#98: The Last American Hero
Last night, I stepped off a flight into Terminal B of the Indianapolis airport, where a police officer immediately rode past me on a bike. I thought that image perfectly captured the contradiction that airports embody: On one hand, they’re our most pure spatial manifestations of surveillance capitalism, where we temporarily trade freedom (mostly the kind we don’t really use anyway) for convenience and expedience; on the other hand, airports are some of the most pedestrian-friendly and car-free public spaces we have, futurist urbanist paradises that we can’t construct in the chaotic pluralism of the outside world. As Edwin Heathcote recently wrote, the contemporary airport “occupies a very particular interstitial place outside the city that is both sprawling and super-secure, high-tech and suburban, a virtual police state and yet also a curiously open public space.” Airports are places we enjoy spending time, but that enjoyment is always compromised by varying degrees of anxiety.
Airports also occupy one side of another contradiction: As infrastructural space, they’re the opposite of roads, which are America’s last frontier in all the wrong ways. Most of the liberty we sacrifice upon entering the airport, we retain while driving. Even the most heavy-handed traffic surveillance, like the red light camera, is somewhat random, localized, and unevenly enforced, far from the airport’s near-perfect behavioral conditioning. If you accidentally run over someone while driving, there’s a great chance you won’t be faulted, at least not legally (and the political will to change that is not nearly as strong as you might expect). Although not constitutionally supported like guns, cars too are an anachronistic piece of our national cowboy mythology, the increasingly scarce outlets for the violence that environments like airports effectively repress. They’re the last remnants of what Deleuze called spaces of enclosure, in contrast to the “ultrarapid forms of free-floating control” that have succeeded those, and although the technology exists to impose the latter within vehicles (cars are computers, after all), that domain and the liberty it assumes are afforded a sacredness that has dwindled almost everywhere else.
Both extremes I’m describing here are flawed, in entirely distinct ways: Cars kill a huge number of people while commercial air travel is incredibly safe. That safety is only possible, however, because of the draconian control to which passengers submit upon setting foot in an airport. The logic of the airport is increasingly spilling over into other environments where the stakes are lower, a process facilitated by the many forms of digital surveillance that we eagerly embrace (and even loop the police in on). We need spaces that exist beyond the scope of that logic, but why should the roadways, where the stakes are actually high, be among those spaces? Airports are evidence that we’re willing to build and inhabit a panopticon; roads are proof that we’ll resist doing so in precisely the situations where a panopticon would help us the most.
Reads:
What the demise of Barney’s and Dean & DeLuca indicates about our changing relationship to cities and shopping. This piece falls victim to nostalgia at moments but is a great read overall. “The world that created Dean & DeLuca was a world in which demand was not so obviously engineered.”
China’s reforestation program and “green deserts,” where large-scale planting of a single tree species undermines those areas’ biodiversity.
Why people are nostalgic for Minecraft. Productivity and capitalist logic in virtual space.