Pop go the rivets

At some point in the mid-late 1980s (I think), I read a novel written in the 60s or 70s (I think) about submarine warfare.  This was pre-Tom Clancy stuff, not technoporn. More the gritty, sweaty industrial stuff.

Anyway, in the book in question (Event-1000?) a submarine is damaged (I forget if due to hostile action, malfunction; it doesn’t matter) and is starting to sink uncontrollably. One of the characters (iirc not particularly sympathetic, but not a ‘baddie’) races to the bit of the submarine where he knows there are escape pods. He makes it to the relevant bit, but hears popping sounds, and he knows that it is rivets going, under the pressure of the depth of the water they are now in. He knows, therefore, that the escape pods are now irrelevant – he would be crushed. So he stops his climb up a ladder, and awaits his fate.

Funny what stays with you, isn’t it?

Where am I going with this? Is two (three) questions in a row too many? 

That sound of popping rivets is what I hear every time I read a newspaper, watch a doomscroll.  This glacier melting far faster than thought – pop goes a rivet.  That uncontrollable wildfire. Pop goes a rivet. That modelling exerc… you get the idea.

Pop pop pop.  No escape. Just the pressure building until, well…

Guy Rundle (despite various ill-judged comments, still one of my favourite writers, especially on Australia since the 1970s, said it well in a recent Arena article.

“There is abroad a melancholy that has crept into many areas of human affairs, and it arises not merely from a perception that much of humanity may be entering harder years. At the centre of this flattened adversarial process sits the capacity for everything to be ended by the tools we, as a species, have developed. In Silicon Valley… this has supercharged a quasi-religious transhumanism that seeks transcendence from this world. In many humanist intellectuals, it has prompted a retreat to an uninvolved hedonism of ideas as they wait for the barbarians, or the darkness. Hedonism or the turn to religion has nothing ‘quasi’ about it.”

Pop. Pop pop.