Santa Claus came early, and he brought unmanned aerial drones.

These flying robots, semi-autonomous and semi-remote-controlled, pumped out by aerospace/defense contractor Northrop Grumman, are bringing joy and happiness to the American heartland.

Over at Alternet, the brilliant Laura Flanders is reporting on recent mega-million-dollar contracts to create “drone base controls”; it’s hyped as a sure-fire job creator, and local communities in Wisconsin and Missouri and South Dakota are rejoicing. It’s nice that folks can get jobs, but it would also be nice if there was money to create jobs that didn’t in turn create “the charred flesh of children killed by accident, by remote.”

Meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security “will deploy additional Border Patrol agents, ICE investigators, two drone aircraft and other technologies to its border with Mexico as part of a new effort to combat organized crime and illegal immigration…. In the Texas-Mexico border, two additional Predator drones will patrol the area and nearby areas in the Gulf of Mexico region, once Congress approves the 500 million dollars President Barack Obama has requested for such purpose.”

500 million dollars for two Predator drones? Those are some expensive robots!

These border deployments amount to a proxy war between defense contractors and drug cartels, with the government handing out massive wads of cash. Corporations and organized crime - these are the new epicenters of power. Fiscal insolvency is leading to the “erosion of the nation-state’s power to protect/advance the well being of its citizens;” an abandonment of political power for the sake of financial power. That’s the point of the Bush tax cuts and Reaganite policies in general; to take away the power of government to help people (de-funding and demolishing public education, housing, health care, unemployment, etc), and turn government into a funnel for money - out of taxpayers’ pockets and into the hands of businesses and foreign militaries and the “right kind” of global insurgents, the ones resisting governments we don’t like, the ones who probably hate us but will take the cash and weapons we throw at them and then use them on us ten or twenty years down the line.

At the U.S. Social Forum there’s a workshop on “Challenging Robotic Empire.” I’m sad I’m not in Detroit to check it out, but it’s good to see that anti-militarism folks in the US are already thinking through the ways in which military robotics will change the nature of warfare, and therefore the nature of our response to it. I’m hopeful that as we learn how to respond to the new challenges posed by soldier-robots, we take it as an opportunity to take radical anti-militarism work in a new direction…

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 10:13 am and is filed under Organizing and Resistance, The Poetry of Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.