Presider: Sarah Wanenchak (@dynamicsymmetry)

Hashmod: Amanda Brennan (@continuants)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled –––⁂–(⊗__⊗)–⁂–––: Drones, for better or worse

We’ve talked a lot about drones in the past couple of years, and with good reason. Not only are they a category of technology that’s expanding its presence beyond the more familiar context of warfare – not only not going away but proliferating like mad – but they’re also challenging us to think in new ways about our relationship with our machines. Where is the line between operator and drone? How do we construct that line? How does it blur? Is it there at all? Who is more subject to droning and who controls the drones? What are the stories we tell about drones, and what do those stories mean? What is our drone discourse? What can it do, and what are its limitations? How do we navigate it? What do we talk about when we talk about drones? What do we mean by drone, anyway?

We obviously can’t tackle all of these questions in a single panel, but we hope to address at least a few of the more pertinent ones. This is simply a fragment in a much larger, ongoing conversation. This fragment will be populated by Adam Rothstein, Olivia Rosane, James Bridle, and Eleanor Saitta, but the talking should not and cannot end there. Under the cut is a preview of that conversation, a short interview with the panelists.

What is your approach to the panel’s topic? What are your thoughts on some of the primary issues posed by the existence of drones?  

Olivia Rosane: What interests me about drones is that they don’t provoke a neutral response. They inspire both fear and fascination, and my goal in talking and thinking about them is to engage with both reactions. I think part of why drones cause such a stir is because they remind us of the autonomous robot killers of science fiction, when in fact drones are not autonomous. The real moral issue they raise is a different one, namely, what happens to war when one of the combatants can kill remotely and therefore faces no physical risk at all, while the other faces all the risk and has no means of fighting back? So I’m also interested in untangling the imagined futures drones suggest to us from the present and future they actually create/ are creating.

Adam Rothstein: Every technology has an ethical component to it. We tend to separate ethics from other questions of technology–design, potential uses, even environmental effect. We think that the decision on how and when to use technology happens later, after the “product is on the shelf”, so to speak. I want to put ethical questions back in our central considerations for a technology. It should be part of our longest range design process for tech to consider how it could possibly be used and misused. We can’t predict everything, but we can do better. I think drones are important because we can see the potential effects if we don’t consider the ethics of technological development, and yet, we are not doing so.

James Bridle: I imagine I share common interests and questions with the rest of the panel – I certainly do with the above. My interest stems however from the existence of drones as one visible endpoint of large, complex systems, a point of entry into a discussion of such systems – like the architecture of datacenters are a good way to start talking about the internet. The fact that this most “visible” part of these systems is also largely invisible is, for me, a cue to start talking about the way technology masks political intent, rendering it apparently neutral to those without the literacy to read it. Conversely, such intent is very clear to those who possess such literacy, so there’s still hope for our more utopian dreams of tech.

Eleanor Saitta: I’ll second what folks have said above, and raise that in addition to being part of a large infrastructural system, they’re also one of the thin ends of the many-wedged Empire.  Drones are an end-effector in a system of social and structural control, a tool of inherently asymmetric force projection.  Institutions (including states, their subsidiaries, and large multi-nationals) are generally aware of the liabilities of guard labor and of both the inefficiency of devoting large numbers of people to it, and more importantly the risk of that guard labor breaking down.  Drones are one of the more legible faces of efforts to automate that labor.  Drones in times of pseudo-peace are to me more interesting than drones in an actively hot battlespace.

How do drones figure into your work/research?

Olivia Rosane: Over at the State, I’ve been writing for almost two years about the way people are using digital technologies to create art and literature. Out of this came an interest in the ways drones are both used for art and represented in art. My fellow State blogger Adam Rothstein and I decided to co-curate Murmuration, a Festival of Drone Culture last June in order to generate and showcase more art, writing, video, and music that dealt with drones. Part of our goal was to use art to explore questions drones raise. What is it like to live under drones? What is it like to pilot drones? What would it be like to be a drone? We were also interested in challenging popular, inaccurate fictions about drones, such as their autonomy, with more complex fictions that dealt more precisely with what drones do and could do.

Adam Rothstein: Drones are super interesting because they are both new tech, and old tech. Global Hawks use cutting edge satellite communications and digital imagery sensors, and yet the plane is basically an updated U-2 frame, designed for a mission over 50 years old. Drones are a great opportunity to look forward into our technological future, while keeping our technological history in mind. A lot of people think that “looking forward” means history is less important, because we are “changing the paradigm”, “disrupting”, etc. But drones remind us that’s not really true.

James Bridle: I use the image of the drone to explore the representation of complex, network technologies in the Drone Shadows series, 1:1 outlines of drone aircraft in public spaces. Marked out in London, Istanbul, Washington DC (and a host of other cities, increasingly by volunteers following published plans), they take on a new resonance in each location, such as the research following the censorship of a Global Hawk shadow in Brisbane, Australia in 2013, which focused on the use of drones to police and enforce abusive asylum practices, far from the battlefield uses we hear more about. Dronestagram and Watching the Watchers explore the disparity in surveillance capabilities and point of view between the public, the media, and governments, again attempting to give virtual form to these political, technological narratives.

Eleanor Saitta: Drones to me are a cipher; I’m less interested in their specificity than in their position within the larger scheme of soft and hard force projection.  That said, their specificity, like the specificity of all sociotechnical systems, is where much of their meaning is encoded.  The fact, for instance, that drones are mostly flown at trans-oceanic levels of remoteness, safely from within the heartlands of Empire, completely changes the social relationship they have with the people they’re used to murder.  To the same degree, the situation of hobbyist-led DIY drone manufacture and that community’s relationship with the hacker community speaks to unfolding relations between that community and the military-industrial state.  In all of these cases, the cipher of drones let us speak about the dreams we have for the future we want to build and the political and social impacts of those dreams and of the technology we build on historical time-scales.

Why are drones worth talking about?

Olivia Rosane: Drones are worth talking about because they are currently being used to oppress marginalized populations in real ways, both by  U.S. military and intelligence forces in Pakistan and by domestic police departments. We have to confront the oppression these drones enable. Drones also, however, represent a major technological innovation: the ability to remotely control an object over large distances. We have to decide if this ability can be used for good and then determine ways to make sure it is used for good rather than for violence and control.

Adam Rothstein: Drones are a military technology that is now being forced into commercial markets, less because of that market really existing, but because there is such a futuristic fascination with drones that they are being driven there by investors and developers. This could result in a bubble, or it could result in a major problem, if drones suddenly take off, but they are still more military technology than commercial technology. Our tech enthusiasm is basically throwing a weapon into the skies, without preparing for the consequences. It could end up okay–like GPS technology has, for the most part. Or, it could end up more like the AR-15. People are somewhat concerned about this possibility–but in my opinion, the discourse is distracted and not really up to date on what the real risks are, and so we’re not tackling the real issues on converting drones from weapons into commercial tech.

James Bridle: In talking about drones, we may develop a new vocabulary to describe the networks, visible and invisible, and the forms of agency, granted and denied, which are produced by the seamless interweaving of contemporary technologies into the world around us. This vocabulary is urgently needed both to address the immediate concerns of autonomous warfighting, but also to fully and truly articulate and critique the world in which we find ourselves today, the networked present.

Eleanor Saitta: We live in a brief moment of visibility for algorithmic systems of structural power.  Drones, along with the surveillance systems we’ve spent so much time talking about in the last year, cameras, and any number of analytics pipelines are in this moment all new enough to be visible socially, and in the case of drones and cameras, still large enough to be obvious to the eye.  The negotiations that we come to with power on the use of algorithmic and robotic technologies of control during the course of this period of visibility will echo through decades of sociotechnical power relations.

Where can people go to find more of your work?

Olivia Rosane: You can visit my archive at The State: http://www.thestate.ae/author/orosane/ or follow me on Twitter @orosane. You can also visit the Murmuration tumblr: http://murmurationfestival.tumblr.com

Adam Rothstein: http://www.poszu.com is my personal site. I’m @interdome on Twitter, and http://interdome.tumblr.com on Tumblr. I’m also a contributing editor at The State.

James Bridle: I write about what I do at http://booktwo.org, and keep a record of most of it at http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/. I’m @jamesbridle on Twitter and have far too many Tumblrs, including http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com and the drone-focussed http://onevisiblefuture.tumblr.com.

Eleanor Saitta: You can find some of my essays at http://dymaxion.org/essays, which, although it’s permanently behind on being updated, attempts to collate at least most of my writing.  I’m relatively active on twitter as @dymaxion.

Olivia, Adam, James, and Eleanor’s panel presentation, “–––⁂–(⊗__⊗)–⁂–––: Drones, for better or worse”, will be held during Session 7 (3:30-4:45pm) on Saturday the 26th in Studio C.