Cyber-Hot Take Strike Force 2017: The Reckoning

Reports from an alternate timeline where the sky’s the color of a television tuned to a dead channel.


Like everybody else in the US, I saw the story about a man being beaten and dragged off a United Airlines flight for refusing to “volunteer” the seat he’d paid for. Seeing friends’ reactions to it on Facebook beat and dragged me just far enough out of my white middle-class bubble to realize that yes, it’s almost definitely the case that the man’s ethnicity played a factor in how far it was allowed to escalate. Fortunately for you, the reader, it didn’t drag me far enough out of my white middle-class bubble to convince me that the internet wasn’t interested in hearing my opinion about it.

When I saw the video that had been recorded and broadcast by a passenger on the plane, I was sitting in San Francisco at my job writing social media software for mobile supercomputers. I watched the video on my touchscreen-enabled internet-connected tablet computer, playing in a window on the screen around the comments coming in live from viewers around the country, next to a sidebar describing how the reality TV celebrity who was now the President of the United States had authorized military theater missile strikes on another country without Congress’s permission.

And in response to one of the most viscerally blatant abuses of power against a person in an objectively, grossly unfair situation, reaction was mixed. Outrage against United Airlines was running neck and neck with assertions that the real problem is the guy didn’t do what he was told.

It was at that point when I realized son of a bitch, I’m living in a shitty 1990s corporate-run future dystopia.

I spent years making fun of those things as being hackneyed and adolescent. I rejected anti-corporate paranoia as sophomoric, literally — the kind of thing that college students choose as My First Liberal Outrage Experience on their way to becoming truly Woke. Now here I am just one cybernetic implant away from living it.

What’s especially magical about the United Airlines incident is how it combines so many 21st Century United States attitudes into one thoroughly unproductive and distressing conversation. There’s absolutely a streak of the “Conform! Embrace the police state!” types, but it’s at least tempered with — if not actually overwhelmed by — the kind of lazy, cynical, apathy that pervades everything in 2017. Even cheering the Chicago PD for beating up a guy would be taking too strong a stand. Instead, you get more of the “Well, actually, FAA regulations state that…” contingent.

They’re not defending United, oh no. They just want to make it clear that it’s not as simple as you’re making it sound. There are just so many shades of gray to the issue of a corporation requesting the physical assault of a civilian for not peacefully complying with the fact that they’re denying him the service that he paid for.

(And yeah, I will go to the easy comparison: it’s the same thing you heard a lot of before and after the election. People kept insisting that they’re not necessarily a supporter of Trump, but then would go on to defend one of the hundreds of completely reprehensible and un-American policies he proposed during his campaign. “Look, I’m no fan of the man who openly mocked a disabled reporter during a campaign speech, I just believe in common sense immigration reform, like a multi-billion dollar wall between two peaceful trading partners.”)

So now I’m in the biofuel-powered hoverboat of someone who knows enough about crappy 90s dystopian sci-fi to be able to make fun of it, but not enough to actually live in it. And on the bright side, if we had to pick one thing from the late 80s and early 90s and agree that we were going to make that our future, we could’ve done worse. At least we’re not all living in a global version of that 4 Non Blondes video.