Sean Rocha

Video drones over Taksim Square in Istanbul

Eighteen months ago I wrote about a mini-drone called the RoboKopter that had been deployed over Warsaw to document the police breaking up a street protest; in that post, I contemplated the way in which drones might enable activists everywhere to break the state’s control over geography.  Since then, most of the talk about drones has been rather different; in particular, the massive state-operated Predators that (as I wrote about here) the US has used to assassinate so many in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.  There is no question that drones can be deployed to serve either side of a conflict — the state or the people — but since the state already possesses an overwhelming advantage in the use of force and access to technology any small shift will be more revolutionary for the protesters in the street.

And so we see in Istanbul, where Turks have been in a stand off with the AKP-led government over the fate of Gezi Park just off central Taksim Square though the protest is, more broadly, about whether in his decade in power Erdogan has lost the instinct for consultative governance that made him such a success early on.  A man named Jenk K has been sending a drone into the skies over the protest to record video of the police response and uploading the footage to a Vimeo account and on his Twitter feed.

Here are a couple of examples:

and:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 25th, 2013 at 4:41 am. It is filed under That is Genius and tagged with Gezi Park, Istanbul, Middle East, politics, revolution, Taksim, Turkey, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.