A digital 3D scan of The Titanic. Photo / Atlantic Productions, Magellan
A digital 3D scan of The Titanic. Photo / Atlantic Productions, Magellan
OPINION
“This story’s nuts!” promised John Campbell on 1News. It was an introduction that didn’t really narrow down the field of potential subjects in these wild times. The story turned out to be: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, cage fight! An unusually gleeful BBC reporter laid out their form. Twitter’sMusk: “Older, carrying a bit more timber.” Worth £196 billion [$400b]. In the Meta (formerly Facebook) corner, Zuckerberg: worth £123 billion.
What? Musk tweeted that he was up for it. Zuckerberg posted, “Send me location.” Musk is 52. Zuckerberg is 39 and has won jiu-jitsu tournaments. Musk: “If this is for real, I will do it.” Revenge of the nerds, only this time they are fighting themselves. Is that progress?
Why? They already rule the word like a couple of feudal lords – we are but serfs toiling on their vast estates, profiting little as we enrich them with our every post, every tweet. If you can have anything you want and everyone wants a piece of you, does anything feel real? Despite their unimaginable worth, their terrifying reach, they are bored.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. In a now-viral back-and-forth seen on Twitter and Instagram, the two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a “cage match” face-off. Photos / AP
The other big story that night was far bleaker tale, a Shakespearean tragedy of ambition, hubris, and the sort of ennui that leads people who can afford it to take risks that are pointlessly extreme. One hundred and eleven years after it sank, the Titanic claimed five more lives when OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded 4000m below the surface. Its mission: to commune with wreckage of the great boat that sank, as director and deep-sea adventurer James Cameron said, “Because the captain took it full-steam into an ice field on a moonless night … after warnings during the day [of] what was ahead of him.”
Founder of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, at the helm on that last voyage, would have known Titanic’s story backwards. On a Newshub item he could be seen telling a laughing journalist, “I run the whole thing with this game controller.”
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush demonstrated the games controller being used to missing submarine Titan. Image / CBS
On 1News, deep sea exploration specialist Rob McCallum shared Rush’s reply to his safety warnings. Rush said he was “tired of industry players who try to use safety arguments to stop innovation”.
Pride, ambition, ennui. Boris Johnson wrote a Daily Mail column in which he calls the Titanic “one of the modern world’s most potent metaphors”. He outlined the lessons of its fate: “That hubris invites nemesis, that man proposes and God disposes … that no amount of cash can help you cheat death.”
He then proceeds blithely to ignore those lessons, taking a swipe along the way at the Lefty Twittersphere for being unimpressed with how the adventure was conducted. “Let me tell you how I feel about those on the Titanic expedition,” Johnson writes. “I think they are heroes.”
Yet the tragedy was not that someone wanted to do it his own way, decided to take huge risks and died. It was that he took paying passengers who placed their trust in him along for the ride, ignoring repeated, urgent, expert warnings.
Those people died in a cause, Johnson assures readers, “pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge and experience — that is typically British, and that fills me with pride.” Is James Cameron any less an adventurer because he has said, “I wouldn’t have gone on that sub”?
There was a 19-year-old boy on the trip with his father. His aunt said in an interview after the implosion of Titan that he was terrified. Cameron has speculated that the sound of the delamination of the submersible’s carbon fibre composite could have been heard by those inside. That boy.
Among other nuts stories of our time: Putin’s increasingly chaotic war; Trump having another go at unknitting the fabric of society; AI marching on like a headless army no one knows what to do about; climate change … Hubris, ambition, power, procrastination, ennui. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport,” wrote Shakespeare. His lessons remain forever relevant and forever unlearnt as we charge, full steam ahead and heedless, at icebergs on a dark, moonless night.
