Why emphasize the personae behind the earliest B.C.E. form of a gadget that would experience a profound transformation beyond the twentieth century? On the contrary, any successful engineer disappears beneath the exterior of his or her creation (thinking of Heidegger’s notion of tools disappearing in users’ hands to the transparent objects in The Matrix trilogy). And the creator’s intention has never been a strong suite; even modern drone-maker Karem admitted that he ‘did not envision the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of warfare with non-state adversaries.’ At a surveillance conference I spoke with a drone researcher who had watched engineers test their devices in air fields. The contention that their scientific research would be used in stealth warfare to kill combatants or noncombatants visibly horrified them (convincingly or not—but the separation barrier between inventor/invention and user/tool, at least how it is grasped socially, appears dense).

“Drones are Paranoid Androids”  |  Read More.

Does time heal all wounds?

One of the poems in my book Human Scale contains a section that reads:

Time heals
No wounds
Least of all

My own, which
I have sat here
Licking, year

After year, until
All I could taste
Was your name

So I guess the answer is no.

From “Five Questions with Michael Kelleher” by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi