How technololgy can lead to madness

Matthew Pulver, Salon - "I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey,” said 13-year-old Zubair, a Pakistani child, during a 2013 congressional hearing on drone strikes in his country. “When sky brightens, drones return and we live in fear.”

It’s a particular sort of tragedy for children to fear the blue sky, but that’s what President Obama’s drone strikes have created in Pakistan as the president by 2012 had already authorized six times as many drone bombings as President Bush had signed off on during his two terms.

Another 13-year-old child, a Yemeni boy now dead after a U.S. drone strike, told The Guardian before his death about the collective trauma of his friends. “We even dream of [drones] in our sleep,” he said. “A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from them and some now have mental problems.”

Flying at tens of thousands of feet in the air, drones are invisible from the ground and turn the blue sky into one vast unblinking eye, like the eye of a wrathful, capricious God. The strikes are argued to be more surgical and effective by proponents of the technology, and the benefit of keeping soldiers out of the battlefield is attractive to a war-weary nation. It’s out of sight, out of mind for most Americans, but while it’s out of sight for Pakistanis and Yemenis, the drones fill their minds with a particular dread, a nightmare in broad day.

Obama seems to prefer a high-tech, “smart” war. He deliberates more than his predecessor’s team of neocons–he’s not a “Shock and Awe” guy. We can out-tech the enemy, says Obama’s Pentagon, not simply overpower them. It’s cheaper, it’s “cleaner,” and it’s largely invisible, both to its victims and to U.S. citizens....