Attacking Windmills With Laser Pointers

2024-12-16

There is an event taking place in the US. Mysterious drones with flashing lights are appearing in the skies. UFOs or UAPs, even at one point resulting in the shutdown of runways at Stewart International Airport in New York. What are these UFOs? Some say the Chinese, the Russians, their own government, or, of course, aliens. I wonder if it's a phenomenon similar to the "killer clown" sightings in 2016. After a few initial reports of drones, other civilian drone owners decided to fly their own. That's just my personal theory of course.

The media coverage of these drone sightings is weak. They don't know any more than any one else does. What interests me more has been the public reaction to the drones. In particular, a phenomenon of boomers videoing these drones, very alarmed, sometimes shining laser pointers at them.

Except, the "drones" in these videos are very clearly just commercial aeroplanes. Like, it's not hard to tell. But scores of people are utterly convinced that they are shining laser beams at mysterious alien ships.

The mad fool Don Quixote famously attacked windmills, believing them to be man eating giants. On the one hand, it's a satire of chivalric tales. But it's also something more. These large windmills are the first stages of industrialisation in the Spanish countryside. They constitute a technological incursion, not just on the physical landscape, but also the social landscape. For an old, low level aristocrat like our titular Don Quixote, they represent the upheaval of the transition to modernity. In some sense, they really were man eating giants.

The mad fools of our era are also tilting at windmills here. But in form, they are attacking a very real enemy: the enemy of mass technological surveillance. Why shouldn't these passenger planes be Chinese drones? Massive metal objects flying through the sky at incredible speed, what about the invention of the aeroplane isn't alien? Mass technological society is the paranoia, the danger, the surveillance, the alien. It's not reasonable to do what these people are doing, they're obviously endangering the planes in some way. They're also self evidently wrong and in a particularly conspicuous and stupid way.

By our social logic, the fact that these aren't UFOs or drones but just regular passenger planes means that they're normal. If they're normal that means they're harmless. There's nothing wrong with planes. Right? There's nothing wrong with planes, is there? Well maybe they pollute our air, serveil us, emit 100 decibels of noise as they move overhead. Maybe mass technological society requires this constant noise to function, leaving us in a state of heightened paranoia induced by noise pollution. Maybe these technologies constantly uproot us. It would be silly to think the news media was hiding the truth about these UFOs. They have no reason to cover up any of this stuff, because they only lie about unimportant things like war and genocide. I imagine the facebook boomer in a constant panicked state. All of their learned logic for parsing the world was obsoleted by technological development in the span of a decade. The aliens / Chinese / whatever else really are coming RIGHT NOW, you can physically see their drones in the sky! They really do perceive these passenger planes as ominous UFOs. They are not lying, they are not using metaphor. Their perception has been genuinely altered. Actually that's the wrong term to use, because it implies that there is some sort of view from nowhere of unaltered perception. The fact that the ugly noises of aeroplanes passing over my house fill me with anxiety is an irrational personal failing.

Only a mad fool attacks windmills with laser pointers.