Introduction to The Drone Age

On January 26, 2015, the White House was sent into lockdown mode. The cause was a remotely-piloted, unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that had crash-landed on the front lawn. While no malicious intent lay behind it, the accident served as an ironic symbol of the military-industrial complex, mandated by successive US administrations, having lost some semblance of control of a technological innovation that it had helped to pioneer.

What the automobile was to the 20th century, the drone is to the 21st.

Similarly, the other defining technology of the last century, television, is in the 21st represented by the arrival of virtual reality.

While the earlier technologies exemplified the modern age desire for freedom of the consumer and gratification mediated through the largely sedentary pursuits of both place and entertainment; the later technologies represent a yearning on the part of the collective unconscious for self-transcendence, for an escape from a reality that feels increasingly confusing, isolating and intractable, and from a world with which we appear trapped in a self-destructive relationship.

The drone is the defining technology of the digital age.

An age in which everything is capable of being replicated and immersed in the hyperreal spectacle, where technology appears increasingly autonomous, and where, in the face of a mass surveillance culture, privacy is fast becoming an obsolete concept.

Despite having vastly significant implications on both legal and moral grounds, drones are characterised, like every technology, by their teleological ambiguity - in simple terms, the nature of their intended purpose.

At present, drones are viewed through the matrix of two overriding drivers – military and commercial.

But as they become more ubiquitous, and the ‘dronisation’ of everyday life continues apace, so the range of possibilities for how they could impact on social, phenomenological, political, cultural, spiritual, philosophical, even sexual, levels are far from being mere fantasy.

In terms of the primal instincts, drone pornography is already being experimented with, but how long will it be before the first non-military drone atrocity, and what will be the lasting implications?

Already we see what once was a technology used as a ‘humanitarian weapon’ by the President to strike names off a kill list with all the detachment of swiping through profiles on a dating app, now being promoted for purposes as benevolent as tracking whales in the sea or capturing the perfect view of a winning goal.

Despite all his great intelligence, charisma and panache, Barack Obama was hoisted up on a petard of his own moral character to be stained by the blood of drone warfare. The man of such potential and historical significance, being compelled to state that he had "no regrets whatsoever" about the children killed or made orphans in Waziristan.

In this sense, Obama and his legacy, not to mention the hopes of a nation that were rested upon his shoulders, is another victim of the drones, to an extent that perhaps he is only just realising.

The symbolism of this, in simple terms, is his visiting the shrine of Hiroshima and, caught in the crosshairs of the world media, attempting to show contrition for the lives of so many thousands, in the name of a war which revealed such evil, and in pursuit of a devastating technology that would claim so many lives but which from that point on we would never to able to live without.

The subliminal or dominant, subtle or profound roles that people will ascribe to the drone as it becomes another feature of the technological virtual theatre, can as yet only be imagined.

Will we come to prescribe to them certain meanings all of their own, a personalised logic mandated by our psychologies or neuroses, see them as a curious measure of comfort in uncertain times, or as an omnipresent threat, the small shadows cast by the post-Hiroshima world of possible annihilation, whether by our hand or by nature’s sweeping arm?

When starting to think about my new book 'The Drone Age: Streetview Stories', before writing anything I spent many hours sat in front of Google Maps and Streetview. I sank into an almost hypnotic state as I roved across the entire world, diving down completely at random, taking screenshots of anything I landed on.

The people and scenes captured in these images served as inspiration for the characters in this book. As author, by striking indiscriminately and without aim, I have played the role of the drone.

The book itself can be seen as a form of literary drone.

Throughout, I have used the concept of the drone as a metaphor, sometimes explicitly, other times more subtle, for an array of alternate conditions, from guilt and memory, to paranoid delusion and mental breakdown, to capitalist greed and dreams of flight.

It is my hope that this will be the first example of drone literature.