Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word "drone" fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what's coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.
It turns out that drones are not as scary as they appear-but they are more complicated than you might expect. Drones reveal the strange relationships that humans are forming with their new technologies.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

AdamRothstein is a freelance writer and researcher based in Portland, US.

Introduction
Chapter One: Four Technology Stories
Chapter Two: The Military Drone
Chapter Three: The Commercial Drone (or the hole where it ought to be)
Chapter Four: Blinking Lights
Chapter Five: Software and Hardware
Chapter Six: The Non-Drone
Chapter Seven: What the Drone is For
Chapter Eight: The Drone in Discourse
Chapter Nine: Drone Fiction
Chapter Ten: Ourselves and the Drone
Chapter Eleven: Aesthetics of the Drone
Chapter Twelve: The Drone as Meme
List of Images
Bibliography
Notes