One day last year, I was waiting in the security line at San Francisco International Airport. As I approached the clothing and accessory removal zone, I noticed a distinctly uncrowded section in the warren of ropelines marked “area for CLEAR subscribers.” What, I wondered, was CLEAR? As my girlfriend later informed me, CLEAR is a service in which you can enroll to cut the security line at airports. Anyone qualifies; it has nothing to do with your security risk level. You just have to be able to pay $180 per year.
Even though $180 per year is a reasonably modest sum, I noticed feelings of resentment when I regarded this enterprise. The security line is a shared struggle, a forgivable indignity visited upon all of us with obvious justification, in a public place. Now you can just pay money to worm your way out of it? It just felt wrong. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that it comes at a real social and political cost. Lines are an equalizing force in society. We can all bitch together about waiting to get our bodies screened or waiting to get our drivers’ licenses renewed. Take away lines, you’ll accelerate the dwindling of shared experiences that make up our common culture.
When I was a kid in the 90s, I took pride and comfort in knowing that, while society had some true elites -- the private jet, multiple mansion people whose lives I gawked at on VHI -- and also some really poor folks, the vast majority of us were some variety of normal. Waiting in line supported the sense of a single, middle-class experience that existed for everyone even as actual incomes and life experiences varied greatly between the wealth extremes. If you were a Fortune 500 CEO, an actor, or a US Senator, maybe you didn’t have to wait in line for stuff. But even if you were a partner at a corporate law firm, sending your kids to private school, and taking vacations to Europe, you still had sit in traffic like everyone else, and wait in line to pick up groceries, vote, and board a plane.
Today, shared experiences are diminishing. We no longer all watch the same TV shows; I know this because apparently NCIS, which nobody I know has ever watched three seconds of or seen a single piece of content about on the Internet, is apparently the most-watched show in the country. Lamentations about media filter bubbles have become a liberal cocktail party cliche. The NFL, which until very recently was as ubiquitous and unifying as the Catholic Church in the 12th century, is becoming culturally polarized.
Like everything else, lines are giving way to this era’s gravitational forces of digitally-driven classification, differentiation, and discrimination. Getting a taxi in the rain used to be equally hard for everyone; now it’s hard only for those who can’t afford a 5x Uber surge. On freeways, people who pay dynamically-changing prices via devices on their windshields can increasingly bypass traffic, leaving people who can’t afford the fast lane with even slower commutes. And if you can afford it, you can skip to the front of airport security. The extension of data gathering and processing throughout our lives is making lines obsolete. Why should everyone wait together when a computer can measure everything about every person and divide them according to whatever qualities the computer’s owner sees fit?
Since Donald Trump was elected, the question everyone who writes or talks about politics for a living, and many who don’t, has been why? What’s the deal with this simmering rage that is so well documented but so hard for people who don’t feel it to understand?
The reason most commentators feel safest giving is economic struggle. It’s true that wealthy people have been capturing most gains from economic growth since 2008. But most people have, materially, most of what they had in 1999, when everyone was just so excited about the Internet and the end of the Cold War. Commentators who are in touch with reality offer that the rage Trump supporters feel is simply racism.
I humbly submit that another factor, which walks hand-in-hand with outright racism, may be something so simple as the decline of lines. Waiting in line while other people cut really sucks. It’s the problem with going to nightclubs in New York: you stand in the cold while watching rich guys with foreign accents and wearing scarves go inside and have a great time. Watching that happen in increasing domains of daily life would be extremely frustrating for any human.
That sense I felt as a child, that most things were the same for most people, felt reassuring. It felt fair. That reassuring sense of unity has remained even as cultural polarization and media fragmentation have revealed that, despite Barack Obama’s thunderous declarations, there is no one United States of America. But it can’t endure under the in-your-face indignity of systematized line cutting. Losing the universality of lines means losing the visual reinforcement that we are all pretty much the same, even if we knew we never really were same to begin with.
I have a confession to make: a couple of months ago, I qualified for TSA precheck. Because there’s now enough data on me out there for the government to model with stunning accuracy whether I’m a security risk, I get to cut the security line at the airport. It feels so deliciously fortunate to leave my shoes on and my laptop in my bag while I stroll through the quaint 20th-century artifact that is the metal detector. But my smugness comes at a cost.
What will be the next line to fall by the wayside? The grocery checkout line? The Starbucks line? The line for the ski lift? If we value equality, we should have areas of life where we force everyone to wait in line, efficiency be damned.