Domesticating drone technologies: commercialisation, banalisation, and reconfiguration of 'ways of seeing'

This chapter explores the tensions in transition as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (commonly known as drones) cross over from military contexts into urban city-spaces. Tracing the history of drones through stages of conflict, this chapter argues that the expanding use of drones into everyday life is demonstrative of broader trends in the banalisation of surveillance technologies. By engaging with Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire, Arendt’s banalisation of violence, and Berger’s ‘ways of seeing’, we demonstrate via a comparative analysis with closed-circuit television how banal spaces may be co-opted using such technologies and how such a processes can be exploited in service of biopolitical ends.