A Tragedy in Night City
Gloria Martinez, the mother of the main character in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, is severely injured during a shootout on the highway. Trauma Team saves their platinum clients first. They completely ignore Gloria and David. Only some low-budget surgeon will take care of them. The next day, Gloria dies. The official cause is overwork.
In Night City, everything is a commodity and can be put behind subscriptions: grief, health, safety, housing. David doesn’t have any subscription nor the money to pay to bury his mother, so he’s left with the cheapest option - cremation.
Gloria and David’s tragedy is everyday life in Night City: a rule where the value of human life is determined by the balance of your account. In this world, before a death subscription can be sold to you, you first need to have somewhere to wait for that death - dignified or not. The foundation of it all is the commodification of the most human need: a roof over your head.
Night City is a world of Megabuildings: concrete, vertical slum-cities. The peculiar notion of ‘home’ doesn’t exist there. There’s no ‘first universe’ or ‘corner of the world,’ as it was mentioned in Dark Souls and Bachelard’s philosophy. The home has become just another item in a corporate offering.
David Harvey diagnosed the problem of corporations in cities very well. He introduced the concept of the right to the city; the right not only to housing itself, but to the democratic co-creation of the space in which we live as human beings, according to the needs of the community rather than the logic of profit.
Night City is the ultimate and pathological vision of a city: a true urban nightmare full of highways, unbridled capitalism, and a denial of any right to the city. In today’s world, the mechanism pushing us into Night City’s arms is the REIT-like funds. This is the story of how they are slowly building us a world without homes.
Anatomy of the monster
The chief architect of this new homeless world is the already mentioned REIT. It’s an investment fund that lets anyone buy a slice of real estate on the stock market, just like corporate stocks or bonds. It reduces one’s corner of the world to an abstract exchange value. Although Arasaka is not directly a REIT, it is the consequence of the same logic. It’s precisely this system’s logic, pushed to a brutal extreme in the world of Cyberpunk, that allowed Arasaka to become the owner of entire districts. In our world, funds like Blackstone can take over thousands of homes using law and capital. Arasaka, using police and the military, pacifies areas that are “theirs” because capital and the law have enabled it. The fundamental principle remains the same: living space is turned into a line item in an investment portfolio, and the fate of residents is decided by an impersonal corporation, not the community.
The key element here is the abstraction by which thousands of houses and apartments are treated as investment assets; items meant to increase and bring profit. They become cells of values in a spreadsheet. An apartment in Megabuilding H10 is not a home to its resident; it’s another subscription item that has to be paid for and it must also yield profit to anonymous shareholders. Human needs like a sense of stability, safety, and belonging are undesirable variables, so the spreadsheet doesn’t account for them.
This is where Harvey steps in and asks the hard question: who does the city belong to? To anonymous investors who will likely never come to this specific place, or to the residents who live their lives there? Harvey’s concept of the right to the city says that residents should have the democratic right to co-create the spaces they inhabit. That idea does not exist in Night City. The city, unfortunately, most often belongs to whoever has the most capital. Residents have no rights to it, beyond the right to buy a life subscription.
This process, in which profit displaces human needs, is the natural consequence of capitalism. Capital aims at self-multiplication independently of external causes. Funds like REIT are just one of the tools. What makes them dangerous, however, is that they are the first step toward the total loss of any right to the city. The only thing left will be renting a concrete capsule or tiny cubicle from a callous corporation. Nevertheless, how far along this road are we?
Road to Arasaka
What is a nightmare and exaggeration in Night City has become a business model for one of the biggest players in our real-world financial market; this is about Blackstone after the 2008 financial crisis, which saw opportunity where others saw tragedy.
As millions of Americans lost their homes when the housing bubble burst - which, by the way, is a pathology on its own - Blackstone went on an unprecedented shopping spree through its subsidiary Invitation Homes. The company began buying up tens of thousands of single-family homes, often for a fraction of their value. Houses and apartments were turned into a portfolio of rental properties. Blackstone became the largest landlord in the U.S.
Here’s the crucial point: Blackstone didn’t invest in building new neighborhoods but in taking over existing ones. In doing so, they showed that the human need for a roof over one’s head can be turned into a global financial instrument, since you can also buy REITs in Europe.
We already know the cost of all this from Night City. Due to market monopolization, rents rise sharply, forcing people to move out. Tenant service systems ignore their requests. Evictions are carried out with ruthless, corporate efficiency. These are the consequences when your home is decided by an analyst from Wall Street and a chart in a spreadsheet shows too many red numbers.
Yet this pathology is presented as perfectly normal as a simple consequence of capitalism. As Mark Fisher wrote, this is capitalist realism: the paralyzing feeling that there is no alternative, that “the market is just like that.” In the end the invisible hand of the free market will liberate us. It’s an ideological fog that makes us stop questioning the system and start looking for the fault in ourselves, wondering why we can’t afford to keep a roof over our heads.
Is your home in my portfolio?
We began this brief journey into REITs with death in Night City, where everything is a subscription because that model is more profitable. We end on the pathology of REITs, the stock market, and the spreadsheet. Our real world and its financial mechanisms allow the home to be dehumanized. Bachelard would call it a home-as-tomb. The cells in a spreadsheet and global players use what most of the proletariat calls a “home” to build empires and rake in even more money. Philosophers like Harvey sound the alarm and ask socially vital questions; and we, as a society, treat today’s pathology as Fisher’s inevitable normality.
Night City may be closer to our world than we think. It’s a warning that unchecked capitalism will seep into every part of our lives, just to make a profit and stave off a falling rate of return, even if only briefly.
In this strange situation, few have clean hands, including us, the small and capital-less. REITs are available to anyone on the stock market. Some investment gurus say it’s worth investing in REITs because of their high returns, so as an ordinary person I might not own a home or apartment of my own, but I can own small pieces of your apartment. Thus, where does passive investing end? Where does complicity begin and stripping people away of the last remnants of the right to the city? Is my financial comfort more important than someone else’s home?
Night City shows us what a city and the future should not look like. But aren’t we, in the end, heading toward building our own version of Night City?
Bibliography
These particular books affected the overall shape of the article
- David Harvey - Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
This book provides the essay’s moral and political compass. Harvey’s “right to the city” is not just a concept mentioned in passing; it is the critical lens through which Night City’s urban nightmare is judged and found wanting. It elevates the story from a simple cyberpunk tragedy to a political manifesto, reframing the struggle for a home as a fundamental battle for the soul of the city itself. - Mark Fisher - Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Fisher’s work names the invisible prison that traps the inhabitants of both Night City and our own world. “Capitalist realism” is the essay’s explanation for the pervasive sense of inevitability - the ideological fog that makes us accept a world where homes are spreadsheet cells. It’s the ghost in the machine, whispering that “there is no alternative” as the system consumes the very possibility of a dignified life. - Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space
Bachelard’s philosophy provides the ghost of what has been lost. His concept of the home as our “first universe” is the emotional and philosophical core against which the soulless, commodified megabuildings are measured. This book doesn’t just offer a comparison; it defines the profound, existential stakes of the essay’s argument, showing that what has been destroyed is not just housing, but the very sanctuary of the human soul.