(no subject)

[haptalaon]

I think the political relevance of making fun of the submarine guys - because there's been a handful of scolding posts about why it's in poor taste to be having a good time about the billionares missing under the waves -

The political relvance, really, is the whole ideology behind that submarine company. The sub itself has never been safety rated, and the company are proud of this because they believe it allows for more innovation. The sub window is only safe down to 1,500 (Titanic is 4000 down), and the company has fired a previous whistleblower who raised concerns about them never stress-testing the vehicle. The sub doesn't have an emergency locator beacon, and its connected to the world with Elon Musk satellite technology. On a previous trip, it got into trouble, and the company shut down the internet to prevent journalists in attendence from tweeting.

In short: it's a libertarian tech bro thing. These fellows are profoundly politically significant - they have immense money and power and esteem in our society and politicians are routinely bamboozled into thinking they're cool. But the history of health and safety laws are written in blood.

I was reflecting on my instinctive opposition to (many) new technologies and how to fit that into a bigger framework, & what I came up with is that they're always revolutions - but not grassroots ones. They are imposed onto people. You can't un-invent them. But people as a whole rarely have a chance to weigh in about whether these technologies are desired or undesired, how they should be regulated or limited, and what impact they will have on human lives. I have no issue with the domestic washing machine, but the more depressed I get the more ambivalence I feel about (say) the car or industrial production as a whole, specifically about the consent of the masses. These things happen to us whether we like it or not. I live in a country blighted by AirBnB and moved from a city trashed by Uber, I lived within a mile of an airport and backing onto a motorway: these things are done to residents

& so the titanic sub mission is a shame & I hope those people come out of the water ok - but the future they have envisioned is this for all of us. We won't be going on tourist submarines, but we will be - say - sharing the road with poorly designed Elon Musk cars or having our creative lives hollowed out by AI or new things I've yet to imagine. And when those things happen, they're done by specifially this kind of guy: lots of capital, rules don't apply to them, safety features non-existent, we get the money and others take the risk and pay the price.