The Drone as Symptom

The first thing the drone should call to our attention is the issue of unintended consequences. This is often a euphemism for a failure to think about or take seriously the longer term impact of the technology on society. This is notoriously true of military technology.

The machine gun is an example. Invented in the mid-19^th century, its earliest use was by colonial European powers to quell the mass attacks of indigenous warriors. Subsequently, when applied in the intra-European World War 1, it horrified Europeans who saw factory productivity applied to killing on the battlefield. The startling losses in just one battle, that of Verdun, produced 714,231 casualties of which 262,308 were dead or missing, were substantially attributable to the machine gun. Eventually this weapon was reduced in size from the initial horse-drawn carriage to the submachine gun used in the gang wars of Prohibition in the 1920s. If the larger ramifications of this weapon are of interest to you I would suggest reading The Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis.

Again, we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We killed between 150,000 and 240,000 people to demonstrate our new awesome power to the Russians. This time we had a very knowledgeable prophet in J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of developing the atom bomb, upon witnessing the first test uttered these fateful words from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  He resisted subsequent development of a nuclear bomb. For this he was pilloried by this nation’s leaders, especially that citadel of the short view we call Congress. Here, in the glow of our atomic dominance of the moment, there was little consideration of the bomb’s employment by small countries like Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, not to mention the small “dirty” bomb that can be carried in a suitcase.

During the resistance to our invasions in the Middle East the first roadside bombs have now passed to suicide explosive vests and the explosive carried in a shoe to destroy an airliner loaded with people. One of the pronounced tendencies of modern technology is to go small.

With this evidence of our profound inability to learn, what are we to expect of the drone? Already it has passed from large missile-carrying aircraft to a small, model-airplane sized device called the Switchblade. It is launched from a mortar-sized tube carried, launched, and flown by one person. It kills by crashing into the victim. Wired Magazine reports that drones the size of insects are being tested in England in networked swarms. Surveillance of cities is an intended application.

All this technology dumped on an unaccustomed population that has problems with red light surveillance at traffic intersections, requires a deep understanding of the human psyche and how it functions in a social context. What, for example, does it mean to abandon privacy? Do we know enough about the relationship of privacy to self-identity to subject large populations to mass surveillance unannounced?  People in Southern Yemen have become accustomed to seeing drones overhead. When there is an exceptional number of them they know the Americans are looking for somebody.

 In short, they know danger lurks, but they know not where. What happens to the human psyche living in an environment such as this?

George Orwell dealt with this kind of world in his novel 1984.  A technology that undoubtedly will be promoted to the public as a provider of safety can easily, and probably will, turn into the all-encompassing dictatorship Orwell describes. We simply do not know enough about human beings that have evolved over many millennia in a context of disparate tribal groups, the psychology of which is on constant display in everything from the tribal violence of the Middle East to the tribal violence following a European soccer game.

Where are the sociologists and social psychologists that could lead a well-publicized effort to warn the citizenry of what their corporate-driven government is doing? Where is the Green Peace of military technology?

Bob Newhard