It’s been four days since the Titan submersible, in which five people sought to plumb the depths of the Atlantic Ocean to view the remains of the RMS Titanic, was declared lost.
A “catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber” took out the Titan as it was headed 12,000 feet below sea level. As a huge fan of James Cameron’s 1989 film “The Abyss,” this was the result I expected as the media spent days counting down the sub’s backup air supply. (Apparently, the U.S. Navy knew there was evidence of an implosion all along.)
The discovery of broken Titan parts capped off four days of intrigue, fear, lessons about hydrostatic pressure, eerily ironic ancestry, cheap aftermarket video game controllers, a legendary run of memes (more on that later) and, somehow, Cardi B.
This story has everything, short of a plucky love interest. Unless we’re counting the OnlyFans model who’s “friends” with passenger Hamish Harding’s stepson.
Every news or news-adjacent site published something on the sub; social media was ablaze with conjecture, conspiracy theories and general disbelief. Articles about the whys and wherefores of the expedition stayed on landing pages through the weekend, unseated only by the Wagner insurrection in Russia.
Why five people suffered the most needless deaths I’ve seen in some time distills to a single word: Hubris.
The story of the Titan disaster ― certainly coming to a theater or streaming service near you ― is a great case study for the nature of humans from disparate backgrounds in the 21st century. Hopefully Malcolm Gladwell will write an exhaustive essay on it all, but I only wish to explore it from three angles.
The first is how we all approached the news. Black Twitter, in particular, showed out with meme after meme making fun of the whole affair. Never have I witnessed so many people bargain with their god to avoid hell for laughing at something. For every meme, there was a post castigating us for joking about the untimely deaths of innocent people with families.
As my guy Corey noted, there’s an empathy gap at play. At least two of the five deceased men were billionaires; most humans can’t put hands on the $250,000 the trip cost each person, and the vast majority of us would use that money for anything else in the world outside of crawling inside a minivan-sized tube we can’t stand up in with four other dudes to see the remains of a ship that sunk 111 years ago through a peephole a bit over a foot tall.
It’s not that everyone became heartless, sociopathic assholes overnight. It’s that the very concept of the trip itself and the decisions these men made are so risible and removed from the reality of the proletariat ― especially among Black folks, who already have a touchy relationship with large bodies of water ― that any need for sensitivity was trumped by the sheer necessity of jokes.
No one wanted this end result, but it’s tough to find empathy for these wealthy and highly educated men who stepped in that sub given the information they had. Save, perhaps, for 19-year-old Suleman Dawood. He allegedly didn’t want to go but agreed to accompany his “Titanic-obsessed” father, Shahzada Dawood, because of Father’s Day.
Some folks understandably have trouble applying the word “tragedy” to the implosion, but that the teenage son died to please his billionaire dad is handily the story’s biggest tragedy.
(In contrast, the funniest part of the story is Brian Szasz, stepson of billionaire Harding. He attended a Blink-182 concert, flirted with an OnlyFans model on Twitter and beefed with Cardi B during the search. Dude wasn’t gonna let his missing stepdad get in the way of his plans.)
The second issue is the skewed level of attention paid to the missing sub and the scale of the search. Multiple countries threw resources into the rescue, including the U.S. Coast Guard. When they heard “knocking” from under the ocean (as it turns out, likely well after the implosion), they dedicated even more machines to scouring an area of the North Atlantic twice the size of Connecticut.
Though the families of missing billionaires could certainly cover it, the millions of dollars the search cost will fall to taxpayers. Even in death, billionaires manage to screw us over.
In contrast, it took the incident for many of us to even learn about the fishing boat full of migrants that sank in the Mediterranean off the coast of Greece on June 14. Because the Greek Coast Guard didn’t intervene, more than 200 people perished ― mostly Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian men fleeing their countries for a better life.
Western media outlets spilled comparably little ink on the fishing boat, and one can only imagine that the “search and rescue” conducted for a bunch of poor brown people was likely dwarfed by the one for five wildly rich thrill-seekers – three of them white Westerners.
This leads me to my last point: This event did not help stem the tide of general contempt toward billionaires.
It seems that people with more dollars than sense are inclined to remove themselves from the mortal coil in the name of “excitement.” All I can recall of John F. Kennedy, Jr. and John Denver is that they both checked out after piloting airplanes that neither of them should’ve been flying for various reasons.
Billionaire overlords Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos recently engaged in a friendly challenge to be the first to get their own rockets into space ― a cockfight designed only for people for whom credit ratings don’t matter.
The rockets made it, and the stupid-rich are in line to take future flights. But the Titan survived its first voyages as well; with billionaire egomaniacs at the helm, I expect luck to run dry at some point. (I wouldn’t take Elon Musk SpaceX rocket to the corner store.)
Indeed, there’s no shortage of articles detailing all the ways in which OceanGate CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush purposely cut corners and ignored safety issues.
In 2018, OceanGate fired engineer and sub pilot David Lochridge for throwing up flags regarding the sub’s construction not being sufficient for the depth in which it was meant to travel.
It turns out that building the whole vessel with carbon fiber (allegedly from decommissioned Boeing planes) was never a good idea, and is likely the catalyst for the implosion. Considering Rush said in a 2021 interview, “You’re remembered for the rules you break,” he pretty much got off easy by going down with his ship.
Cameron, who directed the 1997 blockbuster “Titanic” and has made multiple dives to the wreckage, didn’t mince words in blaming Rush and the OceanGate staff for allowing the tragedy to happen.
“I thought it was a horrible idea. I wish I’d spoken up, but I assumed somebody was smarter than me, you know, because I never experimented with that technology, but it just sounded bad on its face,” Cameron told Reuters.
I’m sure the Titan disaster will end the 14-year-old OceanGate company, but considering the victims pretty much signed their lives away, the families will likely encounter challenges if they attempt to sue.
So many lessons to take from the week of submersible drama, but I’m sure we’ll all simply move on and keep chuckling at the memes as we await the deaths of the five men to be commodified in a documentary or Lifetime film. Or both.
I just wonder if Cardi B will play herself.