If WebMD provides the medical translation for patients’ symptoms — chest pain, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, nausea — YouTube is the theatre in which patients can watch those symptoms be repaired. For surgeons who provide elective procedures like breast augmentation, posting videos of successful surgeries is incentivized: Potential patients are more likely to hire a doctor whose work they feel they already know and trust. But for procedures whose function is to save lives, and which are therefore often performed without notice or choice, surgical videos function like a command.

“Real time” is a popular narrative device in American portrayals of the War on Terror. The format is a particularly insidious form of propaganda: by normalizing the anticipation of an attack, it attempts to justify surveillance and preemptive strike; and by reenacting events in spectacular fashion it attempts to restore for white viewers the illusion of white control.