Drone panics and the cultural logic of bullshit
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Today, we’re talking about why the mass hysteria over the drone sightings in New Jersey/Philly/NYC is secretly the fault of Freud’s nephew, and also years of exploitation by various companies and services meant to meet our basic needs.
It felt like the conversation shifted from Luigi Mangione to the New Jersey drones over the weekend without anybody making a conscious decision that this was going to be the new thing we were talking about.
This is largely just how news cycles work. Luigi is attractive, the killing was intentionally carried out in a way that spoke to a larger and very pressing issue in American life, and since it was clearly politically motivated there wasn’t much danger that anyone who wasn’t a healthcare CEO was ever in danger. All of this meant it was very easily memed, but all memes have a short half-life, especially news-y ones where the mainstream media plays the role of providing scoops that evolve into meme fodder, which becomes a double issue when the media either runs out of new information or decides to pivot the narrative to flatter that of its sources — sources which, in this case, are actively invested in painting Luigi in a light that will decouple his actions from larger systemic issues while increasing the likelihood of obtaining a conviction. But it was the fun weird story, and now the New Jersey drones are the new fun weird story. Also, “Luigi Mangione” kinda rhymes with “New Jersey drones,” which is funny to think about but neither here nor there.
If you’re not up on what’s been going on, basically: Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a lot more things in the sky in the mid-Atlantic region, mostly New Jersey but also Philly / Maryland / NYC / DC. Some of these things have just been airplanes or helicopters, and others have just been commercial drones, but there have certainly been more of them than before. There are a lot of conspiracy theories about the drones, but the overarching thing is that because we keep being told that there’s this surfeit of drones in the sky we’ve developed this mass hysteria thing going on where anything in the sky is automatically a drone. The thing is, though, when people say they’re seeing a “drone,” they don’t mean a literal drone — the term has quickly evolved to stand in for “anything that isn’t obviously an airplane/helicopter.” (This is also the definition of “drone” I’m using throughout the remainder of this essay.)
Now, it is very easy to make fun of people who are taking this way too far, or are being influenced by the greater discourse to misinterpret even normal stuff in the sky as something mysterious or sinister, or who think there’s some sort of mothership or a caper involving missing radioactive material. And part of it is definitely a self-perpetuating cycle, where people think they see a drone and then send their own drone up there to investigate, which then causes another actual drone to be up in the sky, and then it can be confused for a “drone,” and so on and so forth.
But there actually is something going on here, and even if there’s a boring explanation the government and the legacy media aren’t being transparent about it. I say this confidently because, as a Philadelphia resident who happened to recently go on vacation to the Jersey Shore, I have seen the drones twice. One of them was even maybe legit a weird thing!
The first time was in Cape May, NJ, when we were walking the dogs at night. Emilie was like “what’s that in the sky” and I was like “idk a helicopter maybe?” and then Emilie insisted it wasn’t and the more I looked at it I too realized there was something off about it. It looked spider-y, I guess. This happened, I want to clarify, before we knew there was a larger story about drones over New Jersey.
The second instance happened in Philly one night as we were going to the grocery store. A thing flew over us very slowly and very loudly in the opposite direction of the airport. When you live near a big-ass airport you become used to the sights and sounds of planes doing all sorts of things, and this seemed different somehow? There’s an optical illusion that happens when a plane above you is ascending where it looks like it’s moving slowly but that’s just because it’s traveling at an upward angle, and this warping of one’s perception can be compounded at night when your eyes mainly focus on the plane’s lights. I kind of think what happened this time is that, because we’d heard so much about the presence of drones above us, we were predisposed to denaturalize whatever happened to be in the sky, and more than that, scrutinize what was in the sky more than we might have otherwise. All of which is to say that we, people who are relatively normal and relatively smart, got tricked into thinking that an airplane was a drone.
One thing that has absolutely fed the mass hysteria is that the government has done a very bad job about being transparent as to what’s actually going on. They keep either saying “we can neither confirm or deny this” or “you people are crazy it’s all just planes and commercial drones and helicopters and stuff.” But, like, it really does seem like something’s going on. If nothing else, there are more things in the skies over the mid-Atlantic region than ever before, and if people are confused about why that is, or distrustful of what the authorities are telling them about what’s going on, that makes them rational.
When writing a piece about public perception, one is legally obligated to invoke Edward Bernays, and when one does so, one is subject to a hefty fine if one fails to mention that he was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and is the creator of modern public relations, so that is what I am going to do now. Edward Bernays is widely credited with grafting the psychological insights of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, onto the practices of marketing, and by doing so created the field of public relations. He did a lot of funny and/or alarming stuff in the advertising world (he sold cigs to women by implying they were a weight-loss tool and tying them with the liberation movement, he sold Dixie cups by founding a fake institute whose studies concluded that only disposable cups were sanitary, he improved the United Fruit Company’s bottom line by convincing the U.S. government to pull a coup in Guatemala, etc.), and generally had a worldview that he inadvertently summed up in his book Propaganda (lol) as, “The idea of invisible government is relative.” In other words, there is a small group of very qualified and humane people who secretly run the world because they know what’s best, and it’s their job to influence people’s thinking so that no one knows they exist. This is obviously batshit crazy and extremely dangerous, but he managed to sell it anyway because he was a marketing genius and a pretty good writer to boot.
This, the idea that the elite know what’s best and that it’s their job to sell it to everybody else, has over the years backfired in ways that Bernays could have never predicted. Or maybe he just did too good of a job selling it: There’s not a lot of daylight between Bernays’s “invisible government” and the Professional Managerial Class, which over the years has become the dominant force in American culture — the backlash against which will continue unabated into the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the postmodern/self-aware/whatever turn of the late 20th century led to people essentially taking Bernays’s ideas about public relations and narrative-shaping and saying them out loud, almost making the act of advertising the substance of the ad itself, or otherwise leaning on the marketing at the expense of substance, as well as adopting the logic of the ad to the product itself (perhaps the crowning example of this phenomenon was when Warner Bros. re-cut Suicide Squad to be more like its trailer). We’ve internalized the cultural logic of bullshit.
People have become conditioned to believe that they’re being lied to constantly, and while the consequences of that have led to some admittedly sketchy outcomes — almost all of which have nothing to do with the quality of Suicie Squad, which I have not watched because I am an adult — the mistrust is truly not unearned. Even the internet itself no longer feels stable as the platforms we come to rely on disintegrate right out from under us. The tech critic Ed Zitron writes a lot about his theory of the online “Rot Economy,” the result of a fundamental misalignment of platforms’ incentive to grow at all costs and users’ desire to, y’know, have products and experiences that don’t suck shit. “In plain terms,” he wrote in a recent piece, “Everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.” He continues:
The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.
[...] We as a society need to reckon with how this twists us up, makes us more paranoid, more judgmental, more aggressive, more reactionary, because when everything is subtly annoying, we all simmer and suffer in manifold ways. There is no digital world and physical world — they are, and have been, the same for quite some time, and reporting on tech as if this isn’t the case fails the user.
One example that Zitron uses is minor but, in my view, significant: He writes about how CNN’s website features “paid partner links” that direct its readers towards website that are, more often than not, just straight-up scams. He points out that while you and I might instinctively know to avoid clicking on those ads at all costs, we are, in the grand scheme of things, in the minority. Even reputable publications have spent the past decade and a half running articles whose clickbait-ass headlines are indistinguishable from actual slop designed to separate you from your money. As a quick experiment, I went to CNN’s website and clicked on an article about how squirrels in California are now eating other rodents (it’s dark; wouldn’t recommend reading). At the bottom of the piece was a link to a scamsite’s article titled “10 Foods Squirrels Eat.” The CNN piece has effectively primed people to click on that ad! This is the type of shit that causes Zitron to write, “I think it’s fair to say that CNN has likely led to thousands of people being duped by questionable affiliate marketing companies, and likely profited from doing so.”
I’m not saying that stuff like this is the only reason that millions of Americans don’t trust the media, but it sure as shit doesn’t help. Publishers, in their pursuit of faulty traffic metrics, have made the experience of using their website so unbearable that it turns people off, and in some cases actively harms them. Why should they trust what CNN’s website has to say about the drones when the cannibal squirrel article they clicked led to them giving their credit card information to some dude in Estonia doing identity fraud to pay the bills until his passion for producing cursed jumpstyle tracks turns into a full-time career?
This is to say nothing of the vast segment of the American economy that is based on outright legal fraud, and the fact that they’re often perpetrated by the institutions meant to provide for our basic needs is all the more insulting to human dignity.
There is a town in Ohio, I recently learned, that only technically exists, and primarily functions as a speed trap for unwitting motorists, collecting millions of dollars in revenue in the name of public safety.
In Philadelphia, tow truck companies have what is in effect a car kidnapping scheme. They find obscurely placed “No Parking” signs, camp out and wait for you to park there because you can’t see the sign, after which they call the cops to issue your vehicle a ticket. After this, they park the tow truck in the road, blocking traffic, with your car on a lift until you return, and then demand to be paid $225 via Cash App on the spot or else they’ll take your car to a lot where retrieving it will cost even more. This happened to me, and I should be clear the tow truck guy had me send money to his personal Cash App.
Earlier this year, my health insurance was briefly canceled because I accidentally set my auto-pay to $5 below my premium, causing the system to reject any attempt to pay off my balance, which led to me paying over a thousand-dollar lump sum in order to lower the amount I pay for a daily medication from $700 to $160.
If you’re lucky enough to have a mortgage, then you’re also lucky enough to have your mortgage be treated as an asset to be passed from one financial institution you’ve never heard of to another, never knowing when you’ll be forced to familiarize yourself with a new payment portal — one which will navigate like it’s from 2014 at the latest — in order to continue to make the payments that allow you to keep living in your home.
Then there are the dozens of services and apps and newsletters and podcasts for which you have a paid subscription, each individually just cheap enough to not be worth the hassle of unsubscribing to — and which create online halls of mirrors when you actually do try to unsubscribe — whose cumulative fees drain a substantial sum from our bank accounts each month. In many cases, these services hope you forget you’re even paying for them so that they can turn you into a source of passive income for years. The fact that Substack, the so-called future of media, has taken these practices, once strictly the provenance of major publications, and made them available to the countless friends and colleagues who’ve been laid off and forced into the rugged individualism of the creator economy, makes me sick. The fact that I have literally no idea how to make it so that the two people paying $5 a month to receive my newsletter from Revue — a platform that has not existed for quite some time — no longer have to pay me $5 a month makes me even sicker. (This newsletter costs money to read in a browser, but only on a one-time basis.) The fact that FTC Chairperson Lina Khan is specifically targeting companies with lock-in subscription models is a minor miracle, and the fact that a handful of the already low number of elected officials who actually support her consumer-focused antitrust crusade are some of the most odious Republicans to ever hold office hurts my brain.
Perhaps as a direct result of all this cynicism and trauma, the infernal logic of constant growth has trickled down to the American people themselves. Or at least that’s one way to think about the second Trump election — a Faustian bargain we’ve made with a bullshit artist who’s promised he’d artificially juice the economy through any means necessary, even and maybe especially the bad ones, so that we may once again achieve a nirvanic state of Number Go Up.
All of this is to say that it doesn’t matter if the drones are aliens or some secret national security emergency or a coin on a string to distract us from launching a post-Luigi class war or social engineering or hallucinations from too much fluoride in the water or actually just planes and this is mass hysteria. It’s all true, and you can’t trust any of it.
