Patterns of Life and Predictive Killing: Image Processes, Drone Strikes and Death by Algorithm

• In Event: Platform Practices and Predictive Seeing 1

Abstract

While popular imaginaries of American drone warfare tend to rest on the notion of the precise killing of individually identified targets, these "personality strikes" are much less common than their counterpart, the "signature strike." Signature strikes depend on "patter of life analysis" (Gregory 2011, Chamayou 2013), which seeks to detect sustained anomalies of behaviour in daily rhythms and activities in order to identify the 'signature' of an enemy - or, crucially, an enemy to be (Pugliese 2013, Shaw 2016). This process of converting life into data and data into death depends on a complex assemblage of remote sensing, algorithmic processing, data storage, image analysis and human-computer interaction. Within this radical transformation of life into death, there is no necessity that the target undertake any specific violent or threatening action. Operationalising the ontopower of preemptive war (Massumi 2015), the very purpose of the process is to cut off the threat before it arrives. Prediction is what links the drone's capacity to perceive and its power: signature strikes are predictive killing, derived via the collection, processing and analysis of images. This paper examines the socio-technical apparatuses of drone vision, telescoping in scale from analysis of singular images to the networked infrastructures and secure databanks that make predictive killing possible. In doing so, it deploys cultural studies methodologies grounded in the study of affect, aesthetics and assemblages to illuminate practices, processes and fractures that bind together bodies and images in determinations of life and death in drone warfare.

Author

• Michael Richardson