A convergence of four genealogies reveals drone power. Environmentality describes the contradictory uses of drones in conservation. Humanitarianism articulates how control is enacted and challenged in human crises. Securitization examines drones in surveillance and counter-surveillance. Militarization, the use of drones in war, explains domination from above and resistance from below. While theories of governmentality dominate, an emergent materialism within drone studies emphasizes the diffusion of power and agency. A synthesis of drone governmentality and drone materialism exposes four flightways or elemental trajectories. The drone is an existential technology – a tool for enlivenment and senescence. As such, drone power migrates between biopolitics and resistance. In doing so, drone performativity generates assemblages of human and nonhuman actants entangled at material-discursive and onto-epistemological levels. Entrapment designates the consequences of increasing dependency on technologies in sociotechnical systems of life and death.

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena.

Drones or unpersonned vehicles are mobile sensing technologies that collapse space and enhance proximity between scientists and marine species. As such, they improve the collection of biological data – images, migration maps, and fluid samples, for example. But while the drone’s benefits to oceanography are apparent, it is less clear what marine species receive for their unintentional participation in data collection. Building on ethnography, piloting experiments, interviews, and scrutiny of public blogs and scientific texts, this article documents two cases of drone oceanography, interrogates the multispecies intimacies they forge and considers what scientists return to marine animals in exchange for their biological data. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration directs ocean-surface Saildrones to follow northern fur seals in the Bering Sea, and Ocean Alliance, a not-for-profit research organization, collects microbes from cetaceans by flying aerial drones, or Snotbots, through their exhale. With the aim of generating more equitable reciprocities in waters that are surveyed by drones and increasingly challenging to live within, this article offers storying, or the building of existential narratives that support conservation through public engagement, as a way of forging multispecies reciprocities in the Blue Anthropocene – an era marked by existential urgencies, technological materialities, and elemental constraints.

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Background  In the wake of the 2007–2008 financial crisis in Iceland, some citizens believed the calamity was the outcome of a cultural of secrecy among the political and financial elites.Analysis  By examining an effort to legislate for a “data haven” in Iceland, this article discusses a shift in how data activists attempted to achieve data justice. This shift challenges existing ideas about cyberlibertarian and technoliberal approaches to social change. In attempting to address the inequalities inherent to the centralization of data and the internet, data activists moved away from advocacy and adopted two previously rejected strategies: formal political organizing and territorial authority.Conclusion and implications  Activism for data equity was insufficient to counter existing data power in Iceland. What comes after technoliberalism? Contexte  Suivant la crise financière de 2007-2008 en Islande, certains citoyens se mirent à penser que ce désastre était le résultat d’une culture du secret parmi les élites politiques et financières du pays.Analyse  Par l’examen d’efforts pour légiférer un « havre de données » en Islande, cet article discute d’un changement dans la manière dont des militants ont tenté d’établir un accès plus juste aux données. Ce changement pose un défi à des idées courantes prônant une approche cyberlibertaire et technolibérale envers le changement social. Les militants, en tentant de s’adresser aux inégalités inhérentes à la centralisation des données et d’internet, se sont éloignés du plaidoyer pour adopter deux stratégies rejetées antérieurement : l’organisation politique formelle et l’autorité territoriale.Conclusion et implications  Le militantisme pour l’égalité des données s’est avéré insuffisant pour démocratiser le contrôle des données en Islande. Dans ces circonstances, qu’est-ce qui pourrait suivre au technolibéralisme?