#9: Airlines & Human Sacrifice
This week’s video of cops dragging a resistant passenger off a United flight, unsurprisingly, struck multiple nerves, linking a few narratives that were destined to come together: the indignity of air travel, customers’ waning tolerance of corporate misbehavior, and the pervasive violence of American culture that now always gets captured on a bystander’s phone. It’s as if police brutality, Uber, and Airline Twitter mated and gave birth to the United incident—not an appealing combination.
The most important narrative about this particular episode, though, is the fragile state of individual entities in today’s economic landscape, however big they are, and the resulting need for an occasional human sacrifice, whether a customer or a worker. Deregulation of the airlines in 1978 ultimately enabled those airlines (the ones that didn’t go out of business) to become profitable at the expense of consumers and cities. The efficiency needed to survive in the deregulated landscape involved more crowded, less comfortable flights in which someone occasionally gets kicked off. Similar dynamics afflict countless industries today.
The "regulated" airline industry, if less efficient, provided a healthier margin of existence for all parties. It wasn’t necessary to extract every possible drop of value from every customer and employee, and it was the golden age of flying. Likewise, the multitude of retail businesses that preceded Walmart and Amazon enjoyed an (inefficient) cushion that enabled more humane and stable relationships among proprietors, workers, customers, and the surrounding society. When Jeff Bezos says, “Your margin is my opportunity,” he describes a dystopia in which more passengers will get dragged off of planes.
Reads:
Attention theft: Start noticing it!
Brett Scott: Reversing the Lies of the Sharing Economy
Some reality show contestants spent a year living in the wilderness and found out the show had been canceled when they emerged.
Until next time,
Drew