The Price of War

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The Price of War 3D memorial showing war casualties from 1816–2024. World War I and World War II appear as massive vertical structures dominating the visual field.

The Price of War is a three-dimensional web-based memorial and data visualization depicting armed conflicts from 1816 to 2024. The project renders war casualties as human-scale figures in navigable 3D space, with each figure representing 10,000 deaths. As of 2024, the visualization displays approximately 102.7 million lives lost across 14 major wars and 47 significant battles.

The project was developed to address what its creators describe as "the abstraction problem"—the tendency for large-scale human suffering to become incomprehensible when represented only as statistics. By rendering casualties as spatial objects that can be navigated and compared, the memorial attempts to restore visceral understanding to historical data.

Background

The visualization draws on conflict data compiled by W. Mutschler, a researcher who maintains the Price of War dataset on GitLab.[1] Mutschler's dataset aggregates casualty figures, economic costs, and temporal data for armed conflicts spanning two centuries, with sources including the Correlates of War Project, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, and national statistical agencies.

The 3D memorial was created as a companion project to make Mutschler's research accessible to general audiences. Development began in January 2026 and the initial version was completed within a single session, which the developer later described as "a 5 minute flash of brilliance project."

Design

Visual representation

The memorial renders conflicts in a three-dimensional space where:

  • The x-axis represents geographic distribution (conflicts positioned roughly by longitude)
  • The y-axis represents casualty count (taller structures indicate more deaths)
  • The z-axis represents time (earlier conflicts toward the back, recent conflicts toward the front)

Each human figure in the visualization represents 10,000 deaths. Additional iconography indicates the nature of combat:

Symbol Meaning
Red figure 10,000 deaths
Tank icon Major armored battle
Artillery icon Siege warfare

At the default view, World War I (approximately 17 million deaths) and World War II (approximately 70–85 million deaths) dominate the visual field, appearing as massive vertical structures that tower over surrounding conflicts. This spatial relationship—where the World Wars physically overshadow all other 20th-century conflicts—is intentional.

Interface

The interface includes several interactive elements:

  • Timeline slider (1816–2024): Filters visible conflicts by date range
  • Rotation and zoom: Standard 3D navigation via mouse or touch
  • Click-to-inspect: Selecting any conflict displays detailed information including duration, belligerents, casualty breakdown, and economic impact
  • Reflections panel: Rotating display of quotations about war from historical figures
  • Running totals: Header displays cumulative wars, battles, lives lost, and economic cost ($14.5 trillion as of 2024)

Ukraine documentation

A dedicated panel titled "Ukraine — Live Memory" displays video footage from the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War. This footage is sourced from Northside, a Telegram-based documentation collective whose members record and archive combat footage from Ukraine. According to the project developers, the collective's contributors "want their stuff to be out there because they feel the world just carried on and didn't care."

The inclusion of contemporary footage is intended to prevent the memorial from functioning purely as historical abstraction. The content warning displayed before entry explicitly states: "This is not entertainment. This is witness."

Content warning

Upon loading, the visualization displays a content warning that must be acknowledged before proceeding:

This memorial contains:

  • Real war footage from Ukraine
  • Images of combat and its aftermath
  • Content depicting death and violence

This is not entertainment. This is witness. The media shown represents real people.

This framing distinguishes the project from entertainment media that depicts violence and from news coverage that may use similar footage for engagement metrics.

Data sources

The primary dataset is Mutschler's Price of War compilation, which synthesizes:

Economic impact figures are inflation-adjusted to 2024 US dollars where possible. Casualty figures follow the conventions of the source datasets, which typically include military and civilian deaths directly attributable to conflict but may exclude indirect deaths from famine, disease, and displacement.

The Russo-Ukrainian War figure (500,000 casualties as displayed) represents an estimate current as of the visualization's last update and is subject to significant uncertainty due to ongoing hostilities and limited independent verification.

Technical implementation

The visualization is built using:

The application runs entirely in the browser with no server-side processing required after initial load. This architecture ensures the memorial remains accessible even if hosting infrastructure changes.

Reception

As of January 2026, the project has not received formal critical review. It is hosted on Cloudflare Pages at price-of-war-3d.pages.dev, with plans to migrate to the thepriceofwar.com domain.

Philosophical context

The memorial is associated with the OMXUS project, a governance system based on proximity-weighted democracy. Within OMXUS philosophy, The Price of War serves as evidence for the argument that decisions should be made by those who bear their consequences. The implicit connection: wars are decided by people who do not fight them, and the 102 million deaths visualized represent the cost of that disconnect.

This aligns with the OMXUS principle of proximity voting—the idea that an individual's vote on any issue should be weighted by their proximity to that issue's effects. Applied to matters of war, this principle would weight the votes of potential combatants and civilians in conflict zones more heavily than those of distant decision-makers.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Mutschler, W. "Price of War Dataset." GitLab. https://gitlab.com/wmutschl/price-of-war

External links

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