There’s a belief among a certain set of elites that America has adopted the aesthetic, values, and social logic of an airport lounge as its dominant cultural mode. Everything from restaurants, homes, public spaces, and even the structure of economic life has taken on the bland, frictionless, prestige-lite uniformity of the airport lounge.
- The lounge becomes the central metaphor for America’s architectural and cultural flattening, with places designed to soothe, not to express identity or history.
- Access to desirable urban life becomes contingent on holding the right financial products, not on civic membership or public infrastructure.
- Tap to pay and credit card rewards become mechanisms of soft exclusion.
- Cities like Austin, Nashville, and Scottsdale are read as interchangeable remote-first lifestyle hubs for affluent transplants, producing copy-paste “slop” culture.
In this telling, the airport lounge isn’t just a place. It’s a metaphor for a society that has decided to live in a perpetual pre-departure limbo that’s comfortable, bland, and controlled.
life in american cities will be gated behind a "tap to pay” kiosk. your ability to procure an asinine rewards card will allow you passage into safe, bland, and crowded high protein bowl based concepts. we’ve said no to the social credit score only to rebuild it privately
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) December 1, 2025
its 2030: living in nyc costs you $5500 an hour, but its the only place you can earn $1.5m in your role as “entry level ai engineer” (net 5k a year, post expense post tax). you have no retirement, but your draftkings amex gives free helicopter rides to the airport 3 hours away
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) December 1, 2025
Not to quibble, but this is literally the Bilt 2.0 card.
— Greg Lindsay (@Greg_Lindsay) December 3, 2025
This isn’t an original thought, or a new critique. It’s literally the thrust of Walter Kirn’s book “Up in the Air.” If you’ve only seen the movie, the main thrust doesn’t actually come through.
Kirn describes Airworld, a fully realized parallel country made out of airports, clubs, rental cars, and chain hotels. It’s corporate monoculture turned into a place, the manifestation of homogenization and alienation.
- Everywhere is the same place. Ryan Bingham lives in “nameless suite hotels,” shuttles, lounges, concourses. Cities barely register. What he really knows is club locations, security layouts, and rental counters. Geography is replaced by a network map of corporate facilities.
- Airworld has its own bland culture. Its “newspaper” is USA Today, its food is heat lamp buffet and food court chains, its entertainment is gate TVs and in-flight magazines. Nothing local, nothing rooted – just national, brand-safe wallpaper.
- Miles are pure, abstract belonging. Ryan treats frequent flyer miles as “private property in its purest form” and the true currency of Airworld. Hitting his million mile goal with a single carrier matters more than family, place, or career. His “home” is effectively his account balance.
- People reduced to types and transactions. Other travelers are sorted into categories (rookies who block the aisle, pros who glide through security), coworkers are voices at the end of a phone, and the people he fires are temporary assignments. He interacts with almost everyone through scripts and systems: boarding groups, HR euphemisms, status rules.
- Routine as self-erasure. His days are interchangeable: same wake-up in a standardized room, same airport choreography, same club, same cutlery. The very conveniences that mark him as “elite” also erase any sense of uniqueness or story.
Alienation comes from embracing this world, not having it imposed on him. Ryan has chosen Airworld over any specific place or community. The cost is that he’s disconnected from anything not mediated by a brand, a schedule, or a loyalty program. He’s proud of his fluency in that system, but underneath it he’s essentially placeless and interchangeable – a high-status ghost in a corporate machine.
In the book, Airworld is the organizing concept. It’s a quasi-nation with its own culture and currency, and the main way Kirn explores alienation. In the movie, airports and hotels are mostly backdrop. The focus shifts to Ryan’s relationships and emotional arc. The book doesn’t dwell on the structural critique of global corporate sameness.
Ryan Bingham’s written character is obviously unstable and hollowed out by his choice to live entirely in Airworld. He’s paranoid about systems, accounts, and shadowy firms. There no sense that he’s on the verge of healthy “connection.” He’s fundamentally sympathetic, if lonely, in the movie with the story framed as “can this guy learn to connect?” rather than “what does it mean to have replaced reality with a corporate simulacrum?”
The is about a man who has expatriated into a corporate nowhere and what that does to his sense of self. The film is a more conventional story about intimacy and personal growth. Honestly, I enjoyed the film more! But this notion of alienation and corproate sameness is not new.
Max Weber argued that modernity is defined by instrumental rationality: organizing social life around efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. Weber talks about an “iron cage” where people become trapped in systems optimized for goals they did not choose, serving structures that prioritize efficiency over meaning. This leads to dehumanization, disenchantment, loss of autonomy and value flattening.
George Ritzer took this 1910’s critique and applied it to consumer capitalism in The McDonaldization of Society, corporate sameness with McDonald’s as the central metaphor, riffing on Max Weber. The world increasingly looks and feels like a McDonald’s: interchangeable, rationalized, and devoid of distinct local character.
I don’t thnk this is right, though. McDonald’s takes on a distinctly local flavor as anyone that’s seen one in India or French Polynesia can attest.)
- Consumers choose speed, low prices, and predictability
- Efficiency reduces scarcity. Lower transaction costs and scale economies free up resources.
- McDonald’s exists because millions of people value affordable, predictable meals. Criticizing this as cultural decline is paternalistic, presuming consumers don’t know what’s good for them. In contrast, Ritzer romanticizes messy, inefficient, artisanal systems that priced out the poor and limited mobility.
- In fact, consumers have more choices than at any point in human history. Niches thrive online and in big cities. Consumers can spend less on baseline meals and they have more income left over for artisanal choices. How often did people eat out in the 1920s and 30s or 50s?
- Small producers now reach customers through Shopify, Etsy, DoorDash, Substack, Patreon, YouTube, TikTok. Globalization lets niche niche brands to scale and reach anyone who wants them – precisely because of corporatization and homogenization in supply chain.
Standardized coffee chains like Starbucks and Peet’s actually introduced whole generations of consumers to premium coffee and created the market for third-wave roasters. The same holds in beer, wine, fashion – and travel. Consumers aren’t trapped, they can shift to alternatives at whim.
Growing up, of course, I had Chinese food. It wasn’t very good. Mexican food was Taco Bell. Now I have easy access to Laotian and Malay food – even in a third-rate city for Southeast Asian cuisine. And not just food from Malaysia, but varietals within that (like Nonya cuisine).
In fact, so many things are better. As I finished up college I didn’t think that would be true. Life felt like Natalie Merchant’s “These Are Days” (1992) which was sung in the present tense but framed from the future: right now is the future you’ll nostalgically replay. It was about privilege and luck, not entitlement. Yet the world does keep getting better, for most people. Western corporations export their wares, but American consumers import from abroad, too.
Airport lounges themselves have actually improved. I remember ginger ale and goldfish crackers as a kid in the early 80s, a photocopier in the Admirals Club at DFW in the early 90s, and packaged Tillamook cheese in United’s Red Carpet Clubs in the early 2000’s. More people have access today and the lounges themselves are better. Even as American Express homogenizes its lounge food compared to 2014, Capital One offers José Andrés tapas in D.C. and the new Chase lounge in Las Vegas features David Chang.
And need I add that the homogeneity of airports themselves is a function of governments, rather than market capitalism? It’s governments that own the airports in the U.S. and contract for their retail experiences. Goods sold there pass through government security checkpoints, usually brought through by preferred vendors selected by the state. It’s those government entities that dictate the dinner-only ‘Japanese restaurant’ must serve the same eggs for breakfast as everyone else in the airport.
The reason, of course, that this is an elite theory is because the central problem of the airport lounge is that too many people have access.
It’s a story of aspiration and upward mobility that creates crowding at the top. Access has expanded, and that makes these spaces less elite. So the snobbish amongst us don’t like it.
This guy Manidis sounds like a real condescending pr1ck….