Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism

Abstract

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, excitement broke out around the potential for drones to generate aerial solutions to devilish pandemic problems. But despite the hype, pandemic drones largely failed to take to the sky and far from the scale initially imagined. This article pursues the failure of the pandemic drone to materialise, showing how it nevertheless functioned as a locus of experimentation for remote logics and processes. As such, we shift focus away from what the pandemic drone is to if and where it – or its logics – can be found. To learn from the pandemic drone, we turn to three trajectories of failure: failure as experiment, failure as imaginary and failure as glitch. With particular attention to specific case studies, we show how failure enables drone logics and processes to migrate across various socio-technical forms, sites and applications of automated decision-making responses to the pandemic.