Thursday, March 18, 2021
Company towns
MindMatters is getting its panties in a wad about Big Tech building new company towns in Nevada.
Company towns aren't automatically a bad thing. They can go two ways.
Social economics companies 100 years ago built beautiful company towns with strong culture and social support. Ponca (Conoco) and Dayton (NCR) were beautiful places .... until the company died or moved elsewhere. The good time lasted for a century.
Mining towns were more typical of Nevada. They were hastily built without any social structure at all, ran wild and rowdy for 20 years, then quickly turned into ghost towns when the silver or gold was exhausted.
Google and Facebook are data miners, and their overall attitude is similar to the fast-growing fast-shrinking Gold Rush.
Social economics was killed in 1975, so we can be sure new company towns won't be like Ponca or Dayton. They will be mining towns.
The real two-way alternative now is between HONESTLY NAMED company towns and HIDDEN company towns. Right now Google and Amazon and Bloomberg exert total uniform absolute power over all cities, while cities pretend to be running their own affairs. Company towns would at least be openly controlled, so the people can KNOW who is destroying them.
See also Symmetrical Scapegoating.
Labels: the broken circle
¶ 11:51 PM
