Multispecies Theories of Drone Firmware

• In Event: More Instrument than Data: Attuning to the Apparatus - II

Abstract

Neither software nor hardware exist. There is only firmware that connects the two. Neither nature nor culture endure alone. There are only technologies and practices that connect the double. Matter in both cases has become programmable. Firmware is a hybridization of hardware and software entangled with the external world. This conceptualization is essential for understanding recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles or drones—a new class of atmospheric IoT infrastructure at work in humanitarian logistics or ecological conservation. Two types of firmware will be introduced, the hardcoded black firmware of the drone’s materiality and the ecological firmware of the drone as an instrument blurring the distinctions between nature and culture. Data power—domination through information—is performed in both black and ecological firmware through control over the technologies of natureculture.

Drones are examples of black firmware—or control through opacity—a result of buggy technology managed by opaque artificial intelligence, illiberal regulations, and foreign technology companies.

Drone-aided remote sensing is techno-genetic entanglement; it is a practice of quantifying nature. Through sensing, perceiving, and artificial intelligence drone-based ecological firmware renders subjects readable and manageable.

As unaccountable yet governing firmware, drones enact an exclusive form of data power that is blackboxed while also identifying, connecting, and securitizing non-humans and endangered species including humans.

Drawing from recent fieldwork with drone operators on three continents I define black firmware and environmental firmware as new classes of sensing and management infrastructure.

Author

• Adam Fish, University of New South Wales