The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Abstract

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.

Drone methodologies: Taking flight in human and physical geography

“…In meteorology, the turbulent boundary layer is defined as the part of the atmosphere where interactions with the Earth's surface occur and, depending on local spatio‐temporal variations, its depth can range from just a few metres to several kilometres. From the perspective of human geography, Shaw suggests that at present “there is a prima facie grey zone for aircraft flying between 83… and 1,000 feet” (Shaw, , p. 13) that we suggest can be conceptualised as the Nephosphere.…”

“…Bringing a human geography sensibility to the technology stimulates consideration of ontological as well as epistemological questions where “materials, technologies and infrastructures associated with vertical spaces and forms can also shape people's memories, feelings, sensations and emotions” (Harris, , p. 610). In the words of Shaw (, p. 11), “these prostheses are unimpeded by terrestrial obstacles and can access subjects from above, reconfiguring the interface between capital, state, and sense. For this reason, aerial prostheses must be considered ontologically”.…”

“…In his potent critique of the overlaps between military and corporate drone technologies, Ian Shaw (following Crampton, ) has argued that “the upper atmosphere was an inaccessible frontier” (Shaw, , p. 12) but that “corporations of various sizes are seeking to colonize the skies with a robotic armada” of drones orbiting “the towering skyscrapers of a capsularized elite, materializing a cloud city of secessionary volumes” (Shaw, , p. 12). Shaw suggests that this new constellation of atmospheric activity amounts to an effective enclosure of vertical common space that echoes 17th and 18th‐century land enclosures in England.…”

“…Almost 2 million drones were sold in 2016 (doubling sales in 2015) and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts that 4.3 million consumer drones will be sold by 2020 (Masunaga, ; Schuessler, ). “In 2016, Price Waterhouse Cooper valued the global market for drones at over $127 billion” (Shaw, , p. 13). With over 1,500 different drone designs now in existence, Wallace‐Wells () suggests that a new taxonomy that places military and civilian drones in different phyla is required to sidestep the “doublespeak” of the drone.…”

“…For example, physical geographers use consumer‐grade drones widely in their research (for examples, see Mancini et al., ; Mlambo et al, ; James et al, ), but there is scant evidence that they have discussed the social, legal and experiential implications of their praxes with human geography colleagues, despite their operations regularly coming into contact with organisations or individuals who may be wary of drone operations (Duffy et al., 2017). Reciprocally, human geographers have critically engaged military drone technologies (Gregory, ; Shaw, , ) and imagery (see Gregory, ) and argue that “the experiences, practices and textures of vertical life” need to be studied (Harris, , p. 608). But there has been little evidence of human geographers engaging practically with consumer drone technologies – building, flying, crashing repairing and upgrading them – so as to be able to effectively chart a course toward more critical drone methodologies.…”