Airline Panopticons

I'm writing from the Baton Rouge airport on my way to my conference in Orlando. Originally, I was supposed to leave around 11, navigate a lightning-quick layover in Charlotte, and get to Orlando by 4:30ish.

This morning, as I'm finishing my packing, my phone dings. It's American. My flight out of Baton Rouge is delayed 30 minutes. I'm probably not going to make that lightning-quick change, I think. Another ding. Now it's delayed an hour. Bye-bye, 4:30 arrival in Orlando.

My partner, rousing from sleep, asks why it's delayed. No idea, I answer. Because if it's mechanical, he continues, they have to help you.

Do they? I ask myself doubtfully. Really, the airline can say whatever it likes about why the flight is delayed. Mechanics. Weather. Gremlins. Who am I to argue? I'm actually at their mercy.

I know others (my partner included) disagree. We're the customers. We pay (well, LSU pays) for their service. They must provide it.

I'm more like, They hurtle me through the air at Everest height at five hundred miles per hour in an 80-metric-ton miracle of engineering that would sound like Greek (or Hindu) mythology to anyone from most any other time. I put my trust entirely in their hands. I'm not in a good position to grouse about a couple of hours' delay.

That isn't, I recognize, the healthiest attitude to take toward airlines. But there we are.

Besides, previous experience led me to trust that the same algorithms that sent me a "your flight's delayed" text would also (1) notice that I was going to miss my connection, and (2) rebook me.

And so it happened. I'm now booked on a 4:30 flight from Charlotte to Orlando--without my having to call or bother or even ask anyone.

French philosopher Michel Foucault famously wrote about the panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's proposal for a more humane and efficient prison architecture. In the panopticon, prison cells were arranged in a circle around a central guard tower. The cells were transparent to the tower (and to each other); the guards in the tower were invisible to the prisoners. The efficiency lay in the fact that prisoners lived out their sentences knowing that at any moment the tower guards might be looking at them, even though they could never be sure if the guards were in fact doing so. For Foucault, the panoptic setup presaged a more modern, distributed, and invisible system of surveillance. We are all being watched; we are all watching ourselves.

In theory, a panopticon is a nightmare, literally the omnipresent Big Brother Is Watching You viewscreens from 1984. We are regularly reminded that, in fact, Big Brothers are watching us, though in practice the BBs are as likely to be corporations as governments. Ubiquitous cameras record our mundane movements all day long. Our phones and computers track us constantly in life and online. Our every transaction and communication is monitored, recorded, and bundled into big datasets to be parsed by machine learning programs. Privacy is in many ways a quaint idea.

And yet, in situations like mine today at the airport, that cocoon of watchfulness provides a sense of comfort. I'm kinda glad American Airline knows and anticipates my travel needs. I suppose that's part of the service I'm paying them for. (Of course, they're getting more out of the deal, refining their marketing and price points based on my behavior.)

My comfort, however, mixes with resignation. If American told me that, sorry, there's nothing we can do. You'll have to fly tomorrow. Well... Shrug emoji. I trust that, for the most part, in aggregate, it's in American Airlines' best interest to treat me well, to use their surveillance powers and artificial intelligence programs for my benefit. But I recognize and accept that, unless I  have my own plane that I can fly--or unless I'm willing to travel some other way or just stay home--I don't really have any other choice but to trust airline good will.

There's a capriciousness to the capitalist panopticon, an always temporary truce: We'll exploit you only so far and no further. Maybe. In the meantime, enjoy your flight.

More tomorrow,

JF