I was intrigued by Brown’s analysis of the accident, particularly the idea that if we were to memorialize accidents, we would need to do so with the understanding that accidents do not exist without the technology involved, that they are therefore not accidents at all (82). As he quotes Virilio as saying, “The shipwreck is consequently the ‘futurist’ invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as the Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station” (82). I have encountered this idea before in Melissa McCarthy’s (not that one) 2018 book Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion, which explores how sharks have been depicted in our culture and what humans are to sharks. She presents this argument in terms of the shark attack being an invention of the surfboard–when we go into the native habitat of an animal with the potential to kill or maim us as people, and invent a vehicle to do so efficiently, we are inventing these attacks. Where I think there is something else to explore is where the human body comes into play. We are much more fragile than say, a plane or a ship, and we have more autonomy in terms of leisure or sport than transportation. Shark attacks also occur close to the shore and are often visible in some way to others–those who die in incidents like plane crashes or shipwrecks are often lost with the technology itself, left to our imaginations. Are surfers therefore responsible for the individual deaths of shark attacks in a different way than the engineers in Chernobyl? (269) [JU-16]
[Brown, 2012] [McCarthy, 2018]