Simone Weil offered a very fine interpretation of the Platonic myth and reformulated it definitively for the present day. What is invisible, she said, is not the person who wears the ring, but the ring itself. “The ring of Gyges that has itself become invisible—that is precisely in what consists the act of setting apart. It is setting apart oneself and the crime one commits; not establishing the connection between the two.” What Gyges says is, “I have become king and the other king has been assassinated. The two things are totally unrelated. Here is the ring.” One sets something aside and forgets that one has set it aside, one compartmentalizes—and “that faculty of setting apart makes all crimes permissible.”

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 427