Looking back from 2076: How the private jet crash in Maine shattered the 21st-century myth that money could buy an exit from reality.
A View from the Quiet Era
I was reading through the digital archives this morning, looking at news reports from the mid-2020s. It is strange, from here in 2076, to see how obsessed you were with movement. You measured freedom in miles per hour. Today, we measure it in stability. But one story caught my eye—a private jet crash in Bangor, Maine, in January 2026. At the time, it was a minor headline, buried under political scandals. But looking back, it feels like a prophecy. It was a crack in the glass dome of the elite, a signal that the age of unconstrained mobility was running on fumes.
The False Promise of Velocity
You have to understand how strange the concept of a ‘private jet’ seems to us now. It was the ultimate manifestation of the desire to be separate. The philosopher Paul Virilio, writing decades before that crash, saw the danger clearly.
The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
– Paul Virilio
The passengers in Bangor believed they had bought the ship without the shipwreck. They thought that by paying a premium, they could edit out the risks of travel. But wealth in the 2020s was not measured by what you owned, but by how fast you could escape the consequences of your own society. That crash was the universe correcting the ledger.
The Solitude of the Skies
There is a terrifying loneliness to that incident. In your time, you confused isolation with safety. You built gated communities, then armored cars, and finally, these pressurized tubes in the stratosphere. You wanted to be untouched. But as the writer J.G. Ballard observed about the psychology of the enclave:
In a totally sane society, madness is the only freedom.
– J.G. Ballard
Perhaps the madness was the belief that you could live above the world without eventually crashing down into it. The ‘Bangor Warning’ was simple: gravity is the one law you cannot lobby against. Looking back, I don’t feel anger toward the people of your time. I feel pity. You spent so much energy trying to fly away from each other, you forgot how to live together.
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The Final Descent
We don’t fly much anymore. We don’t have the fuel, and frankly, we don’t have the desire. We have learned to stay put and fix what is broken rather than trying to outrun it. That crash in Maine was one of the final gasps of a civilization that thought it could solve its problems by moving faster. It couldn’t. The wreckage in the snow was a monument to the end of the illusion. It was the moment we started the long, hard work of landing.