Let’s Implode all the Billionaires

Did you hear about the “submersible?” The little barely-sea-worthy craft that wasn’t even up to snuff for anyone to call it a submarine? The thing that was basically a very expensive pressurized fiberglass and titanium minivan made to take absurdly rich people down into the ocean’s depths to take a gander at shit? The “Titan,” the one that was going down so those rich fucks could go gandering at the wreck of the Titanic? You heard how so many people were looking for that rinky dink little ship and its crew all week, until they figured out that it had obviously imploded?

Of course you did.

The news was filled last week with daily updates about the search for the lost crew of the “Titan submersible.” Tons of money, resources, and manpower were thrown at the terrible tragedy of a small gang of rich tourists taking a ridiculous, pointless, and needlessly dangerous vacation excursion. And hours of media coverage was devoted to the search and speculation of what could have happened. The Titan probably got as much or more contemporaneous coverage as the Titanic did.

Meanwhile, hundreds of migrants died when their ship capsized off the coast of Greece, during the same week, and got scant attention. Innocent poor people died in droves all over the world and no one particularly cared. Or the news media didn’t care enough to make people care. They presumed that people didn’t care. But they knew that everyone would care about the story of a small ragtag crew of wealthy looky loos, who most folks could have guessed were dead about a day after contact with them was lost. Because that’s a more unusual, and potentially more exciting, story, about rich people.

The story of the Titan is about as stupid and embarrassing as the story of the Titanic. The fascination that people have with the Titanic is baffling. The Titanic was just a shitty ship. It sank, like thousands of ships throughout history. That’s it. There’s no mystery, no adventure, nothing particular to justify the mass obsession with it. The story of the Titanic is a joke. They built a giant ship, proclaimed that it was unsinkable, and it almost immediately sank. Do we make movies and take dangerous trips to check out the wreckage of planes and cars that blew up and crashed on their first test run? People have made much bigger and better ships since the Titanic, many of which didn’t sink like a stone on their maiden voyage. There have been much more sympathetic shipwrecks, as well. I feel a lot worse for the countless shipwrecked refugees, or for all the kidnapped Africans shackled in the hulls of sunken slave ships, than I do for the passengers on the Titanic, and much more than for the crew of the Titan.

But this incident does potentially have a silver lining. It shows us a way of dealing with our excess of billionaires. There are too many billionaires these days, too many greedy, egotistical parasites, hoarding wealth and attention. Wouldn’t it be grand if we could cull their numbers by sending them down in implodable deep sea vessels? We could pulp the whole lot of them, provide vital nutrients to the monsters that dwell in the ocean’s depths, and redistribute their wealth among the people who need it, who don’t blow their money doing stupid shit like gandering at objectively insignificant shipwrecks.

Of course, this wouldn’t work on all of them. They’d eventually get wise to all their peers being jellied in over-stressed pressure tubes going down to see the wreckage of sunken or previously imploded crafts. That just means we’ll have to vary it up. There are plenty of land-based catastrophes where a curious billionaire could be disposed of. And there’s space, of course. We could send countless rich fucks into space. Hell, some of them are already tempting fate with their vanity joy rides there themselves.