Pulp to Plutonium

This essay argues that media systems are not passive instruments of military power but active infrastructures that shape how war is conceived, executed, and sustained. Building on Harold Innis’s staples theory and the materialist traditions in media scholarship, we analyze three case studies—the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and the ongoing conflict over rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—to demonstrate how media-specific demands produce new regimes of logistics, extraction, and violence. In each historical moment, war is not simply conducted through media but organized around it: paper shortages in the 1860s tied to cotton blockades redefined print media as both resource and battleground; telegraphic entanglements during WWI transformed cable infrastructure into a target and tactical medium; and today’s digital economies sustain conflict through their dependence on minerals sourced from war-torn regions. Rather than treating media as ancillary to strategy, we position them as infrastructural cores of military operations. Media circuits demand raw materials, labor infrastructures, and spatial control—linking sovereign power to media logistics in enduring ways. Our analysis reveals that war and media are co-constitutive processes tied together by shared material conditions. From the newspaper to the fiber-optic cable, the terrain of conflict shifts in step with the demands of media technologies. This entwinement renders modern war a struggle not just over territory or ideology but over the infrastructures that make communication—and domination—possible.