Zen and the Art of Airline Marketing

A couple of weekends ago, I flew to Michigan to visit my daughter at school.  When I arrived, we went straight to the Crisler Arena to watch a basketball game, where I dazzled her with my explanation of the finer points of the pick and roll.  I grumbled at the fact that none of the players seemed to know the proper way to roll after setting a pick – dropping the top leg so as to “seal off” the defender -- which creates a much better scoring opportunity.  Kids today.

Air travel for something that isn’t work has a certain allure.  Packing a bag with no dress shirts. Reading for pleasure. Paying attention to things, without the overhang of meetings or presentations.  

While boarding my flight to Detroit, I noticed that Delta’s ads lining the jetway mostly featured photos of people sitting in airplane seats and gazing at screens. Eyes vacant, faces softly illuminated by their phone or the in-flight entertainment system or an iPad shared with a significant other. 

It used to be that airlines would promote travel by showing attractive destinations (beaches, foreign cities, exotic dining). Now they promote travel by showing people looking at their phones.  You could say that Delta is, in a dime-store-Buddha kind of way, highlighting the journey, not the destination.  But of course it’s not really the journey: it’s the escape from the journey, enabled by screens and noise-cancelling headphones. “The ‘me time’ you deserve,” promises one ad. 

What does this say about Delta’s customer experience?  I suppose at one level you can commend them for their honesty. "We know that the experience of our product is so unpleasant," they imply, "we’re going to promote it by showing how you can remove yourself from that unpleasant experience thanks to technology.  Which by the way we will gladly enable by providing in-flight wifi, USB outlets at your seat, and unignorable video screens approximately 6 inches from your face."

Meanwhile, Apple recently launched their Vision Pro headset, the latest salvo in Silicon Valley’s war against human experience that is unmediated or non-monetizable.  Interestingly, their marketing for the Vision Pro also has a veneer of Zen.  A video shows a man standing at his uncluttered workspace, app windows floating gently in space around him. “Be in the moment. All over again,” Apple promises.

In a perverse way, marketing the Vision Pro in terms of a philosophy that extols the virtue of “non-self” is spot on.  When you use this product, you remove all direct connection with the outside world. What you perceive is completely captured, filtered, and presented by Apple, Inc.  With the headset on, your eyes as perceived by others are not your eyes at all, but an avatar, created and projected by the device. Your visual connection with reality has been severed, and a representation of that reality, one that is completely administered and controlled by a commercial interest, has been grafted in place. You, vis à vis the “real world,” cease to exist. 

Some of the reviews of the Vision Pro speak in similar terms of dislocation. “It's easy to lose track of where I am when I'm wearing the Vision Pro,” begins Scott Stein in CNet, who writes from “inside” the device, as if it were a whale that has swallowed him whole.

As I’ve mentioned before, the idea of self-annihilation shows up often in mystical traditions. The only way we can approach direct contact with the divine is to relinquish our egos.  If we do this right, we simultaneously embrace/submit to an essence (call it God if you’d like) that is surpremely powerful and loving and good. Delta and Apple also invite us to lose our selves, but in the service of late capitalism and the glory of spatial computing.

People are not buying this, figuratively and (especially given the $3,499 price point) literally.  Many of critiques of the Vision Pro have highlighted the horror of what this product is and represents.  And yet: a lot of reviews suggest that, once the technological bugs are sorted out, the miracle of augmented reality will usher in a new era of awesomeness.  All we need, they suggest, is Apple to get the hand-eye interface to work more smoothly, and we’ll finally be able to get lost.

 

In the future the robots will care for us

 All the races are cancelled, so I perked up last week when I received the email saying that the 20km de Genève was organizing something.  Initial confusion at the subject line which read “2.0km de Genève.” I thought this was either a typo, or that perhaps they had broken down the race into 2.0km intervals, which seemed odd.  Finally I realized that they meant “2.0” as in “version 2.0,” a clever touch further over-egged in the modified logo, which had the “.” in “2.0” at the tip of the accent grave of “Genève,” like a typographical shooting star.  This year’s edition would have the usual choices of 5km/10km/20km distances.  But since we wouldn’t be able to run all together given COVID restrictions, each participant could run whenever they wanted (before Nov 22^nd), and we could follow the course and track our times via a smartphone app.  I signed up for the 10km. 

I set the alarm for 7:45, but I woke up a few minutes before it went off. I fed the cats, had coffee and toast with almond butter, drove to the other side of the lake, and parked near the finish line.  I traversed the Paquis (the closest Geneva has to a “red light district”), past a disheveled woman on a park bench speaking loudly to herself and a young African guy listening to music on his phone, which he held at ear level but looked away from.  I arrived at Rue de Lausanne just in time to catch the #15 tram, which would bring me up to the starting line at Place de Nations.  I realized that I had forgotten to bring a mask, which is obligatoire on public transportation now, so I slid the Buff I had brought with me over my head and wore it bandit-style.

Near the front gates of the United Nations, a few other runners milled around, heads bowed as they consulted their phones.  I almost never run with a phone, as I don’t listen to music or anything when I run, and I don’t like to have the extra weight on me.  I also enjoy the feeling of not knowing exactly where I am when I’m running, when the aperture of my senses seems to be at its widest.  On those rare occasions when I have brought my phone with me on a long run, it’s been stowed away in a pocket in my hydration vest, withdrawn only to take a picture if the scenery is especially nice.  I cringe whenever I see someone running with their phone in their hand, as if they were desperately chasing after it.

However, given the set-up of this race, leaving the phone behind wouldn’t be an option, especially if I wanted to “register” my time – something with no tangible value whatsoever, but one likes to be “official” and to compare times with other runners.  I wore a long-sleeve top with a phone-sized pocket over the left breast, so my plan was to put the phone in there, hoping that it wouldn’t bounce around too much.    

The blue sign marking the starting line was attached to a lamppost at the bottom of Avenue de la Paix, which curves up and around the UN headquarters.  As I approached, three fit looking guys fiddled with phones and watches as they engaged in pre-race bouncing-in-place.  They were lean and fast-looking, with close-cropped hair and red knee-high compression socks, so I figured I would let them go first, so I wouldn’t have to endure the psychological blow of watching them speed away from me.  After a few seconds, one of them said, “Okay, allez,” and off they flew, only to come tramping back down the hill around 20 seconds later, frowning and muttering that the app hadn’t started properly.  A moment later, they had sorted things out, and they disappeared around the corner for the second time.

I took out my phone and opened the race app, which required logging in with a registration number I had been emailed.  Once open, the app told me cheerily to “approach the starting point!”  I looked up and confirmed that I was standing immediately next to the start sign, but for some reason the app said I was 35 meters from the start, then 50 meters, then 10 meters, as I assume the GPS was trying to find me.  Then all of a sudden, a synthetic male voice with a British accent began counting down, calmly but very loudly: “TEN…NINE…EIGHT…”  I managed to stuff the phone back in my pocket and get the zipper closed by the time he reached “ONE,” and off I went. 

Normally at the start of a race, you feed on the excitement of the people around you, so you run faster.  This morning, there was no one around me save the stray passing car, but I still found myself breathing and stepping more quickly than I would on a normal Sunday morning. 

Soon the app’s voice (hereafter “the Voice”) switched over to synthetic British female.  She gave a plug for a breast cancer charity.  I huffed up the long hill, past the US mission and the hotel school.  The Voice then instructed me to take my next left onto Chemin de Machéry, butchering the pronunciation and making me wish I had chosen the French Voice.  I passed through the village of Pregny-Chambésy, and the Voice welcomed me, mangling its name as well. Then the grade smoothed out and the road narrowed, and I moved through the quite pretty and bucolic fields outside of town.  Ahead of me, beyond the airport, the Jura mountains hung purple as the sun strained to burn through in the morning mist.  This is one of the cooler things about living here: one can go from the center of town to farmland in a matter of minutes.  My legs felt strong and my rhythm steady as I headed downhill in the direction of the autoroute.  My km splits were under 5:00, so my rough target time of less than 50:00 (respectable for me on a hilly course like this) was still within reach.  

As I came to an intersection, the Voice instructed me to cross the street, turn into a private driveway, and follow a path into the woods.  This sounded a little suspicious, but I did as I was told, and behind a row of jumelle houses there was indeed a path, which I followed.  I checked my phone, and the little blue dot indicating me was still overlaying the red line indicating the course.  The path became a trail through thick woods, but the Voice’s commands were clear, and I negotiated a couple of turns while keeping a brisk pace.

The path hugged the edge of the woods parallel to the autoroute, then turned east, back toward the lake.  I checked my phone a couple of times to make sure I was still on course.  After another 500 meters or so, the light ahead of me started to brighten as the path neared the edge of the woods.  I emerged to find myself at a T intersection, with concrete paths the color of butter leading to the left and right of me.  In front of me on the other side of a wall were train tracks. 

I realized that I hadn’t heard the Voice in a while, and when I pulled out my phone to check, I saw that I had somehow flicked the little “silent” switch on the side.  The red line on the phone map seemed to lead to the right, so I continued that way.  I held my phone as I ran, trying to get my bearings, but the little me-dot was drifting away from the line of the course.  The Voice remained sullenly silent.

Raising my gaze, I saw figures moving quickly toward me, and as they got closer, I recognized the three fast-looking guys from the starting line.  They passed me and headed back in the direction I had come.  I paused for a moment, and then decided that I must have made a wrong turn, and that I should follow them, at least until I could figure out where I was.  I turned and ran back for another 3 minutes or so, past the T intersection, before realizing that no, this was actually the wrong direction.  The three fit guys were probably running the 20km, which starts with the 10km, but then peels off into a different direction. 

Still clutching my phone, I headed back in the other direction, past the T intersection again.  Looking down, I noticed that my screen had gone black, as my phone had locked itself.  I unlocked it, poking awkwardly with the touchscreen-sensitive tip of my gloved index finger, to find that the app itself had closed.  I reopened it, and it asked me for my password again, which I had to dig around in my email to find.  Finally, I managed to log in, and a cheery “approach the starting point!” message appeared on the screen.  The app had evidently forgotten that I had already started.  I poked around, looking for other menus that might be able to let me pick up where I left off, but there were none.

By this point, around ten minutes had passed since I had first emerged from the woods.  Fortunately, I could still see the course map on my phone, and I was able to pick my way across a bridge over the train tracks, then down a set of stairs to a paved path that ran parallel to them, alongside a cluster of houses near the lake side of Chambésy.  My pace had slowed, and finally I emerged near the gas station close to the autoroute on-ramp, a landmark I knew well, so I would be able to find my way "unofficially" to the finish line from there.

I would like to say that at some point I experienced a peaceful moment of “letting go” and giving thanks for the misty fall morning and for living in such a lovely place and for the ability to go out and run: a Zen-like realization that it’s not about how fast you get to the finish line, but the joy in the journey, etc.  I did not. Instead I just felt sour as I loped past the WTO, then down alongside the water for the final kilometer or so.  The paths next to the shimmering lake were already crowded with people, desperately clutching at the few remaining strands of fall before the arrival of the long, dark winter, whose approach this year feels especially ominous.  I passed the blue sign marking the finish line, then walked to my car and drove home, feeling the chill from the sweaty clothes clinging to me.

Machina ex machina

Last week, I sat in a room in San Francisco with 40 of my colleagues for four days, listening to business school professors and start-up founders talk about Disruption and Transformation.  One presenter talked about how all of the innovation – as measured in companies with a market cap of $1 billion or more – is coming out of the US and China, and that Europe has been left way behind, presumably because the Europeans worry too much about the welfare of their citizens and not enough about their start-ups.  We visited a start-up incubator where young ambitious CS majors pitched us on their ideas to solve the problem of the “data abyss.”   We talked about how Wal-Mart – the largest private employer on the planet – is investing heavily in automation and AI, and that many of the 1.5 million people who work for Wal-Mart could be out of a job soon.*   

Outside, homeless people drifted around Market Street like zombies.  A leathery-skinned black man approached me on Monday as I was walking up to Chinatown and laughed as he punched himself in the jaw repeatedly.  Thursday I saw another man with a scraggly beard, prone on the sidewalk in front of the Nordstoms and flailing violently every few seconds, while a policeman and an EMT stood by, not quite sure how to approach him.  My colleagues reported encounters with people copulating on street corners and defecating in alleyways.

The weekend before, I took my daughters to Panera for dinner one night (highly recommend the blood orange lemonade, BTW).  Panera has always pretty operationally efficient as far as I could tell: the workflows are well organized and they give you the flashing tile thing that buzzes when your order is up so you can find a place to sit down in the meantime.  Now they’ve taken things up a notch and installed touch-screen ordering monitors, which are placed in offensive-line formation in front of the regular counter, which is at this point still manned by a human being.  Evidently, this is part of “Panera 2.0,” and the business press has unsurprisingly talked about this as a cost-saving measure and that people will lose jobs, all of which is true.  Perhaps more frightening is that most people would prefer interacting with yet another screen to having even fleeting, transactional contact with another human being.  But this shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point.

On the flight home, I read an article in the Guardian about how the Church of England has taught Amazon’s Alexa to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

* Not that Wal-Mart employees have it so great, but still.