Sit Down and Be Sorted

Happy holidays from Kneeling Bus! Annual subscriptions are discounted 20% through the end of the year. If you paused for even a split second to consider subscribing just now—GO FOR IT!!

Airport lounges are one of the great evergreen topics of internet discourse, maybe because the experience of the lounge mirrors social media itself, in the sense that your value as an individual is quantified and then publicly displayed to your peers, often with degrading results. The airport lounge and the social network both began as embellished limbo zones—places to spend time while on the way to something better, or in the dead time between stretches of “real life”—but both gradually evolved into more enveloping types of space, not quite destinations but self-contained universes where you could forget for a while that you were waiting for something else. We still reassure ourselves that the internet is not reality, at least when it’s making us feel bad, and we might similarly dismiss airport lounges as a ruse of advanced consumerism when we’re confronted with a status tier that excludes us. But as the spirit of each encroaches upon more areas of life, it grows harder to maintain one’s belief in the sanctity of some purer, un-gamified reality.

We’re fascinated by airport lounges, that is, because they’ve spread everywhere, having long since escaped the confines of the airport. In the wake of the pandemic, mid-2021, I started noticing this after a short stretch in which I went to the lounge-filled US Open and also encountered an open-air Chase Sapphire lounge in the middle of the South Street Seaport. NYC’s grimy facades seemed to conceal an archipelago of bland backrooms that an AmEx card can get you into. Lounges represent the possibility of physically inhabiting a brand, the power of embodied presence as a superior form of attention: “The final form of the physical store is an environment where prospective or existing customers just hang out, marinating in the brand without necessarily buying anything,” I wrote at the time. A company like American Express, whose product is not merchandise or even tangible services but an amorphous and ever-expanding idea of individual presence in the consumer sphere, are perfectly suited to provide this.