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Link – Drones

The videogame-like fantasy of drone use captivates the state and the public – only critical analysis disrupts this illusion and mass violence against people feared as terrorists


Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba, “Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 5-6)//SY

“They count the copses and they’re not really sure who they are” (Quoted in Becker & Shane, p. A11), an intelligence officer admitted to the New York Times reporters. Yet the president is “quite comfortable with the use of force.” How does he know they are actual or potential terrorists? He knows it essentially by an act of fantasy. Since you don’t really know for certain that they are terrorists, but you know that there are out there people who commit acts of terrorism, you are free to assume that their “pattern of life” may betray their terrorist intentions. Fantasy surrounding the figure of “the terrorist” becomes a major component of any explanation why the president and the American public can have such a cavalier attitude toward targeted killings of people about whom we even do not know their names. A critical perspective on terrorism discourse confronts us at the outset with the ontological ambivalence of what is the real of the thing itself. The figure of the Terrorist gives ground to a reality the menace of which is felt to be greater than the one posed by the superpower Soviet Union during the Cold War. The task of a critical approach is to problematize that real as necessarily imbued in fantasy. This requires we deploy a valid theory by which fantasy is not equal to the not-real but rather “constitutes a dimension of the real” (Butler, 1990, p. 108). This is a theory of fantasy removed from the representational realism of the media whose reports on terrorism tend to be oblivious of the “state of the exception” in which they are gathered and produced (censorship, one-sided sources, information obtained under torture, and so on). In such realism “representation becomes a moment of the reproduction and consolidation of the real” (Butler, p. 106). A positivist view of the real stabilizes itself by the phantasmatic exclusion of all absence as unreal. Terrorism is that disavowed phantasmatic exclusion, included in the system as exception, that solidifies and gives ground to the politically real. Since this real is shaped by the phantom of terrorism constrained by the State of Exception, the exceptional phantasmatic draws the boundaries of the real and “assumes the status of the real, that is, when the two become compellingly conflated” (Butler, p. 107). Thus fantasy emerges with the mask of the real. As Nader remarks, counterterrorism in many of its forms “appears as fantasy requiring terror in the name of ending terror, when in reality the elimination of terror is the apotheosis of terror” (2012, p. 113). Not surprisingly, the current drone war has been described as “sheer fantasy, if not literally science fiction” (Sluka, 2011, p. 72). Indeed, as admitted by everyone working in the industry, science fiction is the major inspiration behind the drone technology. “If you do not read science fiction, you’re not qualified to talk about the future” (Quoted in Singer, 2009, p. 160), said Arlan Andrews, a writer close to the White House and Department of Homeland Security. Politicians easily become fascinated with technological novelties and spatial operations. The fantasy plays into the seductive illusion of virtual war “as a surgical scalpel and not a bloodstained sword”, wrote Ignatief, adding: “We need to stay away from such fables of self-righteous invulnerability” (2000, pp. 214–215). Such “fables” are now the dominant culture, believed not only by the general public but also the political class and the media elite. You will not read or hear in the mainstream media reports indignant about the drone killings. What science fiction presents as pure fiction, robotics makes it an aspect of reality. When the fiction turns out to be reality, a frenzy of excitement and the oft-repeated sense of magic obtains. A frequent comparison of the remote controlled unmanned drones is video game. In fact, military researchers are modeling the robot controllers “after the PlayStation because that’s what these 18-, 19-year-old Marines have been playing with pretty much all of their lives” (Heines quoted in Singer, p. 68). Making war a continuation of the kids’ video games creates an experiential link between “play” and “war,” confusing the virtual and the real.

Legal curtailment of drones fails --- their ban turns drones into the newest desireable transgression, making circumvention structurally inevitable


Rothstein 11/23/12 (Adam, Freelance writer, “The Drone and the Gaze”, http://www.poszu.com/poszu/index.php/blog-archive/drone-and-gaze/)//trepka

Like stepping out of our homes into a sky filled with satellites, an atmosphere seething with flying drones, a city with buildings dripping with closed-circuit cameras. We could elude the lenses, shine an impeding glare into the sensors, dazzle the algorithms. But for how long could we escape the constantly inscribed regime of sight-recording that exists in our contemporary surveillance state? A map of CCTV cameras cannot be the full surveilled territory. The cones of observation we avoid are limited to those we know of, and even our tools of observation and avoidance now observe us back. We live in an age of Drone Ethnography, in which any attempt at recording what is happening to us is overshadowed by another lens, watching a lens, watching a lens, watch us. The opportunity for opting out of a visual culture elapsed long ago, when our eyes were evolving in the membranes of a long lost taxonomic ancestor. We cannot ban drones anymore than we can dispel the gaze. If the technological gaze is banned by legal means, it will only occur extra-legally. If human sight is judged as immoral, it will only become a fetish. We are always already being recorded, and there is nothing we can do about this. What matters is whether someone will persecute, rape, or kill us on the basis of that recording.

The military will continue to pursue drone development to make the fantasy of perfection in robot warfare a reality


Zulaika, 13 – Professor and Director, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno (Joseba, “Drones and fantasy in US counterterrorism,” Journal for Cultural Research, 10-11)//SY

What happens to the axis of time in the expectations of robotic technology? Robots will have to react in such speed, we are told by an army colonel, that in the decision cycle, reduced from minutes to microseconds, “As the loop gets shorter and shorter, there won’t be any time in it for humans” (Quoted in Singer, p. 64). It is no longer the “perversion of temporality” in the waiting for terror, but the very elimination of human time – the perfect fantasy by which humans are left aside in a war in which, not only they will not die, but, by reducing time to the category of fiction, they will not have to make the tough decisions and carry the burden of their consequences. Thus in robotic reality not only is the decision cycle no longer going to be minutes but microseconds, but also it dabbles in futuristic expectations that tend to reduce time to the category of fiction. What science fiction presents as pure fiction, robotics makes it an aspect of reality. When the fiction turns out to be reality, a frenzy of excitement and the oft-repeated sense of magic obtains. Drones provide the latest instance of Arthur Clarke’s notion that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Quoted in Singer, p. 165). Not surprisingly, the drone machines are treated as real soldiers and given “battlefield promotions” and “Purple Hearts” medals (Singer, p. 338). Far from perceiving the militarization of technology as leading to an impending catastrophe, the possibilities offered by new fields such as lasers produce “immense excitement among soldiers, scientists, and sci-fi geeks alike … to the point that one study called it the ‘Holy Grail’ of weapons” (Singer, p. 85). This is no longer a Hollywood fantasy; it is something that is happening in the real world. The “Predator” is no longer an animal metaphor but a real predator up in the sky. Not only will human time be eliminated from the loop of increasingly rapid robotic responses, and the “human baggage” sidelined as to avoid faulty senses such as human eyes, but there can be no place for human error in hitting the targets. One of the magical words for robots firing missiles from drones piloted from via satellite communication from 70 to 500 miles away is “pinpointed.” The implication of such accuracy is that the missiles fired by the drones kill only the bad guys. The precondition of targeted precision becomes imperative in a fight whose very nature is best imagined as the hitting the needle in a haystack. Amazing as it may appear to common sense, counterterrorists have come to actually believe that the best and cleanest way to take away the needle in the haystack is by shooting a missile from 10,000 in the sky and guided from 70 to 500 miles away in Las Vegas. One of the “clairvoyant” prospectors of the bright robotic future and a major consultant for the US military, “the Ultimate Thinking Machine” according to Forbes, is Ray Kurzweil. His main prediction is that, “In just 20 years the boundary between fantasy and reality will be rent asunder” (Quoted in Singer, p. 96). One of his predictions is that, given the exponential nature of progress, we are on track to experience “about 20,000 years of progress in the twenty-first century, 1000 times more than we did in the twentieth century” (Quoted in Singer, p. 102). In a couple of decades we are about to hit “Singularity” – a kind of black hole in which things become so radically different that the rules break down and we know nothing. Some people have mocked the notion of “Singularity” as “The Rapture for Nerds.” When Kurzweil first shared his visionary prospect of a robotisized army of the future, the military saw him as amusing and entertaining, but by 2008 his predictions were “very much at the mainstream” of military thinking.


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