The opening of Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" is set in London at the end of World War 2. It is during the time just after Germany had deployed its new supersonic missile, the V2, and was targeting it at the British capitol.

Traveling faster than the speed of sound, Londoners only heard the whistle of the missile if they were lucky enough to survive the initial blast. Everyone is understandably creeped out not knowing, in Pynchon's words "what may come out of the sky".

During the seige of Stalingrad the Russians made a point of not letting the Germans sleep, causing them to be constantly on edge and hyper-aware of everything.

In the novel this inability of those people, trapped in London, to reconcile the advent of a technology whose consequences have no recourse (that's a fancy way of saying: you're dead) with its complete lack of presence or warning signs begins to take on a life of its own. At least with long range rifles and snipers there was the crack of the shot, even if there was no chance of escape.

One character is sent out to map the blast areas and ends up using the exercise as an opportunity to map attractive women while his co-workers imagine that the map must contain some pattern, almost religious in its meaning, through which they might find an understanding of a sky turned so angry.

Gravity's Rainbow is historical fiction, a big plushy bear of a story wrapped around the skeleton of historical fact.

Sixty-seven years later it is a not inaccurate way to describe to circumstances of those people who live day to day with the threat of modern unmanned drones.

If you think this pixelated foam replica of a drone is weird and goofy you should know that James and I spent a good amount of time investigating what it would take to have a lifesize inflatable balloon replica of a Predator drone made. Like the kind of thing you'd see in the Macy's Day parade.

It's not very expensive. You can have one made for about 6,000 dollars. 8,000 dollars if you want it made with shiny, reflective material. And about 1200 cubic feet of helium to float the thing. As you can see we didn't end up having it made. For a few reasons:

First of all the only way that we'd be able to fit it in this room, with its 60 t wingspan, would be sideways which always seemed a bit ass-y just on aesthetic grounds.

Second, there was some question whether the ceilings were high enough for a giant balloon and whether or not it would go crashing in to all these nice chandeliers.

A lifesize balloon drone, though, remains a hard idea to let go off once you've decided it's worth doing.

I love the idea of walking around SXSW trailing a balloon drone in tow, like walking a friendly and sort of clumsy Great Dane, but anything that big and with that much surface area on which to "catch wind" is going to require a small army of people to keep the thing from floating away or crashing into buildings.

And even if we had those people at our disposal I am not really confident that the thing would fit down many of Austin's streets. The city probably has rules about these kinds of things, whether or not they let the town fill up with hipster nerds and music crazies for two weeks of every year. And a balloon with a 60 t wing span is a hard thing to ask the cops to turn a blind eye to.

Maybe we could have just taken it down to the bridge and flown it at sunset. Freak the bats out a little or left it tethered somewhere along the river bank hovering there for everyone to see.

But that's the thing about a life-size replica of a drone: I don't think anyone would find it ironic or subversive or even a little bit funny. Balloon or not I am pretty sure that people would hate it, instantly, and be unnerved by it in a very primal way.

I live in San Francisco's Mission District which takes re-appropriation and sarcasm as a matter of pride but if I were to anchor this in my back yard or from the top of Dolores Park I expect that I would pilloried publicly, dragged in to court for creating a public nuisance and be the root cause of a lot of people buying crossbows, or pellet guns, with which to shoot the thing down.

At this point we are so over-saturated by images and stories of drones that our lizard-brains take over. Images are defensible. The physical reality of a drone though – its presence and scale – is not.

Aside from the very real military function of a drone I don't actually think that it's drones per se that we find problematic.

Drones are simply the current best shorthand, a manifestation, to talk about a condition of contemporary society that everyone is increasingly becoming hyper-aware of.

An awareness not only that all our actions are being monitored silently (typically in an otherwise benign fashion by way of the digital trails we leave) or not (in the case of systems like CCTV installations) but that they have become the triggers to actions for which there is no warning.

Imagine your credit card's fraud detection system gone berserk. And then imagine that process, to borrow an especially loathesome expression, "weaponized".

I have a layman's understanding of the military so what I am about to say is a bit of reading of tea leaves but it is interesting to consider that the currently strategy of the US military is entirely based around its ability to see at a distance, and out of reach.

The drones we've been told about fly higher than commercial airliners long past an altitude where you can see cars on the road. We only ever see grainy down-sampled video feeds from these devices but the robot eyes of a military camera, we're told, operate in a world of infinite Anselm Adams -esque precision and depth of field.

The natural extension of that strategy is, apparently, to simply place these cameras higher and higher in the sky where their tactical advantage is not simply that they can see further than anyone else's cameras but that they are physically beyond the reach of anyone else's ability to shoot them down.

The military recently shelved plans to deploy blimps designed to hover up around the stratosphere but presumably that's because the operational details haven't been worked out and not because it's a crazy idea. It's no crazier than drones were when everyone looked at them sideways in 2002. It's not a crazy idea because the air force has had an unmanned space ship in actual outer space flying around the planet doing who knows what, for three months longer than it's initial six month flight schedule.

I mention all this because after World War 2 and especially during the 60s and 70s geographers and cartographers were afforded access to a level of remote-sensing and precision mapping that no one had never seen before.

This was, understandably enough, an exciting time. If you'd spent your whole career beholden to the tools and techniques of the last two thousand years and were suddenly given the god's eye view of a satellite you'd be hard pressed not to imagine the how it would change things.

But it also fostered a very particular world view, born as much out of the frustrations of the past as the potential of the new future-present: The idea that maps could finally capture a faithful reproduction of the natural world.

That there is a single reducable and objective truth which can not only be measured and recorded but that punches through and enfolds the boundaries of time and history as well.

This gave rise to a counter movement of voices generally lumped together under the umbrella of "human geographers".

We don't have time to get in to the subtleties of their intellectual argument but the short version is something along the lines of: "That's insane. And not only is it insane, it is fundamentally dangerous."

The human geographers have gone to great, if sometimes pedantic, lengths not simply to assert but to demonstrate that all maps are a series of choices and, by those choices, are a form of control.

This has been valuable and important work because it ultimately questions the idea of the ubiquitous all-seeing data eye. The idea that we can dip in to the slipstream of pure information and ... what? I'm not sure what. I've never heard a really compelling argument for drinking from what we now call the "firehose" that isn't at its core a thinly veiled god fantasy.

In some respects human geography is an intellectual discourse that isn't well-equipped for something like the Internet or the availability and reach of networked screens.

Occasionally the arguments that the human geographers have made verge on the absurb and conveniently ignore the fact that sometimes maps are simply a series of choice dictated by the realities of a finite pixel space. Or that maps are living creatures now, fattened up like a goose with new data and reborn inside a kind of Cylon resurrection ship for geography, usually just called "Google".

But maps are no different than any other firehose. The siren song of all possible voices, or places, is that of all possible choices and as a device for contextualization it's basically useless.

Maps and data visualization are pretty tightly coupled in people's minds these days and I actually think that we'll see the equivalent of the human geographers, but for data viz, in the years to come.

The biggest challenge that data visualization faces as a medium is that people have begun confusing it with actual truth or facts, rather than as an abstraction.

Humans have never not relied on abstraction as a means of survival. Words themselves are abstractions and they are one way that we don't get lost in the weeds. We celebrate the effort of abstraction.

Transposing the intellectual rigour and precision required to, say, model weather patterns on to everyday conversation is like holding yourself hostage to all of space and time.

China Meiville's book "Embassytown" does a better job of discussing this idea so I'd encourage you to read it if you haven't already.

But right now that sometimes feels like what is happening: The recorded output and eventual input of our lives is outpacing our ability to abstract it.

A former colleague of mine showed us her wedding photos over lunch one day. They were, as you might expect, only really interesting to her. She made a comment that stuck with me, though. She said:

"It's crazy. In every single picture I took every person is looking at a different camera!"

Which is not quite the same kind of "bad-crazy" hyper-awareness I talked about at the beginning but it does represent a particular flavour of that same hyper-awareness, where everything is watching itself with not enough time to make determine motive or meaning, that we're all living through right now.

I'm going to close by saying I don't think this is a dire situation. I expect we will adapt. Nor do I think it's a tipping point in to some magic pony world where we bond with our robot overlords and acheive the perfect zen of a rock garden. But it is, as James pointed out when he first started writing about the "New Aesthetic" something... new.

Instead I'm going to finish off by asking a deliberately rhetorical and wooly question. Mostly wooly because on the face of it the question itself doesn't make any sense.

The question is: Have optics rendered pixels obselete? I ask the question in part because I have a theory that media are elevated to the status of captial-A art when they are no longer commercially viable. The history of print-making is a good example of this.

Whenever the military releases satellite or drone imagery for public consumption it is always down-sampled. Pixelated. It's important to consider that down-sampling because that's the world we – those of us without security clearance and left to purchase consumer grade tools – are always going to live in a slightly blurry version of the future.

Do we then need to learn to read those grainy images the way we do paintings and is that part of the reasons we're all so obsessed with pixelating everything these days?

Or is it just a way to make the world defensible again?

Thank you.