The Titan submarine tragedy turned our feeds into a morbid circus

polygon.com:

Stories of wrecks, storms, and lost ships have long captivated humanity — going back to The Odyssey and Noah’s Ark. There are stories of missing ships and shipwrecks that have become moments in history, like the Mary Celeste or the Edmund Fitzgerald, but even more recent incidents, like the Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021, have become collective obsessions. There is nothing quite like something going terribly, terribly wrong in the water to grab the world’s attention.

So, though tragic, it was no surprise the news of the loss of the Titansubmersible, owned and developed privately by tourism company OceanGate, became the internet’s cause célèbre. On Sunday morning, the submersible, with five men and 96 hours of air supply aboard, lost contact with its ship less than two hours into a planned eight-hour dive mission to the wreck site of the RMS Titanic. The Coast Guard wasn’t alerted about the missing craft until that evening, but they began a search on Monday in conjunction with the Canadian Coast Guard and military. That search came to a sad end on Thursday evening, when the US Coast Guard reported that identifiable wreckage of the Titan had been found on the ocean floor not far from the bow of the Titanic. All five men died.

When tragedy struck the Titan, the ocean was already on the internet’s collective mind, what with the orcas off the coast of Europe unionizing to attack boats together. Memes about the killer whales’ “war on the rich” abounded, as social posts related the killer whales’ crusades against yachts to the state of the world under capitalism — and the rallying cry to “eat the rich.” The social-media meme complex was primed to conceive of the sea as a perfect canvas for political