Deep-diving for the hot take
Like packs of dogs chasing tennis balls, we often get worked-up over trending stories. The response to the OceanGate implosion, however, is worth our attention.
If you live anywhere in the world with access to mass media, you’ve most likely heard by now about the Titan submersible story. In short: Stockton Rush, the now-confirmed-to-be-deceased CEO of OceanGate, built a business charging clients 250 grand to dive 12,500 feet in a submersible to the bottom of the ocean to view the wreck of the Titanic. About an hour and a half into the latest voyage, the submersible lost contact with its host vessel. After four days of the story buzzing across the mediasphere, it was confirmed that Titan imploded, killing all five people onboard, which included Rush himself and a 19 year-old teenager.
Setting aside the fact that it now appears Titan’s fate was known days before the news was made public, the story has provoked a widespread reaction, as these things routinely do. Even Cardi B weighed-in, going out of her way to post an Instagram video criticizing billionaire Hamish Harding’s stepson Brian Szasz for posting to social media about a Blink-182 concert while (we were told) the search for his stepfather grew more and more dire. “It might be distasteful being here,” read Szasz’s now-deleted tweet, “but my family would want me to be at the Blink-182 show as it’s my favorite band and music helps me in difficult times!”
Cardi, unimpressed, opined that “You supposed to be at the house sad. You supposed to be crying for me. You supposed to be right next to the phone waiting to hear any updates about me. You’re supposed to be consoling your mom and shit.” Szasz and B then traded barbs on Twitter and TikTok, with Szasz firing back “We know all your latest releases are trash but is your career this desperate for attention now??” and Cardi responding that “You was looking for clout all along, nobody knew who you were until you said that was ya stepdad!!! This is why people hate you spoiled brat billionaires yall soo desensitize[d].”
Szasz also posted to Facebook (again, now deleted) about being contacted by none other than Tucker Carlson. That’s understandable, but talk of the sub even filtered into some of my favorite sports commentary:
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From my little corner, I got the impression (via my YouTube feed) that the Titan search was all anyone was talking about, with 2 cents pouring in from every direction like a hail storm. I realize that algorithms can artificially create that sensation, but it’s usually a good indicator when news outlets all over the world glom-on to a story. There were also, of course, memes and jokes at the missing Titan passengers’ expense. According to one report, the search set off a “morbid meme explosion” that “turned our feeds into a morbid circus.”
Normally, I think it’s best to ignore things that I feel are getting too much attention (rather than draw your attention to me making a point about how something’s getting too much attention because, well, your attention is better spent elsewhere). In this case, though, I think we can draw some important insights from the reaction. Without looking too deeply into it, I got the sense that there was widespread disdain for the billionaire passengers and their ability to afford something as indulgent as going to the bottom of the ocean to see the Titanic because they can.
Comedian
(Nikita Redkar), who describes herself as “the only professor at Bimbo University” and posts satirical commentary on economics, pretty much hit the nail on the head with her TikTok video breaking-down the math, explaining that “250 thousand dollars to a billionaire is the equivalent of you buying one iced coffee with a pump of vanilla, a shot of espresso, and oat milk.” As of this writing, Nikita’s video has 6.5 million views.Hamish Harding, as it turns out, had a history of high-priced thrill-seeking. Newsweek (in the same report linked above about Carlson-Szasz) wrote that Harding “is known to be an adventurer, having traveled twice to the South Pole. He has also gone into space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, and dived to the lowest depths of the Mariana Trench.” What Is A Woman? director Matt Walsh posted a video claiming that he didn’t understand why the Titan disaster was met with such mockery. He called it a “cultural sickness” that people would laugh about others dying in such a horrific way.
I’m not sure which is worse: the idea of the Titan crew diving to the bottom of the ocean, or listening to Walsh deep-dive for something he could cook up into a hot take.
A comment I left on Walsh’s clip:
I find it hard to fathom that Walsh doesn't understand why billionaires spending a quarter-million dollars to joyride to the bottom of the ocean - not for research, but just because they can — hits a nerve with people. Either he's exploiting this story to fit his larger narrative about a public that has rampant disdain for wealth, innovation, entrepreneurship and risk/masculine bravery — or he has a massive blind spot when it comes to human nature.
I think most people are actually horrified by the idea of dying like that and would be overcome with compassion if, say, we all saw video footage of these people's last moments. I think part of why people are dismissing this incident so casually and with such disdain is a form of rationalization. By and large, people don't enjoy the idea of someone dying horribly for no explicable "reason," so the mind instantly reaches for some kind of justification.
That said, the disdain isn't coming from nowhere: for one, Stockton Rush, as we're now learning, was apparently way too lax about safety precautions. His recklessness and inner drive to be the kind of "explorer" Matt Walsh admires so much cost other people their lives. To cut corners with safety and testing when you're in charge of taking people to >that< environment is reprehensible, and if he'd lived, he'd be facing murder charges.
I like this clip [the Guillen clip posted further down this post] — it humanizes what happened but also offers appropriate words of caution, with 100 times more insight than Walsh does.
After watching Matt's clip on the Jordan Neely subway chokehold incident, it's pretty clear to me that Matt just jumps on news clips to mold them to fit whatever he's trying to get his audience to think. People who immediately jumped to use Neely as a statement on how poor, mentally ill people are mistreated were exploiting his death, and so were the people who leaped to make a point about how we need to be tougher on crime.
Both takes, though rooted in truth, are gross — none of us was there to say one way or the other. It was screamingly obvious that Matt hasn't spent much time on the NYC subway. It's too bad when commentators stoop to this kind of performative opionating. I know he trolls and provokes a lot, but a lot of times there's something to be gleaned even in his satirical stances. His willingness to indulge in "hot takes" makes it difficult to separate the substance from the bluster.
Believe it or not, my comment has gotten a smattering of support from other people — presumably Walsh fans — in that thread.
I must confess, I initially posted a harsher response to Walsh’s video — now deleted, but reprinted here for your entertainment:
This is just about the dumbest take I've seen from Matt Walsh — and the first time I've gotten the impression he's exploiting a story for its spin value instead of giving his sincere take. This is also the first time I've thought he sounds almost autistic. Or like a teenage boy who spends all his time obsessively building models.
If you have to ask why people have contempt for people who put themselves at gratuitous risk, you're either thinking too hard or not thinking enough. I think most people snickering would feel REALLY bad for these people if they saw their deaths up-close, or saw video footage.
"Cultural sickness?" STFU. This is a non-story. Go jerk off to NASA footage or something.
I get it: risk is necessary, and we should continue to celebrate bravery — particularly the swashbuckling kind of bravery most often exhibited by males. In 2003’s Over The Edge Of The World, a book about Magellan’s iconic sea voyage around the earth, author Laurence Bergreen stresses that, in the 1400s, getting on a ship and traveling across the ocean was the equivalent of what space travel would be today. So little was known about the oceans that the risks were enormous. And the courage it took to jump into that kind of situation almost defies comprehension. Civilizations as we know them simply wouldn’t exist without that quality. Had Stockton Rush lived in that time period, he undoubtedly would have been hell-bent on taking one of those voyages.
But there’s something disturbing about the gleeful “gee-whiz!” enthusiasm of people like him, Harding and Bezos. It doesn’t appear to be grounded in anything useful. These guys remind me of the little boys who narrate the Dr. Seuss classics If I Ran The Zoo and If I Ran The Circus — only with an essential human component missing. Full disclosure: If I Ran The Zoo is one of my daughter’s favorite bedtime stories, and I can see why. Those two books and their narrators are eternally charming because they highlight the power of a child’s imagination.
Just last night, in fact, I told my daughter that five year-olds have the most powerful imagination of anyone alive. But when little boys grow up to be men of means who can’t anchor their dreams in a mature outlook, they become people who chase those dreams regardless of their utility or cost. There’s something very clearly arrested in the development of people like this. They seem stuck in a kind of 1950s ideal of boyhood filled with comic books and monster movies and G.I. Joe toys.
It comes as no great shock that Rush dreamed of becoming an astronaut — or that he nursed that dream into adulthood and channeled it as fuel for his OceanGate project:
But, as Dr. Grande explains in an earlier clip, the bottom of the ocean is not the place to be fucking around and cutting corners in a race to set up your PT Barnum big-tent sideshow:
Two of my daughter’s other favorite books are Dr. Seuss’s Oh! The Places You’ll Go! and Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! What’s interesting about Seuss’s tone in Places is that he celebrates the main character — again, a young boy — for being intrepid. Throughout, Seuss encourages the kids in his audience to go out and explore, viewing the world as their oyster. But he also tempers the story with cautionary messages about setbacks and failures. By all accounts, Stockton Rush appears to have been incapable of considering failure. Where he wanted to be remembered as a trailblazer, his legacy lies in ruins on the ocean floor, while the company he built will already be remembered for gross negligence verging on homicide.
If I’m being totally honest, I could use a little (actually a lot) of what Stockton Rush had. I should go up in an airplane and get shoved off by a resolute skydiving instructor who’s literally going to push past my hesitation. There’s something to be said for feeling alive by conquering obstacles just because. Just ask tightrope walker Philippe Petit. In Man On Wire, the 2008 documentary about his death-defying walk across the Twin Towers, upon his arrest in New York, Petit is repeatedly asked why he did it.
His answer: there is no “why.”
In stark contrast to the sneering about the Titan disaster, Man On Wire celebrates Petit’s daring. Petit, of course, wasn’t a billionaire. Slight in stature, he makes a good stand-in for "the little guy” overcoming impossible obstacles. He also didn’t take the risks lightly and put years of preparation into his efforts. Stockton Rush was born into wealth and viewed precaution as a nuisance. Still, I liked to imagine that I’d find Rush’s enthusiasm infectious. And that I’d be invigorating by his company, especially as someone who was shorted on the risk tolerance he possessed in spades.
I highly doubt I’d have found Rush convincing, though, after watching journalist Ash Sarkar’s unflinching takedown:
I can only describe Sarkar’s comments as a kind of exquisite brutality:
I think that what happened to those five individuals was absolutely dreadful. It’s a terrifying and grim way to die, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I also think it was absolutely avoidable. Human beings have always pushed boundaries in the name of exploration and scientific discovery. But that isn’t what happened here.
OceanGate thought they were smarter than the regulators. They were disdainful of safety constraints and industry best practice. That’s because they wanted to make deep-sea tourism commercially viable before anybody else could. That is […] the very definition of hubris.
And: I do think that their modus operandi as a company was appealing to the vanity and the recklessness of some very rich people — tapping into the idea that, if you’ve got enough money, you should be able to have access to any and every forbidden shore[...]
Money doesn’t make you a more intelligent or responsible person. And, in fact, it can give you a dangerous sense of your own invulnerability and, indeed, a sense of arrogance. It came make people wasteful and heedless and reckless with the lives of those entrusted with their care.
And the minute you begin to point-out the judgement-warping nature of extreme wealth, well, there must be something evil and vicious about you.
Not only do I agree with every word of Sarkar’s analysis, but when I watched the interview footage she re-posted in that segment, I realized I would have been able to pick up on Roth’s vibe from a mile away. It wasn’t just his car salesman-like tendency to gloss-over important questions, or the fact that he always seemed to be making a pitch. In fact, I don’t actually think Roth was a car salesman concerned only with suckering people into making a sale for profit.
I think Rush was driven by something deeper — a yearning for competence, perhaps, and certainly a deep desire to leave a mark. But there was also something thick-headed and cavalier and deeply narcissistic about him, almost as if some part of his emotional being was dead or un-formed. I imagine looking at his brain and seeing gray tissue where certain vital functions are supposed to be governed. And maybe this is unfair, but he was basically the oceangoing equivalent of Billy McFarland, founder of the disastrous and fraudulent Fyre Festival, an event so infamous there were two documentaries made about it.
Physicist Michael Guillen offered what I thought was the most measured-but-useful take on this whole thing. Guillen visited the Titanic site himself in 2000 when he documented a Russian research dive for ABC News. As he explains in the following clip, the submersible he was in ran into serious trouble — so serious, in fact, that he was convinced he was going to die:
Calling for all of future Titanic dives to be called-off, Guillen said:
The vessel I was on was originally designed as a scientific research vessel. It had been time-tested over and over again. It was a serious vessel created by serious-minded people. By contrast, Titan was designed primarily for tourism[…]
This is not a joyride. This is serious business. The ocean is merciless beast. It’s ready to swallow you up.
Keep in mind that it took seventy-three years for us to discover the wreck of the Titanic, which is huge[…]
On the other hand, he also offered the following:
There’s something about us humans that’s unique. We have this kind of non-Darwinian spirit that drives us to give-up our sense of survival to explore worlds. It’s that human spirit that drives us to go to the bottom of the ocean or the top of a mountain, or to explore worlds within and beyond our solar system. It’s a very mysterious thing that science can’t explain, but there it is[…]
I know what it feels like to be buried alive in a tin can at the bottom of the Atlantic. It’s terrifying[…] The ocean is ready to swallow you up.
I mostly stand back and watch as stories like this set-off these huge tidal waves of emotion. Even before the barrage of fearmongering that became standard in 2020, I’d gotten the sense that our emotional buttons are constantly being pushed and tweaked on purpose. Now, that sense has grown impossible to ignore. When I watch masses of people get fixated and start to project importance onto these events that flare-up in the collective mindscape, I’m always struck by how arbitrary the outrage is. One story will spark intense backlash while another gets ignored.
I watch the response to these things unfold and it reminds me of a pack of dogs chasing a tennis ball over and over. Dogs, of course, will almost always chase a ball wherever you throw it. And they’ll do so until they exhaust themselves and have to lay down, panting with their tongues out. It’s hard to shake the impression that we’re being manipulated in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts method of mass misdirection that, as we’ve seen since 2020-21, has gotten all too easy to get away with.
This time, though, there’s something here.
These days, people are sensing that the gung-ho attitude of figures like Rush has gotten us into very treacherous waters. Stockton Rush and the Titan implosion have become a proxy for the way Bezos and his ilk have plunged the rest of us over the precipice into a blind, cultish celebration of “progress” — with little to no regard for the inherent consequences or risk involved. Understandably, there’s a simmering undercurrent of anxiety as billionaire technophile cowboys with creepy, plastic-looking skin keep smiling and playing with their toys while nightmarish prospects once unimaginable draw closer and closer to becoming real.
For once, I think we need to listen to our response to a trending story rather than move on to something “more important.” This time, there is an important message in all the memes. Like the 19 year-old Suleman Dawood, who allegedly let his father talk him into getting on the Titan in spite of his apprehensions, we are being led down a path by people without the emotional capacity to assess where we’re going and what we do when we get there and something goes wrong.
According to Suleman’s mother Christine Dawood, Suleman’s father Shahzada “was so excited to go down — he was like a little child.”
Not to be a dick, but that sounds about right…
<3 SRK