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That fucking realtor ghoul absolutely gushing over these overvalued ziggurats of excess as if this is just perfect and normal. 169,000,000 for a fucking unit? We need Minecraft and then a sequel
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I feel a special kind of disgust about the fact that people will buy homes that they will never live in as investment vehicles. Not even rent them out either, just keeping empty homes as speculative assets. Peak capitalist shit right there.
The synthesis of marketing intelligence with rendering software has generated a social milieu in which architecture is constituted in the production of investment images.
The English political economist William Davies writes, “The only resource on which financialization is necessarily dependent . . . is the future.” Transhumanist monuments are already a feature of finance capitalism, but what about the next step: an investment-oriented architecture that moves further and further away from materiality itself? As the vibrant presales market suggests, it is already happening. What will be left of architecture in this emergent condition could be what is already the essential fact of architectural production: representation and its potential realization. If one imagines the duration of presales increasing to ten years, to twenty years, to fifty years, to perpetuity, where only the investment image exists as the medium of investment, then one can glimpse one possible outcome of the financialization of nonfinancial entities.
From this vantage point, it is possible to conceptualize rendering software as not only an architectural tool, but also a type of FinTech. For through it, architecture sublimates into the financial electrosphere—all that is solid is now all that could possibly be solid. Virtual and augmented reality now achieves a sophistication that indicates an imminent role in everyday life. In this version of representational agency, current truisms of architecture give way to a form of representation that is less virtual reality and more real virtuality. Reinhold Martin recognized this when he wrote of architecture, “It has become a kind of real virtuality, in which, from the point of view of the markets and those who manipulate them, the actual, tangible existence of anything that can plausibly be called a useful object (i.e., a real building) has been superseded by a set of representations.”(from the book in the above video: Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin: Architecture and Capitalism in the 21st Century )
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The real estate guy they interview is such a dork. "I think I get taxed if I go outside and take a left". Such a terrible attempt at appealing to people.
Notice how his eyes shift after he's done with his bullshit on each segment. He knows what he's doing the little shit
The real estate guy played every card in the deck, I'm almost impressed.
- He can't justify things in moral or even close utilitarian terms, so avoiding taxes is just something "intelligent people" do . The rich are rich just because they are intelligent.
- We shouldn't decry capitalism, because seeking wealth is just a natural law of civilizations. This meaning that it's simply unavoidable and we shouldn't bother to try to stop it.
- He even jumps into the old "It's the middle class that suffers the most" trope that they always use, because they're the ones that have to pay all the taxes while the rich and poor live off the work of the mistreated middle class. This makes the poor out to be parasites, that are at least as much, if not more to blame for inequality. Anyone that feels they are paying too much in taxes will then know that they must be this middle class, and that the poor are the reason why they have to pay so much in taxes and live paycheck to paycheck (not realising they are the poor by their country's standards, and that the only ones below them make so little they literally can't be taxed.)
It's scary how the bourg factory just mass produces these people, and even when they are highly financially successful like this guy, they still have to sell the youtube "How to become a billionaire" channel spiel. At some point I have to wonder if they start believing their own bullshit. Maybe that's the only way they can live with themselves?
So, to be clear, every building like this should be seized and the housing units redistributed to people who need them. And the oligarchs keeping dozens of empty apartments for 'investment purposes' need the :gui:
The problem though is these buildings are designed where each unit takes up an entire floor. So it would be much more difficult to repurpose into regular housing. Also these buildings regularly have maintenance issues because they were never designed around people living there full time in the first place.
i would like to [redacted] these bastards just to watch them [redacted]
Parks aren't for people, they're for the property values of empty offices.
They're lucky that police exist solely to defend capitalist assets, or they'd be in a cell by now.
'what makes all this money? luxury real estate, not labor, of course!'
