Technoliberalism and the Complementary Relationships between Humanitarian, Conservation, and Entrepreneurial Dronework in Indonesia

Abstract

Criticism of commercial drones as violators of personal privacy or unsafe public annoyances continues to influence public and academic discourse. At the same time, the commercial drone’s benefits for humanitarian, conservation, industry, and emissions-reduced delivery have also become evident. That such a powerful technology which enhances vision, movement, and force-from-afar could have ambivalent properties appears contradictory. Drawing from the physics and diplomatic work of Niels Bohr, the article argue that drone dualities are complementary rather than contradictory. This theory of complementarity is supported by Bernard Stiegler’s theories including technicity, which argues for hominization or the coevolutionary complementarity of humans and technology, and pharmacology, a bifurcation of technicity into complementary sanitive and poisonous possibilities. This article brings complementarity into the present by linking it to the theory of technoliberalism which situates technicity’s bifurcation in the context of liberalism, namely, the complementary relationship between social liberalism for the collective good and economic liberalism for market benefit. This theory of technoliberal complementarity is examined through ethnographic research into humanitarian, conservation, and economic dronework on the Indonesian islands of Bali, West Papua, and Java in 2018. Complementarity does not elide the importance of dissonance. Instead, it reframes it as a result of interdependent tensions, not their opposition. In this manner, complementarity is a synthetic theory about the generative frictions inherent in technocultural production.