He relinquishes one freedom in exchange for another.

Humans experience life through a range of senses and feelings. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell have the ability to translate external stimuli to internal feelings, and add them to other already existing internal existing internal hibernating feelings. These senses and feelings not only guide us through our life, but also link and connect us to specific places and moments within it. Feelings can be exhilarating, they can be beautiful, they can be amazing, but alas, they can also be quite painful. There has been a lot a talk in the discourse of “What’s Next in the Technological Field?” and Pain Inhibitors are on that list. It’s not something new, it’s like a super upgraded version of Operant Conditioning, which is a learning process through which the strength of a behavior is modified by reinforcement or punishment and is administered by therapists usually to soldiers before they go to war. It is also a procedure that is used to bring about such learning, and it is used to prevent, or at least to decrease the chance or the effects of PTSD. But, what about those Pain Inhibitors mentioned earlier, what might they be exactly? Well, they are exactly what they sound like; total pain suppressors, so that when you are hurt, you do not feel any pain at all, total loss of the pain sensory receptors, even if someone gets shot, they continue fighting as if nothing happens. They are nanobots that are injected within your bloodstream and reach within your entire nervous system and can thus affect your entire body and control your pain receptors and affect how you feel pain. But then you have super soldiers that do not feel pain, but do they feel other things? In the anime, they didn’t get PTSD and they only got triggered by a certain language trigger, the “genocidal organ” but that’s beyond the point. Does this mean, that we must feel pain to be human? Is pain what makes us us? Is the ability to relish feelings and feel pain what constitutes our soul? So, if we use these nanobots to work better, then we lose our humanity and become more mechanical?

These pain-inhibiting nanobots were featured amongst other things like liquid reality-
augmenting lenses and gunning biodegradable aero-flesh pods amongst other futuristic extrapolations, imaginations and machinations of the near future in the anime, which is based on a novel, Genocidal Organ written by Project Itoh. You can read the plot down below if you are interested, and I’ll also attach the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KDYEjGecZc

Genocidal Organ – Project Itoh

“The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it’s up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations, and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ.”

“The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it’s up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations, and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ.”

I think that gendering robots is a reflection of how cultures gender people. In Japan, robots are made to have very thin, feminine voices. I don’t think that that resulted in women in Japan talking in very thin, feminine voices but quite the opposite; Japanese women’s language has existed long before the idea of humanoids did. I think that this Japanese women’s language affected how female Japanese robots were created and gendered them to be hyper-feminine just as the women in real life actually were and still are.

Using drones in war makes it safer for humans as they will not be risking their lives on the battlefield, however, this is only in the countries that have money. Poor countries will not have access to these highly equipped drones so they may rely more on humans. This idea gamifies war somehow as it makes it very similar to video games which makes me even more suspicious, what if video games were actually trainings for “soldiers to be ” to use the new technology? Children may actually become soldiers and very good ones too.

Movies may carve certain stereotypes in children’s subconscious that may affect their thoughts when they’re older. The movie terminator made me have this almost definite belief that robots are the thing that is going to end us not help us. Up until now this idea still lurks in my head.

Drone Intimacy  is such a poetic name and it did not disappoint! I am a big fan of cyberculture  and you can understand that if you read my piece on my relationship with a piece of technology (MY LAPTOP, OF COURSE) and from my intimate and what I believe is truly real and although intangible but I feel it, I do truly believe there’s an entire universe out there where we can float and fly behind that little magical screen. My laptop is truly a sultry little enchantress now isn’t she. However, not everything is magical, there’s always a dark side of the moon, and in this case, enter the screen assassins; drones. Drones aren’t just about the obvious evil which is the most evil sin which is obviously killing, it’s about the more “grotesque” or “morally-wrong fetishes” like distanced voyeurism. Now those drone pilots might complain all they want about their boring lives, but they seem like they have some weird tastes. From God-complexes to watching their enemies copulate, to “war porn” to “Predator Porn”. They’re a creative lot, those drone pilots. They kill with a press of a button, they are not seen doing something wrong, they are perceived as pleasant people but they are virtually evil, like the guy who virtually had incestual relations with his virtual daughter; it was one of the layers of his identity and thus it is part of who he is and thus should be treated accordingly in a fair and just world. But, it’s not just that, from the constant scanning of these villages and areas, they’ve come to memorize these people’s daily lives and have come to feel an eerie sense of immersive sense of intimacy when the drones keep rotating over the same area. You know the people, you get a sense of their daily lives, and as you do that you tend to read their body language, their actions, their movements, everything. That’s called daily narrativization. By narrative infilling, they create mental narrative to accompany the pictures the videos the drones send them and thus create a whole story that the can relate to and thus have a full report. However, in this scenario, one can tend to overstep and we tend to assume we know more than we do and that’s when we make mistakes and BOOM! But this, sadly, isn’t just in reality, it is mirrored virtually as well, and is experienced by all ages. I am talking about another type of screen killing, I’m talking about shooting and killing games. There are similarities and differences to these two screen killings, however the major difference is that in gaming the younger people are raised on shooting games and are born killing people and thus are raised with these mentioned above, but less intensely, but without the stress; also known as remote stress  and is usually diagnosed as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. So, it’s basically, fun times, the madness, but without the guilt.

Becoming unmanned seems like an idea that is very intriguing in the example of feminism. Feminism stands for the equality of rights to women as well as men. But as the autonomous technology joins the warfare activities isn’t just a good a idea for removing gender from the equation as a whole, but it would also declare our senses of what is powerful useless since it wont be in action any more. imagining warfare would be completely different, but even more dangerous than ever before due to the elevated since of technology that removes our dated ideas of who is capable and who isn’t. what would only matter will only how to operate these new technologies. it be a drone for example, what matter is the command given to the drone or the needed code to actually operate and send the drone, so it will cancel the gender part of things and only the information about the object in questions is the only thing that is valuable. also you can see that in the powerful exoskeletons that they can use in warfare, it gives those who use it a different sense of humanity or the limits of their gender almost from zero to a million difference in strength and other attributes. a woman can lift things what a typical masculine man can never lift in the entirety of his life, then this will a give power a new sense of meaning. those who can use this technology better than any other person, whether male or female, will be the strongest not the one which is higher in the normal hierarchies, but those who are higher in the new technological hierarchy. this autonomous technology will dismantle all that we have know about human biology and we might be able to create new ones that replace the ambiguity of our biological structures, where we can create ones that we can but no roles on genders and value those who can use that new technology.

The chapter introduces the topic of remote intimacy by giving examples of real-life examples in which people spend time and be intimately connected to. Those examples include all types of interacting with real or virtual people or objects through the screens such as social media platforms, video games, or even movies and series. It is true that some people get deeply connected to such activities to the extent that they might isolate themselves from their physical surroundings of family and neighborhood members. The main topic of the chapter, which is the relationship between drone operators and people in the field, is a very interesting and provoking topic. I find the idea of screen killing and how easy and sometimes fun to kill a person very immoral and inhumane. Drones that make people fight through thousands of miles is not the main reason as described in the chapter;  it encourages people to act immorally. The argument that drone operators are more likely to kill than field soldiers because they do not face or interact with the insurgents or even innocent people is very sensible. Other examples can be found in cyberbullying, where people criticize, make fun of, and sometimes curse people on social media more than in real life dealings because they are sitting behind the screen and do not have to get possible reactions from the person on the other side of the screen.Moreover, what provokes me the most is that many operators did not show that they have moral and strict values that make their job more moral and beneficial to their countries as well even though some of them had such principles. I think that the reason of this is the culture of most western countries since modernism, which circulates mainly on individualism and relativity; such culture made operators act as the God who decides to take life from someone or not. For me, I think because of the limited role religions, which have almost fixed and strict moral principles, play in western societies in addition to the dominance of rationalism worldwide, western countries and communities do not have main restrictions that determine what is ethical and what is not. Furthermore, moral development is not at the same pace as the continuous materialistic discoveries and inventions. Therefore, we see people use those technologies like robots, movies and games productions, internet, and other great inventions without well-grounded morals and values. Voyeurism, enjoyment of killing others, and the rush in making decisions are all few examples of this culture’s consequences. While reading this chapter, I recalled terroristic attacks that, in my opinion, are results of modernism and nowadays media that is full of violence, one of which was the recent attack in New Zealand where the terrorist videotaped the attack and made us feel as if he was completing a video game mission.In conclusion, technologies including robots, machines, and even drones are great means that accelerate our civilization growth. It is our interaction with those inventions that determines how we use them to (amplify) our abilities.

In this chapter, Mary Manjikian introduced by how drones were utilized in the battlefield in human surveillance operations, and how that drones provided an upper hand by going into places that are too risky for humans and collecting data about destined locations. She proceeds by giving an overview of how autonomous technology can the change the construct of warfare, and how it can have an impact on basic gender constructs.

              Manjikian argues that the essence of the battlefield will be altered with the introduction of autonomous technology. Firstly, it will eliminate the burden of ‘dirty work’ in the battleground, since the battlefield will be mainly consisting of robots, which she then concludes makes warfare irrelevant. The basic inception of war is two armies fighting for territory by eliminating one another, with the introduction of autonomous technology Manjikian argues that the elimination of robots would be irrelevant and does not translate into territory gained during war.

              Autonomous technology has an impact on basic gender constructs, since the traditional overview of both males and females she describes as “protector/protected” respectively. With the development of super soldiers, this will somehow introduce a third gender, eliminating the “protector/protected” view. Thus, she concludes that this would undermine the masculinity of males and would reinforce hegemonic masculinity rather than eliminating it.

The use of autonomous technology, such as drones and robots, has been recently implemented in countries like the United States, with the intention of altering the conduct of war-fighting and our understanding of gendered activity. Historically, wars and the brave soldiers who sacrifice their lives on the battle field, were always considered to be a symbol of strength, bravery, and nationalism. Nonetheless, the author discusses how battles and soldiers will be perceived when warfare becomes automated. For instance, what would be the case when drones are responsible for removing bodies from the battle fields instead of real humans? How would this affect our perception of war? Naturally, when automated technology becomes dominant, battles will be taken more lightly and perceived as less heroic, as the male figure no longer protects the females and the weak. Instead, it is the robot that protects both males and females, resulting in the dehumanization of the battle field. Consequently, the weapon system becomes unmanned, as do the soldiers themselves, since the drone operators are equated with risk avoidance and cowardliness. Later on in the text, the author explains how military robots could have an effect on common gender conceptions, as they could either accentuate and strengthen the traditional conceptions by creating a hypermasculine super solider, or they could undermine distinctions between the sexes by creating a new set of genders. What I mean by the “hypermasculine” super soldier is one with implants to enhance their natural capabilities in the field, such as being implanted with GPS coordinates for tracking. As well, these supersoldiers include special features, such an exoskeleton on the outside of their bodies, which provides them with strength and mobility in the battle; a typical masculine feature. Therefore, the aforementioned proves how the construction of these robots reinforces masculinity, rather than reducing the common gender misconceptions. In fact, the author argues that the increased use of technology will enlarge the gap between men and women, as technology is created to serve men and demean women. For instance, the implants that are inserted into men’s bodies to control their movements are not very convenient for women, as they raise issues towards historical conflicts women have encountered, such as slavery. In addition, US military planners have inscribed all technology as masculine, since it is seen as providing decision-makers with knowledge; a typical male characteristic. As a female, I don’t feel like the availability of additional war-fighting technology is likely to open up more opportunities for women in war, as the mindsets that design these technologies create them in a way which make them more accomodative to males.

Having the ability to watch over others while they cannot see you, from far far up, predicting their behavior while they’re not even aware there is anything up there other than god. I can imagine that you’ll very easily feel above all, a power-madness situation, or perhaps power-blindness.

No, drone operators are not blind to the limitations of their power, but drone operators are blind to its consequences on them and on other people. when they kill people on the screen, it’s just like ‘playstation’ and i can see why it would seem easy and of no consequences, you just give a command from your joystick to the screen and the target dies. but the truth is innocent civilians might have just been murdered, and it’s not the technologies’ fault.

Yes, the distance between the drone operator and the target makes violence or killing psychologically approximate compared to a regular soldier on the field, but on the other hand, the operator gets to observe the community for weeks. does seeing families and kids that you’ve got to know die counts for nothing? and while the on-ground soldiers get to see the agony on the faces of their targets, hear their cries and perhaps feel the reluctance to kill them which is the ‘normal’ human reaction before becoming murderers, drone operators gets to experience a different and more intimate experience which is seeing the consequences of their actions. It can never be a shoot and run, because they will have to sit and watch the bodies burn to the ground, they have to deal with commanding a kill then finding that the killed targets were just innocent civilians including children, they have to watch the injured crawl on the field trying to find help with their missing limps. They see all these details, yet i still say they are blind to the consequences.

while this chapter showed drone operators being involved in their activity through this screen to the degree where they physically feel present there, or where they feel emotional connection to what they see, I don’t think they get to realize it’s ‘real’ until it happens and take some times to settle in. They release a missile, ‘accidentally’ killing two children then they sit and try to absorb what had just happened, after the deeds are done.