meaningless distance
Never in history has distance meant less. Never has man’s relationships with place been more numerous, fragile, and temporary. Throughout the advanced technological societies, and particularly among those I have characgerized as “the people of the future,” commuting, traveling, and regularly reloacting one’s family have become second nature. Figuratively, we “use up” places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are.
-Future shock by Alvin Toffler (p75)
limbo
It is a pit stop, an in-between place, a “nowhere,” a technicality – a grudging intrusion into the seamless dream of teleportation that is transcontinental jet flight.
The hub is essentially an anti-experience borne of technological necessity and the imperatives of petroleum, flight schedules, the curvature of the planet, and geographic accident. Hubs are nowheres, with their security apparatuses, landing and fueling infrastructures, and pictograms both patronizing and incomprehensible. The unspoken ethos is one of keep-up-with-the-Joneses anti-regional sterility.
Hub signage almost exclusively employs the Helvetica type font, a font specifically engineered to have no personality. Hub food is always vacuum-packed and seems to strive for unitized, stainless placelessness. The buildings feel so sterile that they could only be the precise opposite: incubators of great plagues; fathers of all microbial lies. But airline hubs – more so than airports – are complete nowheres.
This nowhereness both attracts and repels; seduces and frightens. The hub is the embodiment of a certain dimension of capital-P Progress – that dimension equating progress with comfort, the dimension that views progress as those technologies that separate our senses from the world as it was created by nature. The hub is where we experience the horrific torpor of Extreme Progress, where Modernism is fully integrated into a universe of Smarte Kartes, nubbly maroon fabric chairs, nonspecific accents squawking across grand halls that flights with numbers four digits long are currently boarding. The hub is a dead-number office for damned digits, where numbers like 1388, 1490, 1218 are abandoned and thrown away, only to be reappear with Sysyphian regularity.
-Douglas Coupland
