The Places Where Obama’s Drones Are Striking, Now on Instagram (correction)
Note: You may notice something glaringly missing from this trendy Atlantic article. The name of a certain President Barack Obama. Failing to hold the current president responsible for unconstitutional violence is nothing new, but writing about an urgent need “for deeper empathy for people who live a world away,” while continuing the practice is pretty brazen.
So far this year President Barack Obama the American military has launched more than 330 drone strikes in Afghanistan alone — an average greater than one per day. In Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia the numbers are smaller — 80 altogether — but the lesser frequency doesn’t make the strikes any more comprehensible. From this side of the war, President Barack Obama America’s drone strikes feel very remote, their consequences quite abstract, their targets unmoored to actual physical locations.
But with our powerful maps and comprehensive satellite images of the world over, visuals of each of those places lives online, a few clicks away, if we would bother to look. A new project, Dronestagram, is doing the searching for you, marrying the images of Google Maps satellite view to the episodic, image-sharing capacities of Tumblr and Instagram. When drone strikes are reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (which focuses on Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia but not Afghanistan), writer James Bridle tracks down the locations on Google Maps and then Instagrams the picture. He annotates each drone’s-eye-view with a caption about the strike, noting any known casualties. (More images)
Technology has countervailing effects. We can send a battle by air to a land we have never set foot in, laying previously unimaginable distance between us and our wars. But at the same time we can see on a device in our pocket a satellite picture of these places so remote. Maybe the instant connectivity of our world can be a platform not just for faster information, but for deeper empathy for people who live a world away.
Empathy? How about we start by naming the man who is responsible for these drone strikes?
I hope you’ll join me in leaving some comments on the original article as well as here…