“License to Chill”: Revisiting an attempt to analyze the fantasy of elite mobility
In 2020, a year in which I had launched a newsletter about Covid, I wrote a draft post about tourism during the pandemic: "License to Chill". In it, I tried to bring together film analysis, imaginative geography, and a critique of the Airbnb-era tourism industry. It also never really “came together”, so I didn’t do anything with it. Revisiting it 5 years later, I am curious to figure out why it failed, and whether it contained the ingredients of a successful essay.
My 2020 draft’s argument hinged on observation that in the pandemic era, tourism had become closer to the kind of elite travel portrayed in the Bond films:
Though the tourism industry is supposedly at its knees, planes keep flying, hotels keep operating. Someone is traveling, and it’s not just essential travel. So who are these Bond-like figures, traveling without a tourism industry? Their kind of travel predates the pandemic; we could call it “elite mobility.” It consists not just of having the money to fly, but the social capital and personal connections to open closed doors and find “authentic” travel experiences.
In retrospect, we can put this draft in a now-clichéd category of take: the pandemic highlighted, revealed, and/or accelerated previous trends. There is a smugness latent in this rhetorical device, an implication that the clear-eyed writer had already noticed some phenomenon, but that it took a pandemic for everyone else to catch on.
In this draft's case, I try to use this approach to reveal, stripped of its tourist adjacents, the 21st-century fantasy of “elite mobility” as portrayed in the Bond films and anticipated by Zygmunt Bauman:
As Zygmunt Bauman noted in Liquid Modernity (2000), nomadism has shed its stigma and become aspirational. What sets today’s global elite apart is not physical possessions or real estate, he says, but a “speed of movement” that comes with wealth and information. This is even truer today. [...] As Bauman writes: “In an insecure and unpredictable world, clever wanderers would do their best to imitate the happy globals who travel light.”
Finally, I connect this analysis to a favorite villain of the late 2010s and early 2020s:
Cue AirBnN. Its “Belong Anywhere” messaging sells precisely a fantasy of elite mobility. Unlike tourists, who stick out and annoy everyone, the AirBnB traveler is supposed to be more sophisticated, slithering in and out of authentic spaces like a secret agent. The link between elite mobility and AirBnB’s self-branding is especially apparent now.
This jump to dissing AirBnB as the ultimate purveyor of elite mobility tries to raise the stake of the argument by drawing on the reader’s presumed animosity towards a Silicon-Valley unicorn. Sadly, this politicization of the argument interrupts the draft’s attempt to come up with a novel reading of elite mobility. Instead, we land on a kind of AirBnB-bashing narrative that is not necessarily wrong, but ends up in retrospect being less interesting. This all leads up to the line: “As AirBnB users begin to flock outward, away from tourists and one another, they will mold the entire world into a potential tourist site.”
Here, the argument “devolves”, by which I mean that it lulls the self-satisfied reader, already critical of platform capitalism, into a familiar moral (or, honestly, aesthetic) condemnation of a reviled multinational. The primary benefit of the post becomes feeding that reader’s confirmation bias.
But! I just checked an even earlier draft of the essay, and I began to realize that it had been circling an interesting idea it never fully captured, which is that the pleasure of elite mobility is not about mobility of the traveler, but the fixedness of everyone else. This insight bubbles closest to the surface when the essay connects with my “lived experience” rather than theory alone. Here is a discarded line from an earlier draft:
On a journey through Amsterdam this summer [2020], I decided last-minute to stay a few days. It was a far more pleasurable, less-crowded experience than previous visits. In today’s case, the exclusivity and uncrowdedness inherent to luxury travel is instead enforced by public health guidelines, travel bans, and new hygienic habits. But the pleasure of authenticity is there all the same.
Let’s think through what happened here: I don’t really like Amsterdam. Yet when I was there in summer 2020, the tacky tourist shops and weed outlets didn’t bother me. Why? Because nobody else was there. Even in a tacky, touristy downtown, I felt like an elite traveler. Elite mobility is when you easily cross hard borders. In this case, the source of my “eliteness” was not money (train tickets were cheap), but the combination of an EU passport, leisure time, and the wherewithal to take certain risks.
This single moment in Amsterdam (sadly dropped from a later draft) reveals a core part of the elite mobility fantasy: it is not about chasing authenticity, but exclusivity, and thus exclusion. An initial draft almost arrives at this idea: “The point is not that James Bond can teleport wherever he wants, but that in a world of hard borders his mastery helps him slither seamlessly in and out.” But this line, too, was dropped. Another draft contains the following line, also later dropped for brevity: “The elite’s glamor is not in travel as such, but in their ability to navigate the labyrinth.”
So now, in 2025, it turns out that the early drafts of my “License to Chill” contain the germ of a relatively clever idea that could have graced the pages of a snarky 2010s website like The Outline, going something like this:
The pandemic has revealed the true promise of luxury travel, which is that everyone but you is stuck, but you are free to move around. In the pandemic, this feeling is available on a budget.
Now, five years later, this particular trend has reversed. The world’s population feels less “fixed” than ever. Even with immigration restrictions on the rise, a growing global middle-class floods the world with ever-growing tourism, at times reaching almost cataclysmic levels. As viscerally repulsive videos of smartphone-wielding crowds swarming the Spanish Steps spread online, speed of travel is no longer an elite distinction of any kind. In 2023, the New Yorker seemed to hand down a new dispensation in a provocative article: “The Case Against Travel.”
Maybe the next big thing is elite rootedness.