How Drones Became Cool

Wonder(s) and TED Talks

Hiya, readers!

As we saw The Night the Lightbulb Went On, both the federal government and the corporations developing drone technology were facing a pretty serious PR problem in the twenty-teens. I can’t believe they weren’t aware of it, especially when I watch the footage from the Dole Institute I linked to last post. So it’s no surprise that a concerted (though not necessarily a conspiratorial nor even a coordinated) effort to reframe the public debate about drones began around the same time.

Since then drones have gradually become tinged with wonder. As an informal benchmark, when I taught two sections of a course called Wings as Weapons from the Iliad to Iron Man in fall 2014, the general tone of the class was subdued horror. When I revisited the same material in a course in 2020, the class was fairly evenly split and one student said something to the effect of, “Well, you almost got me but I’m going to choose to see this as progress.” (What’s the old bumper sticker say? “I’ve given up on reality. Now I’m looking for a good fantasy.” Something like that.)

How’d we get here? Well, it would help to focus on discourses—nexuses of conversation—where drones and things like them have received applause. For example, there are lots of discourses on McDonald’s. The Reddit thread for the documentary Supersize Me is one nexus of the conversation on McDonald’s. Another one is the McDonald’s app. Still another one might be a Facebook group where people share deals they’ve found, or an article in The Motley Fool about how McDonald’s stock is performing. (As of the date this post was published, none of these businesses or publications is a sponsor of my sponsorless website.)

As I was looking at the discourses on drones I realized there’s a lot of cultural history behind how the discourses play out. So let’s backtrack a half millennium. Here’s an argument you might doubt, but stick with me: the same cultural force that made drones cool in the wake of the assassination of the al-Awlakis has been making art and tech cool for five hundred years or more. What’s that cultural force? Wonder. [Read more]