Derek Gregory notes that the ability to integrate data produced by a variety of sources—“combining the where, the when, and the who”—into a three-dimensional array “replicates the standard time-geography diagrams developed by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand in the 1960s and 1970s.” This extremely inventive development in human geography set out to draw maps of a new kind, spatiotemporal graphs that would show the course of lives in three dimensions, with all their cycles and itineraries but also their accidents and deviations. In a cruel perversion, this idea of a cartography of lives has today become one of the main epistemic bases of armed surveillance. The aim is to be able “to follow several individuals through various social networks in order to establish a form or pattern of life that conforms with the paradigm of ‘information based on activity,’ which today constitutes the heart of the counter-insurgency doctrine.”

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 193