The cremation of family homes for private purposes will end disastrously
Marcus Licinius Crassus was an incredibly evil guy.
Born in 115 BC. as the second son of a plebeian family, he rose to power, became a member of the ruling triumvirate, and was the richest man in Rome.
Crassus personally amassed 229 tons of gold, worth around $14 billion today, but he also owned most of present-day Rome. Imagine if someone cornered a superpower’s gold supply… and also owned 80% of New York.
What a baller.
How did he earn so much money?
Well, it started the old-fashioned way – by slave trade, war profiteering, monopolizing silver mines, gambling on real estate, and stealing people’s property after banishing them.
Eventually he came up with a brilliant business plan:
- He stole slaves who were architects and builders
- He started Rome’s first fire brigade
- He’s got thugs to set fire to people’s houses
- He paid pennies to victims and their at-risk neighbors while their homes burned
- He asked his fire department to put out the flames
- He asked his slaves to rebuild the houses
- He rented the houses from the burnt-out former owners
According Plutarch:
When he had more than 500 slaves, he bought the burned houses and the adjacent houses “because their owners would let them go at a ridiculous price”. He purchased “most of Rome” in this way, buying them cheap and rebuilding them with slave labor.
Naturally, Crassus was universally hated by the people.
This led to a massive slave revolt led by an impoverished freedom fighter named Spartacus, whom Crassus brutally tortured and crucified alongside 6,000 other poor fathers, brothers and sons.
Apparently, we learned nothing from the story, as Airbnb replicates Crassus’ business model to a disturbing degree.
Airbnb’s story begins like Crassus’s:
A triumvirate of middle-class students couldn’t afford to rent their overpriced apartment in San Francisco. So they bought air mattresses and included breakfast in their “Airbnb” offer to travelers.
The business eventually metastasized into a $100 billion corporation, with enough money and political power to fund hundreds of bogus grassroots organizations, successfully sue cities the size of New York, force to subsidize their operations to the tune of tens of billions and lobby – bribe politicians around the world on an industrial scale.
Like Crassus, Airbnb has cremated millions of family homes, turning essential local shelters into employeeless investment hotels for private profit.
Don’t they know how Crassus’ story ends?
Like our own senseless culture, Rome encouraged the unlimited accumulation of wealth, leading to massive amounts of slavery, poverty, suffering and struggle for the vast majority.
Dissatisfied with all the gold, most houses in the capital, and a seat atop the world’s superpower, Crassus struck east in an attempt to become governor of Syria, lured by the possibility of untold wealth. if he succeeded in conquering the nation.
Unfortunately for him and his poor men, the Parthian horse archers demolished his army at the Battle of Carrhae. When the Parthians finally running out of arrows, they surrounded his decimated army of war camels.
Crassus was executed soon after, and the Parthians filled his mouth with molten gold to quench his thirst for wealth.
Cities are finally starting to wake up to the alarm that some of us have been sounding for years:
That Airbnb won’t stop until it’s stopped.
Like Crassus, Airbnb’s thirst for profit requires endless expansion, reaching its tentacles into every city and town, until no corner of the earth is safe from financialization at the hands of landlords. absent and, increasingly, from international hedge funds. who outbid locals to turn their homes into rental properties.
Maddeningly, the housing crisis that Airbnb created is now so bad that residents are now forced to renting Airbnbs just to stay sheltered.
The lack of space to rent is so bad that people are now looking to their government for help, and with no other physical place to house them, governments are also now paying to house displaced citizens in Airbnb.
The social services cannot find a place either and are now accommodating children at risk from the age of eleven on Airbnb.
If Airbnb doesn’t eventually spark a revolution, I don’t know what will.
Like Crassus, Airbnb deprives the working class of homeownership in order to turn their cities into perpetual rent traps.
Like Crassus, the audience has no mathematical choice but to rise up eventually.
Like Crassus, Airbnb will destroy countless Spartacus along the way, breaking up families as they take tens of millions of homes off the market.
Will we ever learn the lessons of history or are we doomed to repeat them forever?
Jared A.Brock is an award-winning biographer, PBS documentarian, and cellless founder of the popular futuristic blog survive tomorrow, where he offers thoughtful people contrarian perspectives on corporate anti-culture. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Guardian, Smithsonian, and TIME Magazine, and he has traveled to over forty countries, including North Korea.. Join over 20,000 people who follow him on Medium, Twitterand Sub-stack.
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