Happiness from the Skies, or a New Death from Above? †cokedrones in the city Caitlin Overington and Thao Phan Introduction In May 2014, Coca-Cola released a 2 minute video featuring remote- controlled drones delivering care packages to migrant workers in the city of Singapore. These care packages consisted of cans of coke with images of handwritten signs thanking the workers from the people of Singapore for ‘building their city’. Once loaded onto the drones, these packages ascended into the skies, crossed the Singaporean city skyline, and entered into construction sites ostensibly to ‘refresh the guest workers’. The campaign was produced in partnership with the Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) 1 , an ongoing, not-for-profit iniative that began in 1997 from what was perceived as ‘the need for Singapore to become a gracious society by the 21 st century’ (Singapore Kindness Movement 2015). The primary aim of the campaign is ‘to encourage everyone to start, show, and share kindness’ through small acts given daily. Aligning with this broad goal, the Coca-Cola campaign was titled ‘Happiness From the Skies’ and received momentum through the spurious claim that it would be ‘bringing a little happiness’ to Singapore’s ‘invisible people’. Rather than engage in any institutional or governmental reforms or critique to alleviate the living status for what are essentially an exploited class of workers, Coca-Cola instead opted to express their kindness through the act of visibility – profiling and the giving of voice (and coke) to what is in many ways a voiceless population. The campaign itself was lauded as an example of the positive utilisation of UAVs (uninhabited aerial vehicles) and so this stunt can also be read as an exemplar of the burgeoning use of drone Somatechnics 6.1 (2016): 72–88 DOI: 10.3366/soma.2016.0175 # Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/journal/soma