Amazon's lobbyists are pressuring members of Congress to allow the company to unleash millions of drones in neighborhoods across America, all so that the company can deliver its packages in 30 minutes or less.
Critics have pointed out that having thousands of drones buzzing around, particularly in the vicinity of our airports, is a recipe for disaster. Privacy advocates have meanwhile raised the alarming specter of a total surveillance society. Imagine the NSA harnessing the power of drones equipped with high-definition cameras and sophisticated communications equipment, monitoring us in our own backyards, or even our homes.
But the potential for government spying is hardly the worst thing about Amazons plan. Rather, it is the damage it would inflict on the natural world, and on our tenuous and fraying connection to it. There is hardly a square inch of terrestrial space not already subject to some form of private technological control. Now, the air itself is to be colonized, parceled up, and subjected to the administrative control of private wealth.
However, the air is not mere empty space. It is a living medium inhabited by countless billions of beings. And it is the latter who stand to lose the most from a drone invasion. Companies like Amazon would force birds and other animals to compete for airspace with millions of robotic machines. The available evidence suggests that they would frighten, confuse, or anger many animals, introducing yet another source of stress and physical hazard into lives already circumscribed and threatened by human encroachment.
But it isn't just the other species who would suffer under the drones. Our own would, too. For countless generations, the open sky has been the horizon of human myth and imagination, of our dreams of transcendence and divinity. We too are animals who dwell under the vault of the heavens, who make meaning and take solace in that expanse. What then would it mean for us to gaze upwards and to see, interposed between us and the clouds, an endless, airborne stream of cheap commodities? The spiritual loss we would suffer, though less tangible perhaps than the loss of our privacy rights, would be more profound.
