Is five people missing 12,500 feet under the sea something to laugh about? The answer, obviously, is no, and the very question is ghoulish. Yet we have to ask it all the same — because too many onlookers to the tale of the lost OceanGate expedition didn’t seem to think the answer was obvious at all.
The Coast Guard announced Thursday that the implosion of a submersible on an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic likely killed everyone aboard. Yet across the internet this week, on Twitter, TikTok and beyond, many people didn’t treat the story as a catastrophe as it unfolded. They treated it as a farce.
The apparent reasoning — that some of these people were billionaires and that billionaires aren’t worthy of compassion — rings more revolting than ever after the tale’s horrible end. But the sentiment’s glaring cruelty is why it’s worth examining.
This is, admittedly, mostly a tale of social media, not a story of what the less-online might call “real life.” But social media is real life. What kids who spend their days on the internet look at and listen to on these platforms says something about what they believe, and what they believe determines what the future is going to look like. This week’s gagfest over the submersible suggests that we’re hurtling toward a world in which the loss of human life is a punchline — and social media’s tendency to turn us into antagonists is to blame.
Judging by the past days’ commentary, it’s okay to grin while people die — at least, if those people are ludicrously rich. The upshot, expressed in one of the more popular tweets on the subject (32,000 likes), was, “You paid a quarter million dollars to be a funny Wikipedia article in 20 years. You die & become a goofy fact.”
Memes on the subject abounded, with users essentially cutting and pasting the passengers’ suffering into the same image or joke formats they all jump on to ridicule feuding celebrities. A case in point, with a whopping 100,000 likes and counting:
The Atlantic Ocean: https://t.co/qlRDQH2qLE
The headline of an article in satirical news site the Onion reads, “Coast Guard Sends Another Submersible Full of Billionaires After The First One.” A colleague who attended a trivia evening at a local bar told me that many teams had adopted names along the lines of “We All Die in a S—ty Submarine.”
Dark humor, of course, is nothing new. This particular story came with its share of absurdities, from the $30 gaming controller steering the sub to the stepson of one of the passengers feuding with the rap star Cardi B over whether it was disrespectful of him to attend a Blink-182 concert as his family awaited news of his stepfather’s fate.
The internet treats everything as content; it cares a lot less for context. So these facts, rather than adding an air of surrealism to a somber moment, turned into fodder for the 21st-century equivalent of dead baby jokes.
Usually, though, tellers of twisted wisecracks acknowledge the queasiness of their quips — that what they’re doing is, at root, sort of horrible. What was weird about this week’s comedy club environment is that so many refused to accept the premise that there was anything awful about cracking wise, because there wasn’t even anything so awful about what was happening to these possibly suffocating people. When others chimed in to suggest the callousness of their chuckling, the joke-tellers replied, no, actually, laughing was good, because these rich guys were asking for it. The episode was an illogical extension of the glee that accompanied reports earlier in the month of killer whales ramming into expensive yachts. Except that this time, what was in peril wasn’t unnecessarily large boats, but human lives.
These days, however, peace and goodwill toward men don’t tend to go viral. The crass jokes illustrate how the internet’s gravity pulls us toward extremes. The incentive is to argue or inflame, because it’s gratifying when our allies loudly agree and our enemies loudly disagree — and besides, the algorithm likes it. More clicks, less careful consideration. Especially when it comes to ideology or politics, persuasion appears impossible, so we give up on each other and many of us give up on everything else, too, descending into doomerism: The world is warming, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
At best, we’re always looking for a chance to act ironic or provocative. At worst, we’re looking for a chance to be angry with each other, or even terrible to each other. Combine this impulse with the “eat-the-rich attitude” so common among Gen Z and left-leaning Americans of all ages. The belief is that not only is every billionaire a policy failure, but also being a billionaire is a personal failure, because of the immorality and lack of empathy inherent in hoarding that much money while the huddled masses starve and the globe gets hotter. In this context, the deaths of these ridiculously wealthy individuals look like an excellent opportunity for a truly disgusting meme. What we are missing is that responding to a perceived lack of humanity with dehumanization will only — pardon the sick, sick pun — sink us all.
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