Drone Cultures

The drone is an object of contradiction. On the one hand, it is a tool of dominance, destruction and death while on the other, as this book shows, it is a tool for education, creativity and entertainment. Encouraging us to think more critically about the figure of the drone, we begin by tracing the rise of drone warfare in the twenty-first century during the Bush administration, before touching on topics such as issues of surveillance culture and political oppression, biopolitics, AI, the role of the digital humanities in examining drones, and literary and artistic representations of (and using) drone technology. Demonstrating why we should stop thinking of drones as agents of chaos and death, we are asked to consider how they are fundamentally transforming our ideas of art, privacy, space, time, dignity, transparency, accountability, and democracy.