Excerpts (from https://www.fastcompany.com/3062246/an-exclusive-look-at-airbnbs-first-foray-into-urban-planning)

Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.

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Meanwhile, International Airbnb Style continues to reproduce, sometimes by outright appropriation. Zoé de Las Cases and Benjamin Dewé, a French interior designer couple, were shocked when they discovered that Airbnb had replicated the design of an apartment that they listed on the platform for a meeting room in the company’s San Francisco corporate office, down to a trio of faux-industrial pendant lights, a twee chalkboard, and a floating shelf full of almost identical art objects (in 2012 Airbnb itself had rented Las Cases and Dewé’s space to host a party). The couple sued Airbnb in late 2015. “They are branding their company with our life,” Dewé told BuzzFeed. In making the replica rooms, company designers would “reproduce the exact sofa, as close as they could to the exact chair,” recalls Lisa Bottom, a design director at Gensler, the architecture firm that designed the office in 2014.

Bottom says the meeting rooms were the brainchild of Airbnb founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, the RISD graduates. Gensler arranged the company’s meeting rooms around an atrium so that, “when you looked up through the atrium space, it was like looking at little snapshots of various cities,” Bottom says. All places, in one place. Imagine traveling across continents in a pilgrimage to the headquarters of the company that helps you open your house to strangers only to find yourself — at home.

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Schwarzmann critiqued the lack of locality in generic places, but Haid’s company suggests a different, paradoxical definition of locality: desirable places should be both specific enough to be interesting and generic enough to be as convenient as possible, consumed quickly and easily — equal parts authentic and expendable. In his 1992 book Non-Places, Marc Augé, the French anthropologist, wrote that with the emergence of such identity-less space, “people are always, and never, at home.”

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Yet the AirSpace aesthetic that Airbnb has contributed to, and the geography it creates, limits experiences of difference in the service of comforting a particular demographic (“the vanilla tourist”) falsely defined as the norm. It is a “hallucination of the normal,” as Koolhaas writes. This is the harmful illusion that so much technology, and technological culture, perpetuates: if you do not fit within its predefined structures as an effective user, you must be doing something wrong.

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Kanyi Maqubela, the Roam investor, sees meaning in the generic from an unexpected source. “If you go to Catholic church in most parts of the world, the mass is going to feel like the mass. There is still a sense of unity,” he says. “We’re starting to enter the world where these private companies have some of that magic to them, the notion of feeling at home across time zones in any country.”

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We have misinterpreted the old adage that the personal is political, she writes—inflecting our personal desires and decisions with political righteousness while neatly avoiding political accountability. We may understand that “the corporations we work for poison the earth, fleece the poor, make the super rich more rich, but hey. Fuck it,” Crispin writes. “We like our apartments, we can subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu, the health insurance covers my SSRI prescription, and the white noise machine I just bought helps me sleep at night.”

The sleek, simple devices produced by Apple, which encourage us to seamlessly glide through the day by tapping and swiping on pocket-size screens, rely on a hidden “maximalist assemblage,” Chayka writes: “server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin.” Also, he points out, the glass walls in Apple’s headquarters were marked with Post-it notes to keep employees from smacking into them, like birds.

Comparing a “society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” to “the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” they contended that there was “too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”