Drones, Vertical Mediation, and the Targeted Class

This article explores how US military drone use has (re)organized everyday life in some parts of the world by producing a new disenfranchised targeted class through practices of vertical mediation. The author argues that the critical analysis of drone technology and warfare needs to extend beyond Paul Virilio’s important recognition of the technological fusion of the airplane, the camera, and the gun to include more careful consideration of the vertical fields, material resources (fuel, labor, lands, hardware, networks, data, sky, orbit) and hierarchies of command that enable aerial restructuring of life on earth. Just as it is important to recognize how drone warfare is organized through systems of remote-control, simulation, and gaming, it is equally important to acknowledge its grounded and embodied dimensions, the landscapes and auto-topographies that register and archive the drone’s uses and affects.