferred, not argued but assumed. Emotional synchrony, once the outcome of shared belief, is now the signal of belonging.  The question is no longer Do you obey? ; it is Are you calibrated? Calibration here does not demand awareness ; it merely requires repetition. The user does not align because she is told to, but because she has been emotionally rehearsed into alignment. Obedience today is not external submission but internal compatibility. Through repeated exposure, affirmation, and rhythm, the user learns not what to believe but how to behave effectively. Returning, scrolling, liking ,these are not neutral acts. They are gestures of compatibility. The military no longer demands fealty through rhetoric. It absorbs the user into a loop where loyalty feels ambient. Civilian space, once imagined as distinct from the military domain, is increasingly fused through emotional media. The user is not called upon to serve; she is shaped to belong. This shift is visible in campaigns such as the British Army’s “This is Belonging”, which avoids command-driven messaging and instead frames military life as an emotionally safe space. The campaign centres on solidarity, mutual care, and quiet strength, inviting viewers not to obey but to feel accepted. The uniform is not a marker of discipline but a signal of inclusion. Loyalty, here, is not requested. It is softly mirrored.

Harcourt (2015) notes that power in the digital age does not repress-it harmonises. The civilian is not commanded to obey but formatted to comply. Military logic no longer operates solely through the chain of command but through the loop of emotional resonance. This is the civil-military interface of the 21st century: not a confrontation between state and citizen but a choreography of digital participation-not mobilisation but modulation. Platforms play a critical role in sustaining this affective circuit. The users’ habits, feedback, and responsiveness are monitored and rendered into loyalty signals. A citizen who regularly engages with military content, shares supportive posts, or follows defence narratives becomes legible not through conviction but through consistency. As Amoore (2020) argues, recognition has replaced identification. You are not what you believe. You are what you repeat. Obedience is no longer enforced through pressure ; it is rehearsed through participation. These micro-performances of loyalty are not framed as service but as self-expression, making them all the more effective. The user does not realise she participates; she believes she belongs. The scroll becomes a pledge. The pause becomes assent. The repetition of emotional touchpoints ,camaraderie, sacrifice, pride ,trains the user into affective alignment. What was once a choice becomes a rhythm. What was once enacted becomes embodied. Moreover, what was once a decision now feels like a homecoming. In this emotional infrastructure, the choreography of participation precedes any sense of choice. It is not a question of loyalty given but of loyalty embedded ,rendered visible through rhythm, not rhetoric.

Figure 17. The Loyalty Circuit: From Obedience to Recognition

The diagram in Figure 17 illustrates the closed emotional loop through which platforms transform user behaviour into affective loyalty. The input layer ,user habits, emotional feedback, and platform affordances ,flows into a processing circuit of affective calibration, repetition, and micro-affirmations. What emerges is not declared allegiance but emotional compatibility. The circuit is closed: there is no exit, only re-entry.

She is not moving forward ,she is looping convincingly.

The user is not asked to commit ,she is formatted to return. In this structure, loyalty becomes less an outcome of political conviction and more a function of behavioural rhythm. Consent, in this model, is not given. It circulates. It is not spoken. It loops silently, as recognition.

This chapter reveals that the civil-military interface in digital environments no longer operates through distinction but through emotional interoperability. The user does not cross into military discourse ,she is immersed in its mood. Through ambient repetition, aestheticised storytelling, and rhythmical participation, the boundaries between citizen and subject collapse into behavioural compatibility. Loyalty becomes affective choreography, not a political decision. It is not demanded but inferred from gesture, tone, and tempo. In such environments, the military does not assert itself through declarations but emotional atmospherics. The uniform no longer marks its presence, but by the emotional register it occupies in the user’s feed. It appears not as a command but as recognition. The user is not pressured to belong ,she is mirrored into belonging. This mirroring is not incidental but infrastructural: platforms provide the logic, algorithms supply the tempo, and users contribute the gesture. In that circuit, obedience is not performed under threat but as an act of affective fluency. The implications are not merely symbolic. The traditional markers of authority, resistance, or neutrality destabilize a governance architecture defined by emotional synchronization. The citizen no longer opposes or endorses ,she orbits. As Krämer (2018) argues, power under digital conditions no longer demands assent. It installs rhythm. This rhythm is the new medium of loyalty: not the flag, the oath, or the loop.

The oath is no longer spoken ; it scrolls silently.

Within that loop, the user becomes not the recipient of command but its performer ,seamlessly, fluently, and often unknowingly. In the architecture of digital militarism, loyalty no longer results from ideological conviction but from affective rhythm. The user does not adopt a position ,she rehearses an alignment. Through habitual interaction, emotional repetition, and aesthetic familiarity, civil identification with military narratives is not a matter of persuasion but design. What emerges is not a mobilisation of citizens but a formatting of users whose emotional resonance is interpreted as loyalty. This reconfiguration of the civil-military interface marks a structural mutation in contemporary governance: Obedience is no longer commanded but cultivated through ambient participation. Platforms do not merely distribute strategic content; they shape the tempo of belief. The civic subject is not asked to join but is synchronised to belong. In this choreography, loyalty is not demonstrated through grand gestures but inferred through emotional compatibility. The user does not act politically ,she feels recognisable. This is the final effect of targeted consent: not a public that follows, but a public that feels in rhythm. In the age of emotional governance, the measure of allegiance is no longer what the citizen declares but how fluently she performs her place in the loop.