The Swarm

THE SWARM
Drone as composite technology and neo-liberal fantasy

Book Chapter | Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology | Technographies series by Open Humanities Press | In-print 2024

Abstract

The notion of the vision machine is embedded in our popular cultural fictions and most laudable scientific explorations (from Minority Report to ATLAS to Neuralink). The machine sees the machine knows but the mechanics are, for the most part, invisible. And so, it is that we have come to understand the drone; a convergent device of computation, engineering and vision technologies, designed for an imminent array of autonomous futures.

The military drone, beyond regulation and oversight and seemingly impervious to moral scrutiny has of course been with us for some time. It represents the apex of military and corporate endeavour, the coalescing of political will (or a lack thereof), advanced engineering, computational intelligence and human labour. Concepts such as 360-degree battlefield, patterns of movement, kill lists, permanent over-watch – and even the notion of a space force – all operate within a linguistic blend of fantasy, menace and ambition to which the automated drone is a central figure. Further still, through a post-Snowden prism, we now have a better understanding of how governments and their military clients and the divisions which they serve might operationalise the possibilities of fully autonomous weapon systems. This in turn will help define what full automation might entail in a grouped setting: the swarm. Coupled with our cultural understanding of the swarm – rampant A.I., replicants, clones, etc - the multitude of machine rendered forms that the drone swarm might assume supposes a dystopic vision of not only the battlespace, but also in the domains of transport, policing, space exploration, commercial delivery, migration control and mass surveillance.

BionicSwift (2018-21) Aerial acrobatics as a swarm (Festo.com)

Like so much of the current debate around the ethics of machine learning and algorithmic profiling, drones and their robotic kin are similarly riddled with ethical and moral conundrums. For the most part, these are playing out in our fictitious dramatizations of technology – in the cinema, in the gallery and in the literature – making the drone one of the early 21st Century’s most provocative cultural icons. Further to this, the concept of swarming automata becomes particularly resonant in the context of drone futures and our darker vistas of the techno-cultural imaginary.

To understand the drone then is to prepare for the swarm.  

Mitch Goodwin (2020) Drone Techno-Terror Ecologies, media assembalge.

This chapter will frame the complex cultural evolution of the drone against a global socio-political backdrop of surveillance, remote-warfare and climate collapse. Using key works from cinema, corporate advertising, military doctrine and media art it will demonstrate that the convergence of automation, machine vision and A.I. has become a central trope of our interpretation of what it might mean to be human in a near-future habitat fit for the swarm.

Publication forthcoming from Open Humanities Press
Original conference paper: Drone Cultures