This week, the world has been following the saga of the OceanGate Titan sub, lost at sea while on a trip to see the remains of the Titanic. As it increasingly looks like those on board are dead—especially as a debris field has been found near the Titanic, and oxygen is believed to have run out hours ago—conservatives are pinning the blame on their favorite target: wokeness.
“Wokeness killed the people on that submarine. Let that sink in. They died because the woke CEO said he wouldn’t hire 50 year-old white men who knew how to command submarines and would rather train others. And the CEO died too. That’s the next level of ‘go woke, go broke’,” political strategist Joey Mannarino tweeted Thursday morning.
Wokeness killed the people on that submarine.
Let that sink in.
They died because the woke CEO said he wouldn’t hire 50 year-old white men who knew how to command submarines and would rather train others.
And the CEO died too.
That’s the next level of “go woke, go broke”.
— Joey Mannarino (@JoeyMannarinoUS) June 22, 2023
It’s worth noting that the pilot of the Titan sub was the CEO of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, who is 61 and white—not that it necessarily matters. But Mannarino’s not alone; similar posts have been shared by many of the usual right-wing suspects. The claims of “wokeness” dooming the Titan sub come from a resurfaced interview that’s gone viral in the rightosphere. In the clip, Rush says that other private submarine operators are “50-year-old white guys”, usually with military submarine experience.
The CEO of OceanGate, which is operating the missing Titanic tourist submarine, explains that the company didn’t want to hire any experienced “50 year old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational.” pic.twitter.com/kxXkhBn7oL
— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed) June 21, 2023
“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational. And I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology, But a 25-year-old… sub pilot or platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational. So we’ve really tried to get very intelligent, motivated younger individuals involved,” Rush says.
Putting aside the fact that most people railing against diverse hiring practices seem to always assume that diverse hiring is merely looking for the first person who comes through the door rather than anyone with experience—OceanGate is not exactly a bastion of diversity. As the Daily Dot points out, the top five leaders of the company are all older, white men.
But all that is a distraction. There’s a very clear reason why the Titan sub was lost and is likely doomed: OceanGate fired their safety guy. David Lochridge was hired in 2015, but complained about the design of the submarine. Lochridge pointed out that the carbon fiber material used to build the hull was likely insufficient to withstand the pressure given how deep Rush wanted to go in the vessel. Submarine hulls are usually made with high-strength steel. Since the carbon fiber was an unusual choice, Lochridge wanted to put the hull through destructive testing to make sure it was safe, but this request was refused, with higher ups telling him it was impossible to perform tests like he wanted, according to CNN.
CNN spoke to another person at OceanGate who questioned the safety of the hull, who spoke to the outlet on terms of anonymity. He said that the hull was only five inches thick, when engineers wanted it to be seven inches thick.
Another point of failure Lochridge pointed out was the viewport. Though OceanGate bragged that the Titan sub had the “largest viewport of any deep diving submersible,” according to National World, The New Republic reported that the material used for the viewport was only certified for a depth of 1,300 meters. The water pressure is much greater at the 4,000 meters that OceanGate wanted to take the sub to, but the company allegedly refused to pay for a window that could withstand the pressure at that depth.
Other elements of the design showed that OceanGate didn’t seem to take submarine building as seriously as it should. Much has been made about the off-brand video game controller used to pilot the submarine. But also, the ballast system was jerryrigged: CBS journalist David Pogue told the BBC that construction pipes were used as ballast. If those inside the Titan sub wanted to surface, they would all move to one side of the submarine, causing it to tip, and the pipes would roll off shelves to lighten the load.
In the interests of brevity, I’ll stop here in laying out the various technical problems with the sub. But at this point it’s clear that “wokeness” had nothing to do with the tragedy. If one wants to blame a cultural phenomenon, a more reasonable target would be the “move fast, break things” ethos first laid out by Mark Zuckerberg. Had OceanGate followed the standards of the private submersible industry, instead of attempting to reinvent the wheel, they’d likely have been fine. How do I know? Rush himself revealed the reason in a 2018 interview with Smithsonian Magazine.
“There hasn’t been an injury in the commercial sub industry in over 35 years. It’s obscenely safe, because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn’t innovated or grown—because they have all these regulations,” Rush said.
Perhaps those regulations are a good thing.
Featured image of the Titanic wreckage by Joseph Mischyshyn, used under the creative commons license.
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