Business Class Warfare

Sticking it to the man, one spoon at a time

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. My first seven years were spent in the US, then there was South Africa, and Australia. There were multiple visits home during those years for my parents to check in with their parents, then visits back out mainly to the US twice a year, to visit colleagues and friends and treasured places after the family finally settled back in England.

As a result, I grew up on planes. Internalizing airports as a gateway to the new and interesting, before they turned into generic corporate malls. Sleeping under my parents’ feet on the floor during transatlantic flights, a practice that these days would give health and safety people conniptions. Assuming all silverware had logos on it, because a substantial portion of ours had been half-inched from airlines by my thrifty mother (many of which were still in use when I had to help clear my father’s house after his death, fifty years later, and over twenty after she died).

My wife and I cleaved to Virgin Atlantic for years but just before COVID struck British Airways started flying from the more-convenient San Jose, and by the time they stopped we were too enmeshed in their points ecosystem (designed, of course, to benefit them, rather than customers) to stop. Whatever the airline, I had a longterm ritual of walking the length of the plane and back several times during a long flight, to stretch my legs and be in the space — the airplane space, which feels like home to me. My son has semi-picked up the habit, too. Walking the plane, we call it.

But that was the venerable 747s, the real planes. Now they’re the giant Airbuses instead (not sure “Airbus” is a great name — “Sky Galleon” would have had more panache), rigorously broken into little pockets of relative privilege. This last weekend I was in transatlantic Business Class, and I’m not complaining. Very fancy for the likes of me, who spent years sturdily flying Premium Economy — a niche that’s being squeezed out, like the mid-list in publishing — but have become reconciled to both Economy and the Sub-Economy Prole Loser Pit (if you score a bulkhead seat and bring a sandwich, it’s fine, and honestly not much worse than being a suitcase).

Business is nice. The crew are nice to you. The food is nice. Having your own private little podule is very nice, especially by a window. It’s all extremely nice and I love it. Please always book me into the niceness. Thank you.

Despite the quality of the seat (which is also nice), my head was full of work and I found it hard to sleep and so deep into the dark lees of the flight I tried wandering the plane as I have for decades, and rapidly found myself in First (a mere dozen feet from my seat, admittedly past a curtain). I’d barely realized this before a female member of cabin crew I hadn’t seen before bustled up to me (I sense that only decorum or stunned dismay prevented her from tackling me to the ground and blowing a whistle) and demanded to know what I was doing there.

Walking, I said, mildly. She enquired where I’d come from, eyes narrowed, as if sensing she might have snared the guy who stole the Mona Lisa or at very least a hitherto elusive serial killer. Business, I said. She suggested acidly that I hie myself back the hinterland where I belonged, and do my exercise there instead.

I did so, baffled — cabin crew on BA are uniformly good and pleasant, one of the decreasing number of reasons we’ve stuck with them despite high cost, price-gouging during the pandemic, a crappy app, and the world’s shittest phone support — and pointedly walked up and down the fifteen yards of my silo instead. Suddenly I’d gone from feeling like one of the fancy few to being some scuffling loser, despite the fact that someone (thankfully not me) was paying a ton of money for me to be in Business.

In a world where tech billionaires have bought themselves ownership of the United States, this struck me as metaphoric. It’s not just about one officious member of cabin crew, whose job — I do understand and accept — is to preserve the blessed sanctity of First Class, lest I infect it with my poverty cooties. It’s symbolic of a wall being built across the upper end of the previously somewhat spectrum-like progression of wealth. Looking back, it was always that way — a curtain keeping you from the rarified atmosphere of the highest levels.

But the rest of plane used to be free range. It used to go: poor, not so poor, doing kinda okay, actually doing well, and then “almost rich”. Now a top level has left all this behind: even the merely “almost rich” are second-class, and each of the lower echelons are firmly marked into regions from which there is no escape. This is your status, this is your class, and that’s where you shall stay.

Not since the Industrial Revolution have we seen a narrow class band, owners of the (in this case virtual) means of production, leapfrogging straight over the ruling and governing classes to lay claim to entire nations. It’s not only Musk I’m talking about (I privately suspect that dude’s too volatile and weird to get much leverage over the dumb but dogged and feral cunning of an old school mobster like Trump) but Zuckerberg and Bezos and that animatronic ChatGPT guy and all the many rest. Men (usually) who have attained incomprehensible wealth precisely through being the kind of people who don’t understand or care about people, but only money and status.

We’re no longer a society. We’re a business. And we’re not all in this together.

The techniques of surveillance capitalism enable the ultra-rich tech dudes (eight out of ten of the wealthiest people in the world acquired their money that way) to track your every move, as they meanwhile put their thumbs on the scales of politics. Think about this every time you do something that puts money in their pocket, and consider whether there might be an alternative (like shopping local, or phoning or emailing a friend instead of scrolling past their Facebook post) — that isn’t to the billionaires’ benefit. They absolutely do not give a fuck about you, and they do not pay their taxes. The challenge is they’ve got us in a box. Amazon is often much cheaper and convenient, and yes, that is an AI image at the top of this post — because I spent twenty minutes trying to find a stock image on the web and they’re all crap.

Apart from the suggestions above, what do you think we can do? Or does progress always come with massive inequality attached?

Meanwhile yesterday I stole a teaspoon off the plane, as always, in honor of my mother. I like to think there’s an overpaid CEO somewhere tearing his hair out over the fact they keep finding themselves one utensil short, and perhaps a hardworking rural cutlery-maker happily bursting into his house and shouting “British Airways, they call, they need another spoon again — the children will eat tonight!”