Oxford University Press
MACHINES are only as good as the people who use them. They are neutral – just a faster, more efficient way of doing something that we always intended to do. That is the argument wielded by defenders of technology, anyway.
Michael Boyle, a political scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, isn’t buying it. From commerce to warfare, spy craft to disaster relief, our menu of choices “has been altered or constrained by drone technology itself“, he writes at the end of this concise, comprehensive overview of the world the drone made.
Boyle manages to be nuanced and terrifying at the same time. At one moment, he is pointing out the formidable obstacles in the way of launching a major drone attack. In the next, he is explaining why political assassinations by drone are just around the corner. Turn a page setting out the moral, operational and legal constraints keenly felt by upstanding US military drone pilots, and you are confronted by shadowy handlers in government, who operate with virtually no oversight.
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Though grounded in just the right level of technical detail, The Drone Age describes not so much the machines but the kind of thinking they have encouraged: an approach that no longer distinguishes between peace and war. In some ways, this is a good thing. Assuming war is inevitable, what isn’t to welcome about a style of warfare that involves working through a kill list rather than cutting swathes through the enemy’s population?
Well, two things. For US readers, there is the way a few careful drone strikes proliferated under President Barack Obama (and even more so under Donald Trump) into a global counterinsurgency air platform. And peacetime living is affected for all of us, too. “It is hard to feel like a human… when reduced to a pixelated dot under the gaze of a drone,” Boyle writes. If information gathered on us expands, but not the understanding or sympathy for us, where is the positive for society?
Boyle brings proper philosophical thinking to our relationship with technology. He is indebted to French philosopher Jacques Ellul, whose book The Technological Society (published in English in 1964) transformed our thinking. Ellul argued that in applying technology to a problem, we adopt a mode of thinking that emphasises efficiency and instrumental rationality, but also dehumanises the problem.
Applying this to drones, Boyle writes: “Instead of asking why we are using aircraft for a task in the first place, we tend to debate instead whether the drone is better than the manned alternative.”
The UN has been known to fly unarmed surveillance drones low to the ground to deter rebels. If you adopt the thinking that Ellul described, this must be good: it means hostiles have been scattered efficiently and safely. In reality, there is no reason to suppose that violence has been avoided, only redistributed. Remember how al-Qaeda, decimated by drones, reinvented itself as an online brand.
Boyle warns us that drones vary so substantially that “they hardly look like the same technology”. And yet The Drone Age keeps this heterogeneous flock together well enough to give it historical and intellectual coherence.
The book is just as valuable on surveillance, the rise of information warfare and the way that the best intentions can turn the world we knew on its head. But, ultimately, if you read only one book about drones, this should be it.
