Rescue

Almost every news story includes what I have come to call "Neptunean" content, inferences, undisclosed judgments or Rules, "back stories" latent but not expressed in Narrative. (The reference is to the manner in which the planet Neptune was first detected.) Rarer are those events which include an entire Neptunean encyclopedia. The implosion of the Titan submersible is one of those.

Most importantly, the Titan is an entire book on the Myth of Rescue. As such, it is also about Inequality. It is an amusing essay on Ontology v. Epistemology. It has Subtext about Libertarianism, the State of Nature, the Post-Truth World, and Declaring Victory. And it contains a significant digression about Billionaire arrogance and lawlessness-- and the astonishment displayed when a Billionaire (or wannabe) discovers that the Laws of Physics apply to him. It also subsumes a small essay on Agency and Responsibility. I will deal with Rescue last.

I start from the premise that the Titan was a submersible more in an Ontological than an Epistemological sense. The entrepreneur, Stockton Rush, declared it to be a submersible, so it was. The fact that he was able, in the absence of any law or government, of any human supervision, to deploy it, killing himself and his customers, is a sort of Poker Tell about the state of our declining civilization. In a memorable early Philip K. Dick novel, Time Out of Joint, objects begin to disappear, replaced by slips of paper with their names ("Park bench" in lieu of an actual, familiar wooden park bench with peeling paint and one broken slat). Among the objects or entities I deal with regularly which seem to be undergoing this transformation are the Amazon music player app on my phone, which often plays a single song before turning itself off during my walk or work out. It occupies an Ontological category with more self confidence than it replaces the old CD player, which got me through an entire half hour of exercise without my having to manage it or even think about it. The CD player in that sense was a tool which uncomplainingly fulfilled a function, while so many of today's "tools" just stand for a role, without fulfilling it. You can't sit on a piece of paper which says "Park bench", and you couldn't make a round trip to the Titanic on the Titan.

The name is rather amusing. Calling the original ship the "Titanic" was an act of consummate human arrogance-- and also rather foolish, given the actual outcome of the underlying Greek myth, where the Titans are overthrown by Zeus and cast into Tartaros. Calling a modest tin can destined to be crushed flat by the pressure the "Titan" was simply re-enactment of history without learning anything.

Stockton Rush's Libertarian "tech bro" comments about safety and test are appalling but funny. "At some point, safety just is pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.” When challenged as to whay he had not put the Titan through a government certification process, Rush said: “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation". In Ontologically presenting the Titan to the world as a "submersible", Rush ignored or rejected as "baseless cries" very specific input from other experts, some of which he had originally solicited, that the viewport was only certified to a fraction of the depth to which he was planning to take it, that the carbon fiber from which he made the hull did not do well at pressure, that he had not tested the vehicle nearly enough, and that he had no redundancy in systems (a second submersible or ROV available which could reach the first one in case of emergency).

Rush thrived in an area in which there was no government, dives made in international waters whose goals, methods and technology were not the subject of an international treaty. As such, the implosion of the Titan stands as a neat refutation of the cornerstone principle of Libertarianism, that governments are unnecessary and that entrepreneurs will make rational rules-of-the-road, better than laws, driven by their own well-considered wish not to die or to kill their customers. Libertarianism fails to take into consideration human greed, stupidity and especially vanity.

I have written extensively about "Billionairism", as a phenomenon by which smart people actually become stupid. This toxic belief system resulted in four powerful, influential people actually paying $250,000 apiece to die at Stockton Rush's hands. History is replete with stories of people who jumped to their deaths from tall buildings wearing personal flying rigs or parachutes that didn't work. Stockton Rush is more unusual, in that he took four passengers along.

Billionaires seem to think that they are the Protagonist of every story, and therefore have what TVTropes engagingly refers to as "plot armor":

"Sometimes referred to as 'Script Immunity' or a 'Character Shield', Plot Armor is when a main character's life and health are safeguarded by the fact that he's the one person (or one of several) who can't be removed from the story. Therefore, whenever Bob is in a situation where he could be killed (or at the least very seriously injured), he comes out unharmed with no logical, In-Universe explanation".

On a very different note, it also intrigues me very much that, if anyone was unable to resist the urge to defecate during the eight hour dive, they did so behind a curtain, in the nosecone, by the viewport, in a bucket, with the music turned up. Thus the customers were potentially paying a quarter million dollars to sniff shit. Similarly, the people paying tens of thousands of dollars to sherpas to haul them up Everest, a closely related variation on a Billionairist belief system, have to sniff garbage, shit and sweat in base camp. This actually stresses the purely Ontological nature of the enterprise and cancels the idea that billionaires create exclusive, unimaginably luxurious surroundings to waste their wealth. I recall a dinner party conversation with a particularly vain friend of my parents, a lawyer bragging about a recent trip to Kenya. I told him I had been there myself, on a budget, taking trains and vans to the different parks and camping out. He said, "Yes, but you didn't fly over Amboseli in a balloon, drinking champagne". But the Titan, which didn't even have seats, was not a Champagne Balloon experience. Apparently, if you can persuade a billionaire to pay for an exclusive experience no one else can afford, if they have to sniff shit behind the Magic Curtain or inside the Black Box, that doesn't matter.

As far as Agency is concerned, in recent years I have made a study of what I call "Glitch" theory, which disclaims responsibility, and attributes all bad outcomes to acts of God or Nature. An example, about which I wrote last month, was the man who choked a homeless man to death on the New York subway, then issued a press release expressing regret for the "unforeseen outcome" (seriously). The implosion of the Titan was not a surprising little freak of nature. Stockton Rush killed everyone else on board. Billionaire Shahzana Dawood of Pakistan killed his nineteen year old son, Suleman, by bringing him along.

Finally, before getting to the fascinating subject of Rescue, I have a comment on the shifting of costs. In an economics course in college, which I found confusing, I at least understood that sleights of hand with costs were possible, and even popular. For example, a few years ago, there was some discussion of the idea that huge chain stores, by not paying employees a living wage, was shifting part of the cost of their salaries to the government, which sustained them with welfare and other benefits. Surprising as it may sound, Stockton Rush was substantially under-pricing his product by not including Rescue in the cost. If he had been forced to create, or contract for, a service which could come retrieve customers stuck 12,000 feet down, a ticket on the Titan would likely have been five million dollars, not $250,000. Instead, he relied on the volunteer efforts of the governments he disdained, to send ships, people and technology outside their jurisdictions to rescue his customers. Which they did.

Now for the main topic, Rescue. We are typically all raised to believe that the State will Rescue Everyone All the Time; as it Declines and Falls, there are great big gaps and contradictions as to whom it will Rescue; by the End-game, no one is being rescued. This Rhymes, by the way, with the “NYPD is your friend”, “NYPD surprisingly beats some other people”, “NYPD beats everyone” Arc. As Eminem rapped: “Superman ain't savin' Shit”.

I have also previously written about Rescuing people on Everest. In that heavily Kitschified environment, people who have paid tens of thousands of dollars effectively to be carried up the mountain like baggage are reluctant to sacrifice their investment to Rescue the unfortunate mountaineers (frequently of other ethnicities and genders) they see dying in the snow in front of them. Recently, there was a news article about a Sherpa who, without compensation, sacrificed an ascent to carry a dying climber down the mountain as a human backpack. The victim, surviving, blocked the rescuer on social media; his vanity and career as a supposed Everest consultant were threatened by his own near-death experience. I have surmised that we should not travel anywhere we cannot bring our morality, and offered as a Contrast the annual or so news report in which five or six sewer workers die, trying to serially rescue each other from fumes in a tunnel.

Everest and the Titan are similar. In both cases you are paying mega-bucks for bragging rights, to be carried somewhere exotic like luggage.

Last week, off of Greece, hundreds of boat people drowned while the Greek coast guard stood by watching, hopeful that (if they did not intervene) the overloaded boat would make it out of Greek waters to Italy. This is the story to hold up against the emergency of the Titan, to which at least three countries have responded, along with private volunteers. You are an impoverished brown-skinned person escaping from intolerable drought, famine or mass murder in a third world country: No Rescue. You are a billionaire who paid six figures to sniff shit in an appallingly dangerous situation for which you are not prepared: Rescue. Sub Specie my preferred Rule-Set, we have a moral duty to rescue the boat people in Greece, in large part because of our contribution to the conditions that will eventually cause half the planet's population to try to move in with the other half. We have no moral duty to rescue the billionaires on the Titan, who risked their lives out of pure stupidity, vanity and complacence. I would calculate the cost of recovering the Titan, and then spend that amount on the boat people.