Name: The Titan Submersible: Is it funny?
Uploaded: 2025-11-29T17:01:44.000Z
Duration: 17 min 21 s
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Adverbs of manner

I want to talk about the period of time when the Titan submersible went missing with only 40 hours of breathable air on board.

Now, once people found out that one of the occupants was a billionaire, the onslaught of jokes and memes began reminding us all once more that humanity maybe doesn't deserve Internet access.

Submarine edition is here with the hottest tracks like Drownin, hit single don't hold your breath, unforgettable hits like no air.

Honestly, the only memes that really made me laugh were like the wholesome ones of like if it was my man in the ocean.

There were also a few like me finding out billionaires are in the sea and people just like straight up strutting into the water, which I really enjoyed.

Now the countdown began to find the submersible before it ran out of air.

And as the hours went by and the memes got darker and darker, a debate began to appear on the Internet begging the is this funny or a horrific lack of empathy?

Now, if you're not familiar with what happened, Oceangate expedition operates a submersible called the Titan for tourists who are willing to pay 250,000 a trip to see the Titanic wreckage.

Now, apparently prior to the tragedy, the Titan actually made like 13 trips to the remains of the Titanic.

I don't understand who is paying for this or why or how it became a thriving business, but

Now on June 18, five people were aboard the Titan.

Chief executive of Oceangate Expeditions, Stockton Rush, British billionaire and explorer Hamish Harding, Pakistani businessman Shahzad Dawood and his 19 year old son Sul Suleiman, and

French maritime expert Paul Henri Nardiolet, who had been on more than 35 dives to the Titanic wreck site.

Now, shortly after the Titan went missing, some absolutely insane details came out.

Most notably that it was controlled by a repurposed Logitech controller, taking a completely new approach to the sub design.

And it's all run with this game controller and these touch screens.

So if you want to go forward, you press forward.

If you want to go back, you go back, turn left, turn right, go down, go up.

I'm sorry, I'm like expecting this man to tell me that if I hit like a B, a B or X, Y, X, Y, or some kind of combo that the sub will like tuck and roll or something because this is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen.

And it's Bluetooth, so I can hand it to anybody and it's meant for a 16 year old to throw it around.

We keep a couple of spares on board just in case.

I would not trust that thing to like help me win Super Smash Brothers, let alone navigate me through the ocean.

This shocked all of us and of course only fueled a new vertical of memes.

It's incredibly disrespectful and way too soon.

But when I looked a little bit more into it, I kind of got some conflicting info.

So apparently in 2017 the Navy announced it was going to implement Xbox controllers on submarines to operate photonic masts which are similar to periscopes.

But then Steve Wright, who's an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of West of England, said that yeah, while many aircraft and sea vessels are partially controlled by what looks like a video game controller, the actual devices would be more advanced and reliable.

Wright was shown a photo of the Titan's Logitech controller and he said, and

I'm quoting, I've never seen anything like that.

And that he would expect that the real submersible controller would have a reliability of about a thousand times that of the games handset.

Now, beyond the controller fiasco, it was revealed that much of the Titan itself had been built with off the shelf parts or discounted materials.

The hull was made from used cut price carbon fiber from a Boeing that was past its airplane shelf life.

And the capsule was bolted shut from the outside and could not be opened from the interior.

The negligence of safety procedures by CEO Stockton Rush were almost criminal.

And his comments, particularly you're remembered for the rules you break, did not age well.

Now it came out also that the Titan was not even certified to reach the levels of deep sea where the Titanic lay.

And apparently Rush had been warned for years by leaders in the submersible craft industry about the possibility of catastrophic problems with the Titan's design.

Like I want you to take a look at James Cameron's $10 million submersible compared to the Titan.

It's clear that Rush cut so many corners, he was a full on circle.

All of this of course meant that the memes wrote themselves.

I mean the architecture was just too good for people to resist.

A billionaire who paid a quarter of a million dollars to deep sea dive with a negligent CEO for the pleasure of viewing a century old similarly avoidable tragedy.

I mean the writers this year were really going off let the strike end.

But what I find really interesting about this situation is how the public's empathy shifted based on the context and perspective that they were viewing this event through.

Now, on the one hand, the sort of like lack of empathy was so obvious when you looked at this from a class perspective.

I think Online creator Josh Dawes articulated this really well.

What could have possibly happened in these last 100 years to create a condition where millions of working class people had almost no empathy for a billionaire in despair?

Where could this lack of empathy come from?

Could it be that poor and middle class, lower class people see the wealth that their labor creates being profiteered on at neural oligarchy levels?

So much so that they themselves are paywalled from the very things that their labor is supposed to provide them, like health care, like education, like access to education.

Their living conditions are being commodified to such an extreme level that, that they don't even know if they can live in the places that they grew up in.

And all of this is happening at the hands of millionaires and billionaires that are taking too much from what they're not creating.

Could it be that we all know this on an intellectual level, but

I am a numbers gal and I want to be armed with concrete information.

So I want us to quickly take a look at the numbers to really understand the class divide that fuels this lack of empathy.

This is going to be a lot of numbers and facts and statistics, but

I want to paint you a really accurate picture, but

for you to understand why people were making some of the darkest memes we've seen in a long time.

Now, according to the New York Times, the federal minimum wage has risen just once since 1996.

But when you adjust that number for inflation, the minimum wage has actually declined by 26%.

And the economic Policy Institute says that if the minimum wage kept up with a growing economy, it would be much, much higher at 1885 in 2016, over seven years ago.

Now in comparison, banks are making record profits.

According to the New Yorker, in 2021, JP Morgan made a post tax profit of $48.3 billion.

That is 35% more than they made pre pandemic in 2019, which was $36 billion billion dollars.

Also fun fact, bank overdraft fees did not exist until the 1990s, and

they now make banks $8 billion in profit annually.

Since 2010, banks have taken over $460 billion in overdraft fees because, yes, let's charge people money for having no money.

As if that wasn't insulting enough, the CEO of TCF bank really had the audacity to buy a yacht and name it Overdraft.

Now, the wealth gap between America's richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016, according to Time, since 1980, the top 10% of earners have seen an income growth of 144%, while the bottom half of earners have only seen 20.

And Pew Research shows that the highest earning 20% of families made more than half of all US income in 2018.

Sociologist Matthew Desmond, who won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for his book Poverty and Profit in the American City, has now written a new book called Poverty by America, where he explores why exactly the United States poverty rate has not improved in 50 years.

census Bureau and other sources, he reported 1 in 18Americans live in deep poverty or a subterranean level of scarcity, and

that the racial wealth gap is as large as it was in the 60s.

When you look at the wealth inequality in the United States, much less around the world, the lack of empathy from the public for the Titan submersible is not only understandable, you start to feel that way a little bit too, right?

Like these people paid a quarter of a million dollars to take a ride in an expired sardine can to visit a watery grave.

The memes are starting to make sense to me, and

I'm sure it felt good to a lot of people to see someone like Stockton, who prioritized profit over people's safety, potentially get his due.

It felt good for the public to think that billionaire Hamish Harding, who paid a quarter million dollars, which to him is like $10, get his own personal fyre festival.

But what if I told you that that billionaire had two children?

And then what if I showed you pictures of his children?

And what if you were looking at a child who would grow up without a father?