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haze-space

Arjun Earthperson

    I don’t remember the jet taking off; I hardly even remember buckling up in my seat. Benzos and whiskey is the premium way to fly now. They have yet to figure out a way to charge for that. On the flight back, however, I was vividly awake. I knew my time in LA was coming to a close, and I didn’t want to miss any opportunity to soak it all in. These would be the scant memories that would make the next few months bearable – until I could come back for another hit, that is.
    The cabin crew mafia had found yet another way to lord over us, the peasantry that constituted nurses, musicians, engineers, farmers, mothers, burnouts alike. It used to be tray tables and seat orientations, then laptops, cell phones, and then when smartphones came along, they went after airplane mode. But the in-flight entertainment got savvier. They gave you Wi-Fi, DirectTV, on-demand movies as they took away even more legroom. Your experience, curated, steering thought, and action as the pilot steered the bird across the skies. Of course, they charged for it all. When the pandemic hit, they stopped handing out even the peanuts.
    Today they ask you to plug out your dead phones from their USB charging ports during takeoff. This was an Airbus A320, capable of seating 150 exhausted souls with drained phone batteries. I will spare you the physics, but not the math. That constitutes to roughly 0.75 kVA in power savings. With each of the 2 main engine generators producing 90 kVA, that’s about 0.42% of power saved. So when the matronly stewardess asked me to plug my phone out, I complied but scowled in protest, imitated her mannerisms like a schoolboy who knew he will regain his power the moment the bell rings and the doors fling open.
    If you enjoy a good power grab but don’t know how to topple a government or lack the natural charismatic skills of a dictator, become a flight attendant. Stick it to the man at 35,000 feet. Hit on the ladies as you please. Be the Julius Caesar you always dreamed of being.
    But it’s not all like how their lordship pleases. Soon they will need to sell their wares: items of basic necessity that they deprived you of in the first place. Things like pillows, blankets, alcohol, earplugs – all exorbitantly priced anyway, I suppose because anything is exotic when they control supply. And suppose you had the desire but didn’t have the means; in that case, they could sign you up for a credit card, ready for you to activate using the onboard, satellite linked, NFC-aware, integrated payment system. The entire system designed to make you a sucker. And if by some grace of God, the luck of the draw, or your own propensity to have your head stuck in the ground, if you somehow managed to hide until today, well now it was too late. They would reel you in, making a new sucker at 500 mph as you fly over West Texas at midnight. Big closers, these stewards and stewardesses. You can’t help but wonder how they nurse their newborns or their beers as they lay in bed waiting to fall asleep.
    But it seems too late now. The systems are all linked up, set in motion, working exactly as designed, calibrated, updated on the fly. The only things left to do are either giving in, staying sucked-in, or perhaps, if you are brave, allowing yourself to ask what the world might look like if you burned it all down. But that’s no easy task. It will take a truly independent thinker and the system is designed to breed out independent thinkers quick and with impunity. More so, it will take a collective effort with a clear ideology and likely no clear leadership – the guerrilla revolutionary’s wet dream. With the goings-on in Kabul, Minneapolis, and DC, a real revolution that champions the cause of the truly oppressed seems all too distant. Then there are the giants that provide the enabling tech services that sustain the status quo. What do we do with them? Should Zuck, Sundar, Tim, Jeff, Satya be executed on the street? Perhaps the people should decide. I have begun to sound naïve, like a child.
    A kid is sitting next to me, playing with his in-flight entertainment system. He is proficient with it, in a way only a kid can be. The beginners mind is uncrowded by ideas of how things aught to be and so he sees things a little more as they are. I wonder if he sees the touchscreens as an artificial entity in the natural world or just as an extension of it? Threats are far more insidious when camouflaged. Perhaps, even though it may be transparent to him now, when he does decide it’s time to shun it from his world, he may be the most technically equipped to do so. That is my hope anyway. I hope that someone will guide him to an awakening, and that he sees that value in staying awake. For now, I wish he falls asleep; he is driving the rest of us nuts.
    One of the stewardesses is walking about the cabin, now collecting trash. A baby screams, no more than two rows ahead of me. The elderly gentlemen to my right is snoring with abandon. The cabin lights have dimmed, and like a migratory bird on its midnight flight, the plane, too, seems to be falling asleep. The wailing won’t stop. It seems the young are restless, and the old are weary, each lost in themselves, deaf to the other. I hope this means revolution. I want to fall asleep, but anticipation keeps me awake. The benzos are hardly helping. I could kill some time by fooling around in the toilet but being stuck in the middle seat, I don’t want to alarm my elderly neighbor. I just might have to jump out the emergency window.

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