Our popular television and film media have prompted us toward
paranoia and seeing enemy spies hiding behind every haystack, but who thought
we’d be looking for those same intelligence rivals in the sky above those bales
of hay? But that’s apparently what’s been happening for the past few weeks
since mid-December 2019 when some residents in wide swaths of rural Colorado and
Nebraska have been piqued to the point of paranoia by large formations of
silver-and-white drones.
As of January 1, 2020., nobody has stepped forward to claim ownership of the
pilotless drones that hover over fields and homes, too far out of reach to be
taken down by sharp-eyed shooters but close enough to creep out residents and
set their dogs to barking. Local police officers are coordinating their efforts
to determine the flight paths of the drones and perhaps figure out their
origin, but so far they have been able to say little more than that the Federal
Aviation Authority has been brought in to help identify who has set these
flying cameras loose into the wild, and for what reason.
Might the canine clamor suggest the drones are using
different technologies to map the areas they hover over? Are they looking for
underground energy resources, carrying out research in night vision technology,
studying wildlife populations, or conducting a simple cartography mission? One
thing’s for sure: those aren’t delivery drones from Amazon.com sent to bring
you that Tom Clancy novel you just ordered.
It is certainly easy to see how this story can grow in the
popular imagination into something decidedly creepy. We are trained toward physical
privacy, which is a good thing for sales of Venetian blinds, curtains, and
window treatments. So many of our horror
stories deal with the monsters that cross the boundaries and come into the
home, violating what we normally assume is a safe space. In horror fiction that
presumption of home safety and the culturally respected protection afforded by the
mere presence of a window and door frame is highlighted by the traditional
Western vampire’s need to seek permission from the homeowner before entering.
(What an absolute mindblow in the Fright Night remake when the vampire, denied
permission to enter the home, finds a way to drive the targeted residents fromtheir own home.)
The creepy aspect of these unidentified drones is not
knowing what they are doing. The idea that they can be scanning homes to “see”
or “hear” the data, downloads, and passwords of residents feels wrong—well, it
is wrong—on many different levels, but mostly because it is a form of “invasion”
that combines both the high-tech (sure, we’ve been giving away our homezone
privacy since we invited the Internet-connected computer into our personal
spaces) and the physical (the presence of a piece of machinery that, flying by
algorithm, seems to have a mind of its own and therefore in our imaginations a
degree of subjecthood). That the drones are “watching us” is creepy.
But I won’t
drone on about it.
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