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Impressions of America

I grew up in the US, but moved away in 2018. This April, I went back for six weeks. It was my first time in the country since before the pandemic, and the changes I saw pained me. I spent much of the trip trying to work out what had gone wrong in America. I'm recording my thoughts on that here.

It was in Newark airport that a problem first really struck me which seems to be the source of so much suffering in America: the US has become a pay-to-play society. Access to the systems which make everyday life tolerable is not a given; as a member of the general public, you have no right to be treated fairly. If you want that, you have to pay for it.

This became painfully clear in the security line at the airport, which for the non-paying masses was a stuttering game of snake. I spent nearly 90 minutes winding my way through this line, almost missing my flight. God help the people who realized they'd forgotten something, or had to go to the bathroom, or change a diaper or entertain a child.

But directly next to the giant snake were not one, but /two/ lines providing paid, direct, quick access to the security checkpoint. One of them, TSA Pre-Check, is run by the government and has been around for a while. The other, run by a private company called Clear, was new to me. You would think (or hope?) that a security checkpoint run by the federal government would be one of the few places in America where all would be equal before the law. But no, there's not even an attempt to /appear/ fair. If you can pony up, you can skip the line, and you get to feel the envious gaze of the plebes as you breeze right past them.

This is a sickness, a creeping kind of corruption. It is horrible that the government allows this. It's bad enough that the government itself provides unequal access to a government function for a fee, via TSA Pre-Check. But why on earth should a /private company/ be allowed to collect money for providing similarly unequal access? Who can believe, in light of this, that airport security upholds any standard of justice or equal treatment before the law? Or even that it has anything to do with security?

There is another problem here, too: like so many other companies in the American economy, Clear makes money not by doing anything productive, but by seeking rent. They collect a toll to access a protected resource, which they guard fiercely. Their employees constantly monitored the physical space to make sure no one moved through it without paying. This was true even if someone moved *away* from the security checkpoint---for example, to get out of the normal line and go to the bathroom. It's obvious why: Clear only has something to sell if the space they control is, well, clear. At least in comparison to the giant snake of plebes shuffling by.

This sort of rent-seeking is not just the security line at the airport. It is everywhere you look in American life, from the literal rents in housing to transportation to technology. Companies just invest in creating real or virtual 'lands', and building up the barriers that protect these lands, barren though they may be. And then they charge for access.

I could feel this especially sharply on this trip, and it weighed on me.

I tried to buy a SIM card for a cell phone that was bought in the US, and that has been working fine in Europe since 2018. But I couldn't: I heard from three different companies that the phone is too old and "no longer compatible with our network". Never mind that it continues to work flawlessly in Europe and the UK. But in the US, never ending hardware upgrades are the price of entry to stay connected. I had to be satisfied with wifi access where I could get it.

And it turns out that in an America where there is an ongoing pandemic, mobile internet is a pretty important system to have access to in daily life. In Seattle, I ate breakfast at a restaurant that would not have been open to me without a friend's mobile Internet: the menu, ordering system, and pickup notification were only available online, behind a QR code. The homeless woman who asked me for money in front of this restaurant wouldn't have been able to buy breakfast there with all the change in the world.

I flew down to California. Having lived in the Bay Area until a few years ago, I knew that Uber and Lyft would be an easier way to take a cab from the airport. I tried to take a Lyft upon landing in Oakland -- only to find that the humongous (450MB!) Lyft app was not up to the task of getting me into a car, presumably again because my phone was too old. I took a cab, and was grateful that the driver accepted a credit card because my only cash was in Euros.

It went on and on like this. I was not used to being outside these systems looking in, and it made them painfully visible to me. I think many middle class Americans don't reflect on the fact that the patchwork of private systems which make their lives comfortable -- credit cards, Amazon Prime, "ride sharing" -- are not open to everyone, and life is a lot more painful if you can't buy your way in. Or maybe they do, but they don't care; they prefer that the riffraff stay out. With the likes of Clear, for example, that's exactly how it seems to be: the system is only a good solution for the people who use it /because/ it isn't open to everyone.

But the cost of this patchwork is steep, namely, a complete lack of solidarity. Even those who can buy into these systems resent the constant trickle of payments going out, especially as inflation strains everyone. And because /their/ access is not free, they can see themselves just a little bit as victims of these systems, rather than as economically privileged, and so have little sympathy for those outside the gates. The prevailing feeling very much seems to be: I've got mine, but I'm just barely hanging onto it, so if you can't get yourself the same, don't expect me to help.

Meanwhile, more and more people are stuck outside the gates. I saw a tent city in Santa Cruz that looked like a refugee camp from a civil war. Homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco hasn't gotten any better since 2018, and in Vermont, I read that employers are starting to provide housing because workers can't find it themselves. It's hard to imagine that the $8 bread in California isn't driving some into malnutrition. And the schlubs standing in the regular security line are starting to miss their flights.

Almost everyone is hurting, but no one seems to recognize the pain of others, or know what to do about it. Most people turn to distractions and isolate themselves whenever they can. On that flight out of Newark, even the shared misery of a crappy in-flight entertainment selection had gone missing: those with a new enough iDevice and Netflix subscription quickly found their solitary distractions behind the gates of the in-flight wifi. The rest of us had to make do with the emergency landing information card.

Those who can't afford such pleasantries haven't figured out how to organize themselves yet, or even to understand what the source of their suffering is. But their numbers are growing. It's hard to imagine that we'll work through this peacefully; it feels like a reckoning is coming.

America is still a beautiful country to visit, and I am grateful that I was able to see it again. But I don't think I'll want to live there for a generation. America today is a country for the rich, or for the revolutionaries.