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Transcript of Drones in Discourse
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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Drones in Discourse
Constructing a Consistent and Malleable Conceptualization of the Contemporary Drone
NIFEMI MADARIKAN
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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INTRODUCTION: A Palpable Unease
“Drones are a tool, not a policy. The policy is
assassination.”
- Jeremy Scahill, ‘The Assassination Complex’
In popular imagination, the modern drone is depicted as an acephalous,
winged, killing-machine; it is an unnatural synthesis of man-machine
consciousness built to surveil and destroy. This representation is as
flawed as it is problematic; the drone cannot be conceptualized as such
a rigid, crudely one-dimensional object. In this paper, I will articulate the
drone in a manner that is conceptually consistent and contextually
malleable. I begin with an investigation of air strikes authorized within
the U.S. military-industrial complex in order to situate the reasons
behind public distrust and fear of the drone. Following this, I explore
some of the several other different spaces in which drones are operated,
spanning a palimpsest of civic, creative, and commercial contexts that
inform each other. Having identified contexts and spaces of relevance, I
then demystify the drone to ascertain its metaphysical underpinnings.
This leads me to my articulation of the drone as a mobile extension of the
operator’s self and experience of space. I further validate this concept
through an analysis of the Internet as a parallel technology that extends
the operator’s experience of space by mapping real-world space subjects
onto Internet space nodes which can be navigated by the operator. This
articulation is expanded to conceptualize the drone as an epistemic
object that operates within a human collectivity for the general good of
the State.
Popular public opinion positions the drone as a mindless tool of violence
and intrusion associated with government-authorized targeted killings,
especially as a means of extrajudicial execution. This representation of
the drone is not entirely without reason; Jack Serle and Abigail Field-
Smith of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism claim that the Obama
administration has authorized at least 491 drone strikes in Pakistan,
Somalia and Yemen to date. (Jack Serle, 2015). In addition to widespread
fear of military application unmanned aerial vehicles, U.S. public opinion
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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reflects a palpable unease about drone application outside of the
military-industrial complex. While brutal hunting machines assassinate
targets outside the U.S., drones within the State raise fears of
“catastrophic aerial accidents and … optical surveillance and personal or
commercial privacy invasion” (McCosker, 2015). The drone has become
an instrument of fear and a subject of anti-military criticism.
As drones begin to appear outside the military-industrial complex,
several organizations, private interests, and authorities have begun the
design of protocols, regulations, and standardizations to ensure the
drone can operate within the State in ways congruent to existing
sociocultural norms, technologies, institutions, and arrangements of
power and space. For instance, US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) has
stated interest in regulating Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) to guard
against aircraft that are operated “in a manner that endangers the safety
of the national airspace system” (Erhardt Graeff, 2015). An Australian
federal inquiry conducted by the Commonwealth Parliamentary
Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs was published
called ‘Eyes in the Sky: Inquiry into Drones and the Regulation of Air Safety
and Privacy’. This inquiry included conjectures on new domains in which
drone technology could become relevant. What this reveals is a
burgeoning desire to integrate drones into the modern day state in a
deliberate, thoughtful manner. This will require a thorough
conceptualization that grapples with the nature of the drone’s
metaphysical existence and its continued relevance to the State.
Angel of Death
A synthesis of man-machine consciousness applied with lethal force, the
military drone has become a hallmark of U.S. modern warfare. Since the
first recorded drone strike outside of the U.S. 12 years ago, military use
of drones in targeted killings has received attention from a plethora of
citizen critics, metaphysical theorists, and sociologists alike. Georgetown
law professor Garry Solis defines targeted killing as “The intentional
killing of a specific civilian or unlawful combatant who cannot
reasonably be apprehended who is taking a direct part in hostilities … in
the contest of an international or non-international armed conflict.”
(Whetham, 2013) David Whetham asserts that this definition is “still
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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commensurate with the core idea found in all codifications of basic
human rights” whereby “while there is an absolute right not to be
arbitrarily deprived of life, the use of lethal force against an individual
can still be justified if it is absolutely necessary for the defense of another
person from an act of unlawful violence by that individual” (Whetham,
2013) However, at the epicenter of recent criticism of targeted killing is
this ‘absolutely necessary’ criterion; public opinion reflects a concern
that targeted killing has become an excuse for extrajudicial execution.
Without any actual imminent threat warranting self-defense, the U.S.
government’s use of military force to eliminate ‘security threats’ is
perceived as lethal punishment of opponents to the State. Furthermore,
concerns arise as to who the U.S. government classifies as its targets and
whether these include innocent civilians merely on the wrong side of the
fence. In a national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted May
12-18 2015, 80% of the 2,002 adults expressed at least some concern
regarding whether U.S. drone strikes endanger the lives of innocent
civilians – 48% said they were very concerned, with 32% only somewhat
concerned. (Poll on U.S. Opinions of Drones, 2015) The survey also
revealed a concomitant wariness of drone warfare – 31% said they were
very concerned U.S. drone strikes could lead to retaliation from
extremist groups, 24% believed negative criticism of U.S. drone warfare
tactics could damage America’s reputation around the world, and only
29% believed the drone strikes were being conducted legally.
Furthermore, 56% of the surveyed adults felt that the United States had
failed in achieving its goals in Afghanistan, especially given the heavy use
of military drones in the region. However, the survey also reveals an
initially confounding oddity; despite palpable concerns about the moral
implications of executing innocent civilians, the efficacy of drone
warfare, and the corollary of a negative national image, 58% of the
surveyed adults still approve the U.S. conducting missile strikes from
drones to target extremist terrorist groups in countries such as Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia. How could public opinion contradict itself so much?
I posit that this is more of revelation than a contradiction; under the
general assumption that the U.S. military operates in the interest of the
State by defending its citizenry, public opinion supports the concept of
proactive military campaigns against terrorism and extremist
insurgents that pose a significant threat to the State. However, public
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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disapproval arises in the realization of this concept, in the physical
details and technical decisions involved in its implementation. Public
disapproval arises where drones are employed in warfare with
unforeseen, or less than perfect, outcomes. What remains is to ascertain
the sources of public unease about military drones with elucidating,
though disputable, evidence.
In early 2014, The Intercept published several articles in response to a
leaked cache of secret documents detailing the inner workings of the U.S.
military’s targeted killing program in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The first article, The Assassination Complex, describes “parallel drone-
based assassination programs” (Scahill, 2015) operated by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). The documents cited by the article reveal intense
internal conflict between these two entities regarding arrangements of
power and ownership of operations. Also revealed is how the
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Task Force
“lamented the limitations of the drone program” and “recommended
capturing and interrogating more suspected terrorists rather than
killing them in drone strikes.” (Scahill, 2015) A note from the UN Special
Rapporteur in 2010 reads “No State has disclosed the full legal basis for
targeted killings … Nor has any State disclosed the procedural and other
safeguards in place to ensure that killings are lawful and justified, and
the accountability mechanisms that ensure wrongful killings are
investigated, prosecuted and punished.” (Whetham, 2013) With no
measure of international accountability for targeted killings, the U.S.
military allegedly authorized attacks on targets outside of its own official
standards on several occasions – two of which were leaked to The
Intercept: Operation Haymaker in Afghanistan, and Objective Peckham
between England and Somalia.
Once British-Lebanese citizen Bilal el-Berjawi was suspected of having
cultivated ties with senior al Qaeda militants in East Africa, his British
citizenship was immediately annulled and “he was placed on a U.S. kill
list.” (Gallagher, 2015) According to a Pentagon case study, Berjawi left
London in 2006 to attend ‘Bayt al-Jinn’ – a camp where he received
training on explosives. The case study further states that soon after, he
returned to the U.K. and provided financial support al Qaeda allied
operatives in East Africa. Although the Pentagon case study leaked to The
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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Intercept did not specifiy the location of the Bayt al-Jinn camp, a secret
detainee report on a Kenyan terror suspect was published by WikiLeaks
in 2011 which mentions a ‘Bayt Jinn House’ in Mogadishu, Somalia.
Berjawi was placed under surveillance by both British and American
intelligence for at least 5 years as he travelled back and forth between
England and Somalia. In a case study included in a 2013 report by the
ISR, Berjawi is referred to as a target codenamed ‘Objective Peckham’.
On January 21, 2012, Berjawi was executed by a drone missile strike, 10
miles northwest of Mogadishu. According to the secret Pentagon
document ‘FFF Timeline: Objective Peckham Case Study’, Berjawi’s
white SUV was observed at 3:59 a.m. by constant drone surveillance over
several hours until 11:03 a.m. when Bilal el Berjawi was “eliminated via
kinetic strike”. News of this attack sparked outrage in U.K. and U.S.
citizens, and paranoia among al Qaeda elements in East Africa. Public
concern was fixated on the decision to execute Berjawi given that the U.S.
and U.K. intelligence forces had several opportunities to apprehend and
detain Berjawi over the 5 year period of his almost constant surveillance.
Much criticism of targeted killing is premised on the moral implications
of harming civilians in drone strikes. Between 2011 and 2013, the U.S.
military, CIA and other subsets of the U.S. intelligence contingency,
launched ‘Operation Haymaker’ – a campaign against Taliban and al
Qaeda forces in the Hindu Kush, along Afghanistan’s northeaster border
with Pakistan. The Intercept obtained secret documents, including
detailed slides pertaining to Operation Haymaker and other operations
in the border regions of Afghanistan which “show that during a five-
month stretch of the campaign, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in
airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets. By February 2013,
Haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 “jackpots” … while
more than 200 people were declared EKIA.” (Devereaux, 2015) Jackpots
and EKIA belong to a glossary of codenames and inside terms within the
U.S. military – the former referring to successful assassinations, and the
latter as an acronym for “enemy killed in action”, when some individual
other than the target (possibly including civilians) is killed. This same
vernacular encodes drones as “birds” and specific targets as “objectives”.
(Begley, 2015)
Through a page-turning, case-by-case exposé of U.S. drone warfare, The
Intercept inserts itself into drone discourse as ammunition for public
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critics to vociferously attack military application of unmanned aerial
vehicles. But how trustworthy is this source relative to other works? In
‘Counting the Dead: The Proportionality of Predation in Pakistan’, Avery
Plaw provides a rigorous analysis of the collateral damage caused by
drone strikes. Following extensive research, Plaw claims that “the best
available evidence suggests that civilian casualties are moderate to low
in relation to suspected militant casualties.” (Plaw, 2013) This is in stark
contrast to the high civilian death toll described by The Intercept. Plaw
concludes his analyses with an appeal for drones to be “permitted more
time to achieve their objectives and to prove how precise and effective
they can become.” (Plaw, 2013) Perhaps the precision and effectiveness
that Plaw describes are most congruently aligned with the reflections of
Jeff McMahan – a philosopher who posits that drone technology enables
operators to more carefully discriminate the targets they destroy and
“monitor the target area for lengthy periods before deciding whether,
when, and where to strike.” (McMahan, 2013) This line of thought
suggests that drone surveillance technologies provide operators a way
to closely observe and thus correctly identify their targets, enabling
them to “make morally informed decisions about the use of their
weapons.” (McMahan, 2013) Worth noting is McMahan’s avoidance of
the technology determinist view of drones as dangerous machines
concomitant with inhumanity. Instead McMahan points out that “if the
operators of the remotely controlled weapons are citizens of a state that
is the victim of armed aggression, they are necessarily under some sort
of threat, so that if the threat they face as individuals is sufficiently
serious to make killing a proportionate response, they can be justified in
using their weapons against the aggressors.” (McMahan, 2013) This flip
of the coin clarifies a crucial property of the drone – its context. One can
argue in defense of drone warfare so long as such military action is in
self-defense. One would not be able to ignore the moral and ethical faults
of using drones in wars of collective defense or intervention where the
intervener is not facing any real imminent threat at all. For the use of
drones in targeted killings to be morally and ethically justifiable, it must
be “neither punishment for past actions nor reprisal but rather a
preventive act taken in self-defense.” (Whetham, 2013)
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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Decentering the Drone
A thoroughly extensive conceptualization of the drone requires an
appreciation of the different physical contexts to which UAV technology
can be applied. Maximilian Jablonowski claims that “Within the last year
media coverage on actual and potential civil drone uses appears to have
increased” (Jablonowski, 2015). Civic technologies shift power away
from centralized government and into other constituents of the State,
typically redistributed among citizenry and their institutions. Through
this lens, drones can be analyzed as tools of participatory practice and
outside the context of military application. Articulating the drone as a
civic technology is necessary to “demilitarize and democratize [the
drones] so they can find their full potential” (Jablonowski, 2015).
In ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Langdon Winner wrestles with the agency
of artifacts – the disputable opinion that technology can “embody
specific forms of power and authority”. (Winner, 1980) Winner proposes
that technology can be evaluated not only in terms of its functions and
physical utility, but also within the parameters of reasonable social
contexts. An example of this is in Plato’s allegory of a sailing vessel and
the inherent power structure attributed to its operation; “no reasonable
person believes that ships can be run democratically” (Winner, 1980)
Winner itemizes two arguments for technology’s inherent political
property; one stating that the use of technology often requires a
particular set of social conditions and directives, the other that
technology can be compatible with particular social relationships. Given
this loose articulation of how technology can be applied within different
social contexts and arrangements of power, the viability of civic drones
becomes more plausible. In ‘Making Drones Civic: Values and Design
Principles for Civic Technology’ Erhardt Graeff and J. Nathan Matias
contest whether drones can be fully accepted as civic technologies which
shift power “away from corrupt actors and toward virtuous actors.”
(Erhardt Graeff, 2015) This redistribution of power is a precursor to
broader participation by citizens in the development of their State; civic
technologies become tools for civic engagement.
The most recently successful application of drone technology to civic
engagement is in monitorial citizenship, whereby citizens reverse the
gaze of surveillance onto the State and its constituents. Civic drones have
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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become powerful information delivery systems that enable citizenry to
better monitor governments and private interest entities and thus hold
them more accountable for their observable actions. For instance, the
Grassroots Mapping efforts to monitor the scope of BP Deepwater
Horizon oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico “offer a practical case of
participatory aerial photography used to contest the narratives of
private interests in spatially disparate situations.” (Erhardt Graeff, 2015)
This ‘sousveillance’ distinguishes itself from traditional surveillance in
that the power to surveil is redistributed among all citizens as opposed
to any single central authority.
When drones appear to hone civic intent into participatory engagement,
it becomes easy to slip into quixotic articulations of technology as the
ultimate transformative proponent of development. Kentaro Toyoma, on
the other hand, “denies technology’s ability to substitute for deficient
intent and capability on the part of project stakeholders.” (Toyoma,
2011) Technology alone cannot solve the myriad problems of the world,
instead it “can appear to have both positive and negative impacts,
because technology is merely a magnifier of underlying human and
institutional intent and capacity, which can themselves be positive or
negative.” (Toyoma, 2011) Again rises the menacing portrayal of drones
as angels of death held accountable to military constituents of the State.
However, Toyoma’s theory of technology as an amplifier of human forces
is neither intended to bedevil technology nor dismiss its relevance in
driving development, but rather to refocus on “building human capacity”
and seeking to “amplify the impact of existing institutions that are
already contributing successfully to development goals.” (Toyoma,
2011) The observation that “progress had been closely bound up, from
its inception, with the accelerating rate of scientific and mechanical
innovation” (Marx, 2010) is one criticized by Leo Marx for its implicit
disregard for human agency, and unabashed adherence to technology
determinist ideals. Marx goes further to critique current articulations of
technology by describing the modern reification of technology as a
hazardous concept that “seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as
to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between
people.” (Marx, 2010) Following this caveat, the civic drone cannot be
treated as a causal agent or else attention may be diverted from the
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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human relations and infrastructure necessary to enact the change and
ignite the upheaval that precede development.
If the civic drone is the first attempt to decenter the drone, the
commercial drone is sure to follow under the purview of ‘purposive-
rational action’, and the creative drone surfaces as another
conceptualization of UAVs outside of the military-industrial complex.
Amazon Prime Air is a future delivery system from Amazon designed to
safely deliver packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using UAVs.
Flying under 400 feet and weighing less than 55 pounds, Amazon Prime
Air drones will deliver packages of up to five pounds within the
parameters of safe operation beyond the line of sight. Few hurdles, such
as need for “regulatory support” (Amazon, 2015) remain before this
rapid parcel delivery system transitions from science fiction to
commonplace reality. On the other hand, a burgeoning amateur drone
community has ascribed creative purposes to the drone through
activities that are unrestrained by specific rational objectives – unlike
civic, commercial, or military drones. Independent hobbyists develop
amateur UAVs purely for the sake of exploring technical problems within
a creative and cooperative space as an end in itself. This informal
creative process allows such hobbyists to “gather momentum and realize
themselves rather independently.” (Jablonowski, 2015) These drones all
form a landscape of differing visions of technological innovations such
that “the drone is constituted by different realities … a ‘real social and
cultural phenomenon’ even though it is not physically present in most
lifeworlds.” (Jablonowski, 2015) Thus the drone is no longer a singular
concept but a technological plurality whose constitutive parts span
military, commercial, creative, and civic contexts. Such plurality in
contextualization is the crucial step towards decentering the drone in a
way that contributes to understanding, contesting, and creating the
“apparent future trajectory of drones.” (Jablonowski, 2015)
Demystifying the Drone
Having situated the source of public unease in its apocryphal military
representations and identified the broadening landscape of its
applications, the task remains to articulate the drone in a manner that is
both conceptually consistent and contextually malleable. The lack of
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standard terminology and classification of drones across relevant spaces
of regulation, production, and use “flags the competing conceptual
terrain in which drones operate.” (McCosker, 2015). The palimpsest of
contexts and criticisms of UAVs I have presented thus far will not suffice
to clear this clouded conceptual terrain; metaphysical scrutiny is
essential to demystifying the drone. In Drone Metaphysics, Benjamin
Noys open his examination of the drone with a metaphor of “the
‘travelling eye of God’ … as the operator of violence.” (Noys, 2015)
Immediately, the reader is launched into a narrative of apathy and
emotional disconnection common to all aerial warfare, a “concomitant
inhumanity”. Noys depicts the drone as the signature device of
“transcendence and destruction” in contemporary arrangements of
power – a violent, mobile panopticon that allows everything to be seen
and known, at every moment and in every place. Also crucial to
understand is the drone’s surrounding metaphysical ‘supplement’ – a
“both unnecessary extra addition and necessary element of completion”.
This supplement is a theological resonance that materializes itself as the
various subjects that are pertinent to the drone as an object.
The first subject of the drone’s metaphysical supplement is what Noys
calls ‘World Spirit’; whereby the drone’s physically obvious acephaly
coupled with its lack of sentience makes the drone difficult to identify.
This difficulty leads to an anxiety of faceless weapons that can neither be
judged nor critiqued in a conventional manner. Regarding military
application, this becomes problematic as drones minimize the role and
direct accountability of humans in Derek Gregory’s ‘kill-chain’ – “a
dispersed and distributed apparatus, a congeries of actors, objects,
practices, discourses and affects, that entertains the people who are
made part of it and constitutes them as particular kinds of subjects.”
(Gregory, 2011) True to its panopticon nature, the drone occludes its
operator from the view of its victims and those who are surveilled. From
the victim’s perspective, the invisible pilot cannot be identified and thus
cannot be held accountable for the drone’s actions. To compose the
drone as a metaphysical object, Noys asserts that ascribing a ‘face’ to the
drone is “a necessary critical gesture.” (Noys, 2015)
Another subject of drone metaphysics is that which is premised in
Projectile Philosophy; the ‘projectile’ state involves the pursuit of ideal
weightlessness, a replacement of vital or physical means of existence
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with the ‘void’ of “pure intelligence in transit” and “speed” (Noys, 2015).
This ‘void’ is present in the absence of the human object. No longer
subject to physical constraints of standard motion, the pilot instead
vicariously interacts through the drone via remote control and visual
and/or audio interfaces. Here the drone becomes “an experience of
weightless dominance in its displacement and augmentation of … the
‘void’, not so much of speed, but of invulnerability”. (Noys, 2015) This
ability of drones to lift their human pilot above and beyond material
constraints, thus augmenting their ability to interact speedily with the
world in a non-corporeal manner, portrays the drone as a device of
transcendence.
Before finalizing the drone as a transcendent object, it is worth
considering the metaphysical subject of Banality – the candid
acknowledgement of the technical limitations of range, speed,
vulnerability, and autonomous operation that tether the drone to
materiality. Noys highlights the drone’s “conjunction of banal labour and
deadly violence” (Noys, 2015), drawing attention to the homonym
metaphor of a drone as a mindless laborer of monotonous work. This
banality integrates human agency into the conceptualization of the
drone in what Noys describes as “the fusion of flesh with steel.” (Noys,
2015) The drone’s return to materiality is consistent with Leo Marx’s
model of interpreting technology in tandem with human structures and
intents; a drone can neither design, program, nor fly itself. Its operation
and existence are contingent on the continued labor of human agents.
Although Noys provides an elucidating insight into varied metaphysical
spaces occupied by the drone, he also limits the drone to an existence of
“brutal surveillance and killing”. Noys warns of “engaging with this [the
drone’s] theological or metaphysical resonance seriously” so as not to
“feed the technological fetishism that can impinge on the thinking of
drones.” (Noys, 2015) Noys’ complete dismissal of technology
determinist analyses is an unfortunate oversight worsened by the small
scope of his own conceptualization of the drone. In order to critique
technologies in an intelligent and conscious manner, it is crucial to
properly understand not only how they act for us, but how they act on
us. Not all drones kill human victims; this violent depiction of the drone
as a murderous machine is what I hope to steer away from in this paper.
In ‘Drone Media: Unruly Systems, Radical Empiricism and Camera
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Consciousness’ Anthony McCosker describes the “distributed ecology”
(McCosker, 2015) in which drones operate. McCosker begins by drawing
attention to dronies - the use of drones in social media practices of self-
imaging. In this case, the drone remains a device of surveillance yet is no
longer a traditional panopticon; its distributed transmission of
‘surveillance footage’ across social media platforms such as Facebook
and Instagram “creates a heterogeneous assemblage that places
perception outside of a singular, fixed perceiving subject.” (McCosker,
2015) As opposed to being forcefully surveilled by a faceless entity, the
subject deliberately renders himself onto the screen of social media for
a multitude of faces to see.
Beyond the physical spaces within which drones are operated and
regulated, (such as legislation, commercial application and military
deployment) are mental processes and connections also worth
investigating. McCosker analyzes the “modes of imaging and visuality”
(McCosker, 2015) within which drones operate during experiences of
‘wirelessness’. This wirelessness blurs the edges between objective and
subjective experiences of sight. When flying drones, the human operator
displaces their consciousness into the drone in an “indirect visuality”
that supports motion - the operator goes where the drone goes and sees
what the drone sees in a vicarious experience of perception and
interaction. Mentally, the drones becomes an extension of the operator, a
surplus set of eyes with wings. Now consider the social implications of
this ‘extension of self’ when the drone, following its operator-provided
directives, broadcasts this visual experience across social media for
other objects to also see. Together, these conditions “create a volatile
techno-social … environment of object and signaletic relations, image
relay and distribution.” (McCosker, 2015) Furthermore, the drone
implicates the operator in a “dual sense of visual augmentation and
anxiety” (McCosker, 2015) The source of this anxiety is in the disruption
of the scene the drone enters. This disruption follows the individual
awareness of being observed through mediated perception and, in turn,
precedes a social wariness of the proliferation of mutual surveillance.
Reiterating poll data, as much as 42% of adults in a recent Reuters poll
opposed private ownership of drones until regulation was in place to
curb potential invasions of privacy by drones carrying cameras (Scott,
2015). The fear of the drone as a ‘mechanized vision machine’ is a
MADARIKAN, N. DRONES IN DISCOURSE FALL, 2015
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palpable one stemming from an aversion to drones interfering with
publically visible relations and experiences previously had in private
seclusion.
In a space of technological surveillance shared with orbital satellites and
static cameras, drones emerge as devices of “unruly trajectories.”
(McCosker, 2015) Whereas traditional surveillance cameras monitor
from a fixed location and satellites operate in directions dictated by fixed
vectors along particular axes, the drone operates with complete freedom
of multidirectional motion; its only constraint being the bounds of the
wireless space it travels within. Despite these differences, preexisting
technologies of surveillance (satellites in particular) provide a useful
history in their use by states and the military-industrial complex to sever
the material relationship between an object and its visual experience
then supplant it with a system of visual observation embodied in remote
“omniscient and objective structures of seeing and knowing the world.”
(McCosker, 2015) In its ability to deliver information through the
footage it records, the drone imbues its operator with knowledge and
becomes an epistemic object.
In ‘Promising Information: Democracy, Development, and the Remapping
of Latin America’ Kregg Hetherington describes three properties of
information: representation as the relationship between independent
things that information refers to, clarity as the recoverability and
comprehensibility of information, and quantification as the extent to
which information can be measured and understood as a ratio between
what has and has not yet been uncovered (Hetherington, 2012).
Excitingly enough, the conceptualization of the drone constructed so far
operates in processes consistent with these properties of information. I
have established that the surveillance drone is operated in a vicarious
visual system that maps the observations of the drone’s own physical
space onto a remote ‘operator space’ via wireless communication. In a
bidirectional relationship, the drone streams real-time, first-person-
view visual data to the operator who then cognitively processes this data
into information used in navigating the drone through the physical
world. This relationship between the drone, the operator, and their
respective physical spaces illustrates representation. That the streaming
of visual data is comprehensible enough for the operator to process it in
real-time and navigate the drone’s flight attests to this information’s
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clarity. Since the drone merely extends the operator’s human vision, the
same limitations on direct experiences of sight apply; the operator
cannot see what is not within the current field of view. With this, a clear
distinction is made between that which has and has not yet been visually
uncovered. This distinction and the cognition that follows it relate to the
quantification of information. Clearly, the drone is more than just a
prosaic recording machine; it is a responsive information-delivery
system, an agent of knowledge, and thus an epistemic object.
Criticisms abound of the drone and its problematic “God trick”
(Haraway, 1988) of a surveilling gaze always beyond view which
nonetheless disrupts social and individual spaces of expression and
visibility. John Johnston on the other hand acknowledges the value of the
drone as an epistemic object, and argues that the new contemporary
visual experience it provides can only be critically engaged with “a new
consciousness of the sense of technical objects” (Johnston, 1999). This
consciousness requires that the drone be depicted as more than just a
machine, but a mobile agent of knowledge that “presents its semi-
subjectivity through its motile, transmissible and sharable image.”
(McCosker, 2015) Furthermore, we must acknowledge that the
surveillance drone possesses a quasi-consciousness of its own in that,
from inception, it is imbued with both technological and social
properties that not only represent but relationally act on the drone’s
operator, its surroundings, and the public it surveils. This is conceptually
consistent across considerations of drone agency and acknowledgement
of the human labors and associated metaphysical subjects that support
the viability of the drone.
Uncovering Parallels
Few systems embody modern arrangements of authority and
information within a space of wirelessness like the Internet. A global
system of interconnected computer networks, the Internet is a grand
epistemic structure. Human operators interface with this vehicle of
knowledge through the World Wide Web (WWW) – a distributed system
that “runs on top of the Internet and presents a model in which
everything looks like a document” (Andrew S. Tenenbaum, 2011). In
using the WWW, operators are able to query content stored anywhere
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across the Internet and then, where applicable, interact with this
content. Like the drone, this interface into the Internet provides the
operator a mobile and disembodied extension of self; the operator
determines how to maneuver within a remote space upon receiving real-
time, relational feedback from the technological object. Unlike the drone,
mobility in this case is not in the traversing of a physical environment
but in the purposeful navigation of networks of information nodes. Just
as the experience of indirect visuality through the drone’s user interface
enables an operator to surveil remote physical spaces, indirect visuality
through the WWW provides an operator the image produced by
mapping a subject from the world space onto relevant nodes in the
Internet space. How are we certain that this mapping conveys
information that meets Hetherington’s criteria of three properties? The
information communicated through the mapped image is representative
of relationships between independent world space subjects. For
instance, a WWW query on ‘Nigeria’ will likely return a set of nodes in
Internet space that communicate some of Nigeria’s world space subjects,
such as geographical location, cultural demographics, colonial history,
natural resources etc. The mapping communicates results of particular
operator queries or commands and thus usually communicates
comprehensible information to the operator – it possesses some clarity.
Lastly, this resultant image is quantifiable since the mapping from world
space to Internet space yields different results for different subjects.
Certain world space subjects correspond to more voluminous body of
nodes in Internet space than others, while some may have no valid
mappings onto Internet space at all. The operator is able to infer some
ratio of that which is discovered and that which is still yet to be known.
The Internet parallels the drone not only in conceptualization but also in
trends observed along its development. Like the surveillance drone, the
origins of the Internet are somewhat tied to the U.S. military-industrial
complex. The Internet was predated by ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network), a “research network sponsored by the DoD
(U.S. Department of Defense)” that “eventually connected hundreds of
universities and government installations” (Andrew S. Tenenbaum,
2011). Just as initial research into the drone’s remote surveillance
capabilities was endorsed by the U.S. military to further its own interests
in advanced reconnaissance and persistent surveillance, ARPANET’s
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structure was designed to be secure and resilient in order to protect the
DoD’s hosts, routers, and internetwork gateways from attack by the
Soviet Union. These pressures and concerns gave rise to the TCP/IP
Reference Model architecture that enabled the ARPANET to support
seamless connection between multiple networks and thus become the
first network of networks. It was the interconnection of regional
academic networks in the 1980s that marked the beginning of the
transition from ARPANET to the modern Internet. The 1990s saw the
inclusion of institutional, personal, and mobile computers and networks
in the Internet – a phenomenon that most resembles aforementioned
contemporary attempts to decenter and demilitarize the drone. Like
drone technology, the Internet currently has neither a centralized form
of governance, nor a set of standard technological implementations and
policies. However, the Internet Engineering Task Force, a non-profit
organization of loosely affiliated international participants has begun to
formulate a standardization of core protocols for the Internet.
The sociology of the internet is a burgeoning discipline that “involves the
application of sociological theory and method to the Internet as a source
of information and communication” (Wikipedia, 2015) to analyze online
communities, virtual communities and virtual worlds, catalysis of
change through new media, and the transformation from industrial to
informational societies. The discipline was born out of concerns for how
this technology may yield certain social implications, such as the
development of new forms social networks through social media
platforms, the arrangements of power within virtual communities, and
the proliferation of cyber-crime. In Social Implications of the Internet,
Paul DiMaggio et al posit that research tends to focus on the application
of the Internet in five principal domains: inequality stemming from a
digital divide, community and social capital, political participation
within deliberative democratic models of the State, organizations and
institutions, and cultural landscapes of participation and diversity (Paul
DiMaggio, 2001). DiMaggio’s investigation of ways in which the Internet
actually interacts with the physical world culminates in an appreciation
of how Internet use “adapts to existing patterns, permits certain
innovations, and reinforces particular kinds of change” since “the
Internet tends to complement rather than displace existing media and
patterns of behavior” (Paul DiMaggio, 2001). Findings like this help
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dispel “utopian claims and dystopic warnings based on extrapolations
from technical possibilities” (Paul DiMaggio, 2001) and instead
contribute to a nuanced, reality-based understanding of the Internet.
This understanding is crucial in ascertaining realistic contextual subjects
and metaphysical bounds of the Internet’s conceptualization as a mobile
epistemic technology. A parallel technology to the Internet, drones in the
material world must also be carefully understood in terms consistent
with conceptual and observable underpinnings.
CONCLUSION: A Malleable Assemblage
Thus far, the drone has been demystified as a mobile epistemic
technology that extends the operator’s ability to relate to space. The
drone is an object found in wirelessness imbued with particular
sociocultural and technological properties; it possesses agency to act on
its environment within human-made contexts and systems. The domain
of its applications extend beyond the military-industrial complex,
spanning civic, commercial, and creative spaces in a palimpsest of
contexts that inform each other. Though elucidating, this
conceptualization is not yet complete as it still lacks a crucial property to
ensure consistency across the fluid integration of its past, present, and
future iterations into a single existence: malleability.
In order to construct a malleable conceptualization of the drone, we
must first explore possible origin stories of how the word ‘drone’ was
injected into modern day colloquialism as a UAV. In ‘Dancing to a Tune:
The Drone as Political and Historical Assemblage’, Ramon Bloomberg
points out that the term ‘drone’ “injects ambivalence into the qualities of
remotely controlled objects that otherwise might be passed off as …
prosthetics of a hidden hand” (Bloomberg, 2015). Bloomberg pinpoints
the source of this ambivalence to “the ways in which the drone is
productive of knowledge and reason” (Bloomberg, 2015), a quandary
best tackled by recognizing the drone not as a discrete device, but as a
political and historical assemblage.
The term ‘drone’ was once colloquially applied to the male bee in an
apiary who “performs no utility other than his continuous attempts to
procreate with a queen” (Bloomberg, 2015), a complacent “sex-machine”
who is content with the banality of his existence. The drone-bee is lazy
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and unproductive; unlike industrious worker bees that labor tirelessly
for the betterment of the colony, the drone-bee lives a dull life that
revolves around procreation with the queen only when needed.
Furthermore, the drone-bee is expendable; he is produced and
maintained only when the queen is able to mate then “ruthlessly hunted
down and killed” when the colony “no longer wishes to support drones”
(Bloomberg, 2015). In this origin story, the drone is best understood
within the context of the entire bee colony which has long served as a
metaphor for human societies. The drone lives a banal existence of
complacency and possesses neither private interests nor passions; these
are all repressed in the interest of “the common good, or public benefit”
(Bloomberg, 2015). The hive represents a “human collectivity of
centralized incentives which mobilize enterprise” (Bloomberg, 2015)
where industrious workers display initiative and creativity in their
labors, while the drone merely accepts that which is given to him. As a
(sex) machine possessing no personal passions and only acting in the
interest of the hive when instructed to do so, the drone as a bee begins
to resemble the popular modern reference of the drone as a UAV – a
remote-controlled, acephalous, flying machine.
Another origin is in the drone as a sonority, a continuous tone or chord
understood less as a sound on its own, and more as a technique. This
drone technique is used by liturgical voices of Gregorian Chant, Indian
ragas, early blues music, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and in Inuit throat
singing. Here, the drone is not so much considered as a single element,
but a spatial-temporal locus which other notes “move around, and in
opposition to it, departing from, and returning to its centrality.”
(Bloomberg, 2015). This way, it becomes clear that the drone as a
sonority is concerned with the establishment of territory, influencing
pace, rhythm and musical movement. This territorializing occurs
through the contemporary drone as well; the operator of a UAV departs
from their static location and explores remote space through an
experience of vicarious consciousness. This exploration extends the
operator’s visuality and expands the territory of that which they know.
In this case the drone becomes expeditionary; its flight is “undertaken as
part of a greater project, to seek knowledge of, or claim to an outside”
(Bloomberg, 2015).
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Incorporating Bloomberg’s origin story analyses, I propose that the
drone be constructed in terms of a human collectivity where expansion
of territory corresponds to an extension of power that furthers
individual interests. Applying the hive model of human collectivity to the
State, small-group and individual interests are coalesced by institutions
and government to contribute to the well-being of the State as a whole.
The drone becomes a mobile epistemic object that expands the owned
territory and furthers the interests of its operator, while wrapped within
a hive-like articulation of the State that focuses disparate, individual
enterprise into a combined endeavor.
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