The Titanic submersible and the memeification of disaster
Tech reporter Mike Isaac considers the internet’s immediate response to the human tragedy
On Monday, the world caught word that a marine submersible from the company OceanGate had gone missing in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Newfoundland as it headed for the wreck of the Titanic with five passengers aboard.
New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac talks with host Elamin Abdelmahmoud about how this grim story so quickly inspired a deluge of jokes and memes on social media — and what their popularity says about us.
This conversation was recorded the morning of Thursday, June 22. Since then, the United States coast guard has said it has found debris from the missing Titan submersible near the wreck site of the Titanic, and all five men aboard are considered lost at sea.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.
Elamin: First of all, I want to ground us in the time that we're talking. We're talking Thursday morning right now. I don't know what's going to unfold as this story keeps happening. There's this old saying that, "comedy equals tragedy plus time." [With this story], it feels like time is not a lot of time. It's down to just a few minutes after the news broke of this story on Monday. How long was it, would you say, before you saw people start to make memes about this?
Mike: Oh man, it had to have been almost instantly. Basically as folks started figuring out what is happening. And then I think as more of the kind of crazy details started coming out is when folks, I think, just sort of weren't able to really believe it. But at the same time, you know, you start sort of memeing and joking about it just because the whole situation was so absurd.
Elamin: But also, we are kind of in this weird moment where there are so many awful tragedies happening. What do you think it is about this story that made it particularly fertile grounds for people making a lot of memes?
Mike: I think the amount of time it has taken to turn sort of crazy events into internet memes has really sped up over the years. But this has been sort of a long time coming, I think, across the internet. You and I are both very online people, I would say.
Elamin: Yes.
Mike: And so we have seen different events and how really spectacle kind of turns into a moment for people across Twitter or Facebook or whatever, to weirdly connect — because it's a shared experience. It's similar to a football game or almost absurdly enough, sort of people-watching the same thing and commenting on it. But I think the details around this case are particularly just sort of strange enough that [it] made a lot of people sort of be like, "How do I even deal with this?" And frankly, the fact that the potential ways that these people could potentially die are horrible — all of the outcomes that would have them expire are basically just really not great. And so I think just alleviating any sort of uncomfortable feelings around that often comes out in humour.
Elamin: I think there is that element of, "We turn to the absurd to deal with the possibility of death," and the idea … that we don't know what's happening here, but in the fear of death, that is one of the tools that we turn to. But it felt like the speed of it is like nothing I've ever seen before — like before we even know what's happening with these people. It's just the simple potential of death existing in this story was something that pulled people towards that absurdity. And to me anyway, it felt too fast, also too insensitive given the stakes of the story.
Mike: Yeah, totally. I think it's also because this sort of situation in which everyone kind of comes together online and understands that something bad or big is happening, and how do we deal with it, has happened so many times before.… I mean, we can go back to things that are of real, serious consequence in almost, I guess, a decade ago now: when Osama bin Laden was killed, it became a whole Twitter thing, right? Or when Trump got COVID-19, it was like a bunch of Twitter commentary almost immediately.
And so I think people are just sort of acclimating to what this means online faster now, compared to when Twitter and Facebook were a novelty and people didn't know, frankly, how to express themselves or how they felt comfortable expressing themselves online. But to your point, there are also these immediate pushback and counter-waves of like, "Why are we talking about this in this way?" … We're on a longer path that seems to be compressing over time, and I'm very curious. I don't know where it goes next exactly, but the window is getting shorter each time.
Elamin: I'll tell you some of the memes that I've seen that make me really uncomfortable. There's a few TikToks going around of somebody pretending to be the passengers on the submersible, but they're on a reality TV show and they're having conversations with each other — and that, honestly, was really difficult to watch. And I've seen some people spammed the Amazon review page of the Logitech controller that has become the central piece of the story. They're giving it reviews, and the reviews are deeply insensitive. It just feels like the insensitivity is mounting up.
I would say it's true, social media has had this long history of providing some opportunity for levity to process truly horrifying stories. But when I think about [it], the earliest example that I can think of is Gen Z's potential of using 9/11 memes.
Mike: Oh, sure.
Elamin: But that was several years later, right?
Mike: Yep.
Elamin: The notion that this would begin immediately felt like it says something about our humanity in a moment of tragedy. What do you think it says?
Mike: That's a really good point. I think about this a lot just in tech reporting: what social media sort of has evolved as, and done to our brains and how we process things and how we deal with them online. And the internet is this force that both — I argue with technologists about this all the time — it has produced great sums of wealth and great sums of, maybe, potential to regain equality in areas where there is inequality. But at the same time, it has also exacerbated a lot more inequality as well as sort of afforded a kind of distance between people, ironically, even though we've never been more connected. We're also sort of more distant from the realities of what this would mean. Like, are you going to make these jokes if you were in the press conference announcing this stuff? Or if you're going to talk to the family members involved? I do think it just removes us a few steps from reality in that sense.
Elamin: Can we just talk a little bit about how the Blink-182 element of the story sort of made it worse? Because I think maybe people might not be aware of that if you're not extremely online.
Mike: Totally. That was almost surreal. Basically, one of the passengers has a stepson who seems to be a little bit out there, but he's got a very much online personality. People found his Twitter account, and then he began tweeting about how he was going to go to the Blink-182 concert that night to grieve, and it became this whole thing. Then it sort of went off the rails and he immediately got canceled for fighting with these other people.… It was just these weird subplots that every twist and turn, honestly, were tailor-made for how the internet works, and that feeling of "we need new weird parts to this story" can make people one-up themselves. And it sort of fed into this meme-y remix culture, if that makes sense.
Elamin: When you see the story unfolding, what do you think it says about where the internet is headed, do you think?
Mike: I worry about this stuff a lot of the time. On the one hand, it's — for many people, weirdly, let's say — this way to alleviate tension in a really horrible moment for particular folks. But at the same time, what are the next events that people are able to joke about in a way that gives them distance but doesn't connect them to what the reality is of what's happening, you know? I just worry that as hyper-connected as we are, there are ways in which it disconnects us from what's going on in the world. I don't know the long term effects of that, but it's concerning to me.
You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Mike Isaac produced by Stuart Berman.