It is the first global digital teenage war—a war in which, not nations, but an age-group from anywhere on the planet is enticed to travel to the cradle of civilization by the tens of thousands to annihilate each other. Among the distinguishing factors of the ISIS jihad is its dream to establish a caliphate, its significantly younger adherents and its global digital reach. A magic cocktail of the teachings of monomaniacal clerics, sexual repression, violence, adventure, love, duty and a yearning to belong mixed with the accelerant of social media seems to be especially potent and effective on the teenage mind. While millions stream away from Syria and Iraq, tens of thousand of young people are traveling in the other direction to be part of an epic, lethal dream.
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The atomized technologies of contemporary militarization also allows war to be waged everywhere over ideological tensions that may even be several degrees removed from place or national identity. The diaspora of war as distributed terrorism sets off a buckshot of multiple diasporas. In this scatter, currently 65 million people, more than at any other time in history, are displaced or locked out with movements that are halting or precarious. And while infrastructure space has managed to perfectly stream line the movement of billions of products, goods and services, it somehow cannot manage to move 6 million people away from a global atrocity like Syria. This is a problem that simply cannot be solved.