GHGeographica HelveticaGHGeogr. Helv.2194-8798Copernicus PublicationsGöttingen, Germany10.5194/gh-71-19-2016The Urbanization of drone warfare: policing surplus populations in the
dronepolisShawIan G. R.ian.shaw.2@glasgow.ac.ukSchool of Geographical and Earth Sciences, The University of Glasgow,
G12 8QQ, Glasgow, UKIan G. R. Shaw (ian.shaw.2@glasgow.ac.uk)15February201671119289September201522December201526January2016This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/This article is available from https://gh.copernicus.org/articles/71/19/2016/gh-71-19-2016.htmlThe full text article is available as a PDF file from https://gh.copernicus.org/articles/71/19/2016/gh-71-19-2016.pdf
This paper explores the urbanization of drone warfare and the
securitization of the “surplus population”. Defined as a bloc of humanity
rendered as structurally unnecessary to a capital-intensive economy, the
surplus population is an emerging target for the post-welfare security
state. If we now live in an age of a permanent conflict with uncertain
geographies, then it is at least partly fueled by this endemic crisis at the
heart of the capitalist world system. Of key significance is the
contradictory nature of the surplus population. The “security threat”
generated by replacing masses of workers with nonhumans is increasingly
managed by policing humans with robots, drones, and other apparatuses. In
other words, the surplus population is both the outcome and target of
contemporary capitalist technics. The emerging “dronification of state
violence” across a post-9/11 battlespace has seen police drones deployed to
the urban spaces of cities in Europe and North America. The drone, with its
ability to swarm in the streets of densely packed urban environments,
crystallizes a more intimate and invasive form of state power. The project
of an atmospheric, dronified form of policing not only embodies the
technologization of state security but also entrenches the logic of a
permanent, urbanized manhunt. The paper concludes by discussing the rise of
the dronepolis: the city of the drone.
Introduction
This paper is driven by the intersection – or collision – of a growing number
of surplus populations across the world and the contemporary
“dronification of state violence” (Shaw and Akhter, 2014). While drones
are now routinely used as military technologies in the so-called peripheral
spaces of the planet – Pakistan's tribal areas, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan,
and the occupied Palestinian territories – the urbanized, capital-intensive
metropolises of the Global North are increasingly becoming targets of drone
surveillance. Police forces are turning towards these robots for
securing the economic insecurities of the contemporary urban landscape.
Accordingly, the goal of this paper is to consider how and why drones will
be used to police and pacify what Marx (1990) first called “surplus
populations” in the robotizing economies of the Global North. Doing so, I
suggest, highlights what could be called the urbanization of drone warfare: the rise of robotic
manhunting in the cities of North America and Europe. Indeed, the drone is
set to become a central technology for policing the fissiparous and paranoid
borders of the emerging dronepolis: the city of the drone.
“If the point of the war against terrorism”, argues Davis (2004:15),
“is to pursue the enemy into his sociological and cultural labyrinth,
then the poor peripheries of developing cities will be the permanent
battlefields of the twenty-first century”. Yet this geography of
militarized peripheries fails to account for how the urban landscapes of the
Global North, or the metropole, are always-already battlespaces, striated by
lives that are valued and lives that are disposable. Discussing this
colonial short circuit, Wall (2013:34) writes, “The case of
police drones speaks directly to the importation of actual military and
colonial architectures into the routine spaces of the `homeland', disclosing
insidious entwinements of war and police, metropole and colony, accumulation
and securitization.” Accordingly, we must account for the hyper-proximate
geographies of what McIntyre and Nast (2011) call the
biopolis and the necropolis: the city of the living and the city of the socially dead. These
segregated spaces, rather than conforming to colonial divisions, or even
national distinctions, now generate the conditions for a type of
“everywhere war” (Gregory, 2011) within the cities of the Global North. My
purpose is not to privilege these homeland geographies but to show how the
dronification of policing will be inseparable from the growing numbers of
surplus populations in Europe and North America. This paper thus advances
established debates about the amorphous post-9/11 battlespace (Graham, 2010;
Gregory, 2011; Shaw, 2013). But it does so from a perspective that
understands the surplus population as both the outcome and target of
contemporary capitalist technics.
“A spectre is haunting Europe”, declared Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in
their famous nineteenth-century manifesto, “– the spectre of communism.”
But other specters now haunt Europe: the ghosts of the exiled and the
disposable. In the streets across Europe, in the shadows of skyscrapers and
shopping malls, one stumbles upon great blocs of humanity unable to find
work. For example, at the end of 2015, the 28 member nations of the EU had
an average unemployment rate of 9.1 %, a figure that masks big
regional differences. In Spain and Greece, the unemployment rate in 2015
stood at 21.4 and 24.6 %, respectively (Eurostat, 2015). These people
have been rendered superfluous to the socioeconomic order of things. As
Davis (2004:11) puts it, “This outcast proletariat – perhaps 1.5 billion today, 2.5 billion by 2030” – represents “a mass of humanity
structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the
corporate matrix.” Young persons are overrepresented, with approximately 21 % of all under-25s without work in Europe. “Both the evidence of
recent trends and the evaluation of future prospects”, writes Harvey (2014a:108), “point in one direction: massive surpluses of potentially
restive redundant populations.”
A proliferation of research has gone into describing the “informal
proletariat”, the “precariat”, the “new poor”, or “neo-proletariat”.
Such terms “connect more or less with Marx's project to identify the
process that relegates a large portion of the world's population to
irregular, insecure, temporary and precarious forms of employment” (Neilson
and Stubbs, 2011:436). Research on surplus populations in human
geography has focused on political issues surrounding who lives, who dies,
and who decides (Cowen and Siciliano, 2011; Tyner 2013). Other work has
looked into the particular spatial regimes of surplus populations (Gidwani
and Reddy, 2011; McIntyre and Nast, 2011). While it may embody a
universalizing tendency in capitalism, the surplus population produces – and
is policed by – a distinct set of geographies that are inseparable from the
contradictions of the urban age.
The millions of people who are continually thrown outside the formal
economy – the “restive redundant populations” Harvey (2014a)
discusses – present a threat to continued capital accumulation and social
cohesion. The surplus population is thus becoming the site of increased
(geo)political importance in the Global North as national security threats
are tied to an outcast population (Tyner, 2013:708). Indeed, these blocs
of humanity frequently make their voices heard: in the riots of London in
2011, the unrest in les banlieues in Paris, or the ongoing protests across Greece.
Unemployment and inequality, even amongst conservative commentators, are now
viewed as threats to social stability. “Countries facing high or rapidly
rising youth unemployment”, warns the International Labour Organization (2015:12), “are especially vulnerable to social unrest.” Accordingly,
surplus lives are becoming the object of intrusive forms of surveillance,
securitization, and militarization. “As the number of superfluous persons
increases”, observes Hudson (2011:1671), “the need to contain
them spatially increases, along with stricter, more aggressive measures of
social control.” Indeed, the material, psychological, and emotional shocks
created by a robotizing form of capitalism are generating immense
insecurities that are embodied in the urban ecologies of surplus
populations.
For decades, these precarious – and at times dangerous – milieus have been
managed by various policing technologies, from CCTV to patrol cars. In this
sense, what John Maynard Keynes first labelled as “technological
unemployment” is tied to the “technologization of security” (Ceyhan,
2008). The helicopter, in particular, has enforced a vertical form of
security. As Adey (2010:52) argues, “megacity security marches to
the rotator-beat of the police helicopter, fuelled by a military
technophilia and in a context of the biopolitical desertion of the city's
most vulnerable.” Policing, of course, has always been a spatial power. As
Herbert (1997:13) observes, “the processes of internal
pacification so central to the authority of the modern state readily depend
on the capacity of the police to mark and enact meaningful boundaries, to
restrict people's capacity to act by regulating their movements in space.”
Yet the drone age is colliding with the urban age to produce a new, more
intimate geography of atmospheric security. How, then, might we understand
the emerging geographies of “unmanned” policing (Wall, 2013)?
The first decade of the war on terror saw US military and CIA drones
concentrated to the mountainous and remote geographies of Pakistan (Shaw and
Akhter, 2012), and later Yemen and Somalia. In recent years, however, drones
in and beyond the USA have been trialed by police forces as part of a
revanchist military urbanism (Graham, 2010). Gregory (2011), for
example, discusses the existence of the everywhere war, and writes that
“war has become the pervasive matrix within which social life is constituted.”
Yet perhaps we need to reverse this formulation, such that it is social life
that is – and always has been – the pervasive matrix in which war is
constituted. The political and geopolitical crises endemic to the surplus
population collapse both “war power” and “police power” in contrapuntal
geographies, such that Neocleous' (2014:162) notion of the everywhere police is a
productive analytic for diagnosing our contemporary condition. Under this
understanding, social problems are always-already militarized, and domestic
space is always-already a battlespace. For example, the long history of
aerial policing and pacification of “restive” populations (Satia, 2014) is
inseparable from colonial and capital expansion.
Yet the contemporary management of surplus populations may yet prove a
decisive break from the past. This paper will argue that drones, and
micro-drones in particular, are generative of newer, more pervasive spaces of
social control. The dronification of state violence not only embodies the
ongoing robotization of state security but also materializes the logic of a
permanent urban manhunt. Moreover, as the sheer volume of surplus humanity
increases, the state is turning towards automated and algorithmic systems to
manage them (Amoore, 2009). This, in turn, removes human administrators from
the loop. In other words, a quantitative rise in surplus populations is facilitating a
qualitative change in the biopolitical systems deployed by the state to manage them
(Shaw and Akhter, 2014). The passage from a (Keynesian) welfare state to a
(neoliberal) security state (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011) has created more
capital-intensive forms of warfare and policing. This includes an armada of
security apparatuses, from biometrics and CCTV to “pre-emptive” or
“predictive” policing in forces such as the Los Angeles Police Department
or the Metropolitan Police in the UK. And we can now can add the drone to
this form of everywhere policing, which materializes a new set of technics
for an older social war between capital accumulation and labor.
Crucially, police drones are not inert objects that simply “add” to
preexisting forms of authority, but mediators that actively transform the
very logics of state power (Meehan et al., 2013; Shaw and Meehan, 2013).
Unlike the helicopters prowling above the Los Angeles skyline, smaller
drones that can pervade and saturate the urban volume complicate the very
idea of remote surveillance. The drone, and micro-drone in particular, with its
ability to swarm in the streets of densely packed urban environments, holds
the potential for more intimate and invasive forms of state power. This not only
intensifies the coverage and mobility of existing state technics but is
fundamentally transforming them. What follows is a provocative analysis into
surplus populations, their geography, and the future of urban policing. My
purpose is to gather together various economic and social trajectories that
point towards the rise of the hyper-secured dronepolis.
Surplus humanity and robotic capitalism
In this section, I want to explore the animating contradiction of the paper:
the creation of surplus populations. Marx (1990:782) crystallized the
idea that a bloc of unemployed – or infrequently employed – humanity was a
direct consequence of capital accumulation. The term should not be confused
with Thomas Malthus' ideas about overpopulation. Marx understands the
surplus population not in absolute terms, but in relation to capital. As Li (2009:68) clarifies, Marx's use of “relative” signals “the continuous
tendency of capital to concentrate labour's productive capacity into
labour-displacing technologies.” Although there are lots of factors that
influence the changing numbers of surplus populations, the one that I want
to focus on is the ratio between constant capital (i.e., the technological
means of production) and variable capital (i.e., human labor power). A
persistent trend in capitalism is to augment, replace, and devalue variable
capital with constant capital. The mechanization of the factory in the
nineteenth century partly fulfilled this function. Today it is reflected in
the ongoing robotization of economic activity. In both cases, the surplus
population “set free” by constant capital further devalues human labor,
constituting “a mass of human material always ready for exploitation” (Marx, 1990:784).
However, a surplus population is not an effective source of demand. Capital
must still realize a profit by selling goods to a growing population made redundant
by technics. Capital is perennially caught in this contradictory unity
between production and realization (Harvey 2014a:81). “Technological
advances”, argues Hudson (2011:1667), “mean that capital is
increasingly unable to absorb the world's massive (and growing) surplus
population.” Yet for for much of the twentieth century, technological
unemployment was mitigated by ongoing economic growth, particularly in the
service sector. But what happens when the fast-food worker, the
telemarketer, and the administrator alike are all replaced by
technics – whether computers or robots? Skilled and cognitively intensive
work, traditionally a form of employment difficult to capitalize, is now
vulnerable. In 2015 a Bank of England study warned up to 15 million “jobs
in Britain are at risk of being lost to an age of robots” (Elliot, 2015).
Other research has suggested that, within decades, 47 % of jobs could
be lost to automation in the USA (Frey and Osborne, 2013).
The automation of sectors across capitalism is reaching levels in which
income growth – already stagnant in many developed countries – is now
massively outstripped by capital returns. “When the rate of return on
capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income”, writes Piketty (2014:1), “as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite
likely to do again in the twenty-first century, capitalism automatically
generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities.” Capitalism in the
twenty-first century, then, is constituted by increasing levels of nonhuman
capital. The rate of return on physical assets and financial instruments,
together with the substitution of labor with technics, considerably exceeds
income growth. Piketty symbolizes this inequality as r>g, what
he describes as the fundamental contradiction of capital.
If the Industrial Revolution exacerbated this fundamental contradiction,
then what of the robotic revolution today? This is a highly debated question
amongst economists. Certainly, the impulse towards a “robotized economy in
which one can increase production at will simply by adding more capital”
(Piketty, 2014:217) exists, even if its total realization is near
impossible. Nonetheless, the technical barriers towards a heavily robotized
economy are dissolving all the time. The elasticity of substitution between
capital and labor increases with advances in artificial intelligence. As
robots become smarter and cheaper, humans become more replaceable. Perhaps
more importantly, “Robots do not … complain, answer back, sue,
get sick, go slow, lose concentration, go on strike, demand more wages,
worry about conditions, want tea breaks or simply refuse to show up”
(Harvey 2014a:103). This inegalitarian impulse could, however, be stymied
by political revolution. Unless, of course, “one peculiarly effective
repressive apparatus exists to keep it from happening” (Piketty, 2014:263). And herein lies the rub of the matter. The surplus population could become
a social force that capital – backed by state welfare
mechanisms – “bargains” with to produce a “new deal”. Or else it could be
targeted by a “peculiarly effective repressive apparatus”. It is this
latter future I expand upon below.
Technological unemployment and its discontents
Technological advancements risk centralizing capital in the hands of fewer
and fewer people. The uneven power relations endemic to such a robotized
economy – one that is splintering away from the surplus populations it
creates – is thus cause for serious concern. Accordingly, we must understand
Piketty's abstract mathematical law, r>g, as underwritten by immeasurable
social discontents. Indeed, Piketty fails to account for these kinds of
dynamics, according to Harvey (2014b), who argues that the relative power of
labor has declined since the 1970s, and this is because capital has
mobilized technologies, off-shoring, and anti-labor “supply-side”
politics to crush opposition. Moreover, after two centuries of machine-based
capitalism, the physical conditions for many in the Global North may have
improved, yet the vast majority of work is still defined by repetitive,
menial tasks – or, for lack of a better word, drudgery. As anthropologist
Graeber (2013) writes, the modern proliferation of “bullshit” jobs is one
outcome of the technologization of work. “Accumulation of wealth at one
pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of
labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the
opposite pole” (Marx, 1990:799).
Marx used the term alienation to describe the condition of losing one's
existential autonomy to the technical and social machinery of the
bourgeoisie. This exteriorization of self is a hallmark of capitalism: the worker sells
their labor in the production process. Moreover, this alienated
relationship between subject and object suffuses everyday life. While the
human has always reached beyond its fleshy boundaries, the modern capitalist
technical system it encounters today subsumes individuals within a logic of
computational control, standardization, and mass psychological
synchronization (Stiegler, 2011). The consequences are profound. The World
Health Organization (2011) estimates that by 2030 depression will be the
leading global health problem. As nonhuman capital becomes increasingly
severed from social labor, then, the technical system no longer operates
with humanity. The surplus population becomes alienated en masse from a robotizing
economy that no longer values human labor. Unsurprisingly, this generates a
deep distrust and even outright hostility among huge swaths of society. In
turn, capitalism must re-arm and re-secure its own survival, further
exacerbating the very contradictions it generates.
Criminalizing, policing, and profiting from this growing surplus population
is big business in the Global North. The prison-industrial complex
parasitically preys on the misery of a deserted humanity. As Wall (2013:40) argues,
“security capitalizes on devastation and insecurity by converting them into
a plethora of opportunities for state power, social order and capitalist
accumulation to be bolstered and reproduced.” Indeed, surplus populations
of hyper-racialized men are at the center of contemporary security politics.
“The prison system”, write Cowen and Siciliano (2011:1517), “has become a means of warehousing a racialized reserve army of
predominantly young male labour.” Up until the 1980s, a broadly demand-side,
or Keynesian, form of economic policy held in Western Europe and the USA. Of
course, since social security was framed within the nexus of economic
security, the former was still overdetermined by the latter (see Neocleous,
2006). Nonetheless, since the 1980s, the responsibility for welfare has shifted
from the commonwealth to the individual, and supply-side tax regimes have
ascended. This neoliberal counter-revolution ushered into the world a new
kind of state – the security state (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011) – and a new kind of society: the control society (Deleuze 1992).
The security state is no longer responsible for ending economic inequality,
but for policing it. As Hallsworth and Lea (2011:142) write, the
security state aims “at the management of social fragmentation and the
`advanced marginality' of a growing global surplus population rendered
`structurally irrelevant' to capital accumulation.” The counterpart of the
security state is the control society. The continuing technologization of
security materializes a shift from Michel Foucault's notion of a
disciplinary society to what Deleuze (1992) presciently labeled the
control society. Rather than just discipline “deviant” populations within state
enclosures – such as prisons, asylums, schools, and barracks – the control
society produces a universalizing form of control driven by computational
surveillance and algorithmic governance (Amoore, 2009). Here we loop back to
the central contradiction of the surplus population: it is both created and
policed by capitalist technics. As more and more jobs are replaced by nonhuman
capital, the expelled workers find themselves policed, occupied, and watched
by an equally robotic security armada. And in between these technics swells
a profound discontent. It is in this sense that a robotizing capitalism
renders vast swathes of humans as materially and psychologically insecure
(Harvey, 2014a:108).
The spaces of surplus populations
The universalizing tendency toward economic inequality is spatially
concentrated in a militarized urbanism. This groups together drug addicts,
terrorists, criminals, young people engaged in anti-social behavior, and
immigrants – indeed, any individual that threatens the economic wellbeing of
the security state. “The result is a kind of social, civil war to control
domestic space” (Graham, 2010:109). This slippage between different
categories of people signifies how surplus populations are continually
remade into enemy populations. As Feldman (2004:332) writes, “these public safety
wars are not wars of utopia, but wars of dystopia that assume that
`perfected' liberal democracies are threatened by an invisible, infiltrating
menace.” This infiltrating menace is the surplus population, materially and
ideologically rendered as an enemy population – one that crosses geopolitical
boundaries and complicates the traditional logics of sovereignty and
territory. This, in turn, drives the explosion of borders everywhere, as the
enemy population multiplies and self-divides. As a result, the borders of
the security state no longer mark the distinction between national
commonwealths, but move inwards, separating zones of urban abandonment with
secessionary communities.
These paranoid and revanchist spatializations are underwritten by powerful
modes of racialization (Merrill, 2011). As McIntyre and Nast (2011:1466)
write, “One cannot, therefore, understand surplus populations without
understanding how the geographical dynamics of accumulation have become
increasingly racialized.” The relationship between race and superfluity
remains an active process in world politics. To conceptualize this
co-imbrication between lives that are valued and lives that are surplus,
McIntyre and Nast introduce the concepts of biopolis and necropolis.
Following Mbembe's (2003) work on “necropolitics” – which
foregrounds the primacy of death, rather than life, as a mode of sovereign
power – the necropolis is the space of the socially outcast and dead, “borne
through displacements, enclosures, and containments, both in the context of
slavery, the colony and (initially) the nation-state” (McIntyre and Nast,
2011:1470). Its opposite is the biopolis – based on Foucault's notion of
biopower – in which the sovereign protects and manages its inhabitants.
“Whereas capitalists attended, however inadequately, to the problem of
biological and social reproduction in the biopolis, no such concern extended
to the necropolis. So long as surplus laboring populations were sufficiently
large, little regard was given to the symbolic or practical course of local
reproduction” (McIntyre and Nast, 2011:1471).
In the necropolis then, capital extracts surplus value. But unlike in the
biopolis, it fails to reinvest in social reproduction. This spatial division
is producing what Gidwani and Reddy (2011:1640) call a
“techno-ecological urbanization”, that is, “two sets of urban ecologies
and populations – one, the ecology set of an urban bourgeoisie actively tied
into global circuits of capital, whose lives are considered worthy of caring
by the state; the other, the ecology set of an urban underclass living off
the commodity detritus of these global circuits, whose lives are of
indifference to the state”. Both spaces – the necropolis and
the biopolis – are thus connected in twisted geographies of economic and
emotional transaction in which capital is traded for misery, and life is
traded for death. Yet the necropolis and biopolis do not straightforwardly
express cities positioned across national borders. As Li (2009:66)
writes, “African-Americans on the south side of Chicago are `let die' at
around 60 years, while the mostly white, middle-class residents on the
city's northwest side can expect to live until the age of 77.2.” The
necropolis, then, can be seen as a matrix of exceptional spaces within the nation state
(Agamben, 2005) – spaces of abandonment that are nonetheless included in
capital accumulation and state power.
The distance between the necropolis and biopolis continues to be
compressed and capsularized. The idea of what de Cauter (2004) calls a capsular civilization expresses this
spatial logic of a hyper-fragmented yet hyper-proximate landscape of
necropolitical and biopolitical spaces. In the comfort capsules of wealth,
users can access biopolitical forms of government intervention – but in the
necropolitical spaces of surplus and waste, the overriding logic is to “let
die”. As Graham (2010:100) underscores, “Urban geographies
become increasingly polarized, and cities experience palpable militarization
as secessionary elites strive to sequester themselves within fortified
capsules.” The necropolis and biopolis thus coexist in intimate, proximate,
and contrapuntal morphologies. Sloterdijk's (2011:55) spatial
metaphor of “foam” describes the hyper-fragmented spaces of solitary
co-isolation and co-confinement in the modern age, particularly in the city.
Deploying this metaphor, we can imagine the necropolis and biopolis as foams
of death and life passing next to each other in intimate and shifting
bubbles, yet without any mutual overlap. Or as Klauser (2010:331) writes, the capsularized and foamy city is “an ensemble of spatially
anchored, more or less hermetically enclosed, socially exclusive, and
atmospherically active spheres of togetherness that are, essentially,
composed by co-isolated, individuated subjects.” So while the logic of
securing surplus populations is an everywhere policing, what is policed is
not human welfare and togetherness. Instead, it is a transcendental logic of
worldly co-isolation, in which outcast bodies are monitored – and
suspended – within the desperate foams of the necropolis. Of course, these
borders are continually transgressed, through uprisings, riots, and more
mundane disruptions of the worldly order. And it is this porosity that
breeds further paranoia and its obverse: manhunting.
Manhunting
A technologically infused manhunt is the means by which the security state
polices the fissiparous borders that snake between the biopolis and
necropolis. While vast swathes of humanity are “let die” in a passive form
of state abandonment, those who transgress their worldly emplacing can be
actively hunted down. As Chamayou (2012:89) argues, “the
police is a hunting institution, the state's arm for pursuit, entrusted by
it with tracking, arresting, and imprisoning.” Manhunting, of course, has a
much longer history than its current incarnation. Capital was born in the
midst of empire and colonial manhunting. Marx (1990:915) famously argued
that “the beginning of conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting
of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of
capitalist production.” Capital and manhunting thus share contrapuntal
geographies: those individuals who resisted capital in the past have been
hunted down. It it in this sense that the manhunt is the modus operandi of a
longer history of pacification, which is to say the production and policing of
bourgeois social order (Neocleous, 2013:8).
Yet the technics of manhunting are spatially and temporally contingent and
ever shifting. “Technicity, as a system”, observes Stiegler (2011:51), “constitutes the artificial and social system of predation and
defense from the beginning of humanity.” So while pacification is a project
that is centuries old, the technicity of the manhunt is constantly shifting
with the evolution of the worldwide military-industrial complex. And this
modern manhunt is inseparable from the logic of targeting. As Cowen and Siciliano (2011:1526) write, “targeting contrasts with the implicit, typically
national geography of welfarism and transforms the said goal of government
from collective welfare and development to managing spatially bounded
problems. Both the military and police now mobilize targeting practices `at
home' to govern overlapping populations of surplus subjects.”
The war on terror materialized the most recent, and planet-wide,
geography of manhunting. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of
11 September 2001, the US military, CIA, NSA, and Special Forces were reengineered
around a new kind of hyper-connected and transnational manhunt (Mazzetti,
2013). As President Bush announced in 2003, “We're at war in a different
kind of war. It's a war that requires us to be on an international manhunt”
(CNN, 2003). This leads Chamayou (2015:32) to conclude that “A single
decade has seen the establishment of an unconventional form of state
violence that combines the disparate characteristics of warfare and policing
without really corresponding to either, finding conceptual and practical
utility in the notion of a militarized manhunt.” This unconventional form
of globalized state violence has pivoted around the military drone, forming
what I have elsewhere called a Predator Empire (Shaw, 2013). However, while there
has been important research on military drones in political geography and
critical security studies (Gregory, 2011; Holmqvist, 2013; Walters, 2014),
the spatialities and logics of the police drone are under-researched. Yet the police
drone is materializing an insidious and spatially amorphous form of
pacification. The dronification of state violence crystallizes the state's
project to pacify external and internal enemies as a single matrix of
targets. As Wall (2013:34) argues, “police drones underline the
unmanning of the police manhunt, that foundational practice of police power
where the `reserve army of labour' is quite literally hunted and captured.”
Drone manhunting thus embodies two seemingly contradictory impulses:
abandonment and surveillance. The surplus population is economically
discarded but nonetheless watched by the state. As Handel (2011:259) argues, in contrast to the Foucaultian notion of biopolitical and
inclusive surveillance that embraces its citizens in a form of sovereign governmentality,
exclusionary surveillance, conversely, uses power/knowledge practices “to exclude unwanted
populations”. This, in other words, is a form of necropolitical
surveillance. As Handel (2011:272) continues, “Exclusionary
surveillance is the state of exception's operative tool. It is exclusionary
surveillance that separates the people who are part of the demos from those who
are excluded from it.” So while a robotizing form of capitalism may
continue to repel surplus populations to the outside of the economic order, they
nonetheless remain on the inside of state power.
Furthermore, in tandem with the “individualization of warfare” (Blum,
2014), the security state requires that the surplus-qua-enemy populations
can be disaggregated to the scale of the individual. This exerts an
inexorable push towards the further technologization of security. As the
sheer volume of surplus humanity increases, the state is turning towards
automated systems that can manage huge volumes of individual data (Amoore,
2009; Shaw and Akhter, 2014). This constructs a technological grammar in
which individuals are converted into what Deleuze (1992) called dividuals: digital
codes constituted by email, phone, and financial records, which are passed
between the policing assemblages of the control society. But the process
does not stop there. These dividuated strings of data are spliced with
spatial forms of intelligence, such as cell phone mast records, license plate
readers, CCTV, and IP addresses, to produce geolocated patterns of life.
“Also called nodal analysis, such geographical work is designed to make a `shadowy foe'
more `visible and vulnerable' by revealing `patterns of life' and thus
taking him or her from being a `foe' hiding in the shadows to a visible
target” (Crampton et al., 2014:206).
The individualization of warfare is thus a double process: the human is
disaggregated across a diffuse set of electronic data sets, only to be
re-individuated by state technics as a moving pattern of life. “The
production of this form of individuality”, argues Chamayou (2014), “belongs
neither to discipline nor to control, but to something else: to targeting in its most
contemporary procedures, whose formal features are shared today among fields
as diverse as policing, military reconnaissance, and marketing. It might well
be, for that matter, that we are entering targetedsocieties.” Targeting, however, should not
imply a narrowing of spatial power. It relies on its necessary obverse: extension.
The entire “normal” population must first be coded and modeled to
geolocate the abnormal. In order to individualize, the security state must
first totalize, effecting an intensive policing of the lifeworld. The two
spatial optics of urban manhunting are thus population (expansion) and
person (contraction), both of which are increasingly connected through the
vertical orbits of the police drone. The targeted society is the robotic
heir to the control society.
The rise of the dronopticon?
The atmosphere has been a crucial space of military power and colonial
pacification since the birth of air power (Satia, 2014). In turn, aerial
forms of civil policing were established throughout the second half of the
twentieth century, as police forces in the Global North turned towards
technology to fight crime. “Los Angeles, for example, developed a
particular brand of policing that emphasized technological sophistication
and aggressive patrolling” (Herbert, 1997:16). The LAPD currently has
19 helicopters, which were first deployed in 1956 after the establishment of
its Air Support Division. Indeed, the helicopter has been a central
technology for policing megacities across the world (Adey, 2010).
Rotary-wing aircraft enable the police to render the urban terrain visible and
impose a form of flexible, mobile control: whether through high-powered
spotlights, video cameras, or loudspeakers. The helicopter materializes the
state's desire to impose order upon the chaotic circulations of the city. In
other cases, the helicopter enables the wealthy to bypass the surplus
population entirely. Sao Paulo, for example, holds the world's most
private helicopters per capita, which allow the ultra-rich to take to the
skies and bypass the city's terrestrial congestion and social danger (Adey,
2010).
But how will the urbanization of drone warfare extend and rework this extant
logic? On the one hand, “unmanned vertical policing extends the police
dream of pacification through air power, or a scopic verticality” (Wall,
2013:42). Under this understanding, the drone intensifies already-existing
regimes of aerial policing – further enclosing the targeted society from
above and rendering the illegible spaces of necropolis visible. Yet drones
also hold the potential to transform state technics. They materialize a more intimate
form of aerial policing that challenges the notion that drones are remote technologies.
Currently, the Predator and Reaper class of military drones surveil the
ground from up to a flight ceiling of 25 000 and 50 000 feet, respectively.
But a big trend in military and domestic robotics is to develop micro- or
“nano”-drones that can range in size from a humming bird to an insect.
Crucially, by going smaller, the geographies of state surveillance become
more intimate.
Most US police drones in existence today are variants of the small-scale
quadcopter drones used by amateur hobbyists. Grand Forks sheriff's
department in North Dakota, for example, owns four drones. This includes the
quadcopter Qube, developed by AeroVironment, as well as the US military's
most widely used fixed-wing drone, the hand-launched Raven (Pilkington,
2014). Moreover, advances in artificial intelligence are enabling
small-scale nano-drones to cooperate together in emergent, cooperating
constellations called “swarms” (Shaw and Akhter, 2012:1500). It is
here that the specifics of a dronified form of policing are glimpsed. With
an ability to swarm in roving robotic clouds, the (nano-)drone holds the
potential to pervade, saturate, and modulate the urban volume in a way that
neither the helicopter nor CCTV can adequately perform.
Adey (2014:835) has previously written that “atmospheres are
becoming objects of security, whilst security itself has gone, or is going,
atmospheric.” Perhaps, therefore, we are entering a new technicity of
atmospheric security. Crucial to the idea of atmospheric security is that
individuals can be immersed without being physically contained or touched.
Jeremy Bentham's classic blueprint for a Panopticon is reflected in today's
network of CCTV cameras fused to the urban architecture. This horizontal
form of surveillance is complemented by the vertical power of the
helicopter. But the police drone – or, rather, the police swarm – will be able to move
across both axes of the city and can thus occupy street and sky
simultaneously. Accordingly, the police drone disrupts the extant geometries
of state power that are constrained to an X and Y axis. Furthermore, nano-drones
would be able to move inside workplaces or perch inside of homes undetected.
These drones would be able to infiltrate a range of currently inaccessible
urban micro-geographies. Such future police drones thus materialize a
swarm-like space of panopticism, or what could be labelled as a
deterritorialized dronopoticon. There are fewer reasons to doubt that, in the future,
swarms of nano-drones will pass freely through the foams of urban living,
shuttling between the biopolis and necropolis, to ensure that everyone is
secured in their right place.
Moreover, by securing and saturating the urban atmosphere, the police swarm
not only straightforwardly mediates the technogeographies of state power
but comes to recalibrate the psychological and emotional landscapes of the
humans that it targets. Drone surveillance “amounts to a psychic
imprisonment within a perimeter no longer defined by bars, barriers, and
walls, but by endless circling of flying watchtowers above” (Chamayou, 2015:45). In places outside of the Global North, surplus
populations – such as those in Palestine – are already subject to this exact
form of atmo-psychological security. The fractured geographies of Palestine
“are not simply enclosed by Israeli-controlled land on their borders, but
also above and below. Israel has refused to handover control of airspace
even after its disengagement from Gaza” (Elden, 2013:48). The
dronopticon, then, is more than an architecture of state power; it is an
affective swarm capable of enclosing, hacking, and remaking the lifeworlds it
infiltrates.
Conclusion: the dronepolis
Imagine a blueprint for a city to come. A city that will not only
materialize the twisted contradictions of the necropolis and the biopolis
but will be secured by a robotic police force hell-bent on erasing the
possibility of politics. Imagine the dronepolis, the city of the drone. The dronepolis
is set to become the latest in a long succession of urban forms that have
pacified and policed the surplus population. It advances the logic of the
machine-readable “smart city” to its natural and dystopic conclusion: a
technologically infused apartheid. The lives of the valued and the surplus
would be proximate topographically, but separated by advanced technics.
“Clearly, any such social order could only exist on the basis of fascistic
mind control and the continuous exercise of daily police surveillance and
violence accompanied by periodic militarised repressions. Anyone who does
not see elements of such a dystopian world already in place around us is
deceiving herself or himself most cruelly” (Harvey, 2014a:264). The
dronepolis materializes the logic of a capital-intensive form of
exclusionary surveillance that secures segregation. Already, across many cities in
the USA, an abandoned homeless population is subject to draconian
anti-homeless laws and hostile urban architecture. The dronepolis will be
assembled by apparatuses of control that range from territorialized
technologies of state power, such as CCTV, to deterritorialized swarms of
nano-drones swimming between buildings. In the atmospheres of this desperate
city, hyper-mobile police drones will surround and enter the homes of
suspects, in a manhunt in which the human is transformed into an abstract
pattern of life: a digital simulacrum chased across the data sets of the
targeted society.
The dronepolis does not represent a decisive break from the past, then, but
is a re-materialization of an already-existing social war between a
fortified bourgeoisie and a planetary surplus population. And it does so,
increasingly, everywhere, as the logics – and profit potential – for a dronified city
spread across the planet, skipping between colony and metropole.
“Oligarchic capitalist class privilege and power are taking the world in a
similar direction almost everywhere. Political power backed by intensifying
surveillance, policing and militarised violence is being used to attack the
well-being of whole populations deemed expendable and disposable” (Harvey,
2014a:292). Describing the ascendance of dronified policing, Neocleous (2014:162) writes, “This is nothing less than a permanent police
presence of the reproduction of order – air power as the everywhere police – in which the
exercise of violence is an ever-present possibility.” And this ever-present
possibility of police violence materializes a landscape of psychological
terror. In its most draconian stage, the dronepolis dissolves entirely the
lines between the biopolis and necropolis, such that “even those bourgeois
communities and citizens usually eclipsed from the police gaze will come
under the stare of unmanned policing, to that extent that air power
obliterates any useful distinction between suspect and bystander, target and
non-target” (Wall, 2013:49).
Finally, many of the police drones of the dronepolis will be weaponized.
While attaching lethal missiles may appear a distant reality, what about
Tasers? In 2015, North Dakota became the first state to legalize
less-than-lethal weaponized drones: flying robots fitted with tear gas,
rubber bullets, Tasers, or beanbags (Wagner, 2015). Whether this opens the
door to other police forces remains to be seen – as does the complicated and
emergent geographies of legal, social, and political resistance.
Additionally, non-state actors will disrupt the smooth running of the
dronepolis while nonetheless feeding its power. Recently, police in Tokyo
established the first “drone squad” tasked with capturing nuisance drones
flown by the public, as well as patrolling important government buildings
(BBC News, 2015). This atmospheric securitization followed a 2015 incident
when a drone carrying a radioactive substance landed on the Japanese prime
minister's office. Such a topography of ultra-secured government and
corporate headquarters fitted with anti-drone shields and patrolled by
police drones will be a hallmark of our looming urban landscapes. The
dronepolis is the city of a robotic capitalism severing from human welfare,
the city of an intimately targeted society, the city of a surplus and
hyper-secured humanity.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editor, Benedikt Korf, and two anonymous
reviewers. Thanks also go to Francisco Klauser and Silvana Pedrozo for
inviting me to the conference “Power and Space in the
Drone Age” at the University of Neuchâtel, where a version of this
paper was first presented. Finally, the paper has benefited from comments
from Majed Akhter, Keith Hammond, Lazaros Karaliotas, Jared Powell, and Marv Waterstone.
Funding for this research was provided by the Urban Studies Foundation and the ESRC (ES/K009087/1).
Edited by: B. Korf
Reviewed by: two anonymous referees
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