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The Good Drone

How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance

Part of Acting with Technology

Author Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Ebook (EPUB)

The MIT Press

On sale Jul 28, 2020 | 324 Pages | 9780262358460

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How small-scale drones, satellites, kites, and balloons are used by social movements for the greater good.

Drones are famous for doing bad things: weaponized, they implement remote-control war; used for surveillance, they threaten civil liberties and violate privacy. In The Good Drone, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick examines a different range of uses: the deployment of drones for the greater good. Choi-Fitzpatrick analyzes the way small-scale drones--as well as satellites, kites, and balloons--are used for a great many things, including documenting human rights abuses, estimating demonstration crowd size, supporting anti-poaching advocacy, and advancing climate change research. In fact, he finds, small drones are used disproportionately for good; nonviolent prosocial uses predominate.

"The Good Drone’s very engaging, accessible, and timely account of the importance of material, not just digital, technologies to social movements, is a mustread for anyone interested in understanding how technologies present new opportunities and perils for protesters."
– Jennifer Earl, sociologist and coauthor of Digitally Enabled Social Change

"ChoiFitzpatrick brings deep thought and research together with years of practical experience in writing this insightful account of technology's effects on politics and politics’ effects on technology."
– Steven Livingston, Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, George Washington University

"It’s hard to know where to start in praise of The Good Drone, but why not with the drone. Just when movement scholars thought they had awakened to the implications of the digital revolution, along comes Choi-Fitzpatrick challenging us to theorize the impact of drones and other cutting-edge technologies on the dynamics of contention. Then there is the inherent fascination of the cases he explores. But for my money, the last chapter of the book is alone worth the price of admission. In it, he sets the new technologies aside to remind us that technology has always powerfully shaped contention, with a compelling revisionist tour of social movement theory to make his case."
– Doug McAdam, Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick is Associate Professor of Political Sociology at the Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego and concurrent Rights Lab Associate Professor of Social Movements and Human Rights at the University of Nottingham's School of Sociology and Social Policy.

Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick View titles by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick

Acknowledgments
Ideas
Introduction: Beyond Social Media
Chapter 1: Emergent and Disruptive Tools for the Public Good
Chapter 2: Democratizing Surveillance
Iterations
Chapter 3: Hacking Space
Chapter 4: The Camera's Politics
Chapter 5: Resisting Drones | Resistance Drones
Implications
Chapter 6: Some New Ideas about Protest Tech
Theoretical Afterward: The Technology of Politics, and the Politics of Technology
Notes
References
Index