Newark Liberty International Airport is a dystopian hellscape
I just wanted to take a shit. I’d landed in Newark Liberty International Airport after an eight-hour flight. I’d staggered my way through immigration and customs. I’d submitted myself to the indignities of another round of airport security. Now I had 3 hours to kill, and the first order of business was to evacuate my bowels of the ‘cannelloni’ that they’d served for dinner on TAP Portugal flight 201.
At first blush it was a perfectly adequate airport toilet. It was reasonably clean. It didn’t assault me with the sour stench of stale urine. Most importantly, there was a toilet in working order which I quickly appropriated in order to conduct my business. It was only after the peculiar relief of a recently emptied intestine washed over me that I noticed the voice.
She spoke with the slightly flirty fluency that you might hear rattling off a barrage of product statistics at trade shows for machine tools or surface to air missiles. She was professional but ebullient, with just a hint of coyness occasionally peeking through. She enthusiastically suggested I consider placing a digital advertisement in an airport bathroom. She promised a captive audience with 100% gender targeting. Well, I guess she was correct. I was a man stuck in a bathroom stall taking a shit at Newark Liberty International Airport listening over and over again to her suggesting that I place an advertisement in said bathroom. It took me five or six rotations of bathroom advertising lady’s message for me to finish. As I walked over to wash my hands, I found that she was perched atop every urinal in the form of a little screen. ‘You, too, can have a limitless supply of men stare at you, dicks in hand,’ she seemed to imply.
With the ‘cannelloni’ gone, I just wanted to eat some real food. My wife and I wandered through terminal C marveling at the food offerings. We walked past a stall that specialized in clams. Another specialized in lobsters. Yet another, a doppelganger of a French café, featured several sandwiches costing over $20. Terminal C, which recently underwent a makeover, is clearly meant to be the type of airport experience that capitalizes on the misery of air travel. If your day involves a few hours of cramming yourself between a nice lady with an unhappy baby and a business type clacking away at her keyboard, you’re going to beg to pay eight bucks for a Corona and twenty bucks for a bowl of dogfood.
As I walked past restaurant after restaurant of bedraggled strategy consultants, I noticed something peculiar: every single seat of every single restaurant was furnished with an iPad. Apparently, part of the terminal’s makeover involved sprinkling some six-thousand of the tablets at various restaurants. It wasn’t until my wife and I sat down at a gourmet meatball restaurant (created by Amanda Freitag — apparently I’m supposed to know who that is) that the true horror of these iPads dawned upon us.
We were seated at a two-person table, facing each other. Well, at least we were pointed at each other. Unfortunately, each of us had an iPad obstructing our view of one another. As we tried to carry on a conversation my eyes kept being drawn towards various bounding icons on the screens. It was, to say the least, distracting. Our conversation quickly drifted towards the antisocial impulse behind these iPads. I, personally, like talking to the person that I’m dining with. Why would you place a piece of technology on the table that literally obstructs your view of the person you’re eating with? Is the suggestion that I should be interacting with this glorified billboard rather than a fellow human? Maybe the assumption is that I hate the person sitting across from me but am too tactful to actually say something about it.
Within a couple of minutes, a waiter showed up to explain the supposed use of this offensive technological intrusion. “Have you ever tried this style of dining?” he asked us. “No,” I replied. If I were a better person, I would have responded, “No, I’ve never eaten in a restaurant that’s designed to keep me from speaking with my wife.” It turns out that one of the key functions of the iPad is for ordering food while simultaneously serving advertisements. Once I’m accustomed to this system, not only do I not need to interact with the human sitting across from me, but I also don’t have to interact with anyone that works at the restaurant. I can just sit back and enjoy being served a meatball sub and a dollop of targeted advertisements for Mileage Plus co-branded credit cards. I just need to slide my credit card, enter my order, and wait for someone to bring out the food. Undoubtedly, even this last vestige of human contact will eventually be eradicated. Soon, we’ll enter the glorious future, where you, too, can go to a restaurant with your significant other and have an entire meal without any human contact whatsoever. Eventually, my wife and I found the tablets so intrusive that we detached them from their stands and placed them face-down on the table. The inconvenience of getting these screens out of our faces revealed that they were never meant to be removed.
Newark Liberty International Airport is a dystopian nightmare. From the obstructive personal advertising in Minority Report to the creepy propagandistic corporate advertising of the original Robocop, books and movies have been warning us about this dark future for decades. But really, what were OTG Management, who oversaw the redesign of terminal C and United Airlines, the terminal’s main occupant, thinking? Were they thinking that people would like to be forced to peer over a flickering iPad to see across the table? And what about those urinal advertisements? Who’s going to buy that product that they saw while taking a piss at the airport? Unfortunately, the answer is ‘someone,’ and today, that’s reason enough to put up an advertisement.
Is this the future that we’re heading for? Are we really headed for this long-heralded dystopia where every conceivable surface that has any potential economic value is turned into an intrusive, attention-grabbing promotion? Are we really headed for this technological hellscape where we’re all entombed in our own private space of advertisements? If Newark Liberty International Airport is any indication, the answer is a resounding yes. Not only will more and more of our attention be captured by people selling us stuff, but they’re going to tell us about how awesome it is. Just look at what OTG Management says about their own handiwork on their website:
“By integrating next-level technology with farm-to-terminal dining, carefully curated food and retail options, and a striking redesign of the terminal space, we’re revitalizing the passenger-terminal relationship. Our designs and innovations remove the physical and digital barriers to make airport travel easier and better connected than ever before.”
Let’s just sidestep the use of the phrase ‘farm-to-terminal dining’ here. Removing digital barriers?!? Wow! Thanks, OTG! Apparently, due to lack of space in a person’s mind, they moved those digital barriers and put them up between people. That way socializing can’t get in the way of making obscene amounts of money for the advertisers.
As I boarded my plane to Chicago and left the hellscape of Newark Liberty Airport’s terminal C behind, I breathed a sigh of relief tinged with fear. I may have escaped the vicious maw of anti-human hyper-capitalism this time, but the whole world’s going in that direction, isn’t it? Before long, I probably won’t be able to sit in silence at home without some form of advertising intruding upon my attention. Ah well. I’ll probably be so used to it by then that, cocooned in a mist of technology in my dimly lit apartment, I won’t even notice that I’m living in an imaginary world all by myself.
