This is the political side of the New Aesthetic, which the discourse of the New Aesthetic has been dancing around since it became a topic of discussion. The New Aesthetic isn’t so much a thing of itself, as the combined sense of oddness that we feel when we discover technology warping or mutating the shape of the world. The New Aesthetic is an aesthetic tag, which James Bridle began attaching to clipped photos and text blocks that demonstrated this warp. The difficulty of confronting the political side of the New Aesthetic is that there is no ideology of it, no state flag or political line to toe. The political side of the New Aesthetic is that politics is everywhere, and anything can be equally political if deployed correctly, depending on who deploys it, and what their next-stage goals are. There is no rubric to assess this politics, no official spokesperson. There is only the vast multitude of instances of links between nodes, whether they are flying missiles, retweeted propaganda, philosophy texts, or the faces of self-Instagrammed soldiers.

And of course, James Bridle is on top of this, only just this past week launching Dronestagram, a Tumblr/Twitter/New Aesthetic/New Politic something, which posts aerial photos of the locations of US drone strikes from throughout the post-national terrain of that war-machine. So very similar to the IDF’s Youtube videos, the effect is entirely different, as it seeks not to brag or threaten, but to document and exhibit.

But could Dronestagram be co-opted by the State? What would be the effect of the IDF’s Twitter account retweeting Dronestagram? What if the president retweeted it? What if Al-Qaeda did? Who does the uncanniness of the New Aesthetic/New Politic work for? Who owns these aspects of the war-machine?