One inhabitant of Datta Khel—a place hit more than thirty times by drones in the course of the past three years—says that his neighbors “have lost their mental balance . . . are just locked in a room. Just like you lock people in prison, they are locked in a room.” Drones are indeed petrifying. They inflict mass terror upon entire populations. It is this—over and above the deaths, the injuries, the destruction, the anger, and the grieving—that is the effect of permanent lethal surveillance: it amounts to a psychic imprisonment within a perimeter no longer defined by bars, barriers, and walls, but by the endless circling of flying watchtowers up above.

Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, loc. 206