Walter Benjamin did some thinking about drones, radio-controlled planes that the military thinkers of the mid-1930s were already imagining. He used this example to illustrate the difference between what he called the “first technique,” which could be traced back to prehistoric art, and the “second technique,” which was characteristic of modern industry. As he saw it, the distinction between them was not so much the inferiority or archaism of the one in comparison to the other but rather a “difference of trends.” “The first technique,” he wrote, “engages the human being as much as possible, the second as little as possible. The great technological feat of the first technique is, in a manner of speaking, the human sacrifice; that of the second lies along the lines of remote-controlled airplanes that don’t require any human crew.”

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 308