The Marketing of Private Drones

I keep meaning to return to the topics of some prior posts, but haven’t yet had the time to write up anything worthwhile.  In the meantime, I thought I’d bring this to your attention.  This sort of thing – drone privatization, that is – has been seen before in other forms, and was probably inevitable.  But I thought that the incorporation of a private drone... er... “flying companion” by Renault in a new concept vehicle was interesting:

http://techland.time.com/2014/02/07/would-buy-concept-car-launches-flying-drone-to-scout-traffic/

Obviously, this is a concept car only, and thus will probably never reach production; it is highly unlikely that we will see "flying companions" above the roads anytime soon.  Thus, as is the case with most concept cars, it is more about brand image and marketing than it is about practicality or transportation.  What is interesting, I suppose, is that the designers and marketers at Renault - at least, if we may momentarily treat their remarks in the video advertisement as genuine - seem to think that having a drone in/around your car is something that will appeal to the youth market.  The youth, who, as we are constantly reminded by anxious automakers and triumphalist urbanists everywhere, seem for whatever reason to be less inclined to drive a car than prior generations.  And the design features read as though they had been devised by someone who had spent far too much time reading pop-journalism/market research about “Millennials”: a compact-ish vehicle (because Millennials like cities and hate global warming!) with modest off-road capabilities (because Millennials like the outdoors!) and eye- and headline-catching futurist features (because Millennials like technology!).

The drone serves no real transportation function.  The assertion is made that it will scout ahead to investigate traffic, presumably enabling the driver of the vehicle to change course in order to avoid obstacles.  But this is redundant, because our satellites already do this for us.  We can already find out about upcoming traffic problems through our Internet-enabled mobile devices and through the GPS navigation system on or in our car's dashboard.  And they do it far more thoroughly than a single flying drone ever could.

The only transportation function for this drone which I can imagine, in fact, is to monitor one's own vehicle from the air, perhaps providing useful information about relevant vehicular movements and road conditions in the event of an accident, in the vein of the Russian dash-cam.

 
But, of course, as the column and video both suggest, the drone is also envisioned as taking photographs of your vehicle on the road which can then be uploaded to Insta-Gram.  The installation of the drone by the engineer-marketers at Renault, then, will enable the driver also to "market" himself as technophilic drone-owner via social media.  And so this is far from being something that actually, you know, helps the driver get to his destination (why would anyone want that in a car?).  Instead, the drone is simply a further manifestation of the vicious symbiosis between corporate branding and personal branding that has always been a feature of capitalist marketing.  Only now, via electronic surveillance and social media, shifted from the real to the virtual.

I suppose that it is somewhat ironic that, in spite of the many areas in which private drones might conceivably serve some genuine purpose, what we get instead is an unnecessary “flying companion” used to move (i.e, sell) vehicles.

One final thought about the politics of technological naturalization.  We have, for several years now, been having a halfhearted public debate about the role of government drones for both surveillance and killing.  That is, we as a people seem to be somewhat uncomfortable with our drone use, but not quite uncomfortable enough to do anything about it.  What is notable here is the way in which this sort of drone has the potential to acclimate to overt aerial surveillance a public that is not quite ready for it.  Note that the marketers have clearly decided that “drone” is a bad word, with negative associations in the public mind, and thus they have decided on the euphemism “flying companion” here.  It’s not really a robot spy-cam, it’s like a pet!  Our phones, social media pages, etc. induced a kind of acceptance of monitoring which would not have existed before the advent of these technologies.  In the 1990s, I suspect, if the U. S. government had proposed to GPS tag everyone in the country, the population would have revolted (at least figuratively).  But now we carry our GPS tags in our pockets, and the government simply collects this data, which we not only willingly hand over, but actually pay money to provide to our mobile-phone company.  The difference is: our GPS-enabled telephones perform real, useful functions which they could not otherwise; even our Face Book accounts serve some genuine purpose.  It is not clear to me, at present, whether drones of this sort are capable of clearing that bar.  Will they be useful enough to get the people to adopt them en masse, and thereby accept this new layer of surveillance as a fact of life and/or a necessary evil, or will they remain simply a novelty and have no real impact on public opinion or the culture as a whole?  Given what Renault has shown us, the latter still seems more likely.  But who can tell for certain the shape of things to come?