When a man risks everything. I successfully avoided the story of the submersible for a day or so before the sheer volume of the discourse finally caught me, as if the gravitational pull of the blackest hole in space, and dragged me into the news, where I watched in horror as it all progressed: five hopeful explorers of the sunken Titanic, sealed in a metal tube roughly the size of a Subaru, lost several miles down below the surface of the ocean. Or, this is what we thought. If the men were still alive, they had no way to communicate with the crew above. They had no food, no water, no room to fully extend their legs, even, and maybe 40 hours left to breathe. If they lost power, their vessel would be pitch black, and freezing. Then, the more specifically human dangers in a situation so fraught were many, and almost too disturbing to consider. The first impulse of most people who learned of the story was, of course, to empathize. What if it were me, or someone I loved? Terrible. Unthinkable. But while this natural impulse to empathy certainly comprised the reaction of most, it was not universal. To the contrary, and to my initial surprise, hundreds of thousands of people appeared to be… celebrating the disaster. Why, I wondered. What could these men and their families have possibly done to deserve so gruesome a fate? I found my answer soon enough. Two of the adventurers were very rich, it turns out, and therefore not quite human. Other. “Part of the problem.” They deserved to die.

Ben Collins, NBC’s chief “disinformation expert,” was the first person I saw characterize the event as “comforting,” and kind of fun. But this was just the shallow end of the psychopathic pool. Hamish Harding “is running a private jet company,” one woman informed the world, which means it’s good he’s dead. Later that night, after “banging” was detected by search parties using sonar, one man photoshopped a bunch of orcas with instruments deep beneath the waters clanging. “Bang Bang,” he wrote, “the water’s fine, send more billionaires.” Over 75,000 people liked that tweet. Matt Bernstein, a left wing political influencer popular among the “disinformation experts,” joked the rich were finally eaten (by sea creatures). Finally, and inevitably I guess, the New Republic’s Daniel Strauss produced the saga’s single most horrific piece of content, or at least thus far. The company’s CEO may be slowly dying 13,000 feet below the surface, he reported, but let’s also keep in mind he donated money to a few Republicans.

I mean, my expectations of the press are low but holy shit.

A lot of what appeared online as this shocking story developed was just a bit of gallows humor, and I’m not here to be the joke police. Okay? I love you, Trashcan Paul, and I will always support your right to be depraved as hell. But the outright dehumanization of the victims from committed Marxists was something else entirely. Namely, it was honest. It was also familiar.

A few months back, Slate writer Edward Ongweso Jr. was widely celebrated in the tech press for a piece of his in which he cutely joked venture capitalists were “parasites,” and they should be mass murdered. It’s a kind of Marxist “joke,” which might more sanely be characterized as a thinly veiled threat, a leftist trend I’ve written about for years. But in an admittedly much funnier recent example, Timnit Gebru, media darling and disgraced former Google “AI safety expert,” stretched the genre to bold new heights. The collapse of San Francisco, she argued, with in particular the large number of homeless encampments, the city’s shitty train service, and literally the fact that several dance clubs she once liked went out of business, was directly resultant of “tech bros.”

Many questions follow: are the “tech bros” shitting in the street? Are the “tech bros” breaking into homes, and cars, and selling fentanyl? Are they quietly watching while the fentanyl is sold? Are the “tech bros” closing our schools, abolishing advanced math, or systematically blocking new construction in the city? Actually, now you’ve really got me wondering, is there even one San Francisco-based “tech bro” in a position of political power? In any capacity?

Timnit, are the “tech bros” in the room with us right now?

Ironically, one of this woman’s favorite things to do is rail against the dehumanizing horrors of racism. Meanwhile, she’s made a career of characterizing a specific class of “white” “men” — pejorative labels, explicitly and incessantly applied — as “TESCREAL,” a concept I took apart in Robots are Racist. The purpose of the term is simple, if despicable: name a group of people, and strip of them of their humanity, to make them easier for targeting. It’s not Joe in accounting you don’t like, for whatever specific reason, the man is a TESCREAL. He’s a weird person who believes in weird things, and he wants to prevent you from breeding — a thing Timnit literally argues, as she hitches her wagon to borderline blood libel in the name of diversity and inclusion. Tech bros? These are not good people who believe in the presently-favored, clown world iteration of black supremacy, runs the logic of the craziest people in America. These are not even people, really. “Tech bros” are “parasites,” remember, and the prudent thing to do with “parasites” is… well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

In this kind of racist, classist stew from discourse hell, how could we not arrive at the actual celebration of gruesome death? Dehumanization has been used for countless horrors, and across the political spectrum. But the particular variety dominant today, and the particular extermination to which it leads, is the natural conclusion of Marxist ideology, as we have seen through history, without exception, in every communist nation. If a group of people, who are hardly even people when you think about it, control the world, and the world is terrible? Hand me the kazoo, their mortal peril is a party.

The other thing about the submersible saga is nobody knows jack shit about submarines. That means the tiniest shred of a strange detail can be woven into, really, whatever story you’d like to tell. In this case: the greed of the rich has guaranteed their doom. But almost every piece of this story is more nuanced than it seems at first glance. For example, the Titan’s use of a video game controller, widely mocked as recklessly cheap, appears to be somewhat standard. Important instructions… on duct tape?! I have some shocking news for you about the International Space Station. But do you know what would really drive the ‘out of control capitalist’ narrative to the next level? If we found a way to loop in Elon Musk, “tech bro” god.

The most unhinged elements of the cartoon left had questions: did Starlink, Elon’s satellite internet provider, cause the submersible disaster? Possibly, declared “fact-checking” outlet Snopes. Okay. Does Wi-Fi work underwater, let alone 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface? No. Is it therefore reasonable to assume nobody working on a vessel designed for diving would attempt reliance, in any way whatsoever, on a satellite internet provider? Yes. In any case, Elon’s probably responsible for murder here, when you really think about it. Something must be done about these “tech bros”!

Still more alarming than the dehumanization inherent of this entire discourse was the degradation of our spirit so painfully apparent, and so proudly displayed. While being male, white, and (especially) rich were all good reasons the Titan explorers deserved to die an unimaginably horrifying death, the risk these men took was probably most often cited, by most people — including many apparently nice, normal men and women! — as the real reason they sort of had it coming. In the first place, five men crammed in a small metal coffin to see the Titanic, which is something you can watch on YouTube? That’s just stupid. Like, what an incredibly stupid thing to do. For what possible reason would you do this?

The conversation concerning risk grew more pronounced once interviews surfaced in which Stockton Rush, the doomed CEO lost at sea, downplayed the risk involved in his enterprise, along with early evidence of what seems a reckless disregard for reasonable safety guidelines. But the quote the press keeps repeating: “At some point,” Rush said, “safety is just a waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed. Don’t get in your car. Don’t do anything.”

And, yes, this sounds very bad in the context of the actual horror movie that followed. But here’s the thing: isn’t it also true?

There is no man alive today descended of the first men who foraged for the first mushrooms, fruits, and vegetables, sorting out — for the rest of human history — which were poisonous. But thank God for those crazy, ancient, caveman-era hippies. Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium, and developed techniques for use in treating tumors. Tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of lives, have been saved because of her work. She died from radiation exposure. How many explorers died before we charted the oceans? How many men have died in combat, fighting to protect our country? Hell, how many fishermen have died so you can pick up crab legs at your local supermarket?

In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew members aboard, perhaps most famously including Christa McAuliffe, an idealistic school teacher. But there would have been no space program at all without risk, and because of the risk our astronauts have taken we can say, proudly, we have been to the moon. For a more grounded accomplishment of note, advances in rocketry have advanced a global network of satellites. For a more aspirational accomplishment to come, man will one day live beyond our world.

The solo climb, the Everest trek, the remote expedition — these are deadly, unnecessary risks. Why would anyone take them? Tabling the more obviously gruesome question of why we shouldn’t celebrate their deaths, why should we celebrate their accomplishments? Here, I think we often miss the point. When it comes to the recreational adventurer, it’s true, few of these narrow victories matter. But that doesn’t make them meaningless for all the risk that they demand. The risk, itself, is the point.

We celebrate the risk taken for glory, for wealth, for curiosity, because watching YouTube videos of the Titanic from the safety of our covers is not the thing that makes us great. The quality that drives so small a subset of the global population to extreme risk is the quality responsible for many, if not most of the most important things we have ever built or discovered. That’s what makes us great. We are nothing without risk.

I grew up awed and fascinated by Harry Houdini, and the million iterations of his death-defying underwater escape that permeated pop culture. In the typical example, a dashing magician waves to the audience. Then he’s locked in chains by his beautiful assistant, bound at the legs, nailed into a giant, wooden crate, and thrown into the sea. The crate sinks. Minutes pass, which feel like hours, and then finally the magician reappears, reborn, triumphant over death.

He could have died. Many magicians have. Why would he risk this?

The crowd cheers, enthralled by this act of such tremendous bravery and cunning. Why did he do it? Because it could be done, and now here was his gift to the world: proof. We are capable of anything. You are capable of anything.

You’re welcome.

Anyone sufficiently committed to misery can find some element of the Titan voyage to condemn, or to mock. There’s a lot of material here, everyone is watching, and social media has this pesky tendency of rewarding our most callous takes. Then, in this sad case, it’s also true the risk taken ended in tragedy. This afternoon, the men on the Titan were confirmed dead. It now appears their tiny vessel imploded, which at least mercifully spared them of all those early horrors we imagined. But these men also lived. How many of us can say the same?

-SOLANA