The implosion of the OceanGate submersible Titan, thousands of feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, has unleashed a lot of discourse, as these things tend to do. Much of it is little more than schadenfreude, either because everyone onboard was wealthy or because the founders of OceanGate were so outspoken in their opposition to safety regulations, or a combination of the two. Which would be fine if this were just some isolated incident that didn’t reflect much larger trends.

Unfortunately, the OceanGate disaster absolutely does reflect a much broader phenomenon in our society: the rise of risk tolerance and technological innovation for its own sake, as markers of a new form of (largely) masculine heroism. That’s right, this is actually about the Pied Piper of high-risk high tech showboating, Elon Musk, and where he continues to lead society.

Before we dig in, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way: no, I am not blaming Musk’s Starlink satellite system for the disaster, as some early hot takes wrongly suggested. As a long-term Musk watcher and critic, that poorly-evidenced theory is the kind of thing that drives me crazy, as it allows Musk’s defenders to paint all his critics as desperate to grasp at the most pathetically thin straws. In fact, to properly understand why Musk is such a dangerous actor you have to understand that is greatest power lies not in what he does himself, but in the example he sets for others.

The Musk quote that OceanGate chose to highlight in this tweet gets very close to encapsulating the core of what Musk symbolizes, reflecting the extent to which our society is mesmerized by the concept of “innovation,” and the suspension of disbelief we are willing to extend to its prophets. In fact, engineering is nothing like magic. Magic is a black box that produces miracles, whereas engineering is a rigorous, quantified, auditable process. But engineering does require money, and as Musk has proven to every ambitious entrepreneur on the planet, the way to get money is to convince people that your technology is indistinguishable from magic.

There’s an entire gameplan to this form of high tech hucksterism, tapping into a wide variety of largely unspoken beliefs that turn out to be extremely widely held. The first is a vague intuition that the established way of doing things has become stagnant and untested, repeated out of sheer habit, rather than because that way of doing things has been proven to be safe, effective, affordable, etc. This intuition (it is NOT knowledge, or even a proper theory) is manifested in a belief that regulation somehow props up this stale status quo, as a corrupt means of propping up the legacy dinosaurs and stifling innovation.

OceanGate’s founder and CEO Stockton Rush spoke about this in fairly explicit terms, in media stories pumping his novel carbon fiber construction approach to submarines. In an official blog post explaining why the Titan sub wasn’t “classed,” the company claimed that “bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation,” and cited Musk’s SpaceX as an example of other companies who “rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations, testing, and validation versus bringing in outsiders who need to first be educated before being qualified to ‘validate’ any innovations.”

A lot of this argument boils down to sheer novelty. OceanGate held up its use of novel materials (nobody else used carbon fiber for submersibles) and technologies (“real time monitoring” of hull integrity) as both symbols of its innovation and the reason it shouldn’t (or couldn’t) be regulated. Of course this is nonsense: OceanGate’s own blog post admits that “classing agencies are willing to pursue the certification of new and innovative designs and ideas,” but that “they often have a multi-year approval cycle due to a lack of pre-existing standards.” The fact that new designs and technologies take longer to approve is glibly conflated with the idea that OceanGate’s technology can’t or shouldn’t be regulated by them. Meanwhile, the firm’s argument that operational issues are as critical to safety as “classing” of the vessel has aged poorly, in light of its many well-documented operational issues.

I am not a submarine or materials expert, or even an engineer, so I won’t attempt to argue that carbon fiber has fundamentally problematic characteristics for this use case. But James Cameron and other experts have made that case, arguing that repeated dives could cause delamination of the composites, weakening the hull over time. Given carbon fiber’s lack of compressive strength and the intense pressures under which the Titan operated, it makes sense even to a layperson that no amount of hull monitoring would make a difference in the event of even a tiny failure of structural integrity. This, and not the corrupt stifling of innovation by legacy incumbents through control of the regulatory process, is why every other deep-sea sub is made of less-brittle metals.

This kind of “novelty is innovative and therefore better than established ways of doing things” logic is precisely what has animated Tesla over the last decade, and continues to approach mainstream orthodoxy in spite of repeated massive failures. Perhaps my favorite example of this was when Elon Musk decided Tesla was going to reinvent manufacturing for the Model 3, with plans for an “alien dreadnought” production system that would eliminate humans from Tesla’s factories, move so fast that the robots couldn’t even be seen with the naked eye, and transform the car business as we know it. Needless to say this idea had already been tried by GM with disastrous results in the 1980s, and Tesla’s effort resulted in not one but two failed production lines at its Fremont factory, and Model 3s being built by hand in a tent (no I’m not linking all that reporting, buy my damn book lol).

But what Musk and OceanGate are pushing isn’t just the idea that we should always value novelty and abhor tradition and regulation, but that we should do these in safety critical contexts. What Tesla has done is bring a paradigm that developed in software, where you can ship an incomplete product and upgrade it over time without the risk of, you know, killing people, into a realm with much higher consequences. Whether using non-automotive grade parts, introducing an absurdly bad new steering interface, lying about the safety impact of its fundamentally dangerous Autopilot and FSD systems, and even just putting critical controls onto a touchscreen to save a few bucks on swithces, Tesla has quietly eroded countless safety norms in automotive design and engineering over the last decade. The lack of consequences for these decisions, and indeed the massive rewards that Wall Street has showered upon Tesla for this “pioneering” work made it all but inevitable that someone would bring it into an even more absurdly safety-critical realm, like submersibles.

In fact, the entire auto industry has already begun following Musk toward a future where cars increasingly dazzle with high tech novelty while skimping on quality and safety. Just this week, the latest JD Power survey came out, and showed that auto industry quality is falling across the board as automakers seek to emulate Tesla’s approach. This decline in quality is centered on the very elements that Tesla popularized: touchscreens, flush-fitting electric door handles, and driver assistance systems. Having proven that consumers will accept atrocious build quality if they are sufficiently dazzled by these high-tech trinkets, Tesla has helped erode the commitment to rigorous quality and safety engineering that the auto industry was once famous for… and unless we learn the lesson of OceanGate, that trend will only continue.