Big Tech can’t save you: modern lessons we can take from the Titanic disaster

I got into a debate recently, via Titanic-related Facebook groups, about whether the 1997 movie would be a blockbuster hit if it were released today. My opinion was no, it would not. Why? Because we’re living through an age of wokeness run riot. I’m pretty progressive on race and equality issues, and I take pride in being self-educated on these issues; I’m also determined to remain teachable. But I also respect historical accuracy. James Cameron’s movie portrays the end of the Gilded Age in all its honor and glory (Titanic nerds: do you see what I did there?) as well as its dark underbelly of indifference and inequality. The movie shows, in painstaking detail, the era’s veneer of elegance and sophistication combined with rampant hypocrisy and greed. Titanic is historically accurate, and history is out with the woke folks. The market for historical movies and novels is shrinking, and not because of lack of audience interest — books like Flags of Our Fathers went on to become smash hits after being turned down by every publishing house in New York. It’s the movie studios and publishing conglomerates that have decided history is, literally, so last century.

As for Titanic, it would be hard to sell the SJWs on a plot where the female lead is repeatedly rescued — both physically and psychologically — by a working-class white guy, until she builds the courage to rescue herself. Audiences might still love these stories, but our cultural gatekeepers do not. They demand “strong female leads” who run roughshod over the male leads — if they have a male lead at all. James Cameron’s Titanic just wouldn’t go over with the Woke Folks.

But there’s another reason: the sinking of the Titanic was not a natural disaster. For the most part, it was a massive failure of Big Tech. Big Tech existed 100 years ago, but instead of creating Google and iPhones, the industry was focused on conquering nature — eliminating threats from earth, water, wind, and fire. They were obsessed with increasing speed and efficiency, as well as comfort — at least for the important people. (Everyone else, including their own workers, could live like “gutter rats” for all they cared, which is why Cal uses this term a few times.) The captain of the Titanic, who had been working on ships for fifty years, gave an interview a few months beforehand about how we were clearly entering an age when sinking was no longer a threat. The ships were designed to stay afloat even after substantial flooding, and besides, we have wireless radio now — so if anything happened, a rescue ship would use navigation technology to locate us based on coordinates. Problem solved!

Actually, everything the Tech experts believed was insurance against disaster turned out to make it even worse. These people didn’t understand physics as well as they imagined, so the “watertight bulkheads” ended up pulling the bow down like a weight, causing the ship to sink even faster and eventually break in half. (The breakup of the ship probably killed as many people as hypothermia, which is why only 300 bodies out of 1500 were found, and many were completely burned and unidentifiable.) Atlantic crossings were notoriously rocky and stormy, and passengers tended to hate these trips. So they decided to travel way North, where there was no wind and therefore no seasickness. It was faster, but there were also no natural waves — making it hard to see something like a huge iceberg up ahead. The sight and sound of waves crashing against ice had previously been a good way to spot them. Also, it’s pitch black this far north, so if unless there’s a full moon to reflect off icebergs, you’re basically charging ahead with absolutely no visibility. That’s why the officers in the movie say they’re getting a bad feeling about this trip: because we’re steaming straight into ice fields and there’s no moon. Thankfully, they did have wireless radios — but they were so far off the beaten path that the closest ship was 6 hours away. At least four ships tried to find the survivors but couldn’t; having the coordinates is like knowing someone is sitting in a little rowboat in an area the size of four counties. You’re not going to find them. It’s a miracle someone did.

Anyway, the elites took the sinking as a huge, humiliating blow to their grandiose claims about how we were entering a new, hip, modern age, led entirely by them. So they attempted to blame the crew. Actually, the crew 100% did the right thing by refusing to tell the first class passengers they were sinking. They accurately predicted they would make the whole thing about them, demanding to use the wireless to send personal messages and screeching at the crew to get all their luxury items out of the cargo holds — which were already underwater, leading to meltdowns and threats of lawsuits. (At least someone went down to the kennel and let the first class passengers’ dogs out, but only after it was too late for the passengers to insist their prized bulldog deserved a seat in the lifeboat more than the foreign mistress they snuck aboard. The bulldog survived, the owner died. All I can say is: Ain’t God good?) People demanded the crew explain why they didn’t return to pick up survivors, despite having plenty of room. General answer: the first class passengers demanded we row miles away from the sinking ship, fearing “suction.” The experienced crewmen who had been at sea since age 14 tried to patiently explain that suction during a sinking is not a thing. They were not having it. Therefore, the only lifeboat that returned was full of second and third-class passengers who complied with orders that allowed it to happen.

These people haven’t changed at all, which is why they spent all of 2020 screeching about how Trump “didn’t stop” COVID-19 and had personally murdered 500,000 Americans by not “getting control of the pandemic.” How? Everything Trump tried to do, they hysterically denounced.

But it’s not about politics and partisanship. I haven’t considered myself a GOP loyalist in years, and I’m no Trumpist. I don’t want him to make a comeback. However, I know how viruses work. They mutate and spread in ways we often can’t predict, let alone stop; they are impervious to the latest innovations by Elon Musk. You can’t just make a virus disappear by demanding to speak to the Manager of Viruses. Nor can you report the virus for “violating community standards.” As the movie version of Quartermaster Hitchens screams at a bunch of nitwit Tech Wives in his lifeboat demanding he Do Something: “Are you out of your minds? We’re in the middle of the North Atlantic! Now do you want to live or do you want to die?”