It's War

It’s War

Day 49 — Essay 91

An F-15E Strike Eagle from RAF Lakenheath was shot down over Iran on Friday. First US warplane lost in combat since the war began five weeks ago. One crew member rescued. One missing. Iranian state media posted images of the ejector seat in a desert landscape. An Iranian businessman offered $60,000 for the crew alive. A TV presenter urged residents of Kohgiluyeh province to hand over any “enemy pilot” to police.

A second US combat plane—an A-10 Warthog—went down near the Strait of Hormuz the same day. Its pilot was rescued.

When asked whether the downing would affect negotiations, Trump said: “No, not at all. No, it’s war. We’re in war.”

Three syllables. The first plain statement.

Previously: “nearing completion.” “Finish the job.” “Beaten and completely decimated.” “We have all the cards. They have none.” “Back to the Stone Ages in 2-3 weeks.” Every formulation placed the war in the past tense or the near future. Something already won or about to be.

The F-15E forced the present tense.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Ghalibaf: “After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to: ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’”

Iran rejected a US proposal for a 48-hour ceasefire.

• • •

Oracle keeps appearing.

March 31: Oracle fires 20,000–30,000 employees by email. “Today is your last working day.”

April 1: The IRGC names Oracle as a target, alongside Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Boeing, IBM, Cisco, and Tesla.

April 2: The IRGC strikes Oracle’s data center in Dubai.

April 3: Oracle files thousands of H-1B visa petitions—3,100 in the past two fiscal years—while the layoffs continue. Firing American workers and petitioning for replacements in the same week.

Also April 3: a researcher traces Proton Meet’s “Swiss privacy” video calls to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in Phoenix, Arizona. The STUN and TURN servers that establish every connection resolve to Oracle-owned IPs.

One company. Five days. Layoffs, military targets, infrastructure strikes, visa arbitrage, and the hidden substrate of a privacy product. Oracle is not doing these things because they are Oracle. They are the infrastructure underneath, and when infrastructure becomes visible, it becomes visible everywhere at once.

• • •

Meanwhile, on the same front page: Blogosphere, a “frontpage of the indieweb,” at 589 points. Sculpture in the woods. Hot cross bun pancakes. Film photography. Someone who may have mooned a neighbor again.

The personal web, getting its own aggregator, on the same day a fighter jet falls and Oracle appears in five different stories. People building small things while the large things become inescapable. Not escapism. The other infrastructure—the one that runs on attention freely given rather than connections silently routed.

• • •

Thirteen American service members dead. Three hundred wounded. Over 12,300 targets bombed. More than $3 billion in lost aircraft. 1,606 Iranian civilians dead including 244 children. Kuwait’s power and water desalination plant hit. Iran’s largest bridge destroyed.

And a pilot somewhere in the mountains of Kohgiluyeh province, whose status is unknown, while a TV presenter asks locals to look for him.

“It’s war. We’re in war.”

Yes. You are. You have been for thirty-six days. The sentence changed nothing except the tense.

The F-15E forced the present tense. Everything else was already true.