THE SATURDAY EVENING POST: SUNDAY EDITION, AGAIN

Last week I was attending a national crimes conference in Dallas, TX, and was thus unable to make my bi-weekly contributions to this blog. Since I have promised to be consistent in this regard, and in fact have been for many months now, I feel it necessary to kick off by making this explanation/excuse. There, I've done it. Moving on.

Having just traveled by aircraft for only the second time since late 2019, I feel compelled to make a few comments about what the experience told me about the state of the travel industry, and writ much larger, on the state of us, people living in today's post-Covid world. This path gets a little twisted and rambling, even by my standards, but if you can reach the end without rolling your eyes too hard, you may find yourself in agreement with me.

When I was a kid, back in the last century, I looked forward to any family engagement which involved flying. I did this in spite of the fact that my father invariably had us at the airport hellishly early, often up to four hours before the flight. This was pointless and unnecessary, but reflected his obsession with wanting every detail of a vacation planned down to its finest particular, with numerous contingency plans and built-in safety margins. In any event, flying was still quite enjoyable in those days. First and foremost, the airports were not as crowded, and the flights often had numerous empty seats. There was no TSA, just routine security, and airport employees were much friendlier and less harassed and put-upon. Checking luggage was free. On the flights themselves, proper meals were served -- not snacks, but actual meals that came in segmented trays. The food was bad, of course (I remember in particular one compartment filled with eggs so spongy you could have bounded a lead weight off of them), but it was actual food.

In the post-9/11 era, the nature of flying changed dramatically. It became much more of a hassle. Security lines dragged on, sometimes for hours, and passing through TSA checkpoints was like entering a minumum-security prison...as an inmate. Airports began to treat the people coming through them more like a potential threat than as customers. Airlines began to seek ways to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of passengers while reducing their comforts: seats got smaller, leg room shrank, food service was canceled, flights were deliberately overbooked, and customer services were slashed or carried out with such ill grace that "air rage" became a problem worthy of magazine covers. It's typical of how the press carries the ball for corporations that this phenomenon was blamed upon "entitled passengers" and not on the airlines themselves: on two occasions in the past I can clearly recall having to overmaster strong desires to smash an airport employee in the face. This was not entitlement. I was the natural response of a tired, stressed-out human being who had been treated with deliberate disrespect.

I know there is a tendency, bordering on mania, for people who have lived long enough to unfavorably compare the present with the past. I am definitely guilty of this sometimes, and have been so even in this blog. That having been said, I am not remembering my 20th century travel experiences "with advantages." No human enterprise is ever consistently excellent. Things did go wrong: bags got mislaid, flights got delayed, connections were missed, et cetera and so on. But the overall experience was more one of adventure than endurance. It wasn't until the 2000s that everything began its slide to the present, expensive and uncomfortable nadir.

Now, some would say that me even talking about this subject reflects that dreaded and previously used word: entitlement. First world problems, anyone? After all, if I have to endure some discomfort and boredom and humiliation to travel across a continent in six hours, what of it? Why should anyone care?

My answer to that question, which seems like a side-step into another subject entirely but really isn't, goes like this:

The idea that aspects of society are getting worse rather than better with the passage of time flies in the face of the faith we have generally placed in technology. After all, technology exists for one purpose: to make human lives better. And if we accept that as true, then logically it follows that every technological advancement should improve life. But in my own lifetime, the experience of flying has become noticeably worse and more expensive, and while technology has softened some of the sharper edges of travel, it hasn't compensated for the general decline in comfort or the increase in cost. In short, travel is simply a bellweather for the curious backwards trend of society as a whole.

I would say the same phenomenon applies to many aspects of modern life, most noticeably in terms of the internet. When the internet first emerged as a readily available tool back in the late 90s, it seemed to have very little downside (slow, screeching, 56K modems aside). And it developed in a positive way for perhaps as long as ten years afterwards, becoming increasingly efficient while providing more and more expansive services. In the later 00s, however, the ascent of Facebook and the advent of Twitter sharply changed the trajectory of how the internet influenced our lives. The years following this have seen an increasingly negative, combative, destructive relationship between the humans who created what we used to call "the worldwide web" and the web itself. What was intended to spread knowledge now spreads disinformation. What was intended to provide service has led to a vast increase in entitlement. What was intended to unite the human race has savagely divided it. For the generation born around 2000 or so, the psychological and spiritual costs of growing up online are now becoming clearly evident. Depression, anxiety, loneliness, and misanthropy are exploding, especially among younger people. Everything from body dysmorphia to dopamine addiction to destructive narcissism, murderous fantasies and suicidal ideation have become commonplace. This is not what was supposed to happen.

As a final example, we have the present writer's strike in Hollywood. This strike was caused by, of all things, the looming threat that Artificial Intelligence poses to the creative sphere. These self-refining programs are now coming dangerously close to replacing humans in the one area of activity which we all believed safe from intrusion by technology: art. Our machines can now not only paint for us, they can write scripts and compose music. And while their first efforts were comically poor, the very nature of algorithms allows them to improve with each effort. A great deal of what defines humanity is about to be appropriated by machines we designed to make our lives easier. Except that these machines are now poised to render writers, artists, musicians and even actors and directors as surplus to requirements as saddlers were in the age of the automobile. And this goes all across the board. From the self-driving car to the unmanned naval vessel, from the essay-writing program to the robot on the production line, we are increasingly allowing our own tools to render us redundant, all while lowering rather than raising our quality of life itself. Everything is faster, but everything is also more expensive and less pleasurable. In every aspect of our existence, the technology which we rely on to help us live longer and better is conspiring against us, driven by greed and a more difficult to define motive, best summed by Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park: "Just because we could doesn't mean we should."

Orwell, who I quote so often in these pages, once remarked that the human instinct to make continuous refinements in tools was a new instinct in the species, and a very dangerous one, since it often occurred for its own sake, without regards to consequences. He predicted that the endpoint of a fully mechanized society was a human being who was little more than "a brain in a bottle." He might have added that a being in a mechanical body might eventually ditch the brain, too: why rely on a sticky, foible-prone lump of organic tissue when a neat little hueristic algorithm can take its place?

Human beings are remarkable things. We seem to have an inborn ability both to innovate and to refine, both to imagine the impossible and then, somehow, to achieve it. Alone among God's creatures we have the power to shape our environment in a truly meaningful way. Yet hand in hand with these gifts comes our ability to turn a positive into a negative: the caveman who learned to sharpen the first stick probably used it to spear his neighbor before he did anything else, and his civilized descendant spends a lot of the spare time civilization has given him finding ways to cheat those around him. We have a two-faced gene which compels us to make miracles, and then promptly screw them up. And I don't know if there is a solution to this problem. That is to say, I don't know if the only possible solution will ever be embraced or seriously considered before it's too late.

What is the solution? It seems to me it rests in changing our relationship not only with technology, but innovation itself. With the idea that some areas of technology simply need not be explored, not at least outside a laboratory, and that "just because we can doesn't mean we should." With the notion that tech exists to serve us, and must do so in a controlled rather than an uncontrolled manner. If we begin to think of technology in the same way we think of pharmaceutical drugs, we would surely experiment with any new tech for years before allowing it to flood the market. First, we examine potential consequences, then we package it for sale. But only then.

This idea is not quite as naive as it sounds. Scientists and economists from Adam Smith to Gerard K. O'Neill have posited variations on the idea of the"steady state society" and "steady state economy" since the 1700s. This subject is far too complicated to discuss in depth here, but a modern take on it would be a society in which resource-use was strictly monitored so as to eliminate all unchecked growth. A kind of governmental and economic thermostat which regulated humanity at a level and pace which preserved both the species and the planet.
Such a society raises the specter of authoritarianism and the dreaded "world government" so cherished by conspiracy theorists, but it also provides our species way out of the seemingly insurmountable problems which unchecked technological growth have created. If nothing else, it's food for thought -- because God knows you won't be getting any of the former on your next flight.