The Thirty-Minute Promise

Amazon announced Prime Air: autonomous octocopters delivering packages to your door within thirty minutes of ordering. Order a video game, order a lamp shaped like Garfield, a drone appears half an hour later like a very small, very obedient courier. The technology is real; the ambition is genuine.

But the framing does something interesting. It takes the desire to have a thing immediately and treats that desire as a problem worth solving with flying robots, rather than as the thing worth examining. The thirty-minute window is doing a lot of persuasive work—what it’s actually selling isn’t convenience so much as the abolition of the gap between wanting and having. Which sounds like progress until you think about what that gap usually contains. Patience. Second thoughts. The moment when you realize you don’t actually need the Garfield lamp. I’ll probably still order it though.