Homeownership was promoted as absorbing free time to prevent political resistance.

Evidence

Homeownership, in the American popular imaginary, was defined as a “duty” for “good citizens” around 1945, after decades of governmental campaigns and programs. Propaganda for property defined homeownership as an act that would ground an individual as a member of a community, directly opposing homeownership with imaginary fears of socialistic, anarchistic, or communistic forms of collective ownership and the destruction of private property. This ideal of citizenship, however, was articulated in terms of time: the time to take care of a house or take care of a family would absorb the amount of time one has for other causes. In the words of Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, “Owning a home … precisely meant being too busy to think or act politically—too much free time might lead to communism!” In midcentury America, homeownership became a central example of the formal subsumption of community by capital, a form of subsumption that persists today, in which the time required for the reproduction of capital absorbs all other possible uses of time, in which home and family become temporal barriers that prohibit resistance to, among other things, the economic domination of daily life. The desire to own a house is a desire shaded by the destruction of free, unallocated time that exists beyond productivity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 147

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the reader’s ‘Grafting & Growth / corporate personhood’ and especially the broader thesis that infrastructure absorbs time and possibility; specifically it parallels how the house as one of the four infrastructures operates as a temporal capture device, laying foundations for the influencer-as-firm reading.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘formal subsumption of community by capital’ through the concrete midcentury homeownership campaign.
• XREF: Connects to Weber’s Protestant-ethic time discipline and to consumer-citizenship critiques from midcentury US history. — connects to: Herbert Hoover made housing a national issue rooted in promoting homeownership — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 84