So a few years back I revisited a topic that comes up every so often: the hollowing out of the middle class, and the fact that the hollowing keeps reaching ever further up. Helaine Olen has hit on this elsewhere but it’s worth reconsidering in light of the United incident over the weekend, where a paying passenger was physically beaten and thrown off the flight by law enforcement after United told him he’d been selected to miss the flight in favor of staff who were flying.
Now, I have a little experience of this – I owe my marriage to the pre-Sept 11 use of United’s Friends and Family travel vouchers. One of my future wife’s family friends was a retired mechanic at United who gave us the vouchers to fly standby for five cents a mile. And $120.95 for a direct flight from Dulles to SFO? That was too good to pass up, even if you did have to dress up and accept that you’d need an empty seat on the bird before you’d get to travel. That was good enough for me, though – I even got bumped to first class once – and without “Uncle” Dwayne, we would have had a much tougher road to where we ended up. Rest in peace, and thanks.
But here’s the thing: it was made abundantly clear that you would flap your arms and fly to San Francisco under your own power before they’d bump a paying passenger. Overbooking is a way of life with aircraft because if the bird doesn’t take off with every seat full, the airline is probably losing money. (When is the last time you didn’t hear “we have a completely full flight today” as you board?) So it’s not surprising that they’d overbook a flight. The bit that I find singular is that they offered a couple rounds of incentives…but they let everyone on board first. You might ask “why the actual fuck would you let too many people on the plane?” That’s easy: because if they can bait you into making a scene on the plane, they can have law enforcement bodily drag you out as a danger to the flight, and they are 100% legally off the hook in doing so. It’s absolutely reprehensible, and yet United may be able to completely skate under the terms of the law as currently written.
And apparently, the bulletproof way to make sure this doesn’t happen to you is…be in first class. Or business. Or anywhere but coach. And maybe you’re less likely to get “re-assigned” if you checked in bang-on 24 hours before boarding. But the point is: the more you paid, the more likely you are to be treated like a human being. In the meantime, all the special measures that had to be taken to financially save the airlines after September 11 are apparently permanent now, whether it’s bag fees or charging for refreshments or making you pay for the in-flight movie.
But that’s not the point of all this.
The point of all this is to go all the way down to the bottom: free. Which is to say: if you don’t actually pay for a service, what is your recourse when things go awry? Is it conceivable that this is the way Twitter or Facebook or Google want it – because they’re a private company, and they aren’t charging you, so when they rearrange the timeline or sell your personal info along…so what? Or to offer another example: there is a university in Palo Alto that we’ll call Hellmouth A&M. They run a shuttle service that’s free of charge and goes around campus and to certain outlying areas for the benefit of employees and students. And for about a year, one of those shuttles was re-routed down El Camino Real past California Avenue, and as such was suddenly very useful to people wanting to take Caltrain to the CalAve station and then come onto campus.
Well, in the course of the Great Schedule Rejiggering of April 10, 2017, when basically every form of transit in Santa Clara County blew up its schedule and tried something else, Hellmouth decided to move that shuttle back to its original route, which takes half as long and doesn’t go through the middle of campus or past CalAve anymore. And apparently some of the riders are PISSSSSSSED. But…the problem is, they don’t pay anything to ride, and the shuttle is operated by Hellmouth. If they work for Hellmouth they could complain, but I can assure you that Hellmouth’s shuttle service is impervious to complaint, because a lot of people were very unhappy over a year ago when they started running that ECR/CA route and making the trip twice as long and the response from Hellmouth was…silence. So the people posting “LETS FIGHT THIS” on Post-it notes on the advisory notices are advised to wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first.
Because when you’re accepting a freebie, you have no leverage at all. None. At least with cash on the fucking barrelhead, you are a customer and in some sort of implied relationship. If you’re passing all your mail through Gmail, though, or letting Facebook be your social outlet, you’re…kinda screwed, in the long run. And yet, we’ve already established that The Potential For GROWTH is all Wall Street cares about, or else Tesla wouldn’t have a higher market cap today than Ford or GM despite the fact that Ford’s F-150 sales alone dwarf Tesla’s revenue and just one of those pickups probably represents more profit than all of Tesla made last year.
One part shell game and one part “please sir can I have some more” – that’s the world we’ve made for ourselves. If you’ve made it a little bit, you better seriously consider that your common cause should be made with those who have less, not those who have more – because the latter want your bit too, and they care for you no more than they care for the former.