Drone Operators Now Have a "Bug Splat" Staring Them in The Face
A Department of Defense study released earlier this year found that drone operators experience the same levels of stress as combat pilots in manned aircraft. Although they're separated by thousands of miles from the casualties they cause, the job of a drone pilot still requires whatever internal reckoning it takes to fire at a human target.
Perhaps for that reason, predator drone operators use the term "bug splat" to refer to the people killed in their operations, and the software that calculates the potential death toll.
In an effort to reverse this Ender's Game attitude toward civilian lives, an artist collective in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan have created a massive installation—visible to drones—that shows the face of one girl killed in an attack.
It's called "Not a Bug Splat."
The child shown on the image hasn't been named, but the artists say she lost both her parents and two young siblings in a drone attack.
The piece is also visible to imaging satellites, which the creators hope will make it a permanent feature of mapping software.
