Can you hear it? It’s the silent airport, the text-only airport, the airport of the future, the airport of your dreams. This is the progress of civilization. Airports shouldn’t be library quiet. They should be completely silent. Abandoned-church-in-the-middle-of-the-night quiet. Welcome.

There are lots of indignities in the modern American airport. The food, both on the ground and in the air, is somehow both overdetermined and bland. TSA is our contemporary theater of the absurd. The process of herding on and off the planes with all our nicely designed luggage puts the idea of human intelligence into question. The overwhelming presence of coordinated sweatsuit sets does not help matters. All of it makes me feel crazy. And yet, I’ll take it everyday. What I want to change is simply the noise in the modern airport.

Here in wonderful 2026, there is no need to have anything but text-based communication in the airport. No public announcements. No announcements from the gate. No more innocuous “welcome to our city” messages by whomever the mayor of Atlanta currently is. (I always seem to hear this while I’m urinating.) No more well-intentioned announcements about child trafficking. There should be signs saying what’s arriving, what’s departing. There should be signs outside the gates showing the same. There should be text messages delivered silently to your phone updating you on the whereabouts of your flight. If you come into the airport, you automatically consent, along with the TSA body search, to receiving silent text messages from the airport. Like with firearms, all audible alerts should be removed once you enter the premises. If we can make AI happen, then we can make this happen. No phone calls. If you need to talk on the phone, there should be private booths where you can conduct your shameful business. (I feel like this used to be a thing historically.) If people can hear you converse from your booth, then they should stare at you and you should feel shame. If you have a problem with your flight that cannot be resolved via text, there should be slightly larger booths where you and an airline official can discuss the matter, far, far away from everyone else.

Part of my beef is that it there are too many sounds. To begin, there is the modern American compulsion to blast pop music from every restaurant, bar, and kiosk, as if we were all trapped in an endless music video directed by Satan. (His theme song is “Mambo No. 5.”) Second, the public announcements don’t work. They’re too difficult to hear and they don’t inform. Airport terminals are too close together for any of the individual terminal announcement systems not to get hopelessly muddled. And then these announcements get preempted by the larger terminal-wide announcements. I’m always trying to parse the noise, trying to figure out what is relevant information. It’s like trying to unweave a rug with my teeth. They should instead install those digital highway signs, those boondoggles that purportedly announce upcoming traffic accidents and road closures but which in the Land Progress mostly sport bad puns related to safe driving. It’s like a modern WPA program for poets. There are worse uses of federal funds, but still.

The announcements that are given at the gate and then on the airplane itself are so rote that many airlines or flight attendants use the occasion to work on their stand-up material. We’ve all witnessed the “humorous flight safety video.” We’ve all been accosted by the flight-attendant doing a bit. It feels like being trapped with an overly enthusiastic football mascot with slightly less fur. I like it when people are funny. I am not a monster. But this is not funny. It’s annoying and desperate. I know the lawyers require the pinned-back-eyelids transmission of the safety video though it seems like this sphere is ripe for innovation. Perhaps take a clue from the endless, unreadable and unread Terms of Service agreements. Let’s get Apple to work on those flight videos. Perhaps travelers can agree to the terms at the same time they agree not to make a peep as soon as they enter the jetbridge, or whatever we’re calling the entrance to the airport now.

While I’m being picky, the planes themselves should be quieter. These machines are too loud inside. All that groaning and gear-shifting. I shouldn’t have to wear my cubicle-grade headphones to shield myself from the Lynchian industrial keening. Perhaps Delta could explore some better insulation technologies or phase cancellation possibilities. Perhaps a collaboration with some outfit like Yeti coolers. I realize that’s a different technology entirely, but man, those coolers really do work. I feel like this could be a mutually beneficial synergistic collab.

And then finally there is my fellow American traveler, equipped now for 18 years at least with a smart phone and yet none the wiser about using it, or at least none the more subtle. The prevalence of taking phone calls on speaker in public shocks me, as if I’m some spinster witnessing white pants after Labor Day. I am not a monster. But honestly, take that call somewhere else and in a way where no one else can hear it, where no one else is subjected to it. It’s a kind of aggressive rudeness, forcing a private conversation into the public sphere. Of course I have heard middle-aged professionals instigate calls while urinating in the public restroom in my office building, so there are really no limits to a lack of decorum. (Perhaps they are calling the mayor of Atlanta.) Video calls on speaker are just a declension of the same psychosis. I admit to not understanding the appeal of video calls in general, much less while I’m walking between terminals. (I’m pretty sure Short Form Video is one of the Seven Seals, but I’ll save that rant for another day.)

Instead, hear it with me. See it. Feel it. Completely quiet. Just the sound of people walking. I don’t want to put anyone in jail or anything. I just think some strategic social shaming is in order. I don’t think people should be cancelled or whatever we’re calling it now. But I do think that the people who take video calls on speaker should be politely led off the premises and banned for six months. I’m not a monster. It’s just that silence is golden. Or if not golden, then a pleasant ocher. And something we should strive to paint together. No one likes travelling. I mean, maybe the super rich do. But I’m talking about actual human beings here.

I’m of course writing this from an airport. I’ve got my ear plugs in but I can still hear the kids shrieking from one direction and the vacuuming from another. I can’t hear the announcements, but I can hear that emergency door alarm, the kind that goes off intermittently and seems engineered to loosen bowels and yet which effectuates no change in behavior from anyone. The door just makes that sound every now and then like some dispeptic animal. I don’t think my prohibition should apply to small children. I’m not a monster. Toddlers are going to be toddlers. But as the kids get older we should teach them that the proper approach to air travel is a funereal respect. A holy silence so that can people can watch their ipad movies in peace. Air travel is an absurd privilege, one we should accept while minimizing human suffering.

Also, grownups: no traveling with a blanket. Have some self-respect.