“The fractionalized, blockchain-enabled real estate products of the proptech sector are less buildings, though, than instances of financialized capital, atomized. The real estate on offer targets the immaterial satisfaction of existential needs by feeding a speculative impulse:

you are invited to partake in the real estate game not at the scale of property measured in square meters, but by way of infinitesimally small chunks of circulating capital pegged to spatial products elsewhere.

Just one click and you can share with your virtual and anonymous community in the ownership of an apartment in Rio de Janeiro, a condo in Miami, a pad in Manhattan.

This is a mood-altering architecture that is available in micro-doses.

You inhabit its spaces mentally, in fleeting and snatched moments of screen time. You can withdraw whenever you feel like it, because you are the kind of person who never has to wait.

And yet wait you do, for something fundamentally existential continues to be deferred, sheltering an anticipation of a future that may never emerge. Amidst all these online transactions, where, after all, can you secure sufficiently durable digs? Blockchain-based proptech products are marketed towards a generation, “young and smart and raised by wolves,” who have achieved

a level of speculative dematerialization only dreamed of

by the Patrick Batemans and Eric Packers of Don DeLillo and Brett Easton Ellis novels”