It has been well-documented that that prototypical symbol of the American industrial individual, the suburb, is the public engineering equivalent of a ponzi scheme. In local politics and economics, there is a relentless drive to build and develop, which benefits temporarily both the FIRE sector and the local government, which are often closely intertwined.
The developers get to pump out cookie-cutter housing units with poor building materials and designs - which are often concealed by chic surface textures, design elements, and aesthetics - and then make a killing selling their junk housing amidst an artificially inflated real estate market that is propped up on junk debt, land speculation, and the perpetual development and gentrification process itself.
It takes a constellation of ponzi schemes in other sectors to fuel this process: credit and tech bubbles to fuel demand, and actual over-exploited, over-utilized, and wasted energy such as cheap oil to constantly heat and cool garbage housing, or to propel inhabitants across the artificially expanded living environments to fuel the fossil fuel industry itself.
The local government on the other hand is incentivized to constantly expand its tax base, part of which is eaten into by the underestimated long term maintenance and energy costs of an artificially spread out human environment, which rapidly catches up with the less robust expansion of the tax-base: yes, a ponzi scheme.
And all of this constant ponzi-fueled expansion requires the actual expansion of material activity in space. Which has to constantly steamroll what has existed before it. And within this constant violent expansion and dispersal is an acute spiritual strain and wound, which is constantly reproduced at an ever-extending scale.
