Superyachts: Luxury, Tranquility and Ecocide

By: Gregory Salle

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Synopsis: A superyacht is a boat that exceeds 30 metres in length, with some surpassing even 100 metres—more than a football field. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were about 2,000 of these vessels in the world; two decades and a financial crisis later, there are three times as many. Grégory Salle argues that these are not whimsical fads: on the contrary, luxury yachting highlights the social exclusivity of the wealthiest and the environmental waste they emit. Rather than being simply the plaything of billionaires with extravagant lifestyles, the superyacht offers a disconcerting reflection of the world as it is. A contemporary form of ostentatious seclusion, a magnifying glass for social inequalities, the superyacht leads us straight to the great questions of our time, including the question of ecocide. From class struggle to the over-consumption of the rich, from tax evasion to environmental crime, from eco-bleaching to the differential management of illegalities, to pull the thread of super yachting is to unspool the whole ball of capitalism.