Luxury submarines and the myth of "underwater transcendence"
There's lots of submarine talk these days, so meet the Migaloo M5: a nuclear-powered phallus for billionaires fleeing collapse, dodging laws, and pretending their escape pod is a spiritual awakening.
There’s a new escape hatch for the ultra-rich to ditch the reality of the world they created. While we riff-raff get trapped on 15-minute hamster wheels, billionaires will steam off into unregulated international waters and submerge themselves in the lap of luxury.
An Austrian company called Migaloo is marketing a built-to-order 550-foot nuclear-powered submarine that can accommodate a crew, staff, and about a dozen of your closest friends. Stock up on champagne and stay underwater for weeks — onboard swimming pools, gyms, art galleries, and cinemas will help distract you and your fellow watery refugees from the fact that you’re all trapped in a cigar-shaped phallus posing as a hyperbaric water chamber.
What’s really wild is the marketing language used to sell this idea to folks for whom price is no object. Migaloo is pitching a product that literally sinks into the depths of the ocean as a vessel for spiritual ascent (emphasis ours):
Whether driven by the pursuit of Security and Privacy, the spirit of Exploration and Expedition or the quest for Innovation and Individualization, MIGALOO assures Owners of Private Submersible Superyachts an unparalleled and bespoke set of value elements.
These values guide the Owner from surface-level aspirations to deeper, intrinsic values, culminating in the ultimate benefit of owning a MIGALOO Private Submersible Superyacht: the opportunity to attain a state of self-transcendence.
(This is satire, right?)
Quickly parsing through this marketing mumbo-jumbo, the company is basically saying: Buy our vessel and you can finally escape the gnawing emptiness that no amount of wealth has been able to fill. Don’t think of this as running away. Think of it as leveling up — underwater.
Self-transcendence represents the commitment to surpassing personal limitations and attaining elevated states of existence through avenues such as personal refinement, spiritual enlightenment or the relentless pursuit of excellence.
It’s Maslow for the moneyed set — luxury esotericism, stripped of sacrifice, and sold to the highest bidder. It’s the hyper-capitalist version of the fundamentalist Christian notions of ‘the Rapture,’ only the chosen few don’t ascend, they submerge.
This concept is both frightening and fascinating in equal measure. You’ve got to hand one thing to the predator class: they’re never boring.
Extra-territoriality is the ultimate power move
On the surface, Migaloo M5 appears to be a bug out conveyance. But the elite are smarter than that; this is a jurisdictional cheat machine because the sea is regulated by a confusing cocktail of treaties with weak enforcement. Once you’re beyond 200 nautical miles from shore, you’re in international waters, essentially a legal vacuum where national laws don’t apply. Register your submarine in Liberia, hire a crew from the Philippines, stash your crypto off-chain, and — hey presto! — suddenly you’re not just any old billionaire. You’re your own floating nation state. Migaloo has ratcheted up what appears to be luxury yachting into stealthy extra-judicial sovereignty.
We’ve seen this mindset before: Peter Thiel’s failed seasteading projects, Balaji Srinivasan’s ‘network states,’ Marc Lore’s Telosa fantasy, and of course the insanity of a techno-utopian world where machines run societies with cold hard data, making humanity an afterthought. When that world becomes a dystopian hellscape, as it’s almost guaranteed to be, the Migaloo could well be the perfect escape.
Let’s face it, this luxe lingam is a submerged metaphor for everything that got us here: selfishness, greed, and computer scientists so focused on whether they ‘could’, they never stopped to ask if they ‘should’. So while the Migaloo may seem like a plan, it’s more like a psychological coping mechanism for people who know, deep down, they can’t actually buy their way out of consequences.
At this point, there’s no indication that anyone has actually ordered a Migaloo M5 — at least not yet. But it’s only a matter of time because it’s the perfect embodiment of the endgame of elite escapism: retreat from a burning world, descend beneath the surface, and pretend the collapse won’t reach you there.
Why? Because Mars is for quitters!
Dear Author, keep this in mind; "it takes significant number of very highly trained individuals to maintain, and operate these vessels". Do you think these Billionaires, know that they have to depend on "OTHERS"? Another issue is "compensation" of the staff. Do you know how a Pirate Ship operates? Lastly "food" and "refuel". I doubt that many of these Billionaires have thought about this in detail. "You can run, but you can't hide?" Other considerations; where do you PORT? What defenses does this ship have? Whose FLAG do they operate under?
If they´re out in international waters and presumably no longer bound by laws and jurisdictions then so are the bad guys. If container ships and oil tankers can be hijacked in international waters and held to ransom then I don´t fancy their chances much.