One of those interesting moments where my writerly/SFnal life and my academic life collide happened yesterday with the announcement/demo of Prime Air, Amazon’s new (planned) product delivery venture that will make use of package-toting autonomous octocopters to get your stuff to you within thirty minutes.

Yeah.

I don’t think this really comes as a shock to anyone. Popular discussion about “drones” is still mostly dominated by Predators and Reapers and the potential for fully autonomous combat drones, aerial vehicles with the ability to make on the spot “kill decisions” without guidance from human operators. But domestic – and private and commercial – use is starting to become more of a factor as well. Drones already have a variety of uses, from ecological research to domestic policing to search-and-rescue, and the idea that they have practical commercial applications of all kinds should no longer be strange to most of us. This isn’t a new thing; rather, it’s simply another step down a road we’ve been on for a while now, and which we probably won’t get off of anytime soon.

Many others have already posed and begun to discuss the most immediately relevant issues here, a significant number of which still have to be solved: How will the FAA deal with this, in terms of regulation? What about the law enforcement issues when goods can no longer be surveilled through the postal service? How will Amazon prevent delivery drones from being hacked or simply shot down? What about liability issues? What happens when the first package gets dropped on someone’s head, or the first drone crashes through a bedroom window? Because you know that’s going to happen.

‘I give this book one star because the drone landed on my cat.’

— Jeremy Duns (@jeremyduns) December 2, 2013

All of these are very real concerns, and they’re concerns that Amazon is going to have to deal with. Interestingly – but not at all surprisingly – Amazon doesn’t seem to want to discuss the specifics of these concerns yet, and in fact their jaunty little announcement page is remarkably free of detail. That makes a lot of sense, firstly because a company isn’t going to want to sour their big dramatic reveal by listing all the things that stand in the way of actually making it happen, and secondly because it’s early days and I would be very surprised if Amazon has solutions to most of these problems yet, though they probably have some ideas.

But in fact, I’d argue that Amazon’s cheerful lack of specificity is important for another reason, that has to do with the biggest implication of this entire idea. And it is that Amazon did it the way they did it at all.

A while back, I wrote about another Amazon venture called Kindle Worlds, which was essentially a program for monetizing fandom by collecting the licenses for intellectual properties and allowing fans to legally sell fanfiction based on them. I had a number of problems with Kindle Worlds, but probably the biggest one, the one that underpinned everything else, was that it was Amazon. It was a monster of publishing and retail, a terrifying behemoth striding the land and devouring everything in its path (I know, I know, but seriously though). One of the things that goes along with being a powerful organization is that you get to exercise a lot of influence over discourse – even more, over what people regard as possible and appropriate. You get to set the terms under which people compete. You get to set the rules of the game, simply by declaring that these are the rules now. Amazon has done this with technology before; they aren’t solely responsible for the rise of digital publishing, but they’ve played a massive role, and they were able to do this in part because they decided that the world was going to work this way.

That doesn’t mean that Amazon is some kind of omnipotent retail Illuminati. Amazon can fail, or at least not be as successful as they hope. I haven’t seen much about Kindle Worlds since it launched, and its list of licenses is still pretty spare, though it’s certainly still around. But as I said at the time, that wasn’t even the point. Other attempts to monetize fandom had failed before and it was reasonable to suppose Kindle Worlds might as well. The point was that the giant that is Amazon explicitly decided that fanfiction was a reasonable and desirable thing to sell, thereby making it much easier for everyone else to see it that way.

Amazon isn’t talking about using delivery drones as if it’s a thing they’re considering or a thing that’s possible or a thing that might happen. Amazon is saying, in effect, “We are going to do this. The problems will be taken care of. It will happen.” They have a timetable, despite how optimistic it might be (probably very). They’re setting the terms. They’re placing themselves out in front of a huge amount of change, regulatory, legal, practical, and conceptual. If – when – Amazon drones start flying, other retail companies are going to have to decide how to respond. And that’s not even going into what it will mean for individuals and governmental authorities.

The history of technology and social change is incredibly complex, usually much more so than the narratives that surround it, but just as much as change occurs in small increments of practical discovery and adoption, it occurs when powerful people start talking about a possibility as if it were certain. Then it becomes certain. Social change and discursive change go hand in hand. That’s what Amazon is doing here, and that’s what has the potential to be most immediately powerful.

Sarah speaks with great certainty about unlikely things on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry