By Nathaniel Moher
It’s the holiday season, and I’m sure that, like me, most of you did all your Christmas shopping, or Chanukah shopping, online. It’s just so much easier than leaving the house. (I have a hard enough time leaving my bed. Luckily, Jim Beam ships me crates of the “inspiration juice” monthly.) But, if you’re also like me, waiting for next day delivery on your orders seems crazy — what are we, peasants?!
That’s why Amazon has announced they’re hoping to soon have same-day delivery via drones. The goal would be that within 30 minutes of ordering your product, an Amazon drone would be at your doorstep. (Hopefully it’ll be like pizza — delivered in under 30 minutes or your “Golden Girls” box set is free.)
Now, at first this sounded like the greatest advancement in consumerism since credit cards (“You mean, I don’t actually have to have the money I need to buy the thing I don’t need?”), but then I got to thinking: this is the beginning of the end.
Look, I know a lot about how the world works (not how the physical world works, though. I know nothing about that. I’m still pretty sure the Earth sits on the back of a giant turtle). And I can tell you that it’s not the governments that run the world anymore, it’s the corporations. And this Amazon drone delivery system is clearly the first step in corporations amassing their own personal armies.
Sure, at first it seems like they’re just going to have a couple of drones that deliver you copies of The Secret and the entire “Boy Meets World” series on DVD. However, soon they’ll announce that these delivery drones need drones to protect them from being robbed. Because, really, what’s to stop someone from jumping up real high and grabbing your package off the drones (or, Shaq reaching down to do it)?
So they’ll make the case. They’ll tell us that their protection drones will only attack people trying to steal from their delivery drones, and we’ll believe them, because they deliver us our X-Men 1-5s in a collectible Wolverine display case. And it’ll seem fine, and we’ll be happy to get our shipments in 30 minutes.
But what you regular folks don’t know is that there’s something we non-regular folks like to call the deep internet. And the deep internet is where all the shady internet business takes place (and if you think about how shady the regular internet is, you can just imagine how shady the deep internet is).
This is the place where you can use bitcoins to buy drugs, have people murdered, or order bootlegged copies of “The Golden Girls.” And this is where Amazon will move when it sees an opportunity to turn their protection drones into attack drones. (Corporations always go where the money is.) That’s right, soon you’ll be able to log onto Amazon Dark, drop a few bitcoins, and in 30 minutes or less have someone blown up — all from the comfort of your own bed.
And once Amazon’s done it, then Netflix will have to do it too, and then Chapters, and then McDonald’s. And there’ll be nothing we can do about it, because they control the government. (Plus, they’d probably just blow us up with their drones.)
I know what you’re thinking: “Natty, that’s crazy, Amazon would never kill us with drones.” But that’s just because you don’t know the world the way I know it, and this whole world is getting pretty close to just tumbling off the back of that giant turtle that it sits on in space.
Of course, none of this will matter when the robots enslave us all.
Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.
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