Now the airline’s catching flak for calling in security to drag a man off an overbooked flight – as in literally d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g the guy down the aisle the way Hulk Hogan dragged opponents around the ring. The airline said it needed four passengers to give up their seats to make room for United employees.

The airline hasn’t said a whole lot about the incident. Chief executive Oscar Munoz tweeted that everyone at the airline was upset about the event.

Other people on Twitter — particularly fans of “Hunger Games” — had plenty to say.

There has to be a better way, friend. And certainly when it comes to making room for your own.

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Overbooking has been around for decades for a simple reason: Airlines want to avoid losing money on empty seats. And who can blame them? By using algorithms, the airlines have also become pretty savvy at figuring out how to keep the planes filled without bumping a lot of passengers. Last year, the bump rate fell to the lowest point since 1995 – only about six out of every 100,000 passengers, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

But those statistics are also real people. What’s so wrenching in the reported accounts of witnesses and videos taken by at least two passengers aboard Sunday’s flight from Chicago to Louisville is the way the removed passenger attempted to plead his case before getting bumped and dragged and bumped some more. It’s bad enough to be singled out for removal by some sort of mysterious lottery — like a character in Shirley Jackson’s story of the same name — let alone be manhandled.

So maybe Sunday’s casual violence aboard United’s overbooked flight should also be taken as a warning about the tyranny of the algorithm. We’re getting closer to the day when computers do all our thinking for us and robots manage even more of our daily affairs, including decisions that are far more complex than booking aircraft. But that doesn’t mean we have to be inhuman about it.