Semantically, politics and war seem to track one another. They share the word campaign and the generic lexicon of fighting, filtering down through thousands of associated words thumbed up from the thesaurus. Now and again, design language seeps in around the edges, as in the architect of a strategy .
Design (n.)
- a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made.
- purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.
A Preliminary Atlas of the Killing Fields , by Tim Maly, refers to the second definition. He traces, through satellite photos, the planning and intention that exists behind the action (strike) of a material object (drone). He drew on the incident reporting of Dronestagram and other publicly reported sources. The strike itself was designed by a protocol that differentiates between targeted strikes on known enemies and signature strikes, which target groups of men by analyzing their patterns of movement.
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