Ukrainian 25th Sicheslavska Brigade FPV strike drones (courtesy CC 4.0.)
Hobby drones used in warfare have provided something new: a way to track, observe, hary, kill, and record another person being killed, all in one device. Coupled with distribution by social media, videos of these activities are very much like FPS (first-person shooter) games brought into the real world as FPV (first-person view drone) snuff films, the latest grotesque commodity of tech culture.
The TikTok and Instagram channels of drone killings on the battlefield in Ukraine started with them dropping grenades or mortar rounds into trenches and other enemy positions, but the latest ones offer fanboys their own aesthetic. They all look the same: The earth is a gray-green monotony. The camera is floating above, looking down with an eye for movement. The video has been edited, so as not to be boring. Quickly there is a tiny figure, uniformed to blend in, caught in movement and confirmed by a pale featureless face looking up at the weed-whacker whine. The figure moves faster and is refined to show an arm-pumping sprinter. The camera pursues, nimbler and quicker than a staghound.
Now the landscape can be seen to be a meadow with a trail across it. Sometimes there are trees or a bombed vehicle. The figure is alone—why are there almost never comrades? It is very personal, this impersonal attack by an anonymous drone pilot sitting in a safe room kilometers away, wearing virtual reality goggles.
We get a small sense of the figures by the way they run, twist, turn, dive into the wreckage of a vehicle or building, play Ring Around the Rosie behind a tree trunk. Surprisingly few of them fire weapons at the drone—at us. Maybe the drone has taunted them until they ran out of ammunition, so the video could fit the genre. Some do throw sticks or bricks. There is a sense of exhaustion in their last efforts, of giving up, of helpless fury. They know they are not blameless for being hunted—maybe they claimed their own victims earlier—but it is too late to make different choices. For the video they are stripped of agency and are existentially helpless, pathetic, and in the world of social media this makes them essentially comic.
The camera spins around behind them, no matter which way they twist and turn, as if to show the men in humiliating, panicked retreat. It runs in against their butts and the bases of their spines. Maybe it is a homophobic military joke: I bet if you had that drone up your ass you would feel it. Maybe backsides make it less personal for the drone operator.
We get a sense of the personality of the operator too—first in the fact that the video exists and has been offered to the world. The operator takes his time, loves to watch and delay, a teasing aesthetic. The camera spins around the victim, as in the famous shot of Maria spinning joyfully in The Sound of Music. It nips, withdraws, is irritating. It also seems to offer the victim hope for escape, wants him to feel he is doing well—to a degree. The victim is like the computer-generated, non-player characters in video games that young people point out now on the street or in supermarkets, saying, There is no way that guy is not an NPC. The style of the attack references media, entertainment.
Sometimes the operator watches a soldier run into a den where he thinks he is safe then follows. In one video, the camera flies into a mutilated bunker, where a man naked from the waist down is facing away. Is he masturbating? A rapist? Merely cold and wet? It does not matter to what is about to happen, except for visual novelty.
The end comes when the operator hits the AUX button on his plastic controller to detonate the explosives.
“Really neat set-up,” a Redditor says.
The Chinese company that is the main supplier of the drones has slogans for each model: Rise and Shine; Carry Less, Capture More; Be All In.
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The blast when it is an explosive payload, not a grenade, is always much larger than needed, inefficient, since it is more suited to destroying a building or an armored vehicle than a human body. Of course the drone and its camera disintegrate too. We would not see it happen if it were not for the second drone, positioned at a distance to share the spectacle.
