Drone Capitalism

Abstract

Like so many technologies before it, the drone promises liberation from the burdens of human existence: from work, wanting, waiting and even war. The drone, we are told, will watch our cities and our borders, it will deliver our goods and dispose of our enemies. It will do all this while keeping human bodies – or, rather, certain select human bodies – safe from harm (Chamayou 2015). Yet once the drone is abstracted away from the unmanned aerial vehicle and understood as the figure of autonomous, sensing technology (Andrejevic 2015), its logics become ubiquitous and its complex imbrications with our bodies inescapable. Essential to the emergent drone assemblage and to the affective form of its promise is the rising tide of techno-capitalism: military manufacturers, tech giants, start-ups, robotics labs, venture capitalists (Benjamin 2013, Gusterson 2017). This enfolding of military, industry and finance capital into the networked and mediating infrastructures of contemporary life means that drone capital is increasingly entangled in daily life, impinging upon bodies and producing new modes, forms and flows of relation between the corporeal and the technical. Thus the promise of the drone is also the promise of a future transformed: of modes and flows of capital freed even further from the strictures and constraints of human labour; of space and temporality controlled; of technoaffected experiences of the body itself. Tracing the movements of drone capital from military expenditure, automated finance and logistics, this paper maps the affects of hope and anxiety that accumulate around the ambivalent figure of the drone and its bodily entanglements, impingements and potentials.