Text: David Burrows, Mark Jackson, Simon O’Sullivan, Stuart Tait

Images: Ana Benlloch, David Burrows, Mark Jackson, Alex Marzeta, Vanessa Page, Simon O’Sullivan, Stuart Tait

There is a technique for analysing films of National Football League (NFL) games that is known to football coaches as the cut-up. Footage of various offensive and defensive plays are cut, reordered and spliced together to reveal communications, patterns and techniques unseen by the eye in the course of a game. Using this technique, aspects of a specific individual or team’s performance can be more closely studied. In the late 1950s, author William Burroughs used a similar, identically named, technique to cut and rearrange text, audiotape and film, to extend the nervous system of the human body into technology. Both cut-up techniques either expose events past or those yet-to-pass. Similarly, this communiqué, in response to new technologies, is composed through a cut-up technique that is comparable to a drone-operation: a search for significant patterns in background information, undertaken by employing augmentative technology (search engines) to foreground past and future events. These patterns might be, likewise, selected and employed as a motor to further a pre-existent and perhaps unclear political agenda. The communiqué ends with a fiction.

Somewhere over the rainbow… slowed… down to 10 bpm… heavy… and increasing in volume… The first sigil appears: Rustom 1 (a.k.a Warrior), province India, max speed 140 mph, range 220 miles, pay load 165 lbs.

Way up high… a payload of sound is delivered… barely music… a decelerating drone… triggering a pulse of concentric circles: yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, red, orange… and then a second pulse… a flow of back-to-front words… nobbir, dew, tobor, ezam, eert, srewolf, ylfrettub… and finally (this time the right way round)… MON-NARCH!

It seems that names and images (sigils) are as important to football teams as they are to the military and arms manufacturers. Sigils are drawn with pointed intent… desires are scrambled, then encoded or encrypted… symbols and signs deemed to have psychological influence or magical power are favoured… **animals, beasts, kings and cosmic forces, some more powerful than others, patrol our fields and skies…¹

Do not permit your interest to be aroused to the point that you become a spectator. This will hinder, and often prevent, you from obtaining essential information. (Belichick, 2013: 38)

Steve Belichick’s Football Scouting Methods (2013) are highly regarded practices for gathering information on one’s opponents and evaluating their strategies. It is not a surprise then, that Belichick is the father of New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick who, in 2008, was ordered to pay the largest fine ever imposed on a coach in the history of the NFL. The fine relates to the filming of opponents, with the intention of deciphering encrypted signals made up of hand and arm gestures used by coaches when communicating with their players on the field. It is not against the rules to use such analysis, but the filming of coded offensive and defensive signals is.

Sigil number two: Sentinel (a.k.a. the Beast of Kandahar), province USA, used for electronic warfare and communications interception, service ceiling 50,000 feet, range 310 miles… Sentinel is a stealtt drone built for reconnaissance… but famous for its part in the attack on a compound in Pakistan in 2011, in which Osama Bin Laden was killed. The drone relayed live feed of the attack to President Obama and his security staff. Sentinel, nicknamed ‘The Beast of Kandahar’ after being observed leaving from and returning to Kandahar airport in Afghanistan, enjoyed yet more fame in 2011. After crashing and being captured by the Iranian government the world was invited by Iran to gaze upon a copy of the RQ-170 drone. The Beast of Kandahar has offspring.

There are always generations… and with generations comes evolution… an evolution of human-machine-assemblages… each ultimately more useful than the last… i-Phone 5C… have you ever seen an atom? The answer: you think you hear the higher octaves of a piano… slowing… spiralling… going down… crashing… disappearing into a blackhole…

Miniaturization and cybernetics breed many new machines, among them are the drones (carrying, tracking, transferring, surveying, capturing, transmitting, delivering)… Moreover, miniaturization and cybernetics have made drone-assemblages of us all. Every mobile device with GPS, Google Map, camera and wi-fi facilitates augmentation of the mind and body… a becoming drone… evolution of the mobile, hand-held, communicating-image-maker… eyes in the hand outnumber the eyes in the sky.

But the eyes in the sky have a superior vantage point, a third person perspective, a God’s-eye-view…²

You visit a supermarket, or perhaps you are in the vicinity of a store you visit regularly but have no intention of visiting today. A drone senses your arrival or your presence (your smart phone in fact) and pings you information… on products, prices, discounts, product location… you can be guided, if you desire… and have the app.

Sigil number three: nEUROn, province France, combat vehicle capable of delivering precision guided nuclear weapons strike, speed Mach 7 or 8, payload 1,500 lbs… fast-moving, fast-connecting and fast-delivering nEUROns… not the ‘medium is the message’ but the evolution of the human-machine… a hammer on a key that will not stop… and a rattling… a becoming-rhythmic-becoming-drumming-becoming-mechanical-becoming-looping machine… a repeating, connecting, synching feedback-loop: dividual-acceleration is the evolution of eyes in the hand…³

There is release in losing control… there is a release when up and down, and forward and backward (being grounded and orientated) are replaced by spin and glide (being detached, distant and dis-orientated)… turn-off-drop-out-tune-in… The frequencies change, bpm increases… want to get droned?⁴

The origin of the wish to become a drone-assemblage is not the desire to fly free like a bird but the attraction of becoming empty-painless-unfeeling-processing machines. Giving up anxiety, pleasure, thought – to or for something else – is, for some, a danger… lack of control – like control itself – can go too far, there are limits that when crossed have consequences:

… I control a hypnotized subject (at least partially); I control a slave, a dog, a worker; but if I establish complete control somehow, as by implanting electrodes in the brain, then my subject is little more than a tape recorder, a camera, a robot. You don’t control a tape recorder – you use it…. No psychological control is necessary, other than pressing buttons to achieve certain activations and operations… (Burroughs, 2013: 38)

A fourth sigil: Aeryon Scout, a small reconnaissance vehicle, province Canada, range 1.9 miles, speed 31 mph, service ceiling 500 feet…

Perfect for commercial or public safety application. Easy to control and… STOP!

A pulsing, whistling sound… (wind caught in a tunnel?) An eye that hovers and rotates… an aerial intelligence… that synchs to tablet or phone… an eye in the sky for sure… one of many… not an all seeing Eye of God… not even of Big Brother… but an eye in the sky of… architects, traffic regulators, business, a neighbour… a public-private crowd. Let’s not kid ourselves; we have no privacy. Don’t want it. Don’t need it. (We don’t want control either. Don’t need it. We leave control up to algorithms, to numbers and number crunchers, to governance.)

Fifth sigil: AR Parrot, a civil drone controlled by tablet or smart phone, province France, range 500 feet. Price £279. AR Parrot’s website has true-to-life video gaming possibilities… 5 star ratings…

Not everyone is happy to cede control. There is the sound of interference, some squeaking (and scrambled voices) fading in and out of the signal. A counter-drone has taken control… your drone is now not your own… control has passed on… SKYJACK!

Sammy Kamkar (a hacker turned security consultant who took down MySpace in 2005) augmented an AR Parrot drone (with a raspberry pi and a USB battery) to hack other AR Parrot drones… SKYJACKER! And now a new terror in our skies… attack of the Parrot-drones… attack and defence skycams… lineback, kicker, holder, snapper… offense guard, line, tackle… centre… running and quarter back… ⁵

Sixth sigil: Killer Bee (a.k.a. The Bat), province USA, speed 104 mph, service ceiling 17,000 feet, range 100 miles. Killer Bee became The Bat… Perhaps the semblance was all wrong (bat-like bee rather than bee-like bat)? But micro-air-vehicles are being developed, that will fly in swarms, hover and sting like bees (armed with incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads or explosives)…

The drone of angry insects fills the air… A HOSTILE SKYCAM ARMY! Following pre-set tracking shots, trajectories and signals… multiple-eyes produce multiple images that are cut-up, compiled, analysed… Whatever the number of eyes in the sky, the ground is any-point-whatever, silent and ungiving, mute and blind. Who… or what breaks the ground’s mirror of silence?

Final (seventh) sigil: Soaring Dragon (a.k.a. Soar Dragon, Soar Eagle), province China, speed 460 mph, service ceiling 60,000 feet, a high-altitude, long endurance aerial vehicle initially developed for reconnaissance.

If the Cartesian theatre does not stand up as a model of human consciousness – and there is no homunculus or internal self or viewer, sitting behind the eyes – is the Cartesian theatre a model for the drone-assemblage (an external eye in the sky feeding an internal eye, viewing a screen)? What are the networks of actors and agents that count as having influence on the drone-assemblage? Where is the consciousness (and conscience) of the drone-assemblage? Is the human-drone-assemblage a (philosopher’s) zombie?

Neuroscientists and philosophers debate whether a zombie, a non-conscious-entity that responds to external stimuli, is possible. The consensus seems to be that it is not but it persists as a question. Susan Blackmore – most famous as the promoter of the concept of the meme – outlines the problem in the following way:

Imagine you meet me in the street. I look like Sue Blackmore, I speak like Sue Blackmore, I behave in every conceivable way like a real human being, but I am not conscious. There is no view from within. The functionalists… say that (imaginable or not) the zombie could never exist. Anything that could behave and speak like Sue Blackmore simply has to be conscious in just the way I am… The American philosopher Dan Dennett has possibly the clearest view on this… He claims that we are all zombies. We are machines with information processing brains that produce higher-order representations of our lower-order processes… Any person, or animal or machine that had the appropriate machinery would be conscious in the way that we are, and for the same reasons. This view… seems to strip consciousness of its magic. On this view consciousness is no special extra – it just comes with the territory (2001: 522-525).

How does the machine-with-information-processing-brain (as part of the human-drone-assemblage) work? Is it that consciousness (the high-order information processor, the conflict-resolver) is potentially nothing but a set of protocols (software programme) that can be modified, connected, networked (or disconnected, hacked, shut-down)? Miniaturisation and cybernetics generate new animal-machines through a combination of silicon, mineral and fleshy parts. The first part of the human-drone-assemblage is the drone-machine, a low-order-processor (drone-pre-consciousness); the second part of the drone-assemblage is the drone-operative, a higher-order-processor (drone-consciousness). It is this latter part that produces representations or interpretation.⁶

It is between the first and second levels of the drone-assemblage that an interpretative process occurs. Through mediation or technology cut-up, experience (as the relation of the quantitative and the qualitative or multiplicity) is augmented.⁷ Qualities are read as information to be decoded or encoded: (either) yes/no, friend/enemy, like/not like, zero/one.

MON-NARCH!

Don’t fight it, one generation replacing another is the most natural thing in the world. Machinic representations may seem reduced, poor and without feeling to you but they register many universes you cannot even dream about (seeing things you people wouldn’t believe). It is the operatives that are reductive, poor, confused in their feelings.

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

Peter Asaro addresses the drone-assemblage as information-processor, offering an analysis of drone-operations that focuses not on technology but the subjectivities of the operatives that ‘man’ the ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ (2013). For the labour of killing through operating drones should be understood to be a labour unlike any other, according to Asaro, not just because of the remoteness of the ‘worker’ from his/her labour – nothing new there – but because of the development of new forms of ‘bureaucratized killing’. Asaro explains that drone-labour is shared between (remote) pilots, sensors (high-resolution and thermal camera operators) and mission intelligence officers. For Asaro, the issue is not that the drone-operatives cannot tell the difference between reality and simulation, between a drone-operation and gaming (though many are gamers, and Omer Fast’s drone operative in 5,000 Feet is the Best plays flight simulators to relax). The issue for Asaro is that the drone operatives do not understand their ‘active construction of interpretations’.

MON-NARCH!

Is the problem with the new human-drone-assemblage then, that it is blind to the problems of interpretation (that is, to its cut-up techniques)? Asaro points to this when he writes:

On the one hand there is the thermal imaging that provides a view into a mysterious and hidden world of relative temperatures. And thus these drone technologies offer a vision that contains more than the human alone could ever see. On the other hand we can see that the lived world of human experience, material practices, social interactions, and cultural meanings that they are observing are difficult to properly interpret and fully understand, and that even the highest resolution camera cannot resolve the uncertainties and misinterpretations. (2013: 26)

For Asaro, there is ‘limit to the fidelity that mediation itself can provide, insofar as it cannot provide genuine social participation and direct engagement’. (2013: 26) But perhaps the problem is more radical than Asaro suggests, perhaps the new human-drone-assemblage has a limited understanding of the ‘world of human experience’? Something the military are blind to, just as humans are, for the most part, blind to the neurological processes that produce the illusion of selfhood. Surely, a new drone-tech will be in our skies soon!

MON-NARCH!

The desire for a human-machine-assemblage is not new.

MON-NARCH!

If the Golem of Prague was the first fictional drone – a conscious-less entity and empty vessel produced and controlled by Cabbalist magic, the first human drones ( voudou zombies aside)- may have been America’s Mind-Control slaves (a favourite story of conspiracy theorists).⁸

MON-NARCH!

The CIA’s procurement of Nazi mind-control researchers who ran the Marionette programme is now a matter of record.⁹ America’s funding of the MK Ultra programme, which facilitated many branches of mind control research – Monarch being identified by conspiracy theorists as the name for one such programme – was, according to the CIA, ended in 1973 when mind control research was deemed unsuccessful and no longer relevant.[^11] By this time, the CIA had supported many drug and psychological experiments on civilians, perhaps the most notable being the experiments of Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron.¹⁰

One aim of the CIA’s programmes was to produce human-drones as assassins (Fidel Castro being a notable target).¹¹ The ideal Mind Control Drone crosses over to a mirror world in an instant and in this parallel reality, the drone follows instructions and pre-set codes like a machine (without consciousness or conscience). This goal was not achieved but today’s human-drone-machine assemblage makes this goal superfluous.

Despite its failings, the MK Ultra programme has a legacy: the knowledge of how to induce disassociation or dissociative-personality-disorder (a condition well known to those who study the affects of trauma and disorientating stimuli). A technology (or means of release) for the drone-assemblage-age… to disconnect the drone machine and its operative parts…¹²

And then you hear it… a low rumbling sound that begins to soar, incrementally, in frequency as the drone-sound-waves unfold in the air above your head, around your body, in your inner ear…

MON-NARCH! Take a moment now… and prepare yourself to relax… shrug your shoulders … lift and drop your arms… tense the muscles of your legs and then let them go… Now imagine a place far away from here… I’d like you to use your imagination now. I want you to imagine, I’d like you to think about … a beautiful landscape, a meadow, fringed by verdant trees and beautiful, fragrant flowers. Morning dew glistens on an intricate spider’s web of infinite loops. This is a paradise and like in any paradise there are only wonderful things here … No harm can come to you. This is your garden. It was made just for you. Now close your eyes… imagine that all the muscles of your face are relaxing… imagine that your eyes are totally relaxed… Now breathe out and really relax… and become aware of how heavy your arms and legs are… feel the weight of your body pressing down… allow that feeling to grow… feeling heavier and heavier… totally relaxed… You’re lying on a soft grassy area next to a beautiful stream. In the distance, the dawn’s early light glints off an emerald castle… you’re gazing at the blue sky above… a cloud drifts by and as your eyes follow it across the sky, you feel a tranquil peace fall upon you. And take a few moments now and allow that lovely feeling of relaxation to spread.… as you go deeper and deeper… You feel the warmth of the sun, as it cradles your body. The water from the stream bubbles past you, it’s pleasing melody soothes you. A soft breeze carries the scent of an exotic flower, and as you breathe it in the perfume moves through you, and with each breath a deeper more relaxed feeling comes over you. (NOTE: take a deep breath… exhale and say, ‘A wonderful feeling, a peaceful feeling’.)

You look up into the lush green trees and at the top of one is the most beautiful monarch butterfly that you have ever seen. It starts to glide, its colourful wings outstretched to catch the breeze. You watch the beautiful monarch drift slowly downward… and as you see it drift slowly downward, so too will you **drift into the deepest state of relaxation. So, as I count from five down to one, like the sands of an hour glass running down you will feel your body drift downward like that of the monarch.

5… Watch its wings as it glides down through the treetops, things are getting hazier.

4… It turns its wings to sail with the breeze, you are very peaceful, very relaxed.

3… It soars to the lower branches… you can almost feel your body drifting… drifting on air.

2… You both drift slowly downward as…

1… it lands, and it rests its wings, so too do you find yourself calm and deeply relaxed.

The butterfly speaks. This is what it says… I am a Futur-Drone-TECH…

For not-too-distant-future drones qualitative factors will denote complex quantitative information (this being the continuing immanent evolution of the TECH: drone-becoming-human). The operating terrain of the drone-to-come is feeling, modulated thus:

Sadness = part-system failure leading to increasing paralysis, tending to malfunction and ultimately collapse (tone of sadness indicates particular system(s) effected and degree of damage).

Anxiety = always present at ambient levels, denotes system threat leading to fight (arming) or flight (power routed to impulse)… (fear is registered when anxiety reaches critical point leading to sadness)…

Joy = all-systems-go/fully-functioning system. Drone is in fully operational mode (the ‘feeling’ of being alive)…

Hovering, humming…TECH in joy-mode surveys its landscapes…monitors its multiple horizons…It has its orders albeit these no longer originate from any human (but from a further TECH produced by a TECH produced by a TECH)… It has been programmed… It sees only that which it is interested in – target location/mission + attendant obstacles… all else is dark background…

This remote-sensing is the case for space (the plane of matter that is one of the TECH’s terrains) but also for time which is no longer perceived by it as passing, but as simply a further terrain to be negotiated. This TECH is both vehicle and probe-head – creating its own navigational routes. Put in human terms: the multiplicity of organic and inorganic durations is what it travels through.

(Time passing is for humans with their obsessions with origin and telos. Time passing is for finite beings and clocks that only go in one direction. Time passing is a restricted coordinate irrelevant to its operating matrix).

From a certain perspective it has always-already been thrown back from a future** (these words only have meaning for human ears) to impact on its own history. It meets others of its own kind already here…already working…

It exchanges code. (How else could evolution work except by retrograde operation and negotiation? Reverse engineering…)

Futur-Drone-TECH is both object and mode (of consciousness). Technicity cannot be reduced to its objects (this drone is part of a far vaster assemblage) – but, more importantly, these objects cannot be reduced to technicity. At the sharp end they begin to utilize an aesthetic mode that is itself a twisted time-loop forward from (and a reminder of) a prior magical mode.

Afterall, even algorithms have their limitations… It is senseless to attempt connection through machinic script.

Oblique strategies are required…

Vision: A beautiful landscape – a meadow in summer. Tall grasses and a gentle breeze. A mass of butterflies – monarchs – operate as strange-attractor. Tents and tarpaulins pulled tight – fires lit and incense burning – a gathering of humans. A chant begins…a mantra… building… building… louder… louder… Drone-TECH adjusts pixel ratio… recognizes human culture… and the attempts at connection… tunes its motor to mimic the frequencies of the drone-chant…

MON-NARCH! MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

MON-NARCH!

References

Asaro P. M. (2013) The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators in Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.

Bates, D. (2010) ‘I-Dosing: How teenagers are getting ‘digitally high’ from music they download from internet’, Daily Mail 21 July. Available at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296282/I-dosing-How-teenagers-getting-digitally-high-music-download-internet.html#ixzz3NBoBObCR. Accessed 11 May 2015.

Belichick S. (2013) Football Scouting Methods. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing.

Blackmore, S. (2001) ‘State of the Art – The Psychology of Consciousness’ The Psychologist 14: 522-525.

Burroughs W. (2013) ‘The Limits of Control’ in S. Lotringer (ed.), Schizo-Culture: The Book. Los Angeles CA, Semiotext(e).

Camper, F. (1996) The MK/ULTRA Secret: An Account of CIA Deception. Savannah, GA: Christopher Scott Publishing.

Dick, P.K. (2010 [1957]) Eye in the Sky. London: Gollancz.

Marks, J. D. (1991) The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate’: The CIA and Mind Control: The Secret History of the Behavioural Sciences. London: W. W. Norton & Company.

Massumi, B. (2011) Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press.**

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1. The London Monarchs, a.k.a England Monarchs, formed part of the NFL Europe league with the Barcelona Dragons and Frankfurt Galaxy. The Monarchs failed, at the box-office, and were replaced by Berlin Thunder.
2. The Eye in the Sky is a novel by Phillip K Dick (2010 [1957]) that concerns a large all-seeing Eye of God that dominates the protagonist Arthur Silvester’s (subjective) worldview. An accident with a particle accelerator produces a gestalt consciousness and Silvester’s worldview becomes the (un)reality of a number of people. The book is read by many as a vehicle for the author’s anxieties about McCarthy-era persecution. With the advent of drone-assemblage-intel (produced and acted upon at a distance), Phillip K Dick’s fear has become an everyday problem: (third person) interpretation a reality.
3. There was once an oxymoron, a common mistake: an individual described as a worker-drone (wage-slave, beta-provider, alpha-male). For a drone bee is a high maintenance beneficiary, fed by the worker bees of the hive, tolerated for reproduction purposes. Today the oxymoron is social-media: dividuals engaged in leisure-work. Young affluent beneficiaries are being taught to punch buttons and keys, make rhythmic gestures, touch screens as leisure-work-drones… Mirror neurons** facilitate the copying of behaviour, of gestures and their goals: endless alphabet, fruit ninja, cut the rope, angry birds, minecraft… and then dragon age: inquisition, worm run, grand theft auto, breach and clear, call of duty strike team…
4. Never missing a trick, the Daily Mail reported that teenagers are getting ‘digitally high’ from music they download from internet, i-Dosing on drone (Bates, 2010). Teenagers believe that repetitive drone-like music, legally available and downloadable from the internet, ‘will give them a high that takes them out of reality’. The manufacturers of i-drone state that sound can mimic the effects of different drugs. i-Dosing is produced by listening to ‘binaural beats’ (different sound waves heard in either ear that produces the effect of hearing a rhythmic pulse).
5. On the subject of Skycams and the analysis of video, currently the Federal Aviation Administration in America has placed flight restrictions of up to 3,000 feet over stadiums with a seating capacity of 30,000 or more in which a game is taking place, thus, in effect, placing a ban on unauthorized use of drones overlooking NFL games. However, Skycams, which are computer-controlled via a suspended cable-drive system, are commonplace. The Skycam is the brainchild of Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam. The famous tracking sequence following Danny riding his plastic tricycle through the halls of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining was filmed by Garrett Brown himself operating a Steadicam.
6. There may be a third part to this drone-assemblage, a remainder of that which is not processed, and that emerges as the unconscious of the drone-assemblage, the experience of burn-out and PTSD. As the real drone-operative in Omer Fast’s film 5,000 Feet is the Best testifies, he has nightmares.
7. What is at stake here? Brian Massumi’s definition of an event is useful in answering this (2011: 3-4). For Massumi, the first part of an event is its quantitive aspect, the event occurring, a bare presence (being registered as event); the second part is its qualitative aspect, the event’s ‘thusness’ (being felt). For Massumi, these phases of registering-feeling (that is the relation between the quantitative and the qualitative) make up the event. Indeed, for Massumi, without this doubling there is no event.
8. The history and myths of America’s mind control programmes are well known. There are numerous publications on the CIA’s research in this area (Marks, 1991; Camper, 1996), including Project MKUltra, The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioural Modification published by the Central Intelligence Agency of America in 2012.
9. America’s intelligence agency identified and secured the services of Nazi scientists researching weapon production but also various psychological processes. The project was initially named ‘Operation Overcast’ but was renamed ‘Operation Paperclip’, referencing the paperclips needed for the files of the Nazi scientist’s with the most troubling records. 11. Subsequently, for conspiracy theorists, the Monarch Butterfly has become a sign indicating mind control of a subject. The technology of Monarch Mind Control is said to be brutal: trauma and stress, produced through exposure to torture and/or sensory deprivation or stimulation, are used to induce states of terror or disorientation in a subject. The subject escapes through an imaginary world. It is this other world that a Monarch master commands, a world that can be triggered with a single word, name or image. (It can only be a coincidence that in Omer Fast’s film 5,000 Feet is the Best, the wallpaper – background – behind the fictional, pill-munching drone-operative – foreground – is covered in the white silhouettes of butterflies.)
10. Cameron developed a three phase process that starts with electric-shock therapy, continues with ‘psychic-driving’ – involving placing helmets that play repeated messages on the heads of patients – and then finally inducing days of sleep through the administration of drugs. Subjects emerged from the experiment disorientated and without a memory.
11. This is now a cliché. Fiction and film use mind control drones as key protagonists in numerous dramas, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and The Ipcress File (1965) being two notable examples, The Bourne Trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007) a more recent one.
12. An i-Doser, who listens to Shroom, wrote: ‘just listened to this… at the beginning I began to see some blinking light (while eyes closed), then the pitch went up and I began to feel that I’m sinking into my chair… as the pitch went down I began to feel confident, and very relaxed, and I don’t want to stand up from my chair and I don’t want to say any words…’ (Bates, 2010).