Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World

Digital technologies are essential to establishing new forms of dominance through drones and surveillance systems; these forms have significant effects on individuality, privacy, democracy, and American foreign policy; and popular culture registers how the uses of drone technologies for aesthetic, educational, and governmental purposes raise questions about the exercise of individual, governmental, and social power. By extending computational methodologies in the digital humanities like macroanalysis and distant reading in the context of drones and surveillance, this article demonstrates how drone technologies alter established notions of war and peace, guilt and innocence, privacy and the common good; in doing so, the paper connects postcolonial studies to the digital humanities. Resume Les technologies numeriques sont essentielles pour etablir de nouvelles formes de domination par le biais des drones et des systemes de surveillance. Ces formes ont des effets importants sur l’individualite, la vie privee, la democratie et la politique etrangere americaine. La culture populaire denombre un eventail de ces effets employant des technologies de drones pour des objectifs esthetiques, educatifs et gouvernementaux d’une maniere qui souleve des questions sur la mise en pratique du pouvoir individuel, gouvernemental et social. En etendant des methodologies statistiques des Humanites numeriques, tels que la macroanalyse et la lecture globale, dans le contexte des drones et de la surveillance, cet article demontre la facon dont les technologies numeriques modifient fondamentalement les notions deja etablies de la guerre et de la paix, de la culpabilite et de l’innocence, de la vie privee et du bien commun. De ce fait, cet article lie les etudes post-coloniales aux Humanites numeriques. Mots-cles: Drones; Surveillance; Humanites numeriques; etudes post-coloniales; Mondialisation; Cultures numeriques

Les technologies numériques sont essentielles pour établir de nouvelles formes de domination par le biais des drones et des systèmes de surveillance. Ces formes ont des effets importants sur l'individualité, la vie privée, la démocratie et la politique étrangère américaine. La culture populaire dénombre un éventail de ces effets employant des technologies de drones pour des objectifs esthétiques, éducatifs et gouvernementaux d'une manière qui soulève des questions sur la mise en pratique du pouvoir individuel, gouvernemental et social. En étendant des méthodologies statistiques des Humanités numériques, tels que la macroanalyse et la lecture globale, dans le contexte des drones et de la surveillance, cet article démontre la façon dont les technologies numériques modifient fondamentalement les notions déjà établies de la guerre et de la paix, de la culpabilité et de l'innocence, de la vie privée et du bien commun. De ce fait, cet article lie les études post-coloniales aux Humanités numériques.
humanities too have undergone a rapid change in relation to the use and application of digital technologies in scholarship […] Humanities research has been irrevocably transformed, as indeed have everyday life, our societies, economies, cultures and politics" (1). There is no going back to a pre-digital world; we are in a post-digital era, because "the tendrils of digital technology have in some way touched everyone" (Cascone 2000, 12). The digital is here to stay. What we do with it is what matters.
Tongue-in-cheek yet with insight, Marjorie Burghart (2013) suggests three orders reminiscent of the three Medieval Orders, loosely defined, operating in digital humanities: "Oratores, bellatores, laboratores: those who pray, those who fight, those who work." There are those who work and do things and produce new codes, software, systems, and tools used for scholarship and creativity; there are those who work hard to legitimize this work to non-specialists, the general public, and scholars in other disciplines; they fight the rhetorical battles to gain institutional prestige and academic credibility; and then there are those "non-practicing believers," who are "interested by the DH phenomenon and enthusiastic, but not involved themselves in any practical aspect" (Burghart 2013). Since the aim here is not to rehearse the task of defining and explaining digital humanities, suffice it to say that these definitions are extended in several works: Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth's While digital humanists develop tools, data, and metadata critically, therefore (e.g., debating the "ordered hierarchy of content objects" principle; disputing whether computation is best used for truth finding or, as Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann put it, "deformance"; and so on), rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture. How the digital humanities advances, channels, or resists today's great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporate, and global flows of information-cum-capital is thus a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar.
Liu's call for cultural criticism in the digital humanities is noteworthy, because the tendency to define the field primarily as an extension of computational humanities continues to gain purchase in public discourse; to critics like Stanley Fish (2018), digital humanities are deeply suspect: "administrators who pour funds and resources into the digital humanities are complicit in the killing of the humanities." Recently, in criticizing the institutional cachet of digital humanities and what he views as hasty, misguided approaches to use statistical methods for literary analysis, Fish (2019) notes, "At bottom CLS [computational literary studies] or Digital Humanities is a project dedicated to irresponsibility masked by diagrams and massive data mining." Timothy Brennan (2017) asks, "After a decade of investment and hype, what has the field accomplished?" His answer is sharp: "Not much" (Brennan 2017). Adam Kirsch (2014) sounds the alarm, proclaiming that "technology is taking over English departments," which is a "false promise of the digital humanities." Oddly enough, to these critics, the digital humanities begins and ends with computational humanities, a view demonstrating a lack of awareness of the extensive discussions about the field, including whether it can even be called a field or discipline. Fish's blaming administrators who support the digital humanities as being "complicit" in their devaluation is the kind of myopic, hyperbolic rhetoric we often find in political campaigns where, despite evidence to the contrary, candidates blame each other for all the ills of the world-the real, the imagined, the fanciful, the grotesque-and then some. Liu's call to move beyond the computational towards the cultural turn in the digital humanities is, therefore, more urgent than before; his warning to think institutionally and socio-politically about the digital humanities by examining vast systems and networks that facilitate the flow of money, power, and influence by individuals, groups, and nation-states finds resonance in Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia's (2016) indictment of higher education's growing dependency on neoliberal values and business models. Arguing that digital humanities "discourse sees technological innovation as an end in itself and equates the development of business models with political progress," they contend, "the unparalleled level of material support that Digital Humanities has received suggests that its most significant contribution to academic politics may lie in its (perhaps unintentional) facilitation of the neoliberal takeover of the university" (Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia 2016). Likewise, Anne Cong-Huyen (2013) observes that the field has tended to remain insular by focusing heavily on technological expertise, as if without it one cannot become part of the discipline or really understand it: These digital and electronic technologies are of particular importance because they are often perceived as being neutral, without any intrinsic ethics of their own, when they are the result of material inequalities that play out along racial, gendered, national, and hemispheric lines. Not only are these technologies the result of such inequity, but they also reproduce and reinscribe that inequity through their very proliferation and use, which is dependent upon the perpetuation of global networks of economic and social disparity and exploitation.

Muthyala: Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World
Art. 18, page 7 of 51 Similarly, Tara McPherson (2012) says that "the difficulties we encounter in knitting together our discussions of race (or other modes of difference) with our technological productions within the digital humanities (or in our studies of code) are actually an effect of the very designs of our technological systems, designs that emerged in post-World War II computational culture." The impulse to move beyond race by advocating colour-blindness worked closely like the modular systems that protected the coding logic intact by making it functionally invisible in order to enhance other uses and expectations. Likewise, in "Cultural Politics, Critique, and the Digital Humanities," Tanner Higgin (2010) argues that unless we critique the broader institutional and systemic conditions that have allowed the digital humanities to emerge as they have now, the discipline will replicate inequality, because there are "far more subtle ways technologies reproduce oppressive social relations in everyday life within and without academia." Higgin sees a "potentially techno fetishistic obsession in DH with technological transformation via the creation and use of various digital tools/platforms/networks, etc. as agents of social change. These efforts are often performed under the guiding ethos of collaboration which often becomes an uncritical stand-in for an empty politics of access and equity" (Higgin 2010).
Adding yet another critical angle to the debate, Alex Reid (2014) argues that the scientific worldview can also be unexaminedly appropriated by the humanities, including the very distinction between them that the humanities seek to dismantle.
The risk is that the human in the humanities loses its central role as a subject and agent of experience, knowledge, and consciousness. In "Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities," Todd Presner (2015) seeks to connect critical theory to digital humanities by not flattening out the differences between doing or building something with digital technologies and the appreciative, interpretive, and contextually analytical impulses of the humanities; he suggests that "the first challenge for digital humanities is to develop both critical and genealogical principles for exposing its own discursive structures and knowledge formations at every level of practice, from the materiality of platforms, the textuality of the code, and the development of content objects to the systems of inclusion and exclusion, truth and falsehood governing its disciplinary rituals, doctrines, and social systems" (60). It is what concerns Adeline Koh (2014), who argues that the discourse of civility, the social contract for participating in liberal society, in digital humanities has two requirements: 1) "the practice of civility, or niceness; and 2) possession of technical knowledge, defined as knowledge of coding or computer programming" (94; italics from original) These two stipulations function as "rules" for "entry to the scholarly field" (Koh 2014, 94). Like Koh, Gary Hall cautions against drawing heavily on science to re-orient the humanities, as if the latter were more in need of re-assessment than the former, which implicitly privileges the one over the other; instead, Hall asks, "Along with a computational turn in the humanities, might we not also benefit from more of a humanities turn in our understanding of the computational and the digital?" (2011, 2).
In cautioning practitioners and scholars in digital humanities to avoid relying excessively on the sciences or assuming that scientific methodology in its quantitative modality is fundamentally unlike the unstable interpretive knowledge the humanities offers, Liu, Cong-Huyen, McPherson, Ramsay, Higgin, Allington, Brouillette, Golumbia, Reid, Presner, Koh, and Hall emphasize the need to rethink, not just reposition, the digital humanities in relation to institutional operations, governmental policies, demographics shifts, and cultural orientations that support and legitimize the sciences; in other words, the cultural turn in the digital humanities is necessary and urgent.

Drone warfare and empire in the 21 st century
One way to extend these critics' ideas is to examine the rise of two recent phenomena: drones and surveillance. With their bulbous front-ends, the Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk are the iconic symbols of drones. 27 ft in length and with a wingspan of 55 ft, the Predator can fly for 24 hours at 25,000 ft, and the system costs $20 million. 36 ft in length and with a wingspan of 66 ft, the Reaper can fly for 24 hours at 50,000 ft, and the system costs $26.8 million. 48 ft in length and with a wingspan of 131 ft, the Global Hawk can fly for 28 hours at 60,000 ft and costs $140.9 million (Gertler 2012, 31) (Figures 1 and 2) Grumman, and Lockheed Martin (Benjamin 2013, 34-54). Drones like Switchblade can fire missiles and also plunge towards a target in a suicide mission to kill it.
Research is being conducted to produce technology that will enable drones to be   centres "are the backbone of the new American robotic way of war. They are also the latest development in a long-evolving saga of America power projection abroad; in this case, remote-controlled strikes anywhere on the planet with a minimal foreign 'footprint' and little accountability" gain normalcy (Turse 2012, 22), as "bayonet, telegram, and cannon have been replaced by data mining, satellite reconnaissance, and long distance strikes by weaponized drones" (Hensley 2018, 228). In short, "drones are power tools with the ability to transform the political and social landscape forever" (Yehya 2015, 3). And when we map the landscape of drone wars, "we jibe against the limits of cartographic and so of geopolitical reason," which transforms drone wars into "the everywhere war," observes Derek Gregory (2011,239). This war "transforms the concept the battlefield into a multidimensional 'battlespace' where the enemy is fluid and indeterminate," writes Christine Agius, further adding, "this vertical form of control re-asserts a type of neo-colonial surveillance and ordering that renders contingent any claims to sovereignty, constantly routinizing insecurity in certain spaces" (2017, 372; 380).
Drone wars can take place anytime and anywhere; they re-define notions of normalcy and exception, as they generate constant insecurity by waging perpetual war. In drone warfare, it is difficult to ascertain when a country is at war, and when it is not, when conditions of peace prevail, and when they don't, because the anytimeeverywhere matrix enables powerful states to create and manage conditions of emergency on a scale that is trans-territorial and biopolitical. In The efficacy of drone warfare rests on the quantity and quality of data collected through surveillance (Drew 2009). As they hover in the air, drones secretly surveil entire towns and villages or zero in on buildings and moving objects, while recording thousands of hours of data and feeding them in live or recorded formats, so that pilots, analysts, operators, generals, and others can engage in data mining, target identification, tracking, and elimination. Analysts working in the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-functional Team, a result of Project Maven to "accelerate DoD's integration of big data and machine learning," would then spend time "turning countless hours of aerial surveillance into actionable intelligence" (Weisgerber 2017). In other words, certain methodologies of computational digital humanities-macroanalysis and distant reading-are the sine qua non of drone warfare. In Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History, Matthew Jockers (2013) argues that working with big data can help literary scholars ask new questions about genre, history, gender, and stylometry. As a complement, not substitute, to close reading, he advances macroanalysis to "emphasize that massive digital corpora offer us unprecedented access to the literary record and invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making" (Jockers 2013, 8). He adds, "[…] the literary researcher must embrace new, and largely computational, ways of gathering evidence […]. More interesting, more exciting, than panning for nuggets in digital archives is the ability to go beyond the pan and exploit the trommel of computation to process, condense, deform, and analyze the deeper strata from which these nuggets were born, to unearth, for the first time, what the corpora really contain" (Jockers 2013, 9-10).
Instead of only emphasizing "an examination of seminal works," we can study the "aggregated ecosystem or ' economy' of texts" (Jockers 2013, 32).
Along similar lines, Franco Moretti (2013) in Distant Reading opines that we should not rely on single or small text samples to create a historical period or literary canon or detail genres and styles and plots, but engage with large data sets of information and learn to mine and interpret them for their nodes, networks, proximities and distances from other nodes and networks. Distant reading, he contends, "allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes-or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something" (Moretti 2013, 48-9). Moretti seeks to apprehend literature or history as textual systems and networks by examining or distantly reading, as it were, large corpora containing metadata of thousands of texts and analyzing them across time by visualizing datasets. A good case can be made for the value of CLS to advance systems thinking in literary studies, to generally, provisionally, and visually plot the wide range of datasets gleaned from literary production over time; there is value in moving beyond a small corpus of texts when claims to their representational status are taken for granted or inadequately interrogated. CLS enable us to raise different, new, or recalibrated questions about literary taste, reading habits, genre evolution, and sub-genre transformations, including predictive analytics. However, my aim here is to draw from these debates to make a case for the cultural turn in the digital humanities, so that we do not end up privileging computational literary studies or humanities computing as the primary field for disciplinary valorization and professional identity; moreover, my aim is to use humanities methods of textual analysis, contextual inquiry, historical understanding, and conceptual, theoretical argumentation to study multi-genre and multimodal cultural productions that thematize the digital and technologically embody the digital in the context of drone warfare and the transnational surveillance cultures they generate. I am not saying there is a causal link between DH and drone warfare. What I am saying is that there are similarities in structure and method between them that need urgent scholarly examination. Like its analog precursor, the digital, to extend on Edward Said, is "in the world, and hence worldly," and is "always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society" (Said 1983, 35). Whatever the vastness of digital corpora, the complexity of coding languages, and the sophistication of algorithmic, robotic logics that compress information in space and time to generate analytics with predictive power, the conception, production, dissemination, and use of the digital are worldly endeavours, a series of innumerable acts and motivations profoundly and inescapably shaped by human interests, local pressures, national trends, and global flows. To engage with the worldliness of the digital is to grasp technological innovation as a social and cultural phenomenon that can rewrite, erase, re-draw, or affirm the histories, cultures, and spaces of many peoples and living

Muthyala: Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World
Art. 18, page 15 of 51 things in the world; it is to grasp the digital as affording new ways of conceiving of the world and our being in the world. The worldliness of the digital links First World concerns with so-called Third World realities, by foregrounding the enduring legacies of colonialism and the struggle for post-colonial provenance. Put differently, whereas computational literary studies involve digitizing metadata about literary texts and creating algorithms to retrieve data sets and read them for patterns, repetitions, inflections, and shifts in textual systems, drones and surveillance technologies generate and use data about peoples, cities, villages, towns, and terrains to detect patterns, repetitions, inflections, and shifts in human and animal behaviour with one central aim: track, identify, kill. Some methodologies that have become part of the digital humanities, whose lineage extends into computational humanities, are also essential practices in drone warfare and global surveillance.
These technologies connect vast trans-regional communication networks, command and control centres, video and image feeds, intelligence analyses, military officials, and politicians working in real-time in locations strewn across the world to assess, interpret, and decide whom to kill, where to kill, when to kill. The network of cables, satellites, and screens, the jumble of joy sticks, keyboards, and computers, and the ensemble of bytes, pixels, and video feeds all coalesce to create a global theatre of war; in this theater, the contours and sensory attributes of material reality are looped endlessly in pixels and bytes; they are processed to recreate digital data and knowledge whose power to render the physical world intelligible and controllable and conquerable is of a piece with the sophisticated technology, pragmatic ingenuity, and exceptionalist thinking that characterize American society.

Anarchy of global surveillance
Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2007) propose a new paradigm called "surveillant assemblage" to describe surveillance as a process that manages the flow of information and data produced through a surveillance of ideas, things, and people in migration, thus making mobility a crucial dimension of the politics of visibility.

They write:
This assemblage operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ' data doubles' which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention. In the process, we are witnessing a rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance, such that groups which were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored. (Haggerty and Ericson 2007, 104) The body here becomes disembodied but does not replace the corporeal body but acts as its "data double" (Haggerty and Ericson 2007, 109). Surveillance, writes Daniel

J. Solove (2004) in The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information
Age, leads to the creation of "digital dossiers" that are "collection[s] of detailed data about an individual.
[…] data is digitized into binary numerical form, which enables computers to store and manipulate it with unprecedented efficiency" (1-2). A prominent theorist of information technology and data management, Roger A. Clarke (1998) in "Information Technology and Dataveillance" coins the term "dataveillance" to characterize a new modality of surveillance enhanced by the growth of digital technologies: "dataveillance is the systematic use of personal data systems in the investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons" (499). Dataveillance in this context is best apprehended as "meticulous rituals of power," asserts William G. Staples (2003) in Everyday Surveillance, because they are "microtechniques of social monitoring" and "'small' procedures and techniques that are precisely and thoroughly exercised"; they are "ritualistic because they are faithfully repeated and are often quickly accepted and routinely practiced with little questions"; and they exude "power because they are intended to discipline people into acting in ways that others have deemed to be lawful or have defined as appropriate or simply 'normal'" (xii, 3).
Hence, the Gorgon Stare: with twelve cameras, the MQ-9 Reaper can surveil an area of four kilometers and produce images and video feeds that can be differentially Warfare, Hugh Gusterson observes, "As the drones gaze unblinkingly from above, there can be voyeuristic pleasure in watching the Other. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more voyeuristic technology than the drone" (2016, 62). Some of them would turn out to be terrorists or actively aiding them, but not all. But to catch the few, the Gorgon Stare compels all whom it watches to lose privacy and dignity. To apprehend the few, the Gorgon Stare requires all whom it sees to demonstrate their innocence.
The Gorgon Stare is biopolitical in two ways: it moves beyond the individual to surveil people as a totality, a mass of subjects made amenable to the scopic, panoramic gaze of the drone, and it seeks to manage and regularize life. As Michel Foucault explicates, "It is therefore not a matter of taking the individual at the level of individuality but, on the contrary, of using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as to achieve overall states of equilibrium or regularity; it is, in a word, a matter of taking control over life and the biological process of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized" (1997,.
Biopower seeks to manage all of life, or bring the multitude of the living under the domain of governmentality-to administer, to take charge, to mange, to sort, to distribute, to maintain life. It is this biopolitical impulse that gains incredible computational and surveillant power in the age of drones and the cultures of surveillance they engender.
Thus, the drone instantiates a new structure of biopolitical power that seeks invasive domination through constant, secret surveillance of a space, its peoples, its inhabitants. It is within the drone's optic field of operations that guilt is assumed and innocence a burden to be proven. The terror of the drone is not only that it takes life without notice and with blinding speed, or that it comes from nowhere and recedes into nowhere, or that it hums its presence and withdraws into thin air whenever it chooses. It is much more than that-it adjudicates life on a daily basis of surveillance that considers everyone suspicious, leaving little room for innocence to become the norm and guilt an aberration. This is the terrifying nature of the Drone: it is a predator on the prowl not only for those intending to cause harm, but for those who, in some situations, cannot speak, establish, or convey their innocence.
A good example of how these risks have become military tactics in drone warfare is the "signature strike," a strategy for increasing domination through dataveillance where nuances and specificities are subsumed into behavioural types, correlative data doubles, and predictive analyses (De Luce and Paul Mcleary 2016). As one operator says, "the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata" (Storm 2014), because, as Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron points out, "the practice of constructing an enemy before identifying him, and incriminating all those related to him, is extremely controversial and insufficient to properly clarify those on the ground as enemies" (2014, 91). Moreover, "according to several administration officials," write Jo Becker and Scott Shane (2012) Derek Gregory (2014) observes, "Combatants are thus vulnerable to violence not only because they are its vectors but also because they are enrolled in the apparatus that authorizes it: they are killed not as individuals but as the corporate bearers of a contingent (because temporary) enmity" (7). Peter Bergen notes (2012) The psychosocial impact of drone strikes includes fear and paranoia among helpers and official rescue personnel who retrieve the dead, rescue the living, and care for the injured. Because the blasts from the strikes often burn bodies, dismember them, or sometimes simply incinerate them, the process of identifying victims means gathering whatever body parts can be found and handing them to friends and relatives of the victims. In villages where the Jirga is conducted-public hearings and discussions to resolve disputes by the maliks (local elders) and khassadars (local police forces overseen by maliks)-due to drone strikes that killed dozens of attendees, some of whom were the Taliban who were present at the meeting to resolve local disputes, there is growing fear and anger about drone attacks that target militants but more often than not result in the loss of innocent life (Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey 2012, 23-4).
Because of the "double tap" strategy of striking targets twice or more, rescuers often hesitate to rush to aid the injured, fearing becoming targets and losing their lives, thus depriving the injured, especially the innocent, of timely medical attention (Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey 2012, 74). Strikes that destroy places housing targets also sometimes destroy surrounding houses, leaving individuals and families helpless and destitute. Because medical expenses are high, many of the injured do not get adequate care or take loans they simply cannot afford but need if only to stay alive or avoid becoming severely handicapped. It is common for witnesses to drone strikes to exhibit "anticipatory anxiety" caused by the fear of impending strikes anytime and from anywhere (Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey 2012, 81). Terror, anxiety, and fear of becoming victims of drones generate post-traumatic disorders among those living in places hit by drones, or witnesses to the devastating impact of drone missiles. In some instances, parents and families are pulling children from school awhile, or refusing to send them, fearing that when groups of children get together, they could easily become drone targets. Similarly, practices of mourning and burying the dead, which happen in public gatherings, are observed with trepidation because it increases the likelihood of drone attacks on groups (Cavallaro, Sonnenberg, and Knuckey 2012, 89).

Muthyala: Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World
Art. 18, page 21 of 51 Sites of drone killings or crashes give visibility to the power, structure, and infrastructural systems that facilitate drone wars. As Lisa Parks (2017) argues, in terms of infrastructure, for instance, using Google Earth, we can discern how drones deal with "geology, physics, energy, and weather" through "earthmoving, importation, construction, installation, and maintenance" to build large air strips and hangars, which become the "staging ground for drone campaigns and vertical maneuvers" (137-9). In terms of the forensic, places where drones kill or crash become material signs that make visible the invisible structure of drone warfare, as the bodies of killed and the injured vivify the violence inflicted, and the debris reveals the type of drone, materials used in its construction, technological systems, and so on (Parks 2017, 151-2). In terms of the perceptual, drones and the surveillance regimes they establish produce "spectral suspects," whose identities are established not by epidermal and other discernable features, but through infrared contouring of heat-emitting entities (like the human body), which can appear black or white, based on a given set of technological settings. Spectral suspects are "visualizations of temperature data that take on the biophysical contours of the human body while its surface appearance remains invisible and its identity unknown" (Parks 2017, 145). But here, since identities are not known, "seeing according to temperature turns everyone into a potential suspect or target and has the effect of 'normalizing' surveillance since all bodies appear similar beneath its gaze" (Parks 2017, 145). It is why other assessments and verifications of threat and identity come into play, like signature strikes and double tap, including computational approaches like maintaining data repositories, metadata analysis, data dossiers, data doubles, and dataveillance. To grasp human behaviour as part of a network of actions and patterns, drone surveillance facilitates a distant reading of human collectivities, a macroanalysis of information flows to ascertain suspicious activity and spectral suspects in order to contain or eliminate them pre-emptively.
A major reservation about drone warfare, says Greg Kennedy (2013) in "Drones: Legitimacy and Anti-Americanism," is the question of legitimacy, a term often used "in such circumstances interchangeably with concepts such as proportional, moral, ethical, lawful, appropriate, reasonable, legal, justifiable, righteous, valid, recognized, and logical" (25). There is a tendency, point out Sarah Kreps and John Kaag (2012), to conflate technological sophistication with ethical and legal assessment, because technology is not neutral but used by human beings: "the ability to undertake more precise, targeted strikes should not be confused with the determination of legal or ethical legitimacy," which raises the question of war and justice (17). Fred Kaplan (2013) underscores a key fact: drone strikes take place outside of war zones. They can happen anywhere the US decides a threat is imminent. He writes, "For when we talk about accidental civilian deaths by drones in Pakistan and Yemen, we are talking about countries where the United States is not officially fighting wars. In other words, these are countries where the people killed-and their embittered friends and relativesdidn't know that they were living in a war zone" (Kaplan 2013). To further complicate matters, sometimes, those targeted by drones were "low-level, anonymous suspected militants who were predominantly engaged in insurgent or terrorist operations against their governments, rather than in active international terrorist plots" (Zenko 2013, 10). Such instances lead to drone warfare camouflaging proxy wars fought by a powerful state to help another government, and not necessarily to defend itself against foreign suspects.
To the two dimensions of just war theory-the justification for war (jus ad bellum) and the rules of engagement during war (jus in bello)-philosopher Michael Walzer (2004) in Arguing About War adds a third, justice after the war (jus post bellum) (viii). A good argument can be made that in drone warfare, the new dispensation of American empire, all three dimensions are skewed. The ethical conundrum is this: the US is engaged in a global hunt for people posing imminent danger to the country and scours the entire world for them without formal intimation or declarations of war; the US envelopes entire regions and populations and subjects everyone, without distinction, to a surveillance regime to ferret out suspects and kill them; the US disposes its targets without consistently verifying the proportionality of the strikes, because the targets are chosen by macroanalysing big data generated by covert digital surveillance.

Art. 18, page 23 of 51
Critiques of and opposition to drone warfare emerged from various parts, both within the US and other parts of the world. Especially significant are the efforts by individuals and groups to make the invisible wars of drones visible, literal, palpable, visceral. And here, the turn to art and creativity becomes the avenue for expressing dissent against drone wars, while humanizing their deadly effects. But as we shall also see, drones and surveillance in cultural production raise complex questions about the power of art to register dissent and resistance, and foreground the uneven terrain of freedom and responsibility negotiated by culture producers and consumers; they shed light on the gendered inscriptions of drone warfare in military culture, which feminize drone piloting, because of its distance to and immunity from real-life battlefield risks of injury and death, while affirming the technological superiority of the countries that engage in drone wars, and the manifestation of male anxieties in celebrating bravery and honour produced in the drone techno-spatial ecosystem (Schnepf 2017; Hensley 2018; Clark 2018). They also seek to resist the power of the "robotic imaginary," which Jennifer Rhee (2018) describes as the "shifting inscriptions of humanness and dehumanizing erasures evoked by robots" that emerge in "the inextricable entanglement of 'technology' and ' culture'." She adds, "as a concept, the robotic imaginary offers the capacity to identify both an abiding vision of the human that is held up to be, however provisionally or circumscribed, universal, and the extensive erasures of human experiences that enable this inscription of the human" (2018, 5-6). Drone art and culture foreground the manner in which the human is constructed through a regime of surveillance that generates data repositories, which serve as the basis for algorithmically identifying human targets for threat removal. However, as the next section will show, producing the data and extrapolating the human from the data involves a struggle for the human. Drone art and culture foreground the multifarious dimensions of this struggle, in order not to restore a stable, fixed human entity but to resist digital networks and protocols with the power to adjudicate life and death through invasive biopolitical surveillance.
It's in art, literature, and culture that we see a struggle for the human play out with poignancy (Center for the Study of the Drone 2019).

The struggle for the human in drone wars
Operating Predator drones is not an easy task; it requires new skill sets and a new mode of understanding "battlefield," "enemy," "emergency," and "collateral damage." Hovering virtually more than two miles above the earth to surreptitiously surveil people's lives every day on computer screens in cockpits located thousands of miles away in Nevada, the drone pilot can discern a full range of personal and public behaviour of the people subjected to the drone's watchful gaze. For drones to function as tools to carry out military or police missions, digital tools, software, and networks produce thousands of still and moving images and multimedia feed, which are amassed and assessed as large datasets. In tandem with intelligence reports, data is sorted, tagged, distributed, mined and made amenable for evaluation and assessment by data and military analysts, so as to identify suspects and launch missiles through remotely controlled armed drones to destroy targets. The role of human agency-an embodied sentient being feeling and thinking and deciding-becomes subordinated to the dynamics of data gathering, surveillance, and decision-making.
Between the target and the drone pilot is a semi-autonomous digitally-run system that generates vast gigabytes of data for surveillance, but as it multiplies its data and coordinates with a slew of other data structures and robotic systems to manage drone vehicles and pilot them, surveillance becomes dataveillance and the pilot and target merge into a vast digital superstructure where they become important nodes whose value and significance is internally assessed in relation to the purpose

Drone art and politics
Where #NotABugSplat seeks to reinsert the human into a war whose techniques are virtual but results are materially deadly, Pakistani-American artist Mahwish Chishty seeks to change the symbolic meaning of the drone, from one associated with American empire and postmodern violence effected through virtual means to an object worthy of artistic curiosity. She seeks to abstract the drone from its militarized setting and turn it into a canvas where local Pakistani truck cultural practices can be painted, so that the drone is delinked from foreign state violence and turned into a tool or site for creative experimentation with local culture.
However, the delinking is not an act of transposing politics into art, moving from one medium or modality into another, but of juxtaposing the political and the artistic, or, better still, of showing their imbrication, in order to reveal the contradictory, circumstantial nature of aesthetic production, where national and international interests do not undermine local specificities, while simultaneously not granting the latter a monopolizing power to determine the terms of aesthetic and political engagement. Featured at www.mahachishty.com/ are more than a dozen gouache paintings on paper, handmade paper, birch plywood and Masonite boards. Drones are painted in many shapes, with the MQ-9 Reaper, a popular armed US drone, used as the prominent design. Chishty draws from the folk painting traditions of Pakistani trucking industries where carvings, bright colours, mirrors, calligraphy, and paint are used to adorn trucks, often at considerable cost to their owners.
Trucking in Pakistan is a major industry, as its roadways are used more than its waterways, railways, and airways for freight and public transportation.
60% of its 258,000-kilometre road network is paved, and the Bedford Rocket, an iconic British-based truck brand, now shares popularity with Hino and
Elias (2011) in On Wings of Diesel: Trucks, Identity, and Culture in Pakistan, is "a function of visual culture as a window into the structure and politics of contemporary societies" (12) (Figures 3 and 4). Truck drivers are not the sole initiators of truck painting, but are usually intermediaries between owners and painters with often different intentions for painting: the owners seek to make a business statement and establish uniqueness in the market, which also gives them a chance for personal expression as paintings can include specific  Chishty uses many of these elements in painting drones, which are also represented in a variety of drone shapes: some are small, sharp, triangulations with boomerang shapes akin to X-47B; some have bulky, oval front-ends akin to To her, just as the truck drivers decorate their trucks ornately and with distinctive styles, which she views primarily as aesthetic expression, drone painting by using Pakistani folk art means using local culture to turn an object associated with death and war into an object of aesthetic contemplation. In "By the Moonlight," a gouache painting on birch plywood, Chishty portrays the front underside of a wideangled drone in green with decorative patterns of white appearing as conjoined shapes; the middle body is yellow and the tail-end is blue, with the wings rendered in darkened peach and around twelve semi-circular shapes, their borders lined in blue and yellow and adorning each wing side. This colourful drone is placed at the centre of what appears to be a modern street etched into plywood with tea stain. Several electric poles with wires line each side of the street with multi-storied buildings. The contrast is sharp but not jarring. While the lack of colour in the scene in which the drone is placed suggests its destructive force, it can also be viewed as an attempt to make the drone appear pleasant, colourful, and worthy of beautiful self-expression à la truck drivers styling their trucks (Figure 5). Put differently, Chishty is not practicing representational art in the general sense of using Pakistani truck art to depict realistic drone strikes or their repercussions on property, land, or humans; she is using local art to individually express her desire to counter the dominant perception of drones as objects of violence by turning them into colourful cultural artifacts. Many of them unambiguously titled after formal terms used in military jargon-RQ 170: the Beast of Kandahar, Hovering Reaper, Predator, Black Hawk, X-47B-the paintings evoke truck art in loud, pleasing colours, woodcuts, embroidered cloth, talismans, metal works, calligraphy, and religious and cultural symbols (Figure 6).  The key issue here is whether the appreciation of beauty is possible for people who experience the horror of drone strikes and the constant unease of living under drone surveillance. Even if we grant that it is theoretically or experientially possible, the question is, to what extent? In other words, what are the politics of location in cultural production and reception? Does where we are determine how we view art and culture? Evidently, yes. Chishty's strategic move to wrest drone technology out of the discourse and activity of warfare is predicated on the idea that art ought to function in autonomous, or, better yet, depoliticized spaces. Speaking of truck art, Chishty says that truckers "spend so much time on it and they don't get any funding. This is something that they do, just a personal interest. It has no reason whatsoever other than just an aesthetic sense" (Harkinson 2013). But aesthetic work, as Jamal Elias's anthropological analyses of truck art shows, moves beyond personal, artistic Muthyala: Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World Art. 18, page 34 of 51 expression to collective representation of trucking culture: travails of truck drivers, the sense of home they create and evoke on the road, the geographic differences that influence their choice of themes, and so on. In other words, truck art is woven into Pakistani trucking culture. Chishty's approach draws on contemporary US-Pakistan politics about drones to highlight drones as aesthetic objects, which is a profoundly political act, but justifies this politics on the grounds of aesthetic autonomy. What needs underscoring is the potential for slippage in intent and interpretation: wanting people to talk about drones might well lead people to talk about drones primarily as works of art or only as tools of war; this contradicts the fact that the very purpose of her drone art is to counter the dominant impression of drones as tools of violence, an impression based not on aesthetic insistence (the US military is not advocating that Pakistanis view drones as art objects even as it launches drone strikes), but on verifiable history (drone strikes have killed and destroyed people and infrastructure) (Figures 7 and 8). Critics who dismiss Chishty's work as insulting to people whose lives were wrecked by drone missiles miss, understandably, the political import of her emphasis on drone aesthetics that seeks to grasp the drone primarily as technology, a tool built by human beings to accomplish certain ends. That it is used currently in warfare should not obscure the fact that as a technology, the drone is amenable for other uses, including creative ones that can bring the social and material impact of drone strikes into broader public spaces, a move that can shed light on the geopolitical imbalances structuring drone warfare. Her focus on individual freedom to pursue creative expression by appropriating a tool that has become a potent weapon of war towards non-military ends can be viewed as an attempt to re-centre the human subject that the drone, by its very nature, seeks to de-centre through data mining, algorithmic calculation, distant reading, and macroanalysis, what Bauman refers to as adiaphorization, as we have earlier seen.
Chishty pushes this view further in the video art "Predator," which can be projected into dark areas for a performative event. The video, available on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/129010049), runs for 5 minutes and 27 seconds; centred and taking up the entire screen is a colourful image of a drone, speckled and painted with truck art colours and images; in the first minute, a hissing sound, almost a screech, builds into a crescendo of Aztec death rattles, the sounds produced when one blows air into the skull-shaped artifacts unearthed by archeologists in Mexico (Watson 2008). The sounds of these skull whistles are nerve-wracking, because they seem to condense a thousands screams, which is why they are also referred to in the vernacular as the "scream of a thousand corpses," ostensibly a reference to the manner in which the Aztecs used the whistles for ceremonial rites and to intimidate enemies, or ward off threats. In a minute or so, we can see and hear the drone take a strike, but for almost three minutes, the drone simply hovers, closing and opening its eyes; it hovers and hovers; that is, as we have seen, the drone is hovering because it is surveilling individuals, groups, and populations constantly; then in the last minute of the video, the ominous wailing returns, to end with a drone strike. In video and animation, mixed with painting and sound, Chishty brings aesthetics and politics into open collision-the secret wars of drones are rendered aesthetically, not to displace politics with aesthetics, but to put politics and aesthetics into constant, creative tension. The drone is now no longer a depersonalized weapon of war; it is an aesthetic creation that can also be turned into a tool for violence. It is this double-sidedness of creative political expression that repurposes or reappropriates in order to juxtapose, not replace, which is a unique feature of Chishty's art and installations.

Drones and surveillance in popular culture
The impulse to use drones aesthetically also finds expression in Pashto culture and literature. In "Impact of War on Terror on Pashto Literature and Art,"  The singer recognizes the power that she, a woman, wields over a man; she is confident of her attractive looks as she croons that "the clink of my bangles leaves one enchanted" and "my smile rustles desires in many a heart." Her attractive features are so compelling that they heighten the desire of lovers to the point where their commitment to each is tested, because her "beauty and body at its prime, leaves many going astray." This woman knows she can "sweeten" her utterances and disorient others with her beauty such that they lose senses. The force of these sentiments is echoed repeatedly in the refrain "My gaze is as fatal as a drone attack." The link between drones and fatality is certainty. Drones are deadly weapons of war; they do make mistakes when they kill suspects, targets, and civilians, but what cannot be doubted is a simple certainty-they destroy, they kill. The power of the drone in this song derives less from the drone's technological capacity to unleash missiles from thousands of feet in the air and find targets with accuracy but from its "gaze" that is "fatal." In a neat stroke of lyricism, dance, and sentiment, the song captures the problematic nature of postmodern war: drones and surveillance cultures. Without the ability to subject a people to constant, detailed surveillance, drones lose their power as tools of violence. It is the drone's unique, invisible ability to gaze at the other that makes the other succumb to the drone's missile. Implicit here is the idea that to counter the gaze of this seductive woman, the lover has to resist her at the level of her gaze; he has to turn that gaze around or ensure that he cannot be located in her field of vision. In other words, he has to contest the power of her surveillance that recognizes the disorienting effects she has on him. But that is what he cannot, thus the deadly accuracy of the woman's power: "my gaze is as fatal as a drone attack." Not surprisingly, such cultural interweaving of death, violence, romance, and love generated strong disapproval, even talk of censuring cultural production. Gul Nazir Mangal, an artist from Waziristan, a region administered by Pakistan, says, "We should not be proud of these attacks, which are being carried out by foreigners on our land. This needs to be condemned instead of making songs and dancing on its tunes," because such songs are "not only harmful to culture and literature, but also create a sense of disunity amongst the people" (Khan 2012). Officials should, suggests Mangal, set up a censor board to check cultural content before it's released to the public. Arshad Ali, another musician, reiterates this, saying that "It's not appropriate to incorporate drone attacks in music as it's a grave issue faced by our country. Each artist has a certain responsibility towards society" (Khan 2012). But what is the nature of this responsibility when it comes to digital technologies, drones, surveillance, and networks? We cannot address these issues unless we frame them within global contexts, as we have seen in this essay. Drones and surveillance are woven into digital networks that not only connect different countries but impact individuals, groups, and entire populations around the world; it is hardly surprising, then, that cultural engagement with drones and their effects and the vexing issues of authority, representation, intention, and social purpose have transnational dimensions. "Galvanizing the creative impulse" aptly characterizes the artistic and cultural activity about drones over the last decade. It is an international phenomenon with artists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, England, and America boldly and creatively thinking about and using drones; not just armed drones but drones as a new technological artifact with a unique ability to reorient us to space and time. But as we have seen, the artistic impulse about drones moves well beyond this laudable goal even as it stresses its humanizing potential. Drone art has become cultural life: people are painting drones literally and digitally; they are using mixed media to generate new juxtapositions of ideas and symbols; they are singing about them in telefilms in Pahstun Afghani societies; they are making paper or cloth imprints to attract drone operators; they are using drones in live dance performances; they are rewiring them for paint bombing, or graffiti art. The digital, the arts, and the humanities become entwined in an act of creative exploration that allows suppressed voices to be heard, registers the unacknowledged effects of invisible wars in public discourse, and digitally enables human presence and the quest for dignity to find transnational resonance in a global world.
To conclude: when we moved beyond computational humanities to study the imbrication of the digital-as technology, tool, ideology, and episteme-in drones and surveillance, we bridge the digital humanities to postcolonial digital humanities by foregrounding a new biopolitical reality in which digital technologies fundamentally alter established notions of war and peace, guilt and innocence, privacy and the common good. Such a bridging involves, as Roopika Risam (2019) aptly puts it, "praxis at the intersection of digital technologies and humanistic inquiry: designing new workflows and building new archives, tools, databases, and other digital objects that actively resist reinscriptions of colonialism and neocolonialism" (4). If we don't move beyond the computational humanities to examine the governmental and military institutions that establish sophisticated, transnationally networked digital regimes to surveil peoples and kill terror suspects while also killing civilians, the threat to liberal democracy will increase, not decrease; we need to not only infuse the digital into the humanities but the humanities into the digital; that is, we need to apply humanities approaches to examine how social and political organizations thrive on constant technological innovation to realize national security goals at the expense of robbing thousands of peoples of their rights to privacy and dignity. It involves making the digital humanities public by widely disseminating specialized DH research to general, non-academic audiences, and bringing to bear DH tools and humanities methodologies on domestic and foreign policy, military practices, discourses of exceptionalism, imperial worldviews, in short, on matters of public concern; it involves drawing on complex fields of cultural and social production to enrich our understanding of the human in a digital age, shape our scholarly endeavours, and inform our pedagogical practices. By affirming the human dimensions of surveilled subjects and examining the trans-territorial networks of surveillance in post-colonial societies, we can try to nullify, prevent, blunt, or deflect the same logic of national security being applied to us, right here in America, in American towns, counties, and cities. But that can yet happen, unless we rigorously study, question, and publicly engage with, adapt, re-orient, and transform the cultural and political dimensions of digital technologies.