So, about those drones
As Charlie XCX told us during the Brat Summer of our lord, everything is romantic. As I am telling you now, everything is tech. Stories that don't appear on the surface to be technology stories always have some small line out to the many ways technology disrupts and enhances our lives. This whole pandemonium about the drones over the skies of the northeast is one of these stories, but not in the way you might suspect. While, yes, drones do fall under the tech umbrella, the real story here is one of how misinformation and panic spread, and the ways technology enables human biases to the point of hysteria. This is a story about American illiteracy, boredom, and exceptionalism, all made more breathless by the technology that is embedded in our lives.
I'm almost certain these drones are nothing
When I say nothing, I mean almost literally nothing. I think a few weeks ago a few people saw some mysterious hobby drones, contacted the police and local news, which led more people to look up, which led more people to see lights in the skies, which led more people to claim they saw these drones.
Read any article or watch any video covering the NJ-NY-CT drone scare and you are bound to run into explanations from actual experts. Some points I've seen made by these individuals:
- Human depth perception is awful, especially at night. When mentally primed for it, we can mistake stars (many lightyears away) for drones, planes, and other lights close to the surface.
- Our sense of movement is awful, especially in the sky, and especially at night. Without reference points to aid us, sometimes we perceive things that are moving as not moving at all and vice versa.
- If an adversary were trying to spy on us, they would not use brightly lit and flashing drones to do so.
- The reason there are no very sharp images of these things is that people with telescopic lenses keep looking at them and finding out that people are mistaking regular planes, helicopters, and the planet Venus for spy drones.
This story has all the makings of social contagion or mass panic. One of my favorite characteristics of these kinds of viral moments is when the very method of attempting to figure out What's Really Going On stokes even more concern. Across the northeast, police departments are using this opportunity to pull out their drones to try to track down other drones. But as you can imagine, people on the ground can't tell the difference between a scary spy drone and a police drone (another kind of scary spy drone), thus resulting in more calls to the police of drone sightings.
There are a couple things I want to point out that only make this more of a nothing burger to me:
- We've seen them primarily in the NY tri-state area. Leaving behind for a moment the limitations of human eyesight, lets grant that people are in fact seeing moving, hovering, blinking objects in the sky and not stars or other mostly stationary objects. The tristate area, and the Northeast Megalopolis at large, is both the most densely populated part of the country AND the part of the country with the most airports, making it the part of the country with the most low flying aircraft. This lines up with the continued reports of drones that end up being passenger, cargo, or military planes.
- If a foreign or internal entity wanted to spy on Americans, flying drones over northern Jersey is not how they would do it. If you are trying to spy, you want to be as inconspicuous as possible. Consider Cambridge Analytica. For all intents and purposes, that was an effort to learn the behaviors of American citizens. How did foreign adversaries gain that information? Well aside for it being freely given by Americans, there are not laws protecting the sale and trade of sensitive American data. If someone wants to spy on Americans - what they like, where they are going, who they voted for - there are far easier ways to do it. Additionally, there are currently satellites orbiting over the globe with the ability to see details on a dinner plate. If you are worried about spying and surveillance, you are not seriously concerned unless you are aware of these facts.
- I think it's possible people in the NY tristate area have a heightened sensitivity to low flying aircraft as being especially antagonistic or at least mysterious.
But if they are nothing, why are they something?
Honestly, I think the short answer is that it's a slow news moment. It is not actually a slow news moment, but it's a slow news moment in the ways Americans care about. This opportunity has been seized by many on the right to advance conservative ideas, like warmongering with Iran, Russia, or China and giving the police more toys. I think media outlets are aware of, nefariously or not, the draw a story like this can have and therefore amplify it further, counting on American illiteracy of many topics to turn nothing into something.
I'm not saying that illiteracy about technology or human biases is something to be derided, and it certainly is not restricted to whatever in-groups or out-groups I may be a part of. But I do just want to make the point that there are actual things going on that deserve the breathless coverage this whole thing has gotten, and it is an American idea of exceptionalism, that certain things don't happen here they happen in other countries, that is stoking this flame.
In Gaza and in Ukraine actual unmanned aircraft rumble and whine in the sky while people on the ground attempt to go about their day. A constant hum, a faint blinking light, and the threat between every heartbeat and blink that the roar could get louder and louder until everything is dust, flames, shrieks, and sirens. It is a luxury of our modern American life that we can point our phones into the night and imagine that the constellations are actually watching us.
Don't just challenge what you believe, but challenge how you came to believe it.
I remain curious about the ways American media outlets and social media platforms legitimize narratives and legitimize fear. Perhaps in writing this newsletter I am part of the problem, but I see it as the responsibility of the news, journalism, and analysts to deescalate from our most unconscious impulses. It is not lost on me how many times I've observed political officials, influencers, and newspeople substantiate the concerns of a population about this, and not, say concerns about the United States healthcare industry. Why is it that we've seen politicians share videos of Orion's Belt challenging the federal government to DO SOMETHING about this, but the thousands of people who scream in unison that something must be done about healthcare are met with pretty uniform silence at best and open criticism at worst?
I want to stress that there is no great conspiracy here, the media does not move as part of a coordinated effort to shape public opinion, but individual actors will wield the media to do so. Technology, in this case social media and our smartphone cameras, makes unmasking the world's many mysteries extraordinarily difficult when we lean on base assumptions. It is convenient for the headlines and the memes that appear on our phones to slot neatly into our constructed view of How The World Really Works. Institutions of perceived legitimacy, such as The New York Times, the FBI, or Fox News, constantly fail to move observers in the more literate, grounded-in-reality direction, and a whole lot of nothing becomes something.