The Drone Wars

Don't Mind Us—We're Just Making New Friends

You can't really plan a paradigm shift—paradigm shifts are usually triggered by unexpected catalysts.

When he designed the earliest form of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee thought he was creating something that would allow government agencies to more easily share files. And he did just that, but consequently he also almost completely undermined the music, movie, newspaper, and book publishing industries. Even with the best intentions, the decisions we make can have deeply profound effects in areas we didn't intend to be affected.

It is with that idea in mind that I'd like to briefly discuss the American government's love of drones.

The American defense industry (aka the Military-Industrial Complex) has now combined some of our most recently emerging and important technologies—scaled-down size, data-gathering, weapons-firing, and energy efficient capabilities (now capable of nearly endless sorties)—and turned them into a game-changer. Today's predator drone is a marvel that has changed the way we approach conventional warfare as well as domestic policing.

And therein lies the potential danger.

For the former, the military has always been looking for a killer edge, and since the majority of the literature ever written about warfare concerns the idea that army generals simply wished to know exactly where the enemy was currently gathered, the paradigm has shifted: thanks to drones and satellites, it's much easier than ever to locate and destroy conventional armies.

But just as you can't grab one side of a half-inflated balloon without all the air rushing into and asymmetrically filling the other side, contemporary enemy combatants aren't simply amassing stupidly on the other sides of hills to await their conventional slaughter—they've started fighting a whole new (and by that I mean very old) kind of battle. Because their enemy—America—has a million eyes and a billion megatons of potential, they've stopped playing chicken with us and started slashing our tires and cutting our lines and disappearing into crowds of noncombatants. 

So that's the military side of things, and what we're seeing is that our drones, despite the stellar reputation they've garnered, aren't even all that useful in the way that they're supposed to be used. (Recently a drone succeeded in wiping out a perfectly peaceful wedding in Afghanistan, and I have to wonder how many of the survivors now harbor a deadly ill will against America, how many new terrorists were born.)

Nevertheless, what I'm most concerned about is the recent and disturbing escalation of drones being used here in America as a "security measure" against crime and terrorism. Does our government simply think that by taking two handfuls of one side of the balloon that the air won't simply go somewhere else?

By which I mean this: there are many people who refuse to balk at America's constantly growing "security" measures, based on the oft-cited idea that, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, and therefore these measures shouldn't be a problem for you."

With Tim Berners-Lee and the Internet in mind, here I question the unraised, unspoken absurdity: how can these legislators know what kind of deep psychological damage might be wrought when they basically declare, through overzealous security measures, that American citizens are not entitled to private lives and private thoughts? If all of these technologies are legally allowed to record everything I do when I'm outside my home, while at the same time using existing technologies to spy on me (I'm sorry, collect my data) within my own home, then I and others might undergo a profound paradigm shift of our own. 

I'm not exactly sure what will happen, but something will inevitably result from these decisions, and I can imagine a few possibilities: I and those like me might simply "shrug" and refuse to offer (or become incapable of offering) America or humanity another single shaft of light from our now-completely-public minds, which the government claims not to own but which acts like it owns all the while; or I and those like me might simply begin to harbor a violent resentment against the people who stole virtually all freedom and privacy from American citizens in order to try to preserve those people's lives' quantity; but all I know for sure is that literally everything is connected, so if our government wants to keep heading down this path where the security of America becomes more important than what America fundamentally stood for at its conception (the first nation to declare that the government exists to serve the citizens, and not the other way around), then I hope those legislators have some sort of solution in mind when the American psyche finally and completely breaks.

Every action has a reaction. If you say I'm no longer allowed to have a private internal life, and that everything I do is subject to public record, then there will be a reaction, and I for one hope it turns out to be overwhelmingly violent. If you think that's harsh, consider the fact that our President authorized the unprecedented killing of an American citizen without trial, and the orders were carried out by a drone.

Here's a theory: maybe Al Qaeda hasn't attacked American soil in eleven years because they haven't needed to. Maybe they've seen that all it took was a push, and we jumped off the cliff ourselves, because our leaders are spoiled, stupid, narcissistic, rotten cowards who deserve the enmity of whatever a true American used to be.

Here come the drones.

Drones, indeed.