Feel Like a Rat in a Cage at Airports? You Are.

Take a deep breath because you'll need it to read the title of Popular Science's The Visualization of the Quantification of the Commodification of Air Travel:

Your every whim and wish, your every decision and opinion and complaint probed and parsed by the airline executives whose very future depends upon their ability to understand you —you, the paying customer and captive creature. Your shape, your weight, your feelings about a packet of pretzels insufficient to feed a gerbil: These are their science and their business. So too the gases you emit, the diseases you carry. The airlines crave intel on your food allergies, your tolerance for G-forces and your propensity for air rage. They must know how your body holds up in low humidity and low air pressure and heightened radiation. Their thirst for knowledge is almost unquenchable, their research effort so vast as to approach futility. "Outside of lab rats," says industry consultant Michael Planey, "airline passengers are the most analyzed subjects in the world."

The following is a distillation of what the airlines know about us, their lab rats. It's a breathtaking, though at times vertigo-inducing, view.

Enjoy the flight.

And enjoy the entire article. A checklist of the airline industry's unremitting campaign to convince every American that there is no point and no reason to fly anywhere, ever.

Posted by Vanderleun at October 16, 2003 9:01 AM