The names given to these devices are very revealing: Argus26 and Gorgon Stare. In Greek mythology, Argus, the figure with a hundred eyes, was also known as Panoptes, “the one who sees all.” Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, analyzed by Michel Foucault, was originally an architectural contraption. In a carrying forward of this pattern, in recent decades cities have been stuffed with video surveillance cameras. Surveillance by means of drones is more economical, as it involves no spatial alterations, nor does it require anything to be affixed to walls. Air and sky are all that are needed. As in the film Eyeborgs, the cameras are detached from walls and thereupon acquire wings and weapons. We are entering into the era of winged and armed panoptics. As for the gaze of the Gorgon, it turned to stone all those unfortunate enough to encounter it. It was a gaze that killed. At this point, it is a matter no longer of surveillance and punishment but of surveillance and annihilation.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 199