Airport Food
Drawing a parallel to a scene from WALL-E, the author reflects on how accepting AI-generated content is like settling for bland airport food, leading to a numbness that erodes taste and judgment in the tech world.
Pablo Stanley
Jul 15, 2026
There’s a scene in WALL-E where humans are floating in their hover chairs, and the ship announces try blue, it’s the new red! Every passenger taps their screen and their jumpsuit changes color at the same time. They don’t even look down… they just accept it, fed a constant drip of entertainment and pleasure. There’s some Huxley in there, I think. A brave new world aboard the ship, keeping everyone sedated with comfort
When an LLM offers you something, it’s really easy to just accept it… grab whatever it generates. You can ask for different versions so you can choose, but even those look like variations of the same bland flavor… airport food
And what it makes is fine. It’s ok… it passes. And that’s kinda scary. Good enough that you could ship any of them and nobody would notice. Dangerously good enough where choosing stops mattering, so you just click… any of them
Whatever, who cares?
I’ve caught myself doing it. Dazed… gone… accepting whatever my new robot design overlord made for me
Numbness doesn’t announce itself. Nobody wakes up one morning without judgement. You just click sure… this one… yolo a little faster each time, until the clicking is all u do… becoming one with the gray blob
I try to resist it. Slap myself awake in this self-driving hover chair cruising through the banality of Inter on everything, sparkle icons, redundant UX copy, thick left-side card borders, cards inside cards, hero eyebrow pills, and beige colors. In the tech world bubble we have confiscated a word to describe all this accepting and gorging… taste. But I look around and I see most of us not tasting anything. We’re all just swallowing
But hey… it’s good enough. Try neutral-tailwind. It’s the new red!