prospective homeowners: 0; institutional landlords: 1,000s

The year is 2070. Nobody owns a home any more; the concept of individuals possessing property has gone the way of the floppy disk. Instead, a few large corporations control all the world’s real estate and people “subscribe” to holistic housing solutions on their iPhone 78X in the same way they currently subscribe to Netflix. You can pay your monthly subscription in billionaire-backed cryptocurrency: BezosCoin, MuskCoin or ZuckCoin. If you default on your housing sub (nobody uses old-fashioned terms such as “rent” any more) you are dispatched to Mars to pay off your debt via indentured servitude in intergalactic Amazon warehouses.

This is really the end-game of late-stage capitalism, to force everyone into a subscription model for media (Spotify, Apple Music, Netflix, Amazon Kindle), transportation (Lyft, Uber, Gig), and shelter (courtesy of Wall St and the deep-pocketed investors who can buy up a whole subdivision before a family can buy one of the homes). Rents in everything, ownership of nothing, which means today’s working stiffs will never be able to stop working, lest they miss a payment on all the things their parents used to own outright — their music and movies, books, cars, homes.

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