RETHINKING SECURITY

The next new cool thing may be drone chic. No, I’m not talking about Twitter celebrities like the infamous Drunken Predator or the Sexy Raven UAV, although they’re pretty hip themselves. I’m talking about a culture change in a world when even your friendly (or not) Williamsburg hipster may have a flying robot of his own. Yes, dear readers, hipsters with drones. A dystopian reality if I ever thought of one.

John Robb sketches the seismic change in military culture that might be coming. The same skills possessed by top Starcraft players may be actively sought by drone warriors:

• Training of hand/eye/mind.  Speeds of up to 400 keyboard mouse (macro/micro) tactical commands per minute have been attained.  Think about that for a second.  That’s nearly 7 commands a second.
•  Fight multi-player combat simulations  for 10-12 hours a day.  They live the game for a decade and then burn out.   Mind vs. mind competition continously.
• To become a [Korean Starcraft master], you have to defeat millions of opponents to reach the tournament rank, and then dominate the tournament rank for many years.  The ranking system/ladder that farms new talent is global (Korea, China, SEA, North America, and Europe), huge (millions of players), and continuous (24x7x365). 

Meanwhile, Quiet Bablyon looks at a possible future of civilian drone culture:

Here’s a glimpse of the future: Ubiquitous cheap sensors. Perpetual freelance surveillance. Relentless sunlight, directed by shoals of shadowy interest groups. It has been a bounteous season for panoptiswarm-related news (previously: 1, 2, 3). Sea Shepherd has drones now. They are using them to track the Japanese whaling fleet. Occupy has a drone. It is called the occucopter. There is a thing called the Drone Journalism Lab. They just unboxed their first drone.

You’ll probably see an evolution of drone chic, just as the car and the airplane created a certain aesthetic, sense of romance and adventure, and opportunities for models to pose and strut. Yes, if you like import car model[ing], try drone models (although I suppose “drone” is the default facial expression for most runway models these days anyway).