An airport is a place in which time and personal autonomy are suspended, in which the only freedom you possess is the freedom to make purchases. The aggressive automation of labor; the nightmare synthesis of fevered consumerism and authoritarian surveillance; the apocalyptic frisson of knowing that all this exists in service of, and is dependent upon, massive rates of carbon consumption. And always, too, the distant limbic hum of death, the screaming descent of the burning jet, as the situation’s presiding possibilities, the Chekhovian pistols unholstered at security and irrevocably introduced
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