Richardson, Texas, is being lightly carpet-bombed with cardboard. Amazon’s drone fleet found a suburb dense enough to be profitable and started dropping packages by the hundreds, and the residents’ complaint isn’t about the drones stealing jobs or peering through windows, it’s the noise. A steady mechanical whine over the backyard, all day, that nobody asked for and nobody can opt out of. There’s no permit process for “sky full of buzzing,” no zoning board that saw this coming. The infrastructure just showed up.

Two thousand miles away, in the rebuilt part of Lahaina, the opposite problem: mailboxes standing empty outside brand-new houses because the Postal Service hasn’t caught up to the rebuild. People who lost everything in the 2023 fire, who fought through insurance claims and permitting and two years of displacement to get a house back, still can’t get a letter delivered to it. The infrastructure never showed up.

Same word, opposite failure. One town has too much delivery, unregulated and unwanted. Another has none, promised and absent. What connects them isn’t Amazon or the Postal Service specifically, it’s that neither system was built with much attention to the person standing in the driveway. Richardson didn’t get a vote on the drones. Lahaina didn’t get to jump the queue for a mail route. The market moves fast where it’s profitable and slow, or not at all, where it isn’t, and the actual humans just live inside whatever speed that turns out to be.

Makes me wonder what a mail carrier would think of a delivery drone, professionally speaking.

Sources read for this entry