In Ready Player One, the novel by Ernie Clines that was adapted into a 2018 Stephen Spielberg movie, protagonist Wade Owen Watts lives in The Stacks, a futuristic vertical trailer park towering hundreds of feet into the sky. The rusting metal living quarters are connected to each other by a makeshift network of pipes, girders, beams, and footbridges, each one packed with far too many occupants. Even in a dystopian tale set in 2044, when most of the world has been destroyed by war, poverty, and climate change, The Stacks are a depressing place to live, a symbol of abject poverty and exploitation.

So when a Colorado company debuted “Stackhouse,” a housing project consisting of stacked metal shipping containers, the comparisons were inevitable. In r/ABoringDystopia on Reddit, one user asks, “Why can’t we have normal ‘affordable’ housing instead of living in shipping containers and other things the capitalist class can no longer use"” It’s a fair question. People around the world were already adapting shipping containers into makeshift housing out of pure necessity before this type of “upcycled” architecture was a trend. It’s true that once shipping containers are no longer usable for the transportation of goods, they can make a convenient module for experimental structures, and modular architecture is often more sustainable than conventional construction. But the truth is, shipping containers aren’t ...