Saturday, The New York Times published an article about the future of commercial space travel. Detailing the business plans and operations of Axiom Space, Featured Story Writer Sheila Marikar took the opportunity to toss in a couple of insults directed at the uber-wealthy.
The article is laced with a tone that can only be described as jealous disdain of the rich. Marikar remarked that, “Maybe [space] will be so nice they’ll want to stay there.” She also went as far as to make the article slug, the URL title which identifies the article, “pigs-in-spaaaaaace.” It has since been changed to “axiom-space-travel.” The original slug still redirects to the full piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/pigs-in-spaaaaaace.html.
Several prominent journalists also noticed the switch as well. Lois Beckett of The Guardian tweeted on Sunday:
Andrew Ba Tran of The Washington Post also caught the jab:
Looks like even something as spectacular as space travel is not out of reach from anti-capitalism. Marikar even ends her article with a quote from Suffredini about a new kind of job, ‘Space Butler:’
“But with this idea, this grand idea that we have, comes cleaning dishes and cleaning a microwave, and who wants to do that? Pretty soon we’re going to be flying a butler with every crew.”
If she could only be so lucky.
