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titan
Even When They Fail, They Win: OceanGate and the Cult of the Super-Wealthy Innovator
This deep-sea tragedy reminds us that even when the super-rich die doing foolhardy stuff, our government and media insist that we move heaven and earth to save them from their own recklessness.
Jul 05, 2023
Like many Americans, I was and remain enthralled by the coverage of the OceanGate Titan tragedy. Although death defying adventures are both above my paygrade and antithetical to my risk-averse temperament, the flood of articles and nonstop cable news segments on OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, his victims, and the Titan rescue and recovery efforts piqued my interest because they are palpable expressions of the lives we do and do not value.
As many have already observed, just two days before the Titan submersible imploded near Newfoundland, hundreds of Syrian, Palestinian, Pakistani, and Egyptian migrant workers drowned when their overloaded boat sank off the coast of Greece. The media’s scant coverage of a tale of maritime misery centered on desperate, impoverished, brown immigrant workers stood in sharp contrast to the round-the-clock coverage devoted to Titan’s wealthy occupants. And while the juxtaposition triggered sufficient public outrage that CNN was ultimately compelled to acknowledge the disparity on air, the brief acknowledgement did nothing to shift the balance of coverage.
To describe the story of the Titan as sensational would be an understatement. Because the submersible’s occupants met their end during a descent to the world’s most famous shipwreck, the Titan’s tale is characterized by the kind of morbid symmetry that drives a Hollywood disaster movie, if not an Aesop’s fable. The fact that the Titan tragedy offers a window onto the hubris of the super-rich further amplifies the story’s resonance, insofar as it is an expression of our decades-long fascination with wealthy people and their excesses.
But what is so intriguing about the lives of wealthy risk-takers? If the answer to this question is that the wealthy embody our collective aspirations, how do we explain the fact that we don’t just vicariously revel in the super-wealthy’s triumphs, we regularly delight in their (excessive) tragedies?
The Titan tragedy offers a window onto the hubris of the super-rich further amplifies the story’s resonance, insofar as it is an expression of our decades-long fascination with wealthy people and their excesses.
A key element of the story is that neoliberalism’s combined commitment to socialism for the wealthy and social Darwinism for the rest of us, has nurtured a collective hero worship of the super-wealthy and a related culture of resentment toward the allegedly undeserving “bad people” and “morons” the rest of us are forced to compete against for scarce resources. Because the super-wealthy are… super-wealthy, we tend to presume that they’re smarter and basically better than the rest of us—a disposition affirmed by corporate bailouts, interest rate hikes that advantage investors by spiking unemployment and depressing wages, and real and imagined wealthy people’s decades long outsized imprint on popular culture. The super-wealthy are not just rockstars (even when they’re not), but because they are presumed to have made all the right moves, they have attained a stature akin to real-life superheroes.
If the super-wealthy exemplify what we might all achieve if we have “the smarts” or are willing to “put in the work,” the Titan tragedy makes plain that their stumbles only affirm their vaunted place in our society.
The Titan tragedy is an expression of the unhealthy reverence we have for the corporate innovator, our real-life superheroes.
Indeed, OceanGate reminds us that even when the super-rich die doing foolhardy stuff, our government and media insist that we move heaven and earth to save them from their own recklessness. Worse yet, even though the super-wealthy’s colossal blunders announce their fallibility, their apparent humanity does little to weaken their grip on either our imagination or our politics. Yes, the fact that our presumed natural betters would either build an inherently flawed submersible deathtrap or be taken in by the haughty exuberance of a blue-blooded charlatan brings our cultural heroes down to earth. However, because these bold risk takers are our “job creators” and the innovators who will eventually find a profitable way to remove carbon from our atmosphere or, failing that, spirit us off to a freshly terraformed Mars, all we can do is indulge their flights of fancy or mock them when they fly too close to the sun.
As countless cathartically cruel memes about the Titan reveal, schadenfreude most certainly informs some of the collective interest in the poorly conceived submersible’s fate. OceanGate’s Titanic trips cost between $105,000 and $250,000 per-person—far more than the average annual household income in the United States. Likening Rush’s arrogant disregard for the risks before him to that of Titanic Captain Edward Smith, film director and deep-sea explorer James Cameron has drawn parallels between the tragic ends of the Titanic and the Titan. But comparisons with the Titanic do the bad work of uncoupling the OceanGate CEO from his own historical moment—divorcing the man and his excesses from the troubled times that nurture(d) and permit(ted) them. Rush wasn’t just a bad actor. He was a symptom of a much deeper cultural and political problem that threatens us all, today.
The Titan tragedy is an expression of the unhealthy reverence we have for the corporate innovator, our real-life superheroes. Indeed, Rush’s hubris reflected much the same cost-cutting disregard for human life that characterized Boeing’s 737 MAX program— a reality that had likewise gone largely unrecognized until calamity struck. As was true of Ocean Gate, Boeing’s mismanagement of the MAX program was enabled by a language of “private sector innovation” that presumed corporate leaders were smarter and better than the rest us and should therefore be freed from the shackles of expert testimony and “stifling government oversight.”
Rush wasn’t just a bad actor. He was a symptom of a much deeper cultural and political problem that threatens us all
In contrast to the 737 MAX debacle, Rush’s arrogance led to the deaths of just five wealthy people (Rush among them). OceanGate certainly reveals the fallibility of the class that allegedly makes all the right decisions. Still, the evidence of the super-wealthy’s humanity only strengthens their sway over the popular imagination.
Our culture industry and, sadly, both major political parties insist that individual wealth will not only save us from precarity and alienation, but our personal wealth will allegedly pay dividends for our real and imagined communities. For most of us, the odds of acquiring super-wealth are only about as good as our chances of winning the Powerball. But by reminding us that the super-wealthy can make bad decisions that ultimately cost them their lives, the OceanGate tragedy offers hope, for some, that the rest of us mere mortals—who would never do something as risky as descending to the bottom of the ocean in an uncertified submersible—might escape a life of precarity by right-decisioning our way up the economic ladder.
The super-wealthy may be better than the rest of us, but they’re not gods. Our real-life superheroes are, thus, bound to fail from time to time.
Simply put, calamities like OceanGate make clear that flawed human beings can join the ranks of the super-wealthy. This, for what it’s worth, is much the same culture-work performed by the fiction that our Uber drivers and DoorDashers are up and coming entrepreneurs, rather than misclassified workers.
Superheroes take risks. The super-wealthy may be better than the rest of us, but they’re not gods. Our real-life superheroes are, thus, bound to fail from time to time. And as the popularity of the phrase “go big or go home” reveals, we have come to expect the super-wealthy to fail big—which is easy enough for them to do when taxpayers subsidize the risks.
The OceanGate disaster, former President Trump’s famous love for fast food, and even the much-anticipated Musk-Zuckerberg billionaire cage match would appear to close the divide between the super-wealthy and everyone else. But when these otherwise unrelatable superbeings have been humbled by either tragedy (in the case of the Titan) or contrived public spectacle (Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg) they remain very far removed from the rest of us.
Indeed, the contrast between the response to OceanGate and MAX 8 disasters tells the real story.
It took two crashes resulting in the deaths of nearly 350 passengers and crew engaged in mundane, commercial travel before the corporate media and regulators publicly acknowledged the inherent flaws in the 737 MAX’s design. By contrast, within a day of the disappearance of five wealthy adventurers, the U.S. and Canadian navies, assisted by several commercial deep-sea firms, mobilized a massive and very costly search and rescue operation. Moreover, even before formal confirmation of Titan’s implosion—unambiguous evidence of a fatal design flaw—coverage of the Titan quickly coalesced around well-documented concerns about Rush’s competence, leading to questions about government oversight over the submersible industry.
The real divide between the super-rich and the rest of us remains as wide as ever, despite their public failures and willingness to occasionally perform acts associated with the commoners.
Callousness toward victims of human tragedy is one of neoliberalism’s calling cards.
But does the fact that the lives of the super-wealthy matter more than the lives of everybody else mean we shouldn’t have empathy for wealthy victims of tragedy? Although the schadenfreude-fueled Titan memes may be expressions of discontent over the obvious class-skewed valuation of life in the United States, they are undeniably callous.
Of course, callousness toward victims of human tragedy is one of neoliberalism’s calling cards. Indeed, the regime’s liturgy proclaims an impartial invisible hand rewards and punishes the righteous and villainous, the smart and the dumb. If, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, far too many Americans insisted that New Orleanians invited disaster by stupidly choosing to live in a port-city, that—like all port-cities—is at, just above, or just below sea level, why would we expect an out-pouring of empathy for super-wealthy risk-takers? After all, the victims of Hurricane Katrina, much like Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 victims, were not taking on exceptional risks.
The bizarre details of this particular case, notwithstanding, the Titan tragedy fits squarely within the frame of a broader societal malaise that begs two important questions. First, how many tons of bricks have to fall on us before we realize that government regulation of private industries—from banking to commercial aviation—is both better for the public at large and far cheaper than socializing wealthy risktakers’ hubris? Second, what is the future of this nation if neoliberalism’s insistence that working people don Milk Bone underwear in a dog-eat-dog world deadens our capacity to empathize with even our neighbors? Progressives cannot pushback against this insanity if we accept the claim that organizing efforts that emphasize our common concerns constitute a betrayal of real and imagined particular interests. Frankly, drawing attention to our mutual interest is a tried-and-true vehicle for nurturing cross-group empathy and broad investment in narrower, but nonetheless important, group interests.
OceanGate’s ill-fated Titan is an expression of a long-legged political problem with a very large cultural footprint. The cult of the super-wealthy and the related insistence that (unregulated) “private sector innovation” is our salvation are a danger to us all. When left to their own devices, our real-life versions of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne can be every bit as dangerous as the fictional Gordon Gekko, Vilos Cohaagan, or Patrick Bateman.
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Biden’s Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Titan Submarine Disaster
We have seen what happens when things are built from substandard materials with faulty design.
Jul 01, 2023
When President Biden agreed to the debt deal in May, the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) became his pipeline. Climate scientists tell us it’s exactly the wrong thing to be building in 2023 but the president fast-tracked it anyway. He may claim that his hands were tied by Manchin and the Republicans who were willing to hold the economy hostage if they didn’t get their way. But no one is tying the President’s hands when it comes to an important safety measure regarding MVP.
For more than 50 years there’s been a federal law on the books that says all pipe must have an external coating that is “sufficiently ductile to resist cracking.” The purpose of the coating is to prevent corrosion over the many years and decades that the pipeline will be in service. The reason it has to be sufficiently ductile (flexible) to resist cracking is because 40-foot sections of pipe flex quite a bit when they are moved from the factory to the pipeyard to the right of way and finally into a ditch. The factory-applied coating is designed to flex but it loses its flexibility, as well as other qualities if it sits out in the sun for too long.
The National Association of Pipe Coating Applicators (NAPCA) says that the coating shouldn’t be exposed to the sun for more than six months but the MVP pipe was coated 6 or 7 years ago and most of it has been exposed to the sun in pipeyards or along right of ways ever since. The January 2020 issue of Corrosion Management reported (starting on p. 16) that the coating on Keystone XL pipe was “no longer fit for purpose” after it had sat out in the sun for years just as MVP’s pipe has. Every piece of KXL pipe that was tested failed the flexibility test and had cracks in the coating. Cracked coating is obviously no longer corrosion-proof.
The coating shouldn’t be exposed to the sun for more than six months but the MVP pipe was coated 6 or 7 years ago and most of it has been exposed to the sun in pipeyards or along right of ways ever since.
In 2010 a gas pipeline exploded in San Bruno. It killed eight people, injured more than 60 and destroyed or damaged more than 100 homes. It was a 30-inch pipeline. MVP is a 42-inch pipeline that can operate at four times the pressure. It is critical that MVP pipe have a top-quality and corrosion-proof coating, which it currently does not. We know that because of the Corrosion Management study and NAPCA’s warning.
MVP wants to get the pipe buried as soon as possible and they will no doubt claim that either the coating is fine and doesn’t need to be recoated, or that they can somehow properly recoat it in the field. It would be absurd to believe what they say. This is a company that has already paid millions of dollars in fines for hundreds of violations. And Biden should be told that half of the emissions gains from his highly touted EV (electric vehicle) sales last year were wiped out by the year’s number one climate disaster, a methane leak that MVP’s builder couldn’t get under control for thirteen days.
There are only two ways to properly address the coating problem. Either replace all the pipe with new, recently coated pipe or ship all the pipe in the field back to the plant for stripping, cleaning, and recoating, which is what a Keystone XL pipeline manager said was necessary, because the coating process is quite involved and can only properly occur in a factory setting. See this two-minute video.
After the recent submersible disaster in the North Atlantic occurred, we learned that the builder and captain of the Titan sub had been repeatedly warned by experts that his vessel was unsafe because it was built with inferior materials. He disagreed…and he was right…until he wasn’t.
The company building the Mountain Valley Pipeline will be like that guy. They will insist the coating is fine. But they aren’t the captain of this ship. Joe Biden is. This is his call, not Manchin’s or anyone else’s. The chain of command, from the bottom up, is the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA), the U.S. Dept of Transportation, DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and ultimately President Biden. He can enforce the safety rule and ensure that the coating is sufficiently ductile to resist cracking or he can ignore all the warnings like the captain of the Titan did…and then someday maybe send his thoughts and prayers.
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The Human Beings Who Died on the Adriana Were Treated Like Their Lives Didn't Matter
Meanwhile, the rescue effort mounted for wealthy tourists lost on the Titan shows what’s possible when those in danger are treated like do.
Jun 29, 2023
Recent weeks saw two terrible tragedies at sea.
In one, five explorers died when the Titan submersible imploded in the North Atlantic. In the other, over 600 refugees — most of them women and children — drowned in the Mediterranean when their fishing trawler sank.
Both voyages ended in a heartbreaking loss of life. But there were vast differences between the two tragedies in media attention and government response, highlighting just how unequal our world has become.
On board the Titan were two billionaires and one of their sons, along with a CEO and research director of companies tied to undersea adventure tourism. They were headed for the wreckage of the Titanic, which sank 111 years ago.
How many might have been saved if immigration policy were grounded in keeping migrants safe, rather than keeping them out?
When the Titan lost contact with its mother ship less than two hours after descent began, calls for assistance immediately went out. Help came quickly from the U.S. and Canadian coast guards and navies, along with support from France and offers from other countries.
Sonar-equipped planes, undersea diving equipment, trained divers, and search ships of every variety steamed to the area. Meanwhile, breathless coverage of the tragedy stayed on the front pages around the world as TV news counted down the hours of oxygen left in the small craft.
The rescue cost is unknown, but initial estimates are in the area of $100 million — a cost that will be footed by taxpayers.
Compare this to the story of the Adriana, which sank off the coast of Greece just two days after the Titan went down. The Adriana was thought to be carrying over 700 people, of whom just 104 survived. No women or children were among the survivors.
The limited news coverage of the Adriana included nothing like the up-close-and-personal human stories of the lives and dreams of the five men aboard the Titan. Except for a few, we don’t even know their names.
They were desperate migrants, many of them refugees, from countries wracked by war, poverty, climate disasters, and human rights violations — including Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, Pakistan, and Egypt. They were sailing from Libya in a decrepit fishing boat, hoping to make it to Europe alive.
The Greek coast guard quickly realized the ship was in trouble, but didn’t try to rescue the desperate passengers on the deck. Greek authorities made claims — vehemently disputed by ship captains nearby, migrant advocates, and the passengers themselves — that the ship had turned down offers of assistance.
The ship had been in distress almost two days before it sank, but help didn’t come until it was too late. How many might have been rescued with one-tenth the resources that were rushed to save the five billionaires and millionaires on the Titan?
Europe’s racist approach to migration starts and ends with preventing African, Asian, and Arab migrants from entering European territory. But it’s not just a European problem.
Indeed, the continent’s policies on migrants bear a tragic — indeed criminal — similarity to our own in the United States. As thousands of desperate refugees and migrants have died crossing the Mediterranean, thousands more from Central America, the Caribbean, and beyond have died trying to cross the desert along the U.S.-Mexico border.
How many might have been saved if immigration policy were grounded in keeping migrants safe, rather than keeping them out?
The rescue effort mounted for those lost on the Titan shows what’s possible when those in danger are treated like they matter. U.S. officials should work just as hard to rescue poor and endangered migrants as they do the billionaires — their lives matter just as much.
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