I enjoyed Zach Helfand’s nauseating jaunt in the New Yorker through airport lounges (“The Lounge Wars,” Dec. 1). This is the sort of trend that I predicted in my 2015 book The End of Airports, in which the experience of waiting for commercial flights becomes increasingly hyper-consumerist, stratified, and commodified—to the degree that the travel itself becomes something of a sideshow. The current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has called for a return to “The Golden Age" of air travel, which Duffy claims "starts with you.” But that rarefied spirit of individualism has moved on, into the private lounges. Meanwhile, as Helfand hints at, lower class travelers live by the brute laws of nature, just trying to survive getting from origin to destination. Abstractly, human air travel at scale may look like a modern marvel; but, seen from another perspective, it is a classist dystopia happening in real time.
