@sknob I will pardon the pun.
It's a pretty good comparison. Look into the issues that air travel causes globally including what the travel industry does socially, politically, psychologically etc. It's just as vast.
When you take it apart, every huge capitalist industry looks a lot like AI does on the inside.
1/
Flying produces vast carbon emissions and non CO₂ warming effects, it's protected by fuel subsidies and tax exemptions, and drives airport expansion that destroys land and communities. Travel economies hollow out cities price residents out of housing, displace local businesses, and replace lived cultures with tourist monocultures designed for consumption.
2/
Entire regions become dependent on precarious hospitality labour (so bad in Scotland!) while public funds are diverted to support private airlines and infrastructure that mostly benefits the mobile and affluent. The industry is also incredibly entangled with sexual and gendered harm, from the expansion of sex tourism and trafficking to the normalisation of entitlement, racialised desire, and violence in destination economies.
3/
Itt also props up authoritarian regimes under the banner of economic development. Psychologically, travel is sold as self actualisation and freedom, encouraging constant movement, novelty addiction, and escape rather than stability or repair, while politically it reproduces colonialist logic in which some bodies move freely across borders and others are immobilised or criminalised. And that's just to start...
Kristie
opalideas