You can’t watch the video promoting the new Amazon drone delivery service without checking the date for signs of 1 April. While superficially absurd, there is something distinctly unsettling about this short film. It’s as though someone has made a satirical treatment of our consumer age, a reshaping of Chaplin’s Modern Times.
The Charlie in this video is Jeremy Clarkson. He describes the process of the drone delivery service, as a parcel is prepared in an Amazon warehouse located at their research base ‘somewhere outside Cambridge’. ‘A miracle of modern technology is despatched,’ he tells us, as the warehouse roof opens like the top of a volcano in a Bond film. ‘It is an Amazon drone and after rising vertically like a helicopter to nearly 400 ft this amazing hybrid design assumes a horizontal orientation and becomes a streamlined and fast airplane.’
It does too. Actually it looks like a flying pallet, which is fitting given it was knocked up by a logistics company.
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