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Watch This Sweeping Aerial Drone Footage of Detroit

OK, everybody. Detroit "ruin porn":http://www.vice.com/read/something-something-something-detroit-994-v16nB lost its poignancy years ago. The city is in "a veritable renaissance":http://www.vice.com/uneven-terrain/detroit-lives-vbs-part-1-of-3, and to...

OK, everybody. Detroit ruin porn lost its poignancy years ago. The city is in a veritable renaissance, and to keep gawking over the bombed out remains of 1980s autos manufacturing and abandoned tire lots and theatres and rail stations is not just really, really lazy, but really, really shitty. And wrong. And yeah, lazy.

Leave it to a small-fry surveillance drone, though, to offer a fresh take, to put the Motor City’s decaying past in diminished relief to its verdant boom. YouTuber Tretch5000 captured a “truly haunting” first-person sweep of the city, mixing the “lush greenery of the city's Belle Isle with the decay of abandoned buildings,” as Forbes reports. It’s yet another case, maybe, showcasing spy drones being put to better use than, say, issuing speeding tickets. Or looking in your fourth-floor apartment window. Maybe this will help quell the fears of domestic drone doomers, a varied lot to which I won’t totally except myself. I mean, this video is gorgeous.

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No one, in fact, was ever even supposed to see it. Presumably. Says Tretch5000:

Thanks guys. I didn’t even realize I had made it public. It’s been on my youtube channel forever But never made it accessible. Must have hit the wrong button or something. Lol

Top image via Deadline Detroit

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

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