Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.
It turns out that drones are not as scary as they appear—but they are more complicated than you might expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming with their new technologies.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.
It turns out that drones are not as scary as they appear—but they are more complicated than you might expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming with their new technologies.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Introduction
Chapter One: Four Technology Stories
Chapter Two: The Military Drone
Chapter Three: The Commercial Drone (or the hole where it ought to
be)
Chapter Four: Blinking Lights
Chapter Five: Software and Hardware
Chapter Six: The Non-Drone
Chapter Seven: What the Drone is For
Chapter Eight: The Drone in Discourse
Chapter Nine: Drone Fiction
Chapter Ten: Ourselves and the Drone
Chapter Eleven: Aesthetics of the Drone
Chapter Twelve: The Drone as Meme
List of Images
Bibliography
Notes
Drones are a catch-all, and ominous, technological category, but when we talk about drones we are really talking about our own relationship with this technology.
Adam Rothstein is a freelance technology writer and researcher based in Portland, USA.
Adam Rothstein’s primer on drones covers such themes … as the
representation of drones in science fiction and popular culture.
The technological aspects are covered in detail, and there is
interesting discussion of the way in which our understanding of
technology is grounded in historical narratives. As Rothstein
writes, the attempt to draw a boundary between one technology and
another often ignores the fact that new technologies are not quite
as new as we think.
*Times Literary Supplement (reviewed by Christopher Coker)*
Readers interested in technology and/or warfare will very much
enjoy reading Drone… Adam Rothstein did an admirable job, writing
about every aspect of drones in detailed and organized fashion…
[T]hose keenly interested in the subject will gobble this up.
*San Francisco Book Review*
[Rothstein's] book is a rich collection of vignettes about how to
imagine and comprehend the drone ... [Drone] really excels in
tackling the multiple meanings, symbols, and narratives attached to
drones, all of which provide a bird’s eye view (drone’s eye view?)
of the terrain of contemporary debate ... for those beginning a
research project, or just the curious, this small book packs a big
punch.
*Antipode*
Adam Rothstein's Drone presents this iconic figure of contemporary
warfare-the disconcertingly alluring autonomous airborne
machine-through the lens of a different kind of history. Privacy
and tracking algorithms run side by side with the ethics of
self-guided munitions, activist political programs butt heads with
emerging corporate business strategies, and all of it is tied back
to the earliest experiments in driverless vehicles, quaint
ancestors of today's over-mythologized UAVs. In the end,
Rothstein's book is an exploration of technical agency: Where did
drones come from-and what do they want?
*Geoff Manaugh, Editor of Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices
and Architectural Inventions and Author of the website
BLDGBLOG*
This lucid, visionary work is as close as one can get to science
fiction without the baggage of science and/or fiction. Adam
Rothstein's Drone will be a wonderful cultural artifact in twenty
years. It will be like a broken pomegranate of contemporary
speculations and anxieties.
*Bruce Sterling, Author of The Zenith Angle and Professor of
Internet Studies and Science Fiction at the European Graduate
School, Switzerland*
Portland writer and artist Adam Rothstein’s contribution to
Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series digs into the history and
meaning of autonomous aircraft—the ways they work, the tasks they
perform, where they come from, and how the way we talk about them
reflects the priorities and anxieties of our age.
*Oregon Humanities*
Adam Rothstein’s Drone test[s] the water on what this technology
might yet prove to be as it is successively explored and its limits
and possibilities (military and civilian) discovered. What shall
drones be?
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
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