The frequent flyer programs and all of the data collection and analysis that they enable is why everything on the inside of an airplane is like it is right now. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Amanda Mull.

Amanda is a senior reporter and buying power columnist at Bloomberg Business Week.

Amanda was on the show last year to talk about

e-commerce. It was fascinating, and we dug into the history of consumerism much more broadly.

And more recently, Amanda has been looking into airlines and flights and how they are changing,

in particular in the past few years, as more passengers seem to be buying premium seats as airlines are investing

more in those like premium experiences and in their lounges as well. And at the same time,

how it feels like the experience of other passengers keeps getting worse. And so, you know,

this is a time of year as we head into the holidays where

a lot of people are flying. A lot of people need to get home. So, you know, airlines and flights are

on a lot of people's minds for that reason. And so I figured what a good opportunity to have

Amanda back on the show, to dig into this issue that so many of us deal with, because so many of us

do take at least one flight a year,

and to explore not just why that is changing and the consequences of how the experience of flying is

changing, but also, you know, we talk about the tech angle as well, right, and how tech and

data collection in particular has helped to inform some of these changes, has helped to make it

so that airlines can push more of these premium seats onto their passengers to try to get more

people upgrading and paying for higher fares so that they can make more profits from these

seats and how that differs from the way that business class seats, first class seats used to be treated

in the past. So I found this to be a really fascinating conversation with Amanda because flying

and airlines are, you know, an industry that I have paid a lot of attention to over the years,

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