Is it too late to save us from Amazon’s sky-blackening drone squadron?
Picture this. The skies above Britain are dark with drones. Their high-pitched buzzing, like the angry whine of a disturbed wasps’ nest, seems to follow you everywhere, from the bus stop to your front door. They have cameras built in, but you have no way of knowing whether you are in their sights, or how the footage might be used.
Whenever you look up, you remember with sorrow what the sky used to be like, and how you took its tranquillity for granted. The last uncluttered space in our hectic world.
And here’s the worst part: you are to blame. Or you will be, and so will I.
Amazon has announced that Darlington will be the first UK town to have goods delivered to it by drone.
The retail behemoth has applied for all the necessary licensing, and is unlikely to face much opposition, judging from the tone of Tees Valley’s Conservative mayor.
“We have worked tirelessly to bring this UK-first to Teesside,” crowed Ben Houchen. “We are grabbing the opportunities and optimism of the tech revolution.”
Do you feel optimistic at the prospect of ceding our skies to Jeff Bezos and his robot swarm? Nor me, but it hardly matters. We will all succumb. Just as we did when Amazon first got going, and wise heads warned that online shopping would undercut small businesses, destroy our high streets, drain profits and tax revenues out of the UK economy and turn the retail sector into a near-monopoly owned by a tech bro.
None of us wanted that, but we made it happen anyway. The frictionless click of instant gratification proved more compelling than the long-term health of the society we live in.
Economists have a term for this: the tragedy of the commons. When a resource is intangible or shared, no one acts to preserve it.
Instead, we each follow our own self-interest, exploiting and diminishing that resource until it is lost to everyone. Technology speeds up the pace of destruction.
For example: the shores of Newfoundland, Canada, used to be so thick with cod that, according to one early English settler, “we heardlie have been able to row a Boate through them”.
But in the 20th century, new machinery made it possible for individual boats to land bigger and bigger catches – until, in the 1990s, cod stocks collapsed completely, along with the cod-fishing industry itself.
The most tragic thing about the tragedy of the commons is that the loss is often wildly disproportionate to the gain.
Amazon says its drones may shorten delivery times to an hour. Back when we had functional high streets, you could pop to your local ironmonger/stationer/gift shop and pick up the item yourself in that time. You might have enjoyed many other benefits along the way, such as people-watching, stretching your legs, chatting to shopkeepers, feeling the weather on your skin, being part of your chosen community.
Consumers don’t always want to be free. Sometimes we want to be rescued from our own fallibility. If drone deliveries were outlawed tomorrow, before they get a chance to (sorry) take off, there would be no public outrage, or even dismay. Just a small, inaudible sigh of relief. One less bad decision for us to make.
And in the skies above us, only clouds and birds and the occasional distant vapour trail.