Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-19

Proxy-bodies: the dronification of violence

I The operator who comes home for dinner

In 2015 a drone pilot in Creech, Nevada, finishes his shift at 17:00, drives forty minutes and has dinner with his family. That morning he carried out a lethal decision 11,000 kilometres away.

The forty-minute drive is the subject of this text. Not the ethics of the shot: the drive.

“Distance did not remove the trauma. It removed the rite that processed it.”

II Anatomy of the proxy

Haraway described the cyborg as a creature of the border: neither organic nor machine, and therefore free of origin myths.

The proxy-body is its military version, and it inherits the ambiguity without inheriting the promise. The operator is neither the weapon nor separate from it. His nervous system stretches 11,000 km over fibre and satellite, with 1.7 seconds of latency.

That lag is the most honest thing about the device: the whole fiction that the one who watches and the one who kills are the same person fits inside it.

III Table of what is displaced

Moves away	Stays
the operator's body	his perception
the physical risk	the insomnia
the legal responsibility	the visual memory
the battlefield	the working day

What is striking is not what moves away. It is that what stays has nowhere to go: there is no unit, no homecoming, no ceremony. Only a shift that ends.

IV Antithesis: the companion species

Haraway later proposed thinking the relation with the dog, not with the machine: a coevolution in which both are transformed.

The drone does not coevolve. It is a disposable organ of a body that does change — the operator's, who learns to see in infrared, to read thermal patterns, to tell a shovel from a rifle at 3,000 metres.

The machine does not become more human. The human becomes more sensor.

V Ritual of returnsafe

01

When you finish work today, before you leave, stay sixty seconds without moving.
02

Name three things you did, under your breath.
03

Leave.

No risk, no confession. Only restoring a threshold where the device had abolished it — which is what the continuous working day abolished first in the control rooms and then everywhere else.

VI Risks

There is an easy error: using the drone as a metaphor for all remote work. It is not. The difference between a video call and an execution is not one of degree.

But there is a real kinship and it is the one that matters: both dissolve the threshold between the place where you act and the place where you live, and no culture has yet invented the rite that puts that border back.