Compared to the bureaucratic nightmare that California’s high speed rail initiative has come to, Brightline was meant to show much much more efficient handling something like this over to a private company would be. That was the idea in 2018, when Brightline launched. Today, a person is killed by a Brightline train every 13 days its’ in service.

Why in this modern world where we are the most “advanced” we’ve ever been, do we fail more than ever to trust that specialization and abstraction layer designed to make our lives easier? The answer can be found in so many tendrils of history, but I want to dissect it from an unexpected place: the vividly gruesome, unlikely, and confronting story of TWA Flight 800.

There is a certain brutality in creating a company. Business is not about economic transactions as much as it is a framework for making decisions. That framework is rather simple: get money, buy stuff that makes you money, sell the things, cut back on what you buy if you’re not making enough. It’s a framework that standalone makes sense, but it’s also a framework that when viewed in isolation leads to dehumanization. These are the perfect conditions that cause harm.

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