The gap between the real and the hyperreal is closing faster and faster in even orthodox industries, like house-building.
Why is this? Because simulations are cheap, and authenticity is scarce. But this kind of simple strategy is myopic: what's being chased here (as pointed out in the article) is cool.
And the really interesting bit is that the gap between cool and corporate is as wide as ever: now that the marketing droids have cottoned on to the fact that cool is (was) about references to authentic meanings, like lofts resembling industrial age factories in rural Colorado, they've missed the fact that that very recognition drive cool long ago into irony, or the denial of those references in the first place by decontextualizing and mechanizing them. The point they should really get is that cool is about the inversion of control.