Greetings. This week we’re going to be talking about flying. Let’s begin.
Lately, my TikTok algorithm has been feeding me an unending reel of people fighting on airplanes. Some of them are the same fight caught from multiple angles, some are the same video lifted from the original source or lifted from another lifter. (TikTok has really only sped up the social media machine’s ability to obscure primary sources. It started with jokes and memes and has now moved onto hard news. Engagement!)
But anyway, there have apparently been a lot of fights and insane shit happening on airplanes since we started traveling in earnest again a couple of years ago. Watching people get their phones out to start recording at even a whiff of conflict is something to behold. It feels like one of those scenes out of a Western where the hero draws a gun in a saloon and soon the entire place is pointing their six-shooters in his direction. (And before you think I’m gonna talk about her: that “motherfucker ain’t real” woman was clearly having an episode and/or possessed by Baphomet. It’s irrelevant!)
There’s actual data on this as well, and while it’s clear that things are getting worse there’s not real understanding of why. Mask regulations were one thing you could point to when they were being enforced. For the politically deranged, the mask became a symbolic affront to liberty and by refusing to wear one they were, actually, standing up for the rights of everyone on that plane.
Man, COVID huh? I think we forget that a global existential crisis sort of drove everyone insane for a couple of years, and that no state or cultural body has said that, hey maybe we should investigate exactly what the aftermath of something like that does to a society’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Culturally, COVID was both a hyperlocal contextual event and had aspects of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” that is, overwhelmingly interlocking and global phenomenons that are often too hard to fully understand as humans. Climate change is a hyperobject; so is capitalism.
The perpetual sound of ambulance sirens and sense of doom in NYC were something that my friends in Miami and Denver couldn’t quite empathize with, just like the hardcore lockdowns my friends in London faced were unfamiliar to me. But then there was also this global sense that we were all slowly succumbing to this disease as one. The end of the crisis was also relative and disjointed, which only added to the anxiety. Some people were able to go back to their lives while others still languished. We’ve really only been back at this on a global scale for, what, 18 months?
So if we can’t point to masks, then what is it? The podcast TrueAnon had a great episode on the phenomenon—it’s on Patreon but they’re the only podcast I actually pay for—and run through the usual suspects: smaller seats, more delays and cancelations, the security kabuki of the TSA. Much like the rest of society, the class divergence in air travel is becoming much severe. Just being forced to walk through the first and business-class cabins is enough to ratchet up people’s stress levels. I also can’t imagine the tight confines and being forced to sit next to someone rude or drunk have much of a pacifying effect on people’s nerves.
The velocity and virality of these videos don’t exactly help, either. They’ve become such a surefire way to juice engagement that people are creating fake videos of people doing wild shit on airplanes. The most annoying—and so clearly staged to the point where I’m not sure I haven’t been overestimating people’s understanding of reality for the last decade—was the woman who “made” a nest out of plastic wrap and three coach seats and lost her shit when the “flight attendant” made her take it apart. It’s a very stupid video! It made me mad when I watched it! But the point is that we’ve become so inured to bizarre passenger that someone can make a video on a set used for porn and influencers chasing clout and everyone just shrugs and says, “yeah seems about right.”
That air travel has become the nexus of a bunch of different plagues—concentration of wealth, rapidly tearing social fabric, social media—and that we’re seeing the whole thing play out on video feels like watching society spiral in miniature. It’s become so bad that the original and the reflection are indistinguishable, one feeding the other like the most irritating feedback loop known to man.
Some music
When I introduce myself as “Teddy” (something I do more of these days for some reason?) and they go, “Teddy like (insert famous Teddy here” I always respond with “Teddy like Pendergrass” which delights anyone over 50 years old.
Some clothes
Shout out Street Night Live for bringing these incredible knitted soccer jersey jawns from RICE NINE TEN to my attention. Just beautiful I want all of them.