Happiness from the sies or a new death from above? #cokedrones in the city

The production of the #cokedrone YouTube advertisement by Coca-Cola Singapore in 2014 is a manifestation of the broader trend toward the domestication of drone technologies within city spaces, indicating a prolonged desire to eschew its relationship to violence. This article seeks to briefly provide one interpretation into this ad and the broader contextual implications of drones in cities. We argue that while a variety of strategies are clearly deployed within this ad—the redesign of the body of the drone, the attempt to negate the relation between drones and violence, and finally, through the reconfiguration of the drone eye from the eye that ‘watches’ to the eye that ‘sees’—the overall implications of drone technologies within city spaces warrants further investigation. Particularly as drone technologies are easily adaptable to changing environments, often concealing its security and surveillance capabilities, commercial and domestic participants in this trend must be critically aware of the potential consequences underlying the normalisation of drones as part of everyday life in the city.