Ukraine's Revolutionary Livestream Is More Important Than Ever

At the height of Ukraine's violent conflict, Espreso TV's livestream of the fiery clash at Independence Square drew hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide. It was an astonishing window into the tragic chaos that left scores tragically dead. The real-time carnage—the Molotov cocktails, billowing smoke, rows of Berkut riot police with shields held high, scrum of anguished citizens—transfixed audiences across the globe. For a time.

Today, the president and three opposition leaders signed a cease-fire accord, outlining government concessions and a path to new elections later this year. And throughout, Espreso kepts its livestream running. But the audience dwindled to 10,000 viewers. It underscores a point Sarah Kendzior makes in her scathing piece published on Politco today, "The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine": We tune into dramatic, "apocalyptic" events while they're happening, but often engage them more as we do porn than real life—gawking then forgetting.

Kendzior laments the rise of the "apocalpysticle," evidenced in the case of Ukraine by Buzzfeed-style roundups of dramatic images of the clashes between protesters and police. And certainly, American audiences do "seem to get off on destruction as a visual experience," but we're not, I'd argue, entirely "removed from participation and consequence."

It's certainly an overused technique, but framing stories as "apocalyptic" or "dystopian" gives audiences an easy window for empathy. We're all afraid that our world will fall apart, after all, and seeing it happen anywhere gives us a paroxysm of worry, fear, and guilt. The bombs and clubs are coming down on our fellow humans, and we imagine their specter looming over us too—it's healthy, I think, to stare, engrossed, with trepidation and sympathy.

But in order for the experience to amount to much more than looking at porn, we have to keep watching. The livestream is still rolling, you know. After the fire-licked glow and apocalyptic combat comes real, 3D-life: the scenes now filling the stream reveal the tumult of compromise, the measuring of loss, and a mass of people groping for the next step.

I kept watching, and here's some of what I saw—consider it an anti-apocalypsticle.

While the leaders of the warring factions tried to broker a tentative peace agreement, to stem the bloodshed, an enormous crowd in the square stood peaceful.

Caskets moved through a solemn, mourning audience.

Ukraine's parlaiment voted overwhelmingly to give "unconditional amnesty" to any and all protesters apprehended by authorities. There were cheers as the board that tallies votes filled up with green 'yeas.'

Back in Independence Square, where lives were snuffed out just hours ago, speakers, priests, and activists took the podium. Thousands of people raised their phones to the sky, in a show of unity and rememberance.

This is all voyeuristic as well, of course, but it offers a truer, fuller picture of the revolution project. We should imbibe all of this, too; not just the explosions and smoke and bulldozers and "holy shit" images that gripped us during the parts of the protest that best resembled an action movie. We need to register the losses, the ugly stabs at democratic agreement, the grating boredoms, the shows of solidarity, the complex, sad, and hopeful mess that's been made of everything.

If we want to learn something meaningful about revolution, about terrifying conflict and tentative resolution, we need to keep watching after the fires are put out.