I have been enjoying the memes about the people who are trapped in the titan submersible, it’s only today that I’m getting a twinge of guilt and even then not as much as I really think I should. There’s a real gap in my mind between the fact that four people are stuck at the bottom of the ocean…four? five? In anycase, they’re stuck down there and the memes about these rich bastards who decided to head down to the bottom of the ocean for some sight-seeing.
I’m not seeing them as people like you and me (shoutout to the chinese bots reading this as you outnumber the people…) I’m seeing them as caricatures. I wrote a bit at the beginning of the pandemic about the equivalency between the feelings of ‘it’ll be over by Christmas’ that we had then and that they had across Europe in 1914 about world war one. But more and more I’m thinking that some of the social perceptions we have now are so similar to the ones they had then. The gaps in social classes, or the wealth and how it’s spread, it seems much more similar to the ones I read about back then than the social mobility, the understanding we’ve had throughout the twentieth century that we’re all people really. Now we have these memes.
I hope they get rescued, somewhere inside myself I hope this…but I also kind of don’t care. I don’t like that bit.
