The Erratic Flight Patterns Edition

Ted (T.M.) Brown is a writer in Brooklyn for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other places. He writes the weekly substack on visual culture Is It Supposed to Look Like That?

Lately, my TikTok algorithm has been feeding me an unending reel of people fighting on airplanes. 

Why is this interesting?

Some of them are the same fight caught from multiple angles, some are the same video lifted from the original source or lifted from another lifter. TikTok has really only sped up the social media machine’s ability to obscure primary sources. It started with jokes and memes and has now moved onto hard news. There are times when my little screen feels like a digital palimpsest, people reposting the same video on top of different accounts over and over again.

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But anyway, there have apparently been a lot of fights and insane shit happening on airplanes since we started traveling in earnest again a couple of years ago. Watching people get their phones out to start recording at even a whiff of conflict is something to behold. It feels like one of those scenes out of a Western where the hero draws a gun in a saloon and soon the entire place is pointing their six-shooters in his direction. And before you think I’m gonna talk about her: that “motherfucker ain’t real” woman was clearly having an episode and/or possessed by Baphomet. Either way, I think she’s “something that happened” rather than indicative of a wider trend.

There’s actual data on the rise of unruly passengers as well, and while it’s clear that things are getting worse there’s no real understanding of why. People just seem to be quicker to anger. Mask regulations were one thing you could point to when they were being enforced. For the politically deranged, the mask became a symbolic affront to liberty and by refusing to wear one they were, actually, standing up for the rights of everyone on that plane. Some guy punched a flight attendant in the face over refusing to wear a mask in 2021, and while you probably have something wrong with you to meet a polite request with violence, there is something in that dusty swirl of factors worth interrogating.

Man, COVID huh? I think we forget that a global existential crisis sort of drove everyone insane for a couple of years, and that no state or cultural body has said that, hey maybe we should investigate exactly what the aftermath of something like that does to a society’s mental and emotional wellbeing. Culturally, COVID was both a hyperlocal contextual event and had aspects of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” that is, overwhelmingly interlocking and global phenomenons that are often too hard to fully understand as humans. Climate change is a hyperobject; so is capitalism.

So COVID is something we experienced on an individual and regional level, i.e. The perpetual sound of ambulance sirens and sense of doom in NYC were something that my friends in Miami and Denver couldn’t quite empathize with, just like the hardcore lockdowns my friends in London faced were unfamiliar to me. But then there was this simultaneous global sense that we were all succumbing to this disease as one, that life would just be one slow decline from here on out. 

The out of focus end to the crisis was also relative and disjointed, and only added to the personal and ambient anxiety we all felt. Some people were able to go back to their lives while others still languished. We’ve really only been back at this on a global scale for, what, 18 months?

So if we can’t point to masks, then what is it? The podcast TrueAnon had a great episode on the phenomenon—it’s on Patreon but they’re the only podcast I pay for—and run through the usual suspects: smaller seats, more delays and cancelations, the security kabuki of the TSA. There was a particularly salient point, though. Like the rest of society, the class divergence in air travel is becoming much more severe from the moment your journey begins. TSA Pre and Clear (I have both!), premium security lanes, boarding groups and the passive aggressive throwdown that is the overhead storage bin. Just being forced to walk through the first and business-class cabins is enough to ratchet up people’s stress levels. The actual confines of airplanes don’t do much to pacify people’s nerves either, especially when you’re sitting next to someone who’s hammered or just an ass hole. 

The velocity and virality of these videos don’t exactly help, either. They’ve become such a surefire way to juice engagement that people are creating fake videos of people doing wild shit on airplanes. The most annoying—and so clearly staged to the point where I’m not sure I haven’t been overestimating people’s understanding of reality for the last decade—was the woman who “made” a nest out of plastic wrap and three coach seats and lost her shit when the “flight attendant” made her take it apart. It’s a very stupid video! It made me mad when I watched it! But the point is that we’ve become so inured to bizarre passengers that someone can make a video on a set used for porn shoots and influencers chasing clout and everyone just shrugs and says, “yeah seems about right.”

That air travel has become the nexus of a bunch of different plagues—concentration of wealth, rapidly tearing social fabric, social media—and that we’re seeing the whole thing play out on video feels like watching society spiral in miniature. It’s become so bad that the original and the reflection are indistinguishable, one chasing the other like the most irritating feedback loop known to man. (TB)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Ted (TB)

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