The Vulnerabilities of Drone Warfare with Amy Gaeta

In this episode, we talk to Amy Gaeta, a researcher at the Centre for Drones and Culture and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, about how drones reveal the complex intersections of gender, power, and technology. Amy explains how drones both reinforce and disrupt traditional masculine norms, showing that their use — from hobbyist communities to drone-mediated pornography — is deeply shaped by cultural expectations around control, visibility, and desire. She highlights how these technologies are tied to broader systems of surveillance and militarization, while also offering unexpected opportunities to rethink societal perceptions of gender and embodiment.

Amy Gaeta is a scholar and poet whose work blends feminist science and technology studies, critical disability studies, and visual culture to examine how emerging technologies shape human experience. Her research explores drones as cultural and political objects, focusing on how they influence identity, agency, and the boundaries of what is considered “human.” Through both her academic work and her creative writing, Amy advocates for more inclusive, justice-oriented approaches to technology that recognize diverse bodies, emotions, and ways of being.

Reading List:

• Kathrin Maurer, The Sensorium of the Drones and Communities: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545907/the-sensorium-of-the-drone-and-communities/

• Julia M Hildebrand, Aerial Play: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-2195-6

• Andrea Long Chu, Females: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/898-females?srsltid=AfmBOoqh4ejMnluqlB_XiDps1ovRRa_mN_jqchyUeBuR5xkRqMPO5UrM

• Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517915582/crip-negativity/

• Crip Authorship, edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez: https://opensquare.nyupress.org/books/9781479819386/

• Jina B Kim, Care at the End of the World: https://www.dukeupress.edu/care-at-the-end-of-the-world

• La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-to-go-mad-without-losing-your-mind

• Amy Gaeta, A Disability Theory of Anti-Surveillance Tactics: https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/peitho/v27n1/gaeta.pdf

• Amy Gaeta, The Drone’s Other Target: The Generative Aesthetics of Drone Hobbyists’ Love: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/drone-aesthetics/

• The Thinness of GenAI: The Construction of the Normate through Generative AI Image Models (2025) AI and Ethics

• The Harmful Fetishisation of Reductive Personal Tracking Metrics in Digital Systems (2024) Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. p899–908. (with Carter, L) 

• Conceptualising Fatness in HCI: A Call for Fat Liberation. (2024) In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Article 506, 1–14.

• Strings, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (2019) NYU Press

• Lupton, The Quantified Self: A sociology of Self Tracking (2016) Cambridge Polity 

• (And more accessible) Gordon, “You just need to loose weight” and 19 other myths about fat people (2023) Beacon Press

Transcript:

Kerry McInerney (01:00)

In this episode, we talk to Amy Gaeta, a researcher at the Centre for Drones and Culture and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Amy interrogates how gender shapes and is shaped by the way we use drones, from how masculinity operates in drone hobbyist communities through to how drones are being used currently in pornography. They explain how Crip Theory affects their approach to drones and how drones queer traditional masculine norms through their associations with passivity and submissiveness. Amy also interrogates the relationship between drones, animal life, and the natural world, including how drones are designed to mimic birds and bees and what this means at a time when these creatures are increasingly under threat. We hope you enjoy the show.

Kerry McInerney (01:41)

Brilliant! Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s a pleasure to have you. So just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what brings you to thinking about gender, feminism, and technology?

Amy Gaeta (01:51)

My name is Amy Gaeta I'm a researcher at the Librium Center for the Future of Intelligence, as well as the Center for Drones and Cultures at the University of Cambridge and is very broadly rooted in the humanities, but I'm a transdisciplinary researcher devoted to developing more feminist and anti-apolist approaches to really developing the stories that we can tell about human technology relationships under the conditions of war, surveillance, and authoritarianism, broadly speaking. And a lot of my work uses the body and emotion as starting points for being able to tell those stories, but also reevaluating the ways we think about human tech ethics. So what brings me here, especially in my relationship to feminism and gender, ultimately a lot of my work comes from a kind of annoyance with the really one-sided stories and moral profiles that we, broadly speaking, to use the royal we, attach to technologies.

Most of my work is structured by a feminist queer methodology, which aims to complicate things and really refuses to settle whether technology is good or bad into an either-or category, which I contend is a particularly kind of queer position. And as I mentioned, a lot of my methodology focuses on the body, the emotional, and really the personal as a form of testimony, trying to locate a site that can sit between the local and the global as well as the minority and the universal, and being able to hold both at the same time as the broader aim of my work. But this also really means recuperating associations with women and queer subjects that have been deemed unproductive and bad, and even dangerous. So associations like passivity or weakness, submission, course, vulnerability, which have been widely reclaimed by feminist theorists.

So in my work, I typically approach gender as a structure. So, not necessarily looking at how people of a certain gender use technology, but really how gender shapes the way the technologies are imagined, designed, and used. So, for instance, rather than ask how, say, “Disabled women with prosthetics experience stigma and hypersexualization”, I would instead scale out the word. And I would say, “Okay, what are the social and political conditions that even result in female prosthetic users being fetishized at all? And what is it about that technology in particular that adds a certain element of desire?” So it's kind of very broadly how I do, but I think I'll speak more about my relationship to feminist materialism later on.

Eleanor Drage (04:07)

And your work is super cool. And we have the pleasure of working with you at CFI. Can you answer our big three good robot questions? So what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism or the other approaches that you take from pro-justice ways of thinking help us get there?

Amy Gaeta (04:08)

I thought a lot about this question because I know it is something you ask everyone. And I think ultimately I lean away from terms like good or bad to describe technology. I don't think I'm very interested in describing a moral status to technologies, but more to uses, perhaps. And maybe this is because I find these moral terms too loaded or perhaps over-determining. But instead, in my work, I use a lot of language of possibility and foreclosure, like what does a given technology enable or shut down? And I'm really interested in understanding the politics of a given technology based on the amount of liberation and improvement to quality of life it can afford in a context of that kind of possibility.

In my work, I tend to use the language of possibility and foreclosure to describe the given merit of a technology. And I'm understanding the politics of a given technology based on the amount of liberation and improvement to quality of life it can afford in a context. And then, regarding foreclosure, I tend to consider how a given technology, such as a small drone or an iris or an identification scanner, which may scan someone's eye, may reproduce hegemony more than it disrupts it. And in many ways, this may come across as a really classic utilitarian ethics where I'm interested in doing the most good for the biggest number of people. But I think my approach is a lot messier, actually, and is really centered on the imaginary and the speculative. So when I think about possibility and foreclosure, or wait, maybe I say it's good technologies or bad technologies, instead of thinking about, “Yeah, can it unleash other kinds of speculative futures or different kinds of imagination?” I would put it in the category of good. So for me, this possibility of good technology or the technology of possibility would look like technology that could ultimately trouble or disrupt existing power race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and trouble them in ways more towards liberation. I think feminism, of course, gets us here in many ways, in a very broad sense, because it can serve as a really powerful, rich analytic for identifying those power structures and potential for liberation. And I think particularly important here is this feminist material approach, where I seek to examine the full range of a technology's life cycle from the desires that lead to its creation all the way to how it's disposed of, how it's recycled, if it's recycled, and what its actual composition does to the earth. So I think, feminism allows for this really broad spectrum in terms of thinking about different sites where we may analyze a technology's given merit or potential.

Eleanor Drage (06:55)

Can you tell us what a drone is? We hear a lot about them. We may have something particular in our minds when we talk about drones, but actually, what is a drone in its bare bones form?

Amy Gaeta (07:08)

Yeah, so I can give you a very technical definition, and then I can give you my more theoretical definition here. On a technical level, a drone is some kind of unmanned vehicle. It could be land-based, it could be aerial-based, or a lot of underwater drones. There are no specific design specs, such as a certain type of propeller or operating system, that really define it. It really is some kind of remote-controlled or semi-autonomous unmanned vehicle, broadly speaking. And this really is what gets to my interest in drones, where this term is so broad to the point where the drone can almost be anything. It's so mutable. A drone can weigh several tons. It can fly for 10 hours. And then it can have numerous high-definition cameras and sensors on it. It could cost millions and millions of dollars, or it could also be this $20 toy made of plastic that was 3D printed, that can fly for five minutes and weighs one kilo. So a lot of my interest in drones was in this mutability, where I was like, “how can these things have the same name? Are these in the same category? And what do we get by ultimately thinking about them together?” which is where a lot of my work comes to collide with thinking about desire ultimately. And drones, really, as I theorize, as this tool for projecting and being able to play with one's own desires, seemingly without vulnerability. And of course, we see this in a military context. This is much more pronounced and has a very kind of tactical advantage, right? Where a military can quite literally act without being acted upon. But I think a lot of good work has been done in troubling that and thinking more carefully about the vulnerabilities of drone warfare on the side of the people actually conducting it as well. My work really looks more at civilian drones and thinking about their legacies and militarism. But I understand drones ultimately as desire because of, like I said, that mutability to them and all the different ways that they can be used and the kind of competing narratives about them. But also, as I'll maybe talk about a bit more and kind of hobbyist communities where people really do understand drones as extensions of themselves and do use them to directly act out various kinds of attachments that they wish they could have in the real world, whether that's a romantic attachment, an attachment to an animal or a fictional character or a child. And you see kind of other versions of this elsewhere. And it may also be, in a commercial sense, it could also be a tool for projecting desires around labor or projecting desires around control or around saving, such as the cases of humanitarian drones. But ultimately, it has to do with this apparent one-sided vulnerability that allows for this seeming kind of playground in the sky to act out one's desires in new ways.

Kerry McInerney (09:49)

Yeah, I think that is really, really fascinating. And I want to pick up on that last point you made around drone hobbyist communities, because you mentioned kind of this spectrum of civilian through to militarized drones. And I think there's been a lot of really interesting and important feminist scholarship that has looked at the way that drone warfare has challenged a lot of conventional ideas of masculinity and what masculinity means on the battlefield. And so we'll link some of that in the reading list for this week's episode. So check that out on our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, if you're interested in learning more about today's topic. But I think what's really interesting about the drone hobbyist community is that it seems to me to sit very much in that domestic or civilian use of drones. And yet it is also really troubling and problematizing the way that we think about gender and gender roles. Everything that you're saying about desire, attachment, relationships is inherently deeply gendered. And so I would love to hear a bit more about the way that you think gender is configured in these communities. I'm particularly interested in masculinity. So how does masculinity shape the drone hobbyist community?

Amy Gaeta (10:50)

That's a good question. I'll say demographically, there are no hard numbers on what the demographic makeup of drone hobbyist communities is. And it's even hard to kind of pin down what a hobbyist community is because drone cultures are spitting off into a bunch of different directions, where some people have these photography groups, and they might understand that as a hobbyist community, or drone racing leagues are getting increasingly popular. And some people consider that a sport, or other people would say it's a hobby. So it's a bit of an amorphous term that I use. Drone communities, the hobbyist communities are typically very big in countries that are also world powers. So the US, China, Japan, the UK, and increasingly in Russia and Ukraine. And I think after the war, we'll see more hobbyist communities, because right now, obviously, it's focused on wartime efforts. And many of these people are men. This is true.

There's some great work that I can definitely link from Katherine Mauer and Julia Hittlebrand on this that I think paints a more comprehensive image of civilian drone cultures and the kinds of types of people that make them up. So, now, the way drone hobbyist culture, which hasn't been studied too much, but when it is, it's typically studied along a couple of lines. One, there's a very strong, important reading here about civilian drone cultures and hobbyist cultures as a kind of masculine neocoloniality, and much of the marketing for small hobby drones, more commonly known as quadcopters, you will see this language that is all about mastery and control and aerial exploration just for the sake of it. And there are tons of cases as well that kind of reify this discourse here.

Cases of drone hobbyists disregarding the privacy of others, of flying into no-fly zones, and not doing it for any kind of political reasoning, but just because they wanted to do it. And this is the way we can read in this kind of masculine neocoloniality, this discourse of controlling from the sky. And again, you can see that the absence of real vulnerability there is quite important. There's no physical harm to them. But I'll touch on that more in a moment. There's also been some really great work on civilian drone communities in the US. 

Hobbyist communities as really laden with these techno-masculine obsessions with expertise. And there's a whole subculture around being able to build the best drone and do-it-yourself drones. So my interest in these communities is ultimately in masculinity and how it constructs many aspects of these communities, but also how the drone hobbyist attachment actually queers masculinity in some ways. So for years, I studied drone hobbyist forums associated with these really popular hobby drone models made by DJI. And a lot of these forums gained traction right around, we'd say, like the height of the drone warfare era, in terms of discourse, not necessarily in terms of numbers, during Obama's presidency, so like early 2010s especially. And what's interesting about these communities is that there are all the things you would expect from toxic masculinity. People are saying not great things about women; they're challenging each other to drone racing, they're kind of showing off their technical skills and expertise in all these ways. But what's more interesting is the really loving attachments that they ascribe to their drones that they feel towards them. So this takes place in many ways.

One of the most interesting things is mourning. So a big function of these hobby forums is lost and found. So if somebody loses their drone, let's say, I don't know, in Toronto, you might see a post where someone says, like “I lost my quadcopter today. It's this model I lost in downtown Ontario at this park”, and then they'll go on mourning this drone, and there are various types of things that they may say in response to this. They might say things that describe an agency, such as “the drone wanted to just leave home and go on its ventures by itself”, or they might say something like “RIP my drone, I'm never going to be able to replace this buddy”. And there are other posts on these forums where they talk about how they named their drones, such as naming after their wives or girlfriends, animals, certainly. There's a lot of talk about their drones growing up, and that's how they describe them becoming more technologically advanced. So I became really interested in these kinds of attachments as ultimately, in some ways, reinforcing this kind of really toxic masculine impulse to project your kind of desires onto an object. I think that's certainly the case here, especially in the case where they talk about the drones kind of being a stand-in for their wife or something like that, lying to their wife because they need to go play with their drone or something like that.

But on another level, I'm shocked by how much they let these inanimate objects affect them emotionally. And this is where I think a really kind of interesting potential comes in here, where we can tell new stories about the kinds of relationships that people may have with drones that push against that narrative of one-sided vulnerability, where here are people in the hobbyist communities that are, interestingly, both kind of like the kind of target of their drone and also the user and the controller of it. So it really complicates a lot of those binary ways of thinking about drones.

Eleanor Drage (15:51)

Wow, people do all sorts of things. Another really crazy thing that I tell people about when I talk about your work is drones and pornography. And I have to say I've had a good search on the internet, probably a very weird mind, when I heard that this is what you look into, I was thinking that people are having sex with drones, which, fortunately, it's not the thing, right? So, can you tell us what the relationship between drones and pornography is? Why do people use it? Kind of what the desire, attraction is, and what kind of appeal the drone is in that context, and also how that affects gender.

Amy Gaeta (16:24)

Yeah, so drone pornography is a growing genre, I would say, and it also really came to light again around that same time when drone warfare was at its kind of point of discourse in popular media and discussion around the ethics of it, which I think is quite an interesting context. And drone pornography as a genre is quite interesting. It really falls into a couple of categories, I would say.

So one is that the drone is a filming device. So this is using a drone to take some kind of aerial view of people having sex. There's obviously a kind of voyeurism you can read into that, which is usually the main point of kind of pornographic content, such as using a drone to film two people unknowingly, I hope, unknowingly being filmed by the drone while they're having sex. The second is when the drone becomes some kind of character in the photography.

Eleanor Drage (17:15)

Wait, you hope, or you don't hope?

Amy Gaeta (17:17)

I hope that the people know they're being filmed.

Eleanor Drage (17:20)

Right, okay.

Amy Gaeta (17:21)

To be clear, I hope everything is consensual, and there are no real violations of privacy going on. This is my yes. So the second is the drones becoming kind of characters in pornography. So this takes place in both kinds of literary erotica as well as various kinds of fan art. And then there are a few pornographic films of this, where the drone becomes a character in the sense that sometimes you can see it in the frame rather than it being the filming device. So again, there's a voyeurism there of, this drone is filming these two people having sex. There might be someone spying on them. Or, which I think is more interesting, and ultimately my interest is that the drone is used ultimately as an erotic object. So there are sex toys that are attached to drones that people may be using while the drone is hovering a bit or is just on the ground.

And then there's a growing number of self-published erotica novels that either take place in drone command centers, for instance, in a warfare context, or there are these kinds of magical drones that somehow somebody could have sex with. So that certainly is happening as well, but not in a kind of live-action way.

And then there's a third category, I would say, which is when real drone footage becomes treated as pornography. And this is really from a disturbing study of drone warfare footage. The Department of Defense in the US posts a lot of drone warfare footage on its YouTube channel. And there's been some great sociological work studying the comment sections of those videos.

And it's just about as disturbing as you can imagine, where people describe themselves masturbating to this footage, they describe it as highly erotic. And I think it's very important that we also think about this drone footage as a kind of unintentional drone pornography alongside this genre to give us a fuller picture of the context in which a lot of this was ultimately created. So, how does this affect gender and sexuality? I think one of the things that's interesting about drone pornography is that most of the humans in it, almost always, are very submissive, and they're playing the kind of bottom role. So the drone is taking the more dominant role in a lot of those situations. And I do think this is an important distinction because again, it turns on its head a lot of associations we may have, or we may assume around how people use technologies or how they want to understand themselves in relationship to it, especially in those kinds of neo-colonial readings of people understanding themselves as some kind of master of their technology or gaining some kind of mastery via technology. Whereas drone porn suggests something else, suggests a kind of submission I find very interesting. 

So across my work, one of the big questions in drone studies is the gendering of the drone itself. And this varies based on model, but there are some questions about what the gender of the drone is, ultimately, if it is. And especially when it comes to large warfare drones, they're very phallic shaped and their associations with power and brutality, and control. A lot of people read them as masculine because of the definition that I'd given earlier about the mutability of drones.

I tend to align them more with like, femaleness, ultimately. And to think about, drawing from really Andrea Long Chu's work, who's this really brilliant trans theorist and literary critic, who describes femaleness as this condition of being projected upon someone else's desires, which is, as very much how I understand drones. And I think there's an interesting kind of correlation there to consider in terms of drones as, ultimately, being these projection screens for other people's wants. And then seeing how this plays out in a very real way in pornography, I think, allows us to ask some much bigger questions about what kind of social structures and political structures lead to drones becoming erotic objects, as well as where this kind of submission to technology comes in?

And then of course thinking about this question of like, “Well, this is pornography. Is this happening in people's kind of intimate sex lives outside of this? Or are we understanding this as this kind of larger performance of a certain kind of desire?” I would say it's a complicated answer to that question. But it's definitely something I'm still pursuing and exploring quite a bit. But I think the most important thing there would be really thinking about the downplaying of a lot of traditional masculine roles in pornography that we see in some parts of drone pornography at least.

Kerry McInerney (21:41)

Yeah, and think the work you're doing there is really, really important and must be deeply dark and confusing at times as well. And so, we send a lot of care to you as well as you're trying to grapple with the way that people have eroticized, say, drone-related violence and all the different kinds of harm, I guess, also emerged in some of these communities, even as there can be more creative and interesting and liberatory uses of these technologies in ways that trouble existing gender norms. But I think this idea of fantasy, I guess, is playing out in like so many of the different communities you're describing, and so many of the different uses you're describing are really interesting because it feels like there are these like interlocked fantasies on the one hand of this total bodily control or mastery or aerial site and domination and how there's linked to masculinity at play. And then on the other hand, these roles of kind of submission, bottoming, vulnerability, passivity, which seem to kind of exist in quite a lot of tension with that. And so I actually want to bring you onto another analytic that plays a really, really prominent role in your work, which is disability. And I know that you do really incredible work in disability studies. And so I want to actually ask, amid all this kind of rich and complex work that you do on drones, how do you use and think about disability as a concept or as an analytic, or what role does it play in your work?

Amy Gaeta (23:00)

Yeah, so I became really interested in disability studies and drones around the same point in my life. And I always felt that they were connected somehow, but I didn't know how. And it took me a really long time. But ultimately, as you said, I think it was because I was using disability as an analytic. And this was quite new for me. And this was quite different. And I was really trying to use disability as a way of seeing the world. And this, now I understand, is really a big point of a field called Critical Disability Studies, which is an offshoot of Disability Studies, and then also Crip Theory, which is another part of it. Critical Disability Studies is really interested in interrogating the category of disability itself and understanding how it is constructed and how it is changing. So this is something I certainly look at.

In my work on drone cultures, when certain people in drone cultures may say, desire certain positions or associations, typically negatively attributed to disabled people, such as passivity, for instance. But I'm also particularly interested in depth in Crip Theory, which is really a set of ideas centered around building a value system in which ability is not the organizing principle. So if we wanted to Crip, say, academic work itself, Crip would ask, “Okay, how do we define success not based on the number of academic outputs or the number of days you can come into the office?” So it's just a really radical overhaul of measurement that ultimately gets us away from toxic individualism and equating productivity with worth. 

So in a study of technology, this would mean really attending to technologies that break or fail or maybe technologies that just kind of suck, right? And taking them very seriously and trying to understand what kind of potential they use they've been designated. But this also applies to the people that use them, especially people who use technologies in ways that may de-center or limit or augment their ability, such as I argue is the case with drones, and many people seem to also kind of desire that augmenting of their ability or limitation of it. So instead of having this moral panic about the downplaying of human ability, Crip Theory would say, “Okay, let's slow down and ask what other types of values are working here? And is there something we can salvage from that? Is there something politically viable in it?” And of course, disabled people just have these really unique politically and morally ambiguous relationships with technologies, as many of us rely on them to live. And their knowledge has also really been foundational in shaping my approaches to tech. And then of course, on a personal note here, I'm disabled myself, and I've been really deeply immersed in a lot of disability communities. And these have influenced the way I think about technology and justice, but also the ways I understand what counts as scholarship and method. And this has really helped me to embrace a lot of qualities that have been looked down upon in, or still kind of looked down upon in some traditional academic spaces, such as not knowing, such as partiality, or slowness. And I think this methodological aspect of it is quite critical as well, because it does change the type of work you can do, and it does change the expectations of the work that you can do.

Eleanor Drage (26:01)

I'd like to ask you to talk about the ethically confusing and quite beautiful aspects of drones, which is that they often imitate nature. I met someone a year ago who is an engineer. makes drones. He imitates dragonflies. And he seemed so enthralled in nature. And I found it very difficult to listen to because I wasn't really sure what I thought. So, can you tell us about that kind of more-than-human aspect of drones?

Amy Gaeta (26:28)

Yeah, so a growing aspect of drone design is the field of biomimetics, which is this branch of design that takes inspiration from the natural world, or what I would call the more-than-human world. Biomimetics has been very influential on everyone's life, such as Velcro, which is a famous invention of biomimetics. So some people try to adapt qualities such as how mountain goats stand so well on these rocks, and what if we could mimic it in tires or something like that? And then there's a more kind of end of biomimetics where you're mimicking the entire animal or the entire plant or insect, whatever it may be. So in drones, this often takes shape in various kinds of flying animals. And there's a practical reason here, which is that designers always want drones to be more robust and more agile. Drones are typically not great in the wind, especially smaller drones. A lot get caught in tree branches. something happens with their navigation, et cetera. They're not always the most agile flyers. And this is especially an issue for the sensors, ultimately, the propeller and wing design. And drones can also be super loud and obtrusive and just annoying. So, what is really good at flying birds, bees, and various types of insects? So designers will look towards that world and think about what kind of properties are here and how I can adapt them into drones? And I do have very also kind of confusing feelings about this as well. And a lot of what I tried to do in this perspective is to take a cue from a great drone researcher, Adam Fish, who does this amazing work on how drones are used in conservation and marine life monitoring. And what I love in his work is that he really de-centers the human in thinking about drone ethics and instead thinks about the more-than-human world as the beginning of a set of drone ethics. And by doing so, I think he's able to construct something that really accounts for what the animals actually impacted by these drones benefit from or what is taken away from them?

So in the case of biomimetics, I'm interested in this in a very kind of practical way, like are actual birds scared or may feel unsafe by drones that look like birds, but also on a symbolic level of what it means at a time when many popular bird species are increasingly decreasing in numbers, they are under threat. Their rate of extinction is increasingly climbing in birds, and yet the sky is consistently being filled with these mimicked birds that are ultimately typically sold for commercial purposes of surveillance. Some are certainly used by militaries for various kinds of surveillance reasons, and then some are used to conduct less obtrusive environmental work.

It's unclear, actually, if they really are less obtrusive. So I think there's a kind of symbolic violence here that I'm particularly nervous about and reproduces a lot of colonial tropes. I think about reproducing something for one's own end. And then what happens to actual birds is my big question here. And then on the flip side, I think an important question to ask is to hold on to the agency of animals that are being mimicked themselves, is to think about what the bird ultimately do to the drone? Like, can we tell different stories about the drone? Do drone ethics change if they mimic a bird? And then thinking also practically about the very real instances of many, many birds attacking drones and taking them down and finding them, it seems very obtrusive. So I think there's an interesting tension there. That's, I think, ultimately the side of my research going forward here.

Kerry McInerney (29:58)

Wow, I mean, thank you. This has just been an incredible tour de force, and I'm sure that the way that you're thinking about drones is really going to challenge and excite a lot of our listeners. So I just want to say thank you so much again for taking the time to come on. For anyone who is really interested in Amy's work or wants to dive deeper into any of these topics, we have, as I mentioned, a reading list with every episode. You can go on and find that on our website. But for now, I just want to say thank you so much again, Amy. It's been a real pleasure.

Amy Gaeta (30:23)

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Edited by: Meibel Dabodabo