Implosion: Oceangate, the Cage Match, and Accelerationism

This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere

-Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Now that we’re done collectively laughing about the inanity of the Oceangate imbroglio, perhaps it’s time to more soberly reflect about the cultural significance of this incident.

The Oceangate vessel’s demise does not merely represent an ironic repetition of the Titanic’s sinking, with its 20th century arrogance, its extravagant hubris, its reminder to humanity that we can never truly conquer nature.

Whereas the sinking of the Titanic was perhaps the first hint, the first foreshadowing of the coming failure of all the Modernist projects (from Bolshevism to Art Deco), Oceangate’s downfall is a triumphant confirmation of our era’s Postmodernism (with its constant reminder that “nothing is true” and its total lack of hope or even desire for the end of History). Perhaps this explains the sort of wicked satisfaction, the sadistic delight, we all experienced upon hearing the news. It goes without saying that such a reaction stands in stark contrast to the feelings of devastation that echoed throughout the Western world after the Titanic sank.

In this sense, the collapse of the Oceangate vessel has precisely the opposite significance to the sinking of the Titanic. Rather than providing doubt to the popular imagination’s notion of societal progress, the Oceangate implosion merely reconfirms the reigning Postmodern attitudes.

This, of course, begs the question: what is our Titanic? What is the cultural event which is capable of providing a glimmer of a world beyond Postmodernism?

Our Titanic can never be an anomaly that cracks a fissure into the social totality, for our (Postmodern) social totality is defined and constituted by its fissures: ultimately it is nothing but its fissures, fissures without any need of wall or cliff.

But this is precisely the problem, and the most difficult problem for our age: there is no getting “beyond” Postmodernism. It seems that only self-destruction can await our era, only the ceaseless expansion of the fissures until there remains only dust, until we arrive at the collapse of civilization itself (regardless of the “truth” of such a sentiment, it is telling that it has become a popular cliche that the world is ending). As Oswald Spengler recognized, this is the destiny of every civilization: its own death, its own suicide. It is only fitting that the Oceangate vessel didn’t merely sink, like the Titanic, but imploded in on itself.

And yet the preceding remarks point precisely to what our Titanic must be: the fated cage match between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, an event in which gaudiness will compete with utter stupidity.

Will it take place at the Colosseum in Rome? Perhaps more fitting would be the simulated Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Postmodernism, after all, is defined by its simulations, having abandoned any possibility of originality. Is it a coincidence that Elon Musk heads Twitter, that simulation of social dialogue, and that Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Meta, which wants to replace the universe, as if it were an outdated gadget, with a cleanly simulated “metaverse?”

Regardless of location, brawls between our neo-feudal lords can only serve to entertain us, that is, to distract us from the generalized social brawl, the cleft immanent to our civilization. We simulate a war between our corporate masters in order to turn our gaze away from the fact that we simulate, in our everyday banality, a cohesive society.

Fissures which slam into each other only merge together, growing stronger in their nothingness. Soon enough there will be nothing left but the empty space of a civilization gone haywire, like the shattered pane of a digitized display, or a field of ruins.

It is the task of our generation, not to oppose this madness, but to accelerate it by means of all sorts of “fatal strategies,” and thereby bring the whole filthy edifice crashing down — or, rather, make it implode in on itself. In the meantime, grab some popcorn. My money is on big daddy Zuck.