Live
Audio Only
Last summer, I received an email invitation to a terrorism conference in Tehran—the only problem being that the email was addressed not to me but to the former head of the Pakistani military. (I eventually finagled my own invitation, as well, and was able to attend as myself.)
This summer, a new addition was added to my arsenal of misdirected correspondence with the arrival to my inbox of an email bearing the subject line “Northwestern University startup – Indoor security drone.”
In the message, the founder of a robotics startup at Northwestern University in Illinois informed me that “we're making an indoor autonomous security drone to help security guards patrol by collecting video, images, and 3D maps remotely.”
The email continued: “Of course, a guard still must be on site in case a human presence is required, but we believe the new technology can fundamentally change indoor security. Since you're the expert, I wanted to ask for your thoughts on how an indoor drone could be used.”
When I responded with a request to find out for whom, exactly, the dispatch had been intended, the young man wrote back: “Honestly, I used (digital services marketplace) Fiverr to purchase a $5 gig from a Bangladeshi guy who said he’d help me find a contact list of people in the security industry. He gave me a list of 11,000 contacts in a few hours.”
Ah, the wonders of technology. We can only hope that the actual production of the drones will be conducted in just as professional a fashion.
RELATED:
China Electronics Factory Replaces Workers with Robots
As for the notion that the devices might “fundamentally change indoor security,” there are presumably no truly revolutionary changes in store given the already existing landscape of mechanized hyper-surveillance in the United States—characterized by ubiquitous security cameras and other installations ostensibly meant to safeguard law and order.
Granted, most Americans have not yet progressed to that special level of familiarity with drones that certain blessed populations of the earth enjoy.
In the Gaza Strip, for example, the buzz of Israeli drones overhead is an acoustic mainstay of everyday life—and essentially a means of continuously terrorizing the inhabitants of the besieged coastal enclave.
From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Somalia and beyond, meanwhile, it’s safe to assume that a significant percentage of residents would in fact associate U.S. drones with insecurity. After all, when unmanned aerial vehicles violate foreign borders and engage in such activities as slaughtering attendees at weddings and funerals, it’s tough to locate any security in the mix—that is, aside from the obvious financial security for drone manufacturers.
On the indoor frontier, missile-equipped drones aren’t currently on the menu. But both at home and abroad, there’s a common theme of hyping supposedly omnipresent danger in the interest of profit.
In the U.S., over-surveillance has been normalized along with its attendant processes of criminalization. Not only is there a general perception that technology is inherently good, useful, or at least inevitable, the U.S. public has also by and large internalized the lessons that the security state has worked so hard to impart: society is criminal and we need law enforcement to protect us from ourselves. Indeed, many folks probably wouldn’t bat an eye were drones to be incorporated en masse into the security-scape.
However, constant punitive surveillance does not a nation of mentally healthy individuals—or healthy interpersonal relations—make. Furthermore, a national law enforcement apparatus that shoots and/or murders Black people for driving with a broken taillight or lying on the ground with hands in the air is itself inherently criminal.
What, then, does the future hold?
Perhaps it’s helpful to revisit that lesson gleaned during my brief stint as indoor autonomous security drone expert: that “a guard still must be on site in case a human presence is required.” Some might initially be relieved to hear that there is still a place for humans in this high-tech day and age.
But unfortunately for humanity, the literal dehumanization that occurs via the widespread substitution of technological contraptions for people is accompanied by other forms of dehumanization with more sinister repercussions: the sort that underlie the military drone industry and that convert living beings into targets on a screen, divorced from any empathy-inducing context.
Excising empathy from the equation naturally facilitates the elimination of the target plus whatever other life forms might happen to be in the vicinity—a feat often accomplished by the push of buttons half a world away. And so a viciously lucrative cycle is propagated: by participating in such lethal dehumanization, the aggressors—or button-pushers, if you will—are themselves dehumanized. And war marches on, to the delight of an elite minority and their bank accounts.
Meanwhile, not all drones literally take people out—but they do help sustain a system in which humans are progressively estranged from humankind.
Belén Fernández is the author of “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.
Newsletter
