I am a technological fatalist. I believe that machines and artificial intelligences will one day rule this planet as we humans submit more of ourselves – any shred of life that can be arranged as a zero or one – to feed these data-hungry things upon which we are ever more reliant. I believe we are not only helpless to fight the rise of machines, but actually happy to surrender to it. These are not revolutionary beliefs, and I do not spend much time considering them. But these beliefs are real, and last Wednesday, at Newark Airport, I realized the ways in which they influence my actions.
I was at the main security checkpoint, next in line to enter the slow-trickling stream of people undoing shoes, dropping personal items in baskets, placing laptops in separate baskets, shuffling noiseless in socks or bare feet through scanners, looking relieved when no buzzer sounds, re-tying shoes and aggregating personal belongings, asking companions “You got everything?” then scampering into the wide-open expanses of the terminal, free to use the motorized walkways, visit the restroom, scarf a burrito and consider James Patterson novels before climbing into a large metal tube and being launched into the sky.
The key to entering this grand procession, the boarding pass, is itself a significant indicator of technology’s ceaseless forward march. In just my lifetime, the boarding pass has transformed from semi-precious object (mailed to your home weeks before the flight, kept in a safe, easy-to-remember location and guarded with one’s life at the airport, possibly saved in a scrapbook afterwards), to disposable token (printed at a self-service kiosk on flimsy paper, no more valuable than a receipt), to, now, nothing. My boarding pass for Continental flight 768, flying non-stop to Las Vegas, was simply an image on my iPhone – a one-inch by one-inch black-and-white square into which all of my flight information was encoded.
I was not actively considering the dematerialization of the boarding pass while I stood in line. It was 6 a.m. I had not slept the night before. I was headed to my friend Dan’s bachelor party. I thought about when I first met Dan, when we were randomly assigned to each other as college roommates freshman year and now he’s getting married and I’m finding gray hairs all over my big melon skull. The security guard at the head of the line had just scolded me for trying to duck under the nylon ropes instead of winding back and forth for fifty yards through the empty queue (which was, admittedly, a bad idea; I’m 6’3”, utterly graceless, and as I attempted to duck under the partition my shoulder caught one of the ropes, causing a whole section to come undone. The security guard said, “I told you not to do that,” and I said, “Well clearly I did not listen,” and then there was this tension between us). These were the things on my mind.
Not on my mind: that the dematerialized boarding pass was a kind of technological manifest destiny, an inevitability, or a stopgap on the path to further advances made in the name of security and convenience – identification chips implanted in fingertips, digitized brain waves, whatever. Also not on my mind: more practical concerns like, “How do I use this thing?”
I handed the TSA agent my driver’s license, and then my phone. The agent, seeing that I was using a mobile boarding pass, pointed to a box in front of me, roughly the size of a box of Kleenex, mounted waist-level. The top of the box was glass, and inside I saw red laser beams bouncing around, like in the movies when a master thief shoots a plume of powder into the air, revealing the billionaire art collector’s previously invisible laser security system. It did not occur to me that this box was a scanner that would simply read the image on my phone, like the bar code scanners I used all through high school when I was a supermarket cashier. I had accepted that I was using the most technologically advanced boarding pass, and therefore believed that all other aspects of the boarding process would also utilize maximum (and possibly invasive) technical capabilities. For this reason, I believed that the device in front of me was designed to perform a retinal scan.
Forgetting that retinal scans are still rare in public settings, ignoring the fact that I had not seen anyone else having their eyeballs lasered, not even questioning where my retinal data would be sent or who might have access to it, I bent down so my nose almost touched the scanner and, using thumb and forefinger on each hand, pulled apart my puffy, sleepless eyelids to allow the machine a better read. I do not know what was going on around me during those few unpleasant seconds, but I’d bet that the TSA agent looked over to the security guard, who mouthed, “What an asshole.”
A tap on the shoulder. I looked up at the TSA agent who said, “No no no” and patted the scanner with his hand. “Of course,” I thought, “how silly of me. This is no retinal scanner. It’s a fingerprint scanner!” At which point I mashed my right hand onto the scanner, rubbing thumb, index, middle, ring and pinkie fingers all over the glass, so the fingerprints got on there extra good. (Looking back now, I was probably very close to being stun-gunned.) The TSA agent grabbed my wrist and lifted my hand from the scanner. He said, slowly, “Scan your phone.”
Which I did, and was thus allowed to pass through the metal detectors, eat a bagel and board my flight to Vegas, where I lost $200 to an unsmiling blackjack dealer who told me, as I stood to leave the table, “Your problem is you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”
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