company town

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Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

Despite what I might have heard about made-in-China furniture, he told me, a swarm of high-school wrestlers could pin one another on this chair and it would not fall apart. With the friendly-neighbor discount, I bought it for a hundred and sixty bucks. I had invited Joel to breakfast to pick his brain. I was working on a Roanoke Times series on the impact of globalization on southwest Virginia’s company towns, articles inspired by the work of freelance photographer Jared Soares, who’d been making the hourlong trek from Roanoke to Martinsville three times a week for more than a year. His photos were gritty and moving: church services and tattoo artists; a textile-plant conveyor belt converted for use in a food bank; a disabled minister named Leonard whiling away the time in his kitchen in the middle of the afternoon.

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As Joel explained over a plate of sausage biscuits and gravy that morning, imitating the patriarch’s booming voice and cringe-inducing chutzpah: “The ‘fucking Chi-Comms’ were not going to tell him how to make furniture!” But there was another, even juicier element to the story. John Bassett was no longer living in the eponymous company town of Bassett, Virginia. He’d been booted out of his family’s business by a domineering relative. Three decades later, the family squabble turned corporate coup still had local tongues wagging with talk of a living-room fight scene (some say it was the front porch), a rescue-squad call, and, my favorite detail: John Bassett tipping the ambulance driver a hundred bucks not to tell anybody that he’d had his battered brother-in-law hauled away, like something out of Dynasty.

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And what did the family infighting have to do with John Bassett giving the middle finger to the lure of easy money overseas? Plenty, it would turn out. But peeling that onion would take me more than a year. It would have me burning up U.S. Route 58, the curvy mountain road that meanders through the former company towns just north of the Virginia–North Carolina line, where it hits you why the people of Henry County have come to call what happened “the 58 virus.” It would send me across the Blue Ridge to John Bassett’s billowing smokestacks in Galax; to the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, North Carolina, to meet a crop of young MBAs and marketing execs in their skinny suits and aggressive glasses; and, on the advice of laid-off Stanley Furniture worker Wanda Perdue, to Surabaya, Indonesia, where much of the world’s wooden bedroom furniture is now made.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Dinius & Angela Vergara, eds., Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power, and Working-class Communities (Athens, GA, 2011); and Hardy Green, The Company Town (New York, 2010). 8. Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009). 9. Stuart Dean Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago, 1976), 45. 10. Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle, 2003), quoted at 51, and ch. 8 for the above. 11. Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London, 1995), ch. 6. For Pullman, see Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940, 16f. 12.

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In company shops, workers bought vegetables which had been fertilized on the company farm with their own human waste collected by the local sewage network. Recreational facilities were the pride of benevolent company towns. In Indian Hill, home of the engineering firm Norton, just outside Worcester, Massachusetts, workers could play ball on the company baseball diamond or go rowing and trap-shooting. There were company clubs for amateur gardeners, photographers and stamp collectors. On summer evenings, the Norton bathhouse offered a retreat on the local lake.11 Company towns offered an important countervailing trend to the commercialization of leisure and its separation from communal life that is so often seen to be characteristic of consumer society.

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Inhabitants in Canadian railtowns in the 1960s were much busier with sports and volunteering than those in neighbouring small towns: see Rex Archibald Lucas, Minetown, Milltown, Railtown: Life in Canadian Communities of Single Industry (Toronto, 1971), esp. 196. 21. Arnold R. Alanen, Morgan Park: Duluth, US Steel and the Forging of a Company Town (Minneapolis, MN, 2007), ch. 7. 22. Elizabeth Esch, ‘Whitened and Enlightened: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazialin Amazon’, in: Dinius & Vergara, eds., Company Towns, ch. 4, for this and the following. 23. Jackson Moore Anderson, Industrial Recreation: A Guide to Its Organization and Administration (New York, 1955), 125. 24. Enrica Asquer, Storia intima dei ceti medi: Una capitale e una periferia nell’Italia del miracolo economico (Rome, 2011), 19. 25.

The Enlightened Capitalists by James O'Toole

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, business process, California gold rush, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, collective bargaining, company town, compensation consultant, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, desegregation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, end world poverty, equal pay for equal work, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, means of production, Menlo Park, North Sea oil, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

In an era when American factories were dirty, dismal, and architecturally hideous, he built a state-of-the-art cotton mill in rural Georgia that was not only externally attractive to the eye but also a safe, clean, and comfortable place for those inside to work. The J&J workers were well paid by local standards, and the facility was the first in the region not to employ children. Influenced by the recent example of William Lever, Johnson built a model company town near the mill, with modern, five-room brick houses for his workers and their families.4 Although he soon abandoned the outmoded practice of creating company towns, in subsequent years he would build over a hundred beautiful, safe, and antiseptically sterile factories. He located all J&J facilities in landscaped, parklike settings on which he challenged the finest architects to design buildings that didn’t look like factories.

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Owen then spent time getting to know Dale, and the latter surprised himself by growing not only to like the former but also willing to let him marry his daughter. A cynic might conclude that Robert Owen then simultaneously relieved David Dale of two sources of continuing financial drain. In January 1800 Robert Owen took possession of the New Lanark mills and the company town in which they were situated on the falls of the river Clyde, a day’s carriage ride from either Edinburgh or Glasgow. While David Dale had a well-deserved reputation for being a kind and good man, Owen found little evidence of such benevolence when, for the first time, he toured his new possessions.

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When he initially arrived in New Lanark, the adult mill workers had been laboring as long as fifteen hours a day, often standing for the entire duration. As time progressed, Owen reduced the workday to ten and three-quarter hours, the lowest in the world at the time. He ended the practice of summary dismissal, and provided job security (the only people he fired were cruel supervisors and chronic drunks). As the company town grew to a population of three thousand, he provided free showers and baths for all, established a credit union, and opened a company store that sold healthy food at a 25 percent discount (although a teetotaler himself, he recognized that his business was, after all, in Scotland, and thus permitted the sale of quality whisky—albeit in wee quantities).

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

CHAPTER THREE Surviving America EXACTLY A WEEK AFTER LINDA DECIDED against blowing up her trailer on Thanksgiving Day of 2010, bad news came to Empire, a factory village of three hundred people that clung like a burr to the back of the Black Rock Desert in northwestern Nevada. One of the last traditional company towns in America, Empire was wholly owned by United States Gypsum, the company that makes Sheetrock. The place was a throwback to the much romanticized heyday of American manufacturing, when factory jobs offered workers a sure footing in the middle class and the chance to raise a family without fear of displacement.

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As of 2017, you could still go to Google Maps Street View, drop a tiny avatar on Circle Drive, and wander around looking at parked cars and lawn furniture and folks watering their yards uninterrupted, all frozen in a photographic landscape that hasn’t been updated since 2009. AT THE SAME TIME Empire was dying, a new and very different kind of company town was thriving seventy miles to the south. In many ways, it felt like the opposite of Empire. Rather than offering middle-class stability, this village was populated by members of the “precariat”: temporary laborers doing short-term jobs in exchange for low wages. More specifically, its citizens were hundreds of itinerant workers living in RVs, trailers, vans, and even a few tents.

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Another replied, “It’s easy to lose weight by walking a half marathon every day. Bonus: you’re too tired to eat!” A third worker boasted of walking 547 miles in ten weeks of work. He was later topped by another, who posted a Fitbit log showing 820 miles in twelve-and-a-half weeks. I WANTED TO SEE this new kind of company town for myself. When I mentioned that to a former CamperForce recruiter, he suggested the best time to visit would be late October, because “folks wouldn’t be quite so exhausted yet.” I took that advice, arriving in Fernley the week before Halloween in 2013. By then, workers had already crammed into lots as far as thirty-five miles away from the Amazon warehouse, including the RV parking area at the Grand Sierra Resort & Casino in Reno.

Lectures on Urban Economics by Jan K. Brueckner

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, company town, congestion charging, Edward Glaeser, invisible hand, market clearing, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Economic Geography, profit maximization, race to the bottom, rent control, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, urban sprawl

For example, a consumer whose wage income is positively correlated with housing prices in her city of residence is exposed to more risk than if income and prices were uncorrelated. Such a consumer might work in a “company town” such as Detroit, where bad times in the auto industry translate into both downward pressure on incomes and capital losses on real estate. If they are aware of this kind of double jeopardy, residents of company towns may display less inclination toward homeownership, or buy smaller houses, than consumers whose incomes aren’t correlated with their city’s house prices. On the other hand, some risk considerations can favor homeownership.

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But once one large factory has been formed, the basket workers will live near it, which will lead to the formation of a city. This story is highly stylized, but it captures the essential link between scale economies and city formation, which will also be present in more complicated and realistic settings. But something is missing from the story. It can explain the formation of “company towns,” but it cannot explain how truly large urban agglomerations arise. To see this point, consider a more realistic example in which the production process is automobile assembly. This process clearly exhibits scale economies, since assembly plants tend to be large, typically employing 2,000 workers or more.

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Thus, an assembly plant will lead to a spatial concentration of employment, and these auto workers (and their families) will in turn attract other establishments designed to serve their personal needs—grocery stores, gas stations, doctor ’s offices, and Why Cities Exist 5 so on. The result will be a “company town” with the auto plant at its center. But how large will this town be? In the absence of any other large employer, its population may be limited in size, say to 25,000. The upshot is that, while scale economies by themselves can generate a city, it will not be as large as, say, Chicago or Houston.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

In almost every case of reported labor abuse, the company has denied responsibility, claiming that the problems lay with subcontractors. 43.  But this arrangement typically gave the employer far too much control over employees’ lives (as would have been the case in the ur-EPCOT company town). So, too, the temptation to capture their wages at the company store proved irresistible. See Margaret Crawford, Building the Worker’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995). 44.  William Feuer, “Jeff Bezos’ Day One Fund Gives $98.5 Million to 32 Groups Helping the Homeless,” CNBC, November 21, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/bezos-day-one-fund-gives-98point5-million-to-groups-helping-the-homeless.html.

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People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.” In retrospect, it is ironic that EPCOT was envisaged as a town where workers could be housed “at modest rentals.” Had this promise been carried out, it would at least have created a kind of company town, guaranteeing affordable housing for Disney World employees. But this was not to be. Within a few years, it became clear that this draft of EPCOT was little more than an expedient vehicle to extract planning permissions and self-governing powers for the fiefdom sometimes referred to as “Florida’s 68th County.”8 Once the company got what it wanted from Florida’s wide-eyed lawmakers, Walt’s idealized rendering promptly vanished.

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“But it’s also where I learned that work did not have to be soul-destroying, which had been my experience up until then. It was a lot of fun, and I wanted more of it.” At the same time, Disney critics have rightly portrayed the college program as a convenient source of cheap labor—and, as in any company town, the employer recoups most of the wages in the student’s housing fees, with much of the rest captured by their patronage of in-house eateries or groceries. In a similar vein, the workplace joy described by Gemma and others is a good example of how “passionate labor” is now routinely exploited by employers.20 This is how the trade-off works: because love of performing, crafting, teaching, or problem-solving in a creative field delivers personal gratification, employees are then implicitly offered this emotional reward as compensation for underwhelming pay.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

More housing might be built in urban centers, but it will almost always come at a high price and usually be too small for families.12 Meanwhile, most tech oligarchs themselves live in the Bay Area’s pricey bucolic suburbs, or have rural properties at their disposal.13 Such options may never exist for most of their own employees, particularly the younger ones. The Guardian characterized Google’s move to build high-density units near its offices as “well-wishing feudalism.”14 Company Town or Dystopia? What will the cities created by our tech overlords be like? They certainly will not be like those of postwar America or Britain, with their spreading suburbs, but more akin to the old company towns, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, built around textile mills, or the Pullman company town in Illinois.15 Such developments have been sold as public-spirited accommodations, but they also offered a convenient way to increase control over employees and boost productivity.

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Cities Have a Glut of High-Rises and Still Lack Affordable Housing,” New Geography, September 3, 2017, http://www.newgeography.com/content/005732-us-cities-have-a-glut-of-high-rises-and-still-lack-affordable-housing. 13 Erika Riggs, “Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy,” NBC News, October 12, 2013, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/real-estate/mark-zuckerberg-spends-30-million-four-homes-ensure-privacy-f8C11379396; Melia Robinson, “We scouted the homes of the top tech executives, and they all live in this San Francisco suburb for the1%,” Business Insider, October 7, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/homes-of-tech-ceos-in-atherton-silicon-valley-2017-10; Meredith Bauer, “8 Amazing Homes of Silicon Valley’s Tech Elite,” The Street, May 23, 2015, https://www.thestreet.com/story/13160991/1/8-amazing-homes-of-silicon-valleys-tech-elite.html#3. 14 Veena Dubal, “Google as a landlord? A looming feudal nightmare,” Guardian, July 11, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/11/google-as-a-landlord-a-looming-feudal-nightmare?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. 15 Michele Lent Hirsch, “America’s Company Towns, Then and Now,” Smithsonian, September 4, 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/americas-company-towns-then-and-now-180956382/. 16 Andrew S. Ross, “In Silicon Valley, Age Can Be a Curse,” SFGate, August 20, 2013, https://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/In-Silicon-Valley-age-can-be-a-curse-4742365.php. 17 Susan Crawford, “Beware of Google’s Intentions,” Wired, February 1, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/sidewalk-labs-toronto-google-risks/; Sidewalk Toronto, “Toronto Tomorrow,” https://sidewalktoronto.ca/#documents; Vipal Monga, “Toronto Oicials Question Alphabet Unit’s Ambitions for ‘Smart City,’” Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/toronto-officials-question-alphabet-units-ambitions-for-smart-city-11561412851. 18 “Sidewalk Labs’s vision and your data privacy: A guide to the saga on Toronto’s waterfront,” Globe and Mail, June 24, 2019, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-sidewalk-labs-quayside-toronto-waterfront-explainer/. 19 Crawford, “Beware of Google’s Intentions.” 20 “Albert Gidari,” Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/about/people/albert-gidari. 21 Yulia Gorbunova, “Online and On All Fronts,” Human Rights Watch, July 18, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/07/18/online-and-all-fronts/russias-assault-freedom-expression; Leopord Hakizimana and Dr.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Wood’s brother Rufus took charge of laying out the town that would house the army of workers needed for the plant. And in Annapolis, the company lobbied for the right to remain lord of its new domain, free of nettlesome incorporation or the reach of the elected government in suburban Baltimore County, to which it putatively belonged. Sparrows Point would be the ultimate company town. On May 30, 1890, the works were ready for their grand opening. Dignitaries from Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia arrived by rail. The company hoisted them up eighty-five feet on an elevator to the charging platform on top of one blast furnace, from which they watched transfixed as workers shot off a blast in another furnace two hundred feet away, sending bolts of fire across the sky.

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With its global rivals lying in ruins, the United States was now producing nearly two-thirds of the world’s steel. The industry that had done more than any other to help the United States win the war was nearing its apex. So, too, was the place that had been transformed by that effort, both the company town and the nearby city to which its fate was yoked. On May 14, 1945, one week after the Nazi surrender, the Baltimore mayor Theodore McKeldin made Eugene Grace, who’d taken over the company at Schwab’s death in 1939, an honorary citizen of the city. McKeldin wrote: “The Bethlehem Steel Plant at Sparrows Point, with its tremendous permanent facilities and its use of local labor and production, is our special pride

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A young woman who lived a few doors down from Melton had recently stopped working for Amazon because the exertion had gotten too hard on her back. Increasingly, it seemed as if a significant fraction of people living in the complexes were or had been working at Amazon, as if the complexes had become the new company town, replacing the lettered streets at Sparrows Point with their loops and cul-de-sacs with names like Skipjack Court and Tidewater Lane. On May Day, there were rumors circulating of large walkouts by workers at Amazon warehouses around the country. But there was no sign of any unrest outside the fulfillment center at Broening Highway, where the vast parking lot appeared fuller than ever before, or at the adjacent sortation center, where the collapsed wall had been rebuilt and where half the building was now given over to packing Prime Now deliveries of groceries and household items, which were in high demand.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Everything—all other development work, all other processes of city growth, the fertile and creative inefficiency of the growth industry’s suppliers, the opportunities of able workers to break away, the inefficient but creative use of capital— can be sacrificed to the exigencies of the growth industry, which thus turns the city into a company town.” Or in this case a three-company town where there had once been three thousand. Reduced to an industrial monoculture, the city was no different in the end from Jacobs’s hometown of Scranton (or Kasarda’s Wilkes-Barre) after the coal veins ran dry (or drowned). Detroit’s future was mortgaged to pay for America’s postwar autopia.

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A liberal polemicist like Thomas Frank, on the other hand, finds a starched-and-pressed Sodom: When you drive among these wonders, northern Virginia appears as a kind of technicolor vision of prosperity, American-style; a distillation of all that is mighty and righteous about the American imperium: the airport designed by Eero Saarinen; the shopping mall so vast it dwarfs other cities’ downtowns; the finely tuned high-performance cars zooming along an immaculate private highway; the masses of flowers in perfectly edged beds; the gas stations with Colonial Williamsburg cupolas; the street names, even, recalling our cherished American values: Freedom, Market, Democracy, Tradition, and Signature drives; Heritage Lane; Founders Way; Enterprise, Prosperity, and Executive Park avenues; and a Chivalry Road that leads, of course, to Valor Court. All well and good, except for the fact it’s corporate welfare. Dulles is also crucial to the county’s plans for its next act. First, Fairfax hopes to wean itself from the Pentagon so as not to suffer the fate someday of another company town, Detroit. Then it aims to use the taxpayers’ money as bait to attract the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurs looking to consult for the consultants. It almost worked once before. The all-time greatest instance of the military’s power to spin its science projects into gold runs like a river directly beneath Dulles and most of Fairfax County.

…

Regardless of their contents’ retail price, these packages are priceless to their owners, and they pour from the bellies of wide-body planes here by the millions each and every night. Its trucks, planes, and trailers—not to mention its purple logo— permeate Memphis, which for all intents and purposes is a FedEx company town. In 2008, University of Memphis researchers sought to measure the airport’s impact on the city. They discovered that it was indirectly responsible for nearly half of the local economy, worth $28.6 billion, and for 220,154 jobs—one out of every three in the region. Not only is it the largest private employer in a metropolitan area of more than a million people, it sits at the center of an ecosystem of warehouses, trucking firms, factories, and office parks with roots that stretch back to its not-so-far-gone cotton days.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Many other big companies made positive efforts to cement the bond between capital and labor. U.S. Steel, for instance, spent $10 million a year on employee welfare programs—“to disarm the prejudice against trusts,” as the chairman of the board informed his colleagues. International Harvester established a profit-sharing plan.30 Company towns sprang up across America. Some were brutal prison camps; many more were prompted by what Henry Mills, a Unitarian minister in Lowell, called “the sagacity of self-interest.” Well-housed and well-educated workers would be more efficient than their slum-dwelling, feckless contemporaries. For instance, in 1880, George Pullman built his eponymous town on the outskirts of Chicago in the hope that a “rational and aesthetic order” would elevate the character of the workers.

…

Inevitably, they often justified their own poor training by disparaging “foreign methods,” such as economics, industrial psychology, or accountancy. In the 1930s, no more than a dozen big British manufacturers had management training schemes for university graduates. The horror of things industrial even manifested itself in the development of British company towns. Embarrassed by the filthy, crowded, and chaotic cities that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, some of the best British companies embraced Ebenezer Howard’s idea of the “garden city”—a new decentralized social order, in which people would be rural enough to keep in touch with the land but urban enough to support such civic institutions as hospitals, concert halls, and art galleries.

…

Jack Welch complained that lifetime employment produced a “paternal, feudal, fuzzy kind of loyalty”—and forced his employees to compete to keep their jobs.26 In IBM towns, like Endicott and Armonk, IBM men lost more than their jobs; they lost access to the cocoon of institutions, such as the IBM country club, with which the company had long protected them. This devastation can be exaggerated. Some company towns, such as Redmond, boomed during the period. In Delaware, Du Pont may have faded (its workforce was slashed from 25,000 to 9,000), but its role in local society was partly assumed by MBNA, an uppity credit-card firm that employed 10,500 people in the state by 2002.27 Company Man did not so much die as enroll in a witness-protection program.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

Beyond it stretched the jungles, hot, dense, soggy and ever hostile, alive with animals: the tiger and the panther, the tapir and the one-horned rhino, black apes and giant rats, a range of giant pythons and venomous cobras together with a gaudy wealth of cockatoos, parrots and birds of paradise. Inside the walls grew up the curiously compounded population of this quintessentially Company town. Dutchmen were at first reluctant to come – the ‘scum of the earth’, complained Coen, were the ones who wanted to settle – and in the early years only a vanishingly small number of Dutch women appeared on the scene. In fact there were so few females that Coen was forced to appeal to Holland: ‘Everyone knows that the male sex cannot exist without women… if your Excellencies cannot get any honest married people, do not neglect to send underage young girls: thus do we hope to do better than with older women.’

…

This building served a myriad of functions: the magistrates' bench was here, licences were issued, slaves were freed, ships were sold. On the cobbled square outside was a set of stocks, with miscreants frequently seen locked into them. Inside and below ground there were dungeons, and many are the stories of how the VOC security officers, who ran their Company town with a ferocious rectitude, resorted to torture to extract confessions. A visiting German soldier named Christopher Schweitzer wrote an account of the harshness he saw: The 29th. Four Seamen were publicly Beheaded at Batavia (which is here the common Death of Criminals) for having killed a Chinese.

…

Something did definitely occur on Krakatoa, of that there is little doubt; but whatever it was, it was probably much less significant a happening than the eruption that seems to have taken place in the sixth century; not to mention what took place two centuries later, in the nineteenth century. It did none the less take place within a respectable distance of a newly settled urban population. For Batavia, the primary Company town of the VOC, was in 1680 a full eight decades old, and it had attained some kind of settled maturity. It had a walled quarter and turreted administrative offices, a Chinatown and a collection of godowns, and any number of small terraced houses with streets and canals and taverns, forming a dreamy, steamy simulacrum of the VOC employees' much missed homes back in faraway Amsterdam or Leiden, Delft or Utrecht.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle

active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, barriers to entry, basic income, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, job automation, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), low skilled workers, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, precariat, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telemarketer, the payments system, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, very high income, white flight, working poor, Zipcar

Discussion threads have even been created to “expose Uber employees.”34 Most sharing economy services are a far cry from company towns where workers were paid in script and housed in units owned by the company. One notable exception to this was CrowdFlower, a online platform that allowed for data cleaning and was similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Although Mechanical Turk has been criticized for paying low wages, sometimes CrowdFlower didn’t even pay workers, instead giving them points for various online reward programs and videogame credits.35 While company towns were most common in the United States in the late 1800s, Uber’s recruiting playbook reaches back much farther.

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In 1823, a group of Boston investors took advantage of the thirty-two-foot drop of the Merrimack River’s Pawtucket Falls to establish the first large-scale, planned textile center, a town they later named Lowell. Lowell was different from other mill towns. Relying on vertical inte-gration, the mill combined spinning and weaving under one roof. Approximately 75 percent of its workers were women and girls, some as young as thirteen. By 1840, the mills employed eight thousand women. In this true “company town,” workers lived in dormitories provided by the companies and were subject to strict codes of conduct. As the Boott Cotton Mills Museum notes, “Intemperance, rowdiness, illicit relations with men, and habitual absence from worship on the Sabbath” were grounds for dismissal from the factory and removal from the boardinghouse.

…

According to the Wall Street Journal: “By charging high-lease fees in exchange for the risk, many drivers worked longer hours and returned the vehicles in poor shape, damaging their resale value, people familiar with the matter have said.”39 Additionally, Uber found that established dealers were pushing drivers into leasing more expensive vehicles, lowering their likelihood of turning a profit. As of this writing, it was uncertain if Uber would pursue additional lease opportunities. Just like the workers in company towns, where the loss of one’s job could also result in the loss of one’s home and the social safety net was nonexistent, today’s sharing economy workers are on their own in many ways. Workers pay for their transportation between gigs and while on tasks or rides; they (or taxpayers, through Medicaid) provide their own health insurance; they must calculate and pay payroll taxes such as Social Security/Medicare; and they must personally finance any time off (owing to illness, vacation, or a lack of work).

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

The lack of female employees in the company’s upper ranks also became noticeable. When a woman finally joined the engineering staff, the team scrambled to rewrite the underlying code because they had described a reddish color in the design as “hooker’s blood.” When an employee brought up the lack of female leadership at a company town hall, Adam didn’t offer much of a response except to point to Stella Templo, who was then working as his chief of staff. During another Q&A, Adam took questions alongside Michael Gross and Noah Brodsky, an executive recently poached from Starwood Hotels. The lack of diversity came up again. “Diversity?”

…

Artie was skeptical of Adam’s push to position WeWork as a tech company, believing instead that it made more sense for WeWork to position itself as the Nike of office space—a premium brand that consumers would pay extra for. But Adam wouldn’t hear it, and grew frustrated when Artie expressed doubts about the hundreds of millions Adam was spending on acquisitions. After one company town hall, Adam didn’t realize he was still miked up and that WeWork’s employees could hear him as he walked offstage and told Michael Gross, “We need to get Artie out.” Artie and other WeWork executives found themselves hesitant to press Neumann too hard. Those who did often found themselves kept out of meetings they should have been in, or sent to new jobs in far corners of the business.

…

Neumann had certainly come to believe in his ability to do just that. “The influence and impact that we are going to have on this earth is going to be so big,” he said, wearing a T-shirt that read LET’S MEAT IN THE MIDDLE. A few weeks earlier, after the shocking news that both Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain had died by suicide, Adam had stood up at a company town hall and told his employees that if they were ever feeling depressed or suicidal they should reach out to him directly. At Summer Camp, he relayed what he described as good news: one of his employees had done just that, and was in the crowd today, doing fine. As he had on other occasions, Adam shared some of the difficulties of his childhood, and he and Rebekah expressed a desire to solve the problems plaguing children in even less fortunate situations.

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

Importing 1,600 carpenters, masons, and laborers for the project, the company almost reached its goal, building 946 five- or six-room workingman’s cottages by the end of 1919. Selling for as little as $3,500, they would house generations of GM employees. Civic Park, as the development was known, established Flint as a company town, where General Motors both issued a man’s paycheck and collected his mortgage. General Motors did not control just its employees’ working hours and home lives; it controlled the leisure hours in between as well. The Industrial Mutual Association, funded by workers’ annual five-dollar contributions, built a seven-thousand-seat auditorium that became the recreational and entertainment center of the city, bringing in opera singers from New York; organizing bowling, basketball, and baseball leagues whose teams represented their shops; sponsoring a male glee club, a women’s chorus, orchestras, bands, and a literary society.

…

His father, Thomas Mortimer, was president of the local chapter of the Knights of Labor and led a strike that resulted in his blacklisting from the mines for years. Wyndham himself went into the mines when he was twelve, where he earned seven cents an hour as a “trapper boy,” opening and closing doors for mule teams that hauled the coal. The family’s straitened existence in the company town of Bitumen was “the nearest thing to peonage to be found anywhere in America,” Mortimer would write in his 1971 autobiography, Organize! My Life as a Union Man. Eventually, as coal dust consumed Thomas’s lungs, the Mortimers moved to Elyria, Ohio, where Wyndham found a job in a steel mill. While working there, he heard a campaign speech by Eugene Debs, during one of Debs’s five campaigns for president on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

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See also Flint sit-down strike, 1936–1937 “The Fisher Strike” (song), 63–64 Fisher Two, Flint: blockade by GM, 74–76; components produced at, 73; conditions in during extended strike, 61, 85, 123; decision to continue the strike, 108–9; defensive activity/ weaponry at, 74–77; evacuation march from, 178; response to the settlement, 173. See also Flint sit-down strike, 1936–1937 Fitzgerald, Frank, 31, 43, 159, 173 Fleetwood plant, Detroit, sit-down sympathy strike, 81 Flint, Michigan: autoworkers in, 128, 188; as a boomtown, 4; Civic Park, 6; as a company town, 6–7; congressman from, 122–23; early strikes, 22; Flint Central Labor Council, 5; Flint Socialist Party, 89–90; January temperatures, 73; law enforcement establishment, 67–68; lumber mills, lumber industry, 1–2; marches following evacuation, 177–78; population growth, 3–5; poverty and violence in, 188; prosperity following WWII, 183–84, 186; racism in, 23–24; response to settlement in, 176; “Vehicle City” name, 1; water crisis, 188 Flint Alliance: purpose, tactics, 69–70, 104–5; secret agreement with GM, 106–8; strike-breaking efforts, 125–28; strikers’ reaction to, 70 Flint Auto Worker, 64, 66, 87, 101 Flint Common Council, 14 Flint Journal: photograph of Johnson son on picket line, 90; Sloan’s full-page open letter in, 59; Sloan’s statements in, 131–32; as voice for GM in Flint, 87 Flint Road Cart Company, 2 Flint sit-down strike, 1936–1937: behavior rules, 49–50; call-up of military, 84–85; conditions of strikers and their families, 53–54, 63–64, 123–24; continuation of following double-cross, 108–10; evacuation marches following settlement, 176–78; first shut-downs, 49–50; food committee, 62–63; formal demands, 58–59; impacts on GM productivity, 60, 101–2; imprisonment of strikers, 100–101; injunctions against strikers, 56–58; Lansing Truce, 105–10; negotiations, 55, 99, 105–8, 117–23, 154–55; organizing and feeding of strikers, 52, 61–63; planning/preparations for, 45, 142–43; police committee, preparations for violence, 66, 73–74, 77, 143–44, 156–57, 164, 179; results of settlement, 181–82; and the sealing off of Fisher One, 52–53; securing of the Flint One plant, 52; settlement agreement, 171–72, 174–75; signing ceremony, 173–74; time-passing activities, 63–65; and the UAWA capture of Fisher One, 48–49; UAWA takeover of strike in Cleveland, 48; varying support for in Flint, 55–56; White Shirt Day, 189.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, book scanning, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, citizen journalism, clean water, cognitive load, company town, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, helicopter parent, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Kevin Roose, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, nudge unit, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, random walk, Richard Thaler, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh, Turing machine, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

And he acted on them as well, doubling the wages of his factory workers in 1914 to $5 per day. Even earlier, in 1903, Milton S. Hershey not only laid the foundation for what would become the Hershey Company but also for the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania. The United States had over 2,500 company towns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, housing 3 percent of the population at their peak.27 But unlike in most company towns, Hershey “avoided building a faceless company town with row houses. He wanted a ‘real home town’ with tree-lined streets, single- and two-family brick houses, and manicured lawns.” With Milton Hershey’s success came a profound sense of moral responsibility and benevolence.

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See “On the Origins of Google,” National Science Foundation, http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660. 25. “Code of Conduct,” Google, http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html#II. 26. Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1922). 27. Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 28. “About Hershey: Our Proud History,” Hershey Entertainment & Resorts, http://www.hersheypa.com/about_hershey/our_proud_history/about_milton_hershey.php. 29. American Experience: “Henry Ford,” WGBH Educational Foundation, first broadcast March 2013.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Some tall, slab buildings for mass housing had been constructed in earlier times for particular state enterprises; tenants lived in a sort of vertical company town, with communal toilets and kitchens. By the 1990s, though, private ownership by individuals had become the norm and the shared toilets and kitchens disappeared. A ‘dwelling’ had come to mean an individual apartment, rather than a collective building. It was the collective local life of the city, mostly still embodied in its shikumen – but also now in these vertical company towns – at which the post-Deng era took aim.27 Confined to their individual flats, people began to suffer from the ills of isolation.

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All Googleplexi, sprinkled over the globe from Silicon Valley to Munich, are gated communities designed to extract labour from otherwise unattached twenty-somethings; once people have spouses, partners or children, they will want to spend less time on site. For these people, Google provides – as in Silicon Valley – big white buses to chauffeur them to and from the office, thus extending working hours via absolutely reliable internet connections. This Googleplex formula derives from the classic company towns of the industrial era like Pullman, Illinois, in the US or Port Sunlight in Britain, both built in the 1880s; like them, the Googleplex ties a tight time-knot between working and dwelling. The Googlistas are poster-children for the ‘creative classes’. This term, invented by Richard Florida, is now defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as people who mostly work in advertising, media services and tech start-ups outside universities; the number of independent artists, musicians and poets is relatively minute: the creative classes are more distributors, middlemen and branders than actual Homo fabers.

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Pursued by investors, celebrated by politicians as the answer to urban stagnation, the creative classes are an elite which does not do much for the mass. In fact the reverse. As Nathan Heller has pointed out, in 2014 a traditional business like Citibank employed about 250,000 people, whereas Facebook, with a higher valuation in the stock market, employed about 6,000.3 In a big city, the company-town idea behind a Googleplex translates as an island within the city which nevertheless has a significant effect on the territory around it. Most notoriously, Googlistas and their kind drive up house prices in Manhattan – just as in their other epicentre, the San Francisco region – currently (2017) by 16 per cent annually in the places they favour.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Bakken shale, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, energy security, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, George Gilder, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, More Guns, Less Crime, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Solyndra, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working poor

“Olin Fined $70,000,” Associated Press, Dec. 12, 1979. For decades, Saltville: “End of a Company Town,” Life, March 26, 1971. See also Tod Newcombe, “Saltville, Virginia: A Company Town Without a Company,” Governing.com, Aug. 2012. “They all knew the dangers”: Harry Haynes, interview with author. Dangerous levels of mercury: Virginia Water Resources Research Center, “Mercury Contamination in Virginia Waters: History, Issues, and Options,” March 1979. See also EPA Superfund Record of Decision, Saltville Waste Disposal Ponds, June 30, 1987. Life magazine produced: “End of a Company Town.” “It’s a ghost town”: Shirley “Sissy” Bailey, interview with author.

…

In the tiny Appalachian town of Saltville, Virginia, meanwhile, in the far southwestern corner of the state, the Olin Corporation was facing an environmental crisis of such major proportions that it threatened to end not only Olin’s industrial operations there but also the entire town’s way of life for years to come. The Olin Corporation’s pollution was so extensive and intractable that the company faced the prospect of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup costs, with no end in sight. For decades, Saltville had been a prototypical company town, owned and run in an almost feudal fashion by its only large employer, the Olin Corporation. The company owned ten thousand acres in the ruggedly beautiful mountainous gap, as well as 450 modest clapboard houses that it rented to the town’s 2,199 residents. It also owned the local grocery stores, the water system, the sewerage system, and the only school, which many workers left after no more than sixth or seventh grade.

…

Also, it was under pressure from the United Mine Workers union, which had succeeded after bitter battles in representing the employees. In all likelihood, the factory was doomed not just for environmental reasons. Yet the story line blaming environmental activists for its problems proved irresistible. Life magazine produced an elegiac photo essay called “End of a Company Town,” and The Wall Street Journal lamented the crushing new regulatory burden on corporate America. The Olin Corporation, meanwhile, demolished its factory and sold most of its Saltville real estate back to local residents but found no takers for its mercury waste “muck” pond. It tried removing a foot or so of topsoil around it, and it tried building a ditch along the river to divert the toxic runoff, but these efforts were hopelessly deficient.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, desegregation, Donald Trump, financial innovation, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, income inequality, invisible hand, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, yellow journalism

The businesses were easily accessible from a four-lane public highway, which brought in supplies for Chickasaw’s primary employer, the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation. During World War II, the company and the town had prospered due to contracts with the Navy. Chickasaw’s most distinguishing feature was one a visitor like Marsh might not even notice: it was a company town, wholly owned and operated by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation.15 On Christmas Eve in 1943, Grace Marsh visited Chickasaw’s business block to hand out copies of Watchtower, the official magazine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. A sheriff’s deputy, who was paid by Gulf Shipbuilding to police the devoutly Christian town, demanded she stop, citing company policy prohibiting the distribution of literature on the streets.

…

Although Black recognized that private property owners usually have the right to exclude whomever they want from their property, the “more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general,” the more the owner has to respect the constitutional rights of the public. Here, Chickasaw’s business block was “accessible to and freely used by the public in general.” Because Chickasaw was a town—even if it was really a company town—it could not silence religious minorities.17 Marsh v. Alabama fundamentally flipped the constitutional status of corporations. Ever since Daniel Webster’s Dartmouth College case, corporations were deemed to be private entities, which like ordinary people could assert individual rights against the government.

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Marsh was never overturned, but neither did it become an important precedent. Instead, it continues to live to this day in a state of constitutional purgatory, essentially a dead letter but still on the books. Now the case, when remembered at all, is dismissed as a sui generis response “to the special history and circumstances of the Southern company town”; as those towns faded from the economic scene in the decades that followed, so did Black’s unusual approach to corporations and the Constitution.20 The fate of Marsh was strikingly different from that of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Even though the court explicitly refused to decide whether corporations were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment in Santa Clara, that decision would be frequently cited for establishing that rule.

Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

Even Nashville, where one in thirteen residents norteno music booming from its Latino, has a is sonido: the three Spanish-language radio sta- Los Tigres del Norte compete with Garth Brooks and tions. compliments chipotle chitterlings across a vast stretch of the South, in urban "Little Mexicos" Road new district) (like Nashville's Nolensville and mono-industrial company towns Louisiana or Dalton, Georgia) Houma, (like alike. Table 1 The Latino Core Top Latino Top Latino Top Latino Counties* States (1997) Cities (1992) (1997) 1. California 9,941,014 Los Angeles 4,000,642 New York 1,783,511 2. Texas 5,722,535 Dade 1,139,004 Los Angeles 1,391,411 3.

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This urban-ge- netic exchange has only strengthened the distinctiveness of Frontera as a transnational cultural system in its own right. La LA FRONTERA'S SIAMESE TWINS In Tijuana, 31 Samsung, Sony, Sanyo and Hyundai dominate the maquila economy, master-planned industrial parks and postmod- ern company towns little like Ciudad Industrial Nueva and El Florido - kingdoms of "unlimited managerial prerogatives" or what Devon Pena calls "hyper- Toyotism" - directly abutt the border on the Mexican side.^^ Maquila managers dustrial Chula known commute to Tijuana's in- zone every morning from lush San Diego suburbs while green-card-carrying Tijuanenses Vista, as "transmigrants") make the opposite like (officially commute by the thousands to work in San Diego's post-industrial tourist economy Despite the enduring income precipice between the two sides of the border, social indicators no longer always point in one direction.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Corporate philanthropists such as Cadbury and Rowntree in Britain and Hershey and Kaiser in the United States built model communities to house their workers (at one point the U.S. had more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3 percent of the population).4 In Germany and Japan, industrialists embraced a stakeholder model of capitalism in which workers were involved in decision-making. But by the 1970s company towns were withering across the Anglo-Saxon world, and shareholder capitalism had become bureaucratized. For many business people, corporate social responsibility meant nothing more than throwing some money at the local opera (and getting a few seats in return for the senior managers).

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Alan Rosling, a former Tata executive who spearheaded the company’s globalization, liked to say that “we’re making money so that our shareholders can give it away.” But the commitment to CSR goes deeper than this. Consider Jamshedpur, the home of Tata Steel and perhaps the world’s most successful company town. Tata Steel runs almost all the city’s institutions: a 980-bed hospital; a zoo; a giant sports stadium; academies for football, archery, and athletics; golf courses; and the local utility company, among many others. The company also employs 250 people to work with local tribespeople, to improve agriculture, healthcare, and education, and regularly sends a hospital train even farther into the hinterland.

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Business Week, August 7,1995. 2. Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York: Harper Collins, 1993). 3. From Tim Hindle, The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus (London: Profile, 2009). Also available online, http://www.economist.com/node/13130298. 4. Hardy Green, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 5. See Anita Roddick, Body and Soul: Profits with Principles—The Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick and The Body Shop (London: Ebury Press, 1991). 6. Clive Crook, “The good company: a survey of corporate social responsibility,” The Economist, January 20, 2005. 7.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

It was an idea Michel Foucault took up in the 1970s as a metaphor for producing ‘docile bodies’. Bentham believed his panopticon design could be used for hospitals, mental asylums, schools, factories, the workhouse and all social institutions. Around the world his design has been adopted and has been extended inadvertently by twenty-first-century company towns. The worst case so far is Shenzhen, where 6 million workers are watched by closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras everywhere they go and where a comprehensive databank monitors their behaviour and character, modelled on technology developed by the US military. One could talk of ‘Shenzhenism’ in the way social scientists talk of ‘Fordism’ and ‘Toyotism’ as systems of production and employment control.

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The last could become a badge of honour, respected by those with empathy for the condition of the precariat, as an assertion of a right of privacy, a rejection of the intrusion. Beyond recruitment, the panopticon is in its element in tertiary workplaces. National industrial capitalism spawned company towns. There were over 2,500 in the United States (Green, 2010). In modified forms, this paternalistic concept has persisted, some evolving into vast corporate creations. Thus IBM and PepsiCo have town-sized campuses in the middle of nowhere. The Chinese have gone further with Shenzhen; Foxconn is the global leader.

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Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007), ‘Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarisation of Work in Britain’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 89(1): 118–33. Gorz, A. (1982), Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, London: Pluto Press. [Original published as Adieux au proletariat, Paris: Galilée, 1980.] Green, H. (2010), The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy, New York: Basic Books. BIBLIOGRAPHY 187 Grene, S. (2009), ‘Pension Investors Fail to Get the Message’, FT Report - Fund Management, 27 July, p. 3. Grimm, S. and Ronneberger, K. (2007), An Invisible History of Work: Interview with Sergio Bologna.

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

To me, this is a very concerning side effect of what has happened in the aftermath of the financial crisis.” A few hours later, MIT alum John Thain, who sold Merrill Lynch to Bank of America when he couldn’t save it, held court and told about the time he realized that the computer models used to value mortgage-backed securities couldn’t factor in falling home prices. 25 COMPANY TOWN It wasn’t just tighter lending standards that made homeownership so challenging for a lot of regular Americans after the crash. There was a formidable new competitor for houses in many of the most attractive suburban neighborhoods. In April 2017, a real estate agent named Don Nugent listed a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home for sale in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

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Vamossy, “Predicting Consumer Default: A Deep Learning Approach,” Working Papers 26165, National Bureau of Economic Research, August 20, 2019. “The great misnomer of the 2008 crisis” Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino, “The Role of Housing and Mortgage Markets in the Financial Crisis,” Annual Review of Financial Economics 10 (2018): 25–41. 25. COMPANY TOWN Ryan Dezember and Laura Kusisto, “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2017. Ryan Dezember, “How to Buy a House the Wall Street Way,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2018. _______ and Laura Kusisto, “House Money: Wall Street Is Raising More Money Than Ever for Its Rental-Home Gambit,” Wall Street Journal, July 9, 2018.

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OVER THE HEDGE 13. “WE’VE HAD QUITE A FEW PEOPLE WALK AWAY” 14. SYSTEM ERROR 15. “THE WHOLE CAPER WAS OVER” 16. STREETS WHERE NOBODY LIVES 17. BUYER’S REMORSE 18. THE SPILL PART III 19. FOR RENT 20. MEET YOUR NEW LANDLORD 21. JOANIE 22. FOR SALE 23. WALKING AWAY 24. FROM THREE HOUSES TO FOUR 25. COMPANY TOWN 26. CUT DOWN 27. EPILOGUE NOTES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT First published in the United States by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group UNDERWATER. Copyright © 2020 by Ryan Dezember. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271 www.thomasdunnebooks.com Cover design by Rob Grom Cover photographs: splash © Peter Lakomy/Shutterstock.com; bubbles © Zerbor/Shutterstock.com; house © Buengza/Shutterstock.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Names: Dezember, Ryan, author.

Frommer's Washington State by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, California gold rush, centre right, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, transcontinental railway, white picket fence

The centerpiece of this resort is the historic Hotel de Haro, which was built in 1886 and overlooks the resort’s marina and a gorgeous formal garden. Because the old hotel has not been renovated in recent years, its rooms are the most basic here. To fully appreciate Roche Harbor’s setting, you should stay in a suite (the Quarryman Hall suites are among the finest rooms on the island), a Company Town cottage, or one of the carriage houses or cottages on the green. The condominiums, although dated, are good bets for families. The waterfront dining room has a view of the marina, and the deck makes a great spot for a sunset cocktail. In addition to the amenities listed below, there are moped rentals, whale-watching cruises, and sea-kayak tours. 248 Reuben Memorial Dr.

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The region’s earliest pioneer history is linked to the logging industry. At Port Gamble, on the north end of the peninsula, Andrew Pope and William Talbot chose to build their sawmill, which became the longest-operating mill in the Northwest. Although the mill is now closed, Port Gamble remains a company town and still, for the most part, looks as if it hasn’t changed in 100 years. It’s a charming little village with restored homes, a village green, and miles of hiking and mountain-biking trails through the surrounding forests. The state of Washington seems obsessed with theme towns; there’s a Dutch town, a Wild West town, a Bavarian town, and here on the Kitsap Peninsula, a Scandinavian town.

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D (& 360/265-8300; www.northwestboatrentals. com), which rents sailboats, speedboats, kayaks, and electric boats. If you have time and enjoy visiting historic towns, continue north from Poulsbo on Wash. 3 to Port Gamble (www.portgamble.com), which looks like a New England village dropped down in the middle of the Northwest woods. This community was established in 1853 as a company town for the Pope and Talbot lumber mill. Along the town’s shady streets are Victorian homes that were restored by Pope and Talbot. Stop by the Port Gamble General Store and Cafe, 32400 Rainier Ave. (& 360/297-7636), a classic general store that is home to the Of Sea and Shore Museum (www.ofseaandshore.com).

Truevine: Two Brothers, a Kidnapping, and a Mother's Quest: A True Story of the Jim Crow South by Beth Macy

affirmative action, Charles Lindbergh, company town, desegregation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, market bubble, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, New Journalism, strikebreaker, TED Talk, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

And my hunch, guided by the 1910 census, was that Harriett (nicknamed Hattie) had followed the Clark family to Covington, a small city in the neighboring county, seeking a better job and a friendlier racial climate. In 1910, around seven years before she moved to Roanoke and set up house in Jordan’s Alley, Harriett was working as a washerwoman in the company town of Fenwick, which had sprouted up on the outskirts of New Castle, with some three hundred residents. It had mushroomed to serve the flourishing Fenwick Mines, whose iron-ore deposits drew hundreds of workers to the lush highlands. Anna Clark’s husband, Porter, was a superintendent at the mines, and Harriett’s other neighbors were night watchmen, iron-company machinists, and miners.

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Barnes Circus grabbed headlines with thirty train cars full of its wild-animal menagerie and circus-stunt acts, and had a near-monopoly in the western states. Farmers sold hay and grain so they could afford to take their families to the eye-popping shows. At the turn of the twentieth century, ninety-eight circuses and menageries traveled across the country, the most in American history. The largest among them were traveling company towns, mammoth three-ring railroad circuses that rattled across the nation, toting more than a thousand employees and hundreds of animals. In the Midwest and along the East Coast, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey—the two entities combined in 1919—moved its version of a small city on a near-nightly basis, shrewdly timing its course to bring in the most dollars.

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In the late 1910s and early ’20s, Kelley had helped turn John Ringling into a tycoon. He had rushed to the scene of an Oklahoma oil strike, fortuitously located near one of John’s newly acquired rail lines. Kelley quickly secured eight thousand acres of oil leases that would bring millions in profits and lead to the creation of Ringling, Oklahoma, a company town named for and laid out by John himself. Kelley had elevated the self-titled circus king to oil baron. Though eventually their partnership soured, Kelley always exhibited a deep love for Ringling history, founding the Circus World Museum in 1959, long after he retired. He revered Baraboo, unlike John, who had looked down his nose at the hometown folk and called them Baraboobians.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

airport security, Bob Geldof, City Beautiful movement, company town, David Sedaris, desegregation, Frank Gehry, gun show loophole, Ida Tarbell, Lewis Mumford, Oklahoma City bombing, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine, white picket fence

The egomania required to be president or a presidential assassin makes the two types brothers of sorts. Presidents and presidential assassins are like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City that way. Even though one city is all about sin and the other is all about salvation, they are identical, one-dimensional company towns built up out of the desert by the sheer will of true believers. The assassins and the presidents invite the same basic question: Just who do you think you are? One of the books I read for McKinley research was Barbara Tuchman’s great history of European and American events leading up to World War I, The Proud Tower.

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Lincoln had returned to Chicago and his lucrative private law practice after his service in the Garfield and Arthur administrations. George Pullman, founder of the Pullman Palace Car Company, was his most important client. In 1894, Pullman workers were either laid off or had their wages cut. And even though they lived in the company town of Pullman in housing owned by George Pullman, he refused to lower his workers’ rents. The resulting Pullman strike became a red-letter date in labor history, bringing socialist Eugene Debs to national attention. Pullman’s drawn-out, stubborn refusal to budge on worker demands prompted even “Dollar Mark” Hanna to complain, “A man who won’t meet his men half-way is a God-damn fool.”

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

In the Soviet era the children of peasants, both Russian and ethnically non-Russian, could learn to operate modern machinery, move into state-built apartments with running water and electricity, acquire new Soviet-made watches and radios, and lunch in workplace canteens on industrially produced hot dogs, canned peas, mayonnaise salad, and ice cream (these originally American imports soon became regarded as dearly native). State-led industrialization created a perennially overheated economy of pervasive shortages including the shortage of skilled labor. The Soviet Union in effect became a giant factory and therefore it had to become a gigantic company town, too, where the state as sole employer provided social welfare from cradle to grave. Directing the transformations were party cadres from the special appointment rosters called nomenklatura. Eventually the name nomenklatura would become a pejorative for stolid bureaucrats. Its first generations, however, were the battle-hardened youthful commissars and emergency managers full of revolutionary charisma and “can-do” spirit.

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In China, for example, the development of highly dynamic capitalism is in tension with long-standing local community structures as well as alternative institutions put in place during the communist era—like the danwei, which made a “work unit” the central provider of housing, health care, and employment (with certain similarities to paternalistic company towns in an earlier phase of Western capitalist development). Workers taking new jobs, especially those migrating to new jobs in fast-growing urban regions, are stripped of both older forms of social capital in their communities of origin and the institutional provisions once offered by the danwei. They make new ways of life in cities, doing well to the extent that they have money to purchase market substitutes for the older forms of provision and struggling more when they don’t.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

* * * 3. Power, monopoly, and market abuse. One of the most deprived areas of the United States—the coal-mining country of West Virginia and Kentucky—owes much of its deprivation to a particularly insidious form of monopoly power. Traditionally, many coal miners in those areas have lived in private company towns, where mining companies themselves have run and managed everything, and not to the mine workers’ benefit. Physically isolated, workers could not go elsewhere to meet their needs, and they were even frequently paid in company “scrip,” private money that could only be used in the company store. The result was to extract most of what miners were paid, a practice that continued well past the Second World War: “The greatest drain on the miners’ wages was the company store.… Coercion, the scrip system, and the physical distance often combined to force the miners to deal at the company store, and through the monopolistic control of food and clothing and tools and powder, the coal companies were able to render wage rates and wage increases meaningless.”23 The scandal of a company town’s controlling every part of people’s lives is a reminder that the economy of belonging was never fully established in the United States—and should serve as a warning that market abuse is a potent force of disempowerment.

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.… Coercion, the scrip system, and the physical distance often combined to force the miners to deal at the company store, and through the monopolistic control of food and clothing and tools and powder, the coal companies were able to render wage rates and wage increases meaningless.”23 The scandal of a company town’s controlling every part of people’s lives is a reminder that the economy of belonging was never fully established in the United States—and should serve as a warning that market abuse is a potent force of disempowerment. Unfortunately, it is again on the rise in parts of the West, and the digital revolution makes it a growing danger everywhere.

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

Large Firms, Monopsony Power, and Wage Determination The most autocratic and unfettered employer spontaneously adopts Standard Rates for classes of workmen, just as the large shopkeeper fixes his prices, not according to the haggling capacity of particular customers, but by a definite percentage on cost. —Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897) The large employers that dominated business in much of the twentieth century were in a different position than employers in traditional labor market models. The extreme case occurs in a company town where a single employer essentially provides the only jobs in the labor market. Such an employer (or monopsonist) faces the entire labor supply, and must pay higher wages if it wishes to increase the number of people employed.4 For a unitary employer paying the same wage rate to workers for a similar job, the cost of an additional hired worker not only reflects the wage for that worker, but also the incremental costs for all employees who have already been hired for that job because the company pays all workers at the same wage as that paid to the last worker hired.

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Such an employer (or monopsonist) faces the entire labor supply, and must pay higher wages if it wishes to increase the number of people employed.4 For a unitary employer paying the same wage rate to workers for a similar job, the cost of an additional hired worker not only reflects the wage for that worker, but also the incremental costs for all employees who have already been hired for that job because the company pays all workers at the same wage as that paid to the last worker hired. As a result, the employer hires fewer workers and pays a lower wage than would occur in a competitive labor market with multiple employers.5 Company towns are rare, but an employer need not rule over a coal town to wield some level of monopsony power.6 A common source of employer power in a labor market arises from information problems. A labor market works by matching workers’ job preferences with employers’ demand for workers. That makes information a critical lubricant in the operation of a labor market.

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See also AT&T Cisco, 173 Civil Rights Act (1964), Title VII, and notification about employee rights, 252 CleanNet USA, 133–134, 141 Cleeland, Nancy, 91 Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), 261–262 Coal industry, 101, 315n5, 316n10; and subcontracting, 102–107, 316n12, 317n23; and fatalities, 105, 216; and legislation regarding subcontracting, 204 Coase, Ronald, 30 Cocoa Services, 115–117, 321n55 Collective action problem, 253–256 Collective agents, role of, 253–256 Collective bargaining, 37, 56, 77, 86, 280; and NLRA, 21; process, 39; in 1950s, 41; agreements, 54, 101, 254, 277; and FLOC, 261; in construction, 355n40 Common law, views of employment relationships, 184–190 Commons, John R., 179, 342n21 Communication technology, 8–9; role in employment restructuring, 4; and standards, 60–61; in trucking industry, 61–62; in retailing, 62–63 Company towns, 79 Compensation: and horizontal equity, 83–85; and vertical equity, 85–87 Complaint behavior, 245–248; and inspections, 237; and employer retaliation, 246–247, 360n5; changes over time, 247–248; and exercise of rights, 252–253 ConAgra, 53 Conglomerates, 36–37; dismantling of, 51–53 Construction industry, 315n2; and subcontracting, 99, 355n40; and injuries, 192; residential, 218–219, 231, 350n8, 351n15; and enforcement, 230–234 Continental Bread, 36 Contingent employment, 271–274 Contracts, incomplete, 64–66, 301n19, 311n18 Coordination, falling cost of, 60–63 Core competencies, 49–50, 63, 302n26, 313n34; focusing on, 11, 53–55, 57–58; and branding, 66, 123; in hospitality industry, 145; logistics as, 161; in retailing, 162; of law firms, 275; in financial services, 279 Costco, 259 Cotton, William “Bubba,” 111–113 Council for Educational Travel, U.S.A.

Economic Dignity by Gene Sperling

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, antiwork, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, cotton gin, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, guest worker program, Gunnar Myrdal, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job automation, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, liberal world order, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, mental accounting, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, payday loans, Phillips curve, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, speech recognition, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, traffic fines, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Urofsky, “State Courts and Protective Legislation during the Progressive Era: A Reevaluation,” Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 69, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1903737.pdf. 20. Schuman, “History of Child Labor,” 15. 21. Elliott J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 22. Virginia Commonwealth University, “Company Towns: 1880s to 1935,” accessed November 10, 2019, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/housing/company-towns-1890s-to-1935/. 23. Gorn, Mother Jones. 24. Mother Jones, “Girl Slaves of the Milwaukee Breweries,” Western Federation of Miners, Miners Magazine (April 4, 1910), 5–6, http://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Mother-Jones-Girl-Slaves-of-the-Milwaukee-breweries.pdf. 25.

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The coal mines of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exemplified a domination of labor that bordered on involuntary servitude. Workdays ranged from ten to twelve hours. Conditions in the mines meant deaths, and serious injuries of mine workers were far from uncommon. A typical feature of company towns—rapidly built villages around mines erected by firms in extractive industries—was that the company owned all the services and infrastructure in the town, forcing workers to subsist in employer-owned housing and rely on employer-owned stores. The management of coal mines often paid the workers on slips of paper that were redeemable only at the company-owned store.21 Without competition, the companies were free to charge for housing and food at prices that far exceeded workers’ compensation, leaving workers in debt, and then forcing them to pay off the debts before being permitted to leave the town; often they were blocked from leaving by armed guards.22 Labor rights activists of the time battled private armies and sheriffs who protected the interests of coal companies.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

This manufacture made energy vital to housing. Mining technology lowered the price of coal, but labor remained 60–80 percent of its cost. Two ways to keep that cost down were to pay immigrant workers very little and to settle them in company towns, which compelled them to hand back wages for housing and services such as schools, cut-price English lessons, and recreational facilities. With little control over their lives, workers felt the company town akin to refeudalization rather than benign capitalism. When the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company squeezed their wages, coal miners organized.72 Their strike, from spring 1913 to winter 1914, remains a signal moment in US labor history.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

How to manage it? How to develop a loyal workforce trained in his techniques and prepared to take advantage of the opportunities being created by new communication, industrialization, and transport? He came up with the idea of the Sassoon schools. David set up the equivalent of a Sassoon company town, designed to attract Jewish refugees, first from Baghdad and then from across the Ottoman Empire, and turn them into loyal employees. Poor and striving families sent their teenage sons from Baghdad, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan. They enrolled in the David Sassoon Benevolent Institution, where, using textbooks David commissioned, the teenagers were taught Arabic, geography, arithmetic, bookkeeping, and Hebrew.

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Ben-Naeh reviewed hundreds of letters from David Sassoon to his family, written in Judeo-Arabic. “God Save the Queen!”: Jackson, The Sassoons, 19. “tall, spare, hard of muscle, with an El Greco face”: Jackson, The Sassoons, 10. needed to think creatively: Jackson, The Sassoons, 20–22, 39–40. David set up the equivalent of a Sassoon company town: Jackson, The Sassoons, 333–34; Meyer, From the Rivers of Babylon, 15–16. “We possess all things”: The emperor’s letter to King George III has been widely reprinted; for example: https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1793qianlong.asp. “an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War”: Helen Robbins, Our First Ambassador to China: An Account of the Life of George, Earl of Macartney—With Extracts from His Letters, and the Narrative of His Experiences in China, as Told by Himself (London: John Murray, 1908), Google Books, 386.

The Gated City (Kindle Single) by Ryan Avent

big-box store, carbon footprint, company town, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, income inequality, industrial cluster, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, offshore financial centre, profit maximization, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Silicon Valley, tacit knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Veblen good, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Talent magnets -- a government research agency or a university, for instance -- can create a pool of skilled workers that appeals to firms, which may in turn attract additional workers. It isn't simply the go-where-the-jobs-are factor that makes labor pooling work. Deep markets provide insurance against hardship for workers and firms. A skilled worker in a one-company town has few alternatives if he loses his job. In a thick market, by contrast, bad times at one firm aren't as painful for the company's workforce, which has lots of other job opportunities to consider. The deeper a market, the greater the opportunities for highly specialized firms with highly specialized employment needs.

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

Like a great white hunter proudly hanging the horns of his slaughtered prey over the mantel, Icahn was displaying the trophies as evidence of his intellect and machismo. Continuing his terrorist strikes against the corporate community, Icahn moved next against Dan River, Inc., a century-old textile manufacturer set in the sleepy company town of Danville, Virginia. A sprawling sign erected atop the roof of the company’s main building declared this to be the HOME OF DAN RIVER FABRICS. A major producer of denim and dyed yarns, Dan River was in the throes of a deep sales slump affecting much of the textile industry when Icahn started buying the company’s stock in the summer of 1982, building a position of 398,900 shares—6.9 percent of the company—by the time a filing was made with the SEC in September.

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“I grew up in nearby Greensboro, North Carolina; and my family would frequently drive through Danville on our way to summer vacations in other parts of the state of Virginia,” Nickell remembered. “I was always struck by the omnipresence of the Dan River company. All of those red brick buildings with the Dan River name on them. It was the archetypical company town.” A threat to Dan River, especially one by a “sinister force” from Wall Street, was a threat to jobs, homes and a way of life. As Icahn moved on the company, threatening to control it, Dan River executives capitalized on these fears by whipping the locals into a frenzy, filling their heads with nightmarish visions of Icahn taking control, liquidating the company’s assets and, leaving the employees—many of whom had known no other job, no other life—on the dole.

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried

Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, estate planning, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, Ida Tarbell, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, indoor plumbing, Livingstone, I presume, Nelson Mandela, new economy, plutocrats, refrigerator car, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Although Texas, Nevada, California, and Oregon had already achieved statehood, since the 1830s the contiguous United States had pretty much ended at Fort Leavenworth and the western bank of the Missouri River. The fort served as the quartermaster station for all American military posts in the West. And while the fort was a city unto itself, a separate civilian city with a population of twenty thousand had grown up just south of its main gates. A company town for the businesses of defending, exploring, and exploiting the West, it was essentially the capital of the American frontier. Leavenworth was rough, bustling, and bristling. One of Fred’s best friends described moving there from an eastern city as the greatest feeling of freedom he had ever known.

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AT&SF railroadmen working in Pueblo, Colorado, watched in disbelief as the Arkansas River—which flowed past the depot—kept rising and rising until it flooded its banks, carrying in its torrent everything from the carcasses of horses, sheep, cows, and dogs to hundreds of homes torn from their foundations. And then, just as the western rivers were receding, the workers in George Pullman’s plant went on strike in May 1894. Within weeks, they triggered a monumental national work stoppage—and turned Pullman into the most hated man in working-class America. Pullman had created a “company town” not far from Chicago where his employees built customized cars for his many American and European railroad clients. But the residents of tiny Pullman, Illinois, were outraged when their wages were cut in response to the depression. Their wildcat strike closed Pullman’s plant, but he refused to negotiate with his workers.

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But in the public consciousness, the growing labor movement had successfully painted him as perhaps the worst boss in American history. Pullman was never forgiven for allowing the entire country to be closed for business, and for letting so many be killed and hurt during the protests, simply because he didn’t want to negotiate with his workers. His ideas about controlling life in his company town, long seen as “un-American,” were eventually found to be illegal. While his workers may not have fully agreed with the characterization—especially the sleeping-car porters, who still had some of the best jobs available to black men—Pullman had become the prototype of the corporate businessman more concerned about his stockholders than his employees.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

air gap, Anthropocene, biofilm, British Empire, clean water, company town, Easter island, government statistician, Mason jar, New Journalism, Skype, trade route, zero-sum game

“I’m worried they’ll use the beetle infestation as an excuse to cut the lodgepole-pine forests.” “Yeah, I wouldn’t doubt it.” I looked around to make sure no one was listening. Other students were laughing at a nearby table, downing beers, getting up to throw darts. The pub’s interior was like a log cabin and smelled of mildly rotting pine. This was a company town. I blurted, “I felt like I could have friggin’ died out there last night.” “Hey, you were lucky it wasn’t colder. It was good the truck stalled, because you’d have been in worse trouble driving in the dark over those roads. We were trying to warn you to stay put, but I guess your radio was busted,” said Kevin, back-arming foam off his mustache—someone must hand those out the moment a man opts for a life in the woods.

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Kelly’s shoulder was completely healed after only a year, and he was back on the rodeo circuit. My friend Jean was with me today, and we had our sights on the alpine up Stryen Creek, the first southern tributary of the seventy-five-kilometer Stein River, which flowed east into the enormous Fraser River at Lytton, British Columbia. We were only sixty kilometers south of my company town of Lillooet, which stood a thousand kilometers southwest from the Fraser River headwaters in the Rocky Mountains and more than three hundred kilometers northeast from its terminus at Vancouver on the coast. I felt drawn to this place, its mysterious energy. Jean and I had met in May, having both snagged a summer job with the British Columbia forest service, when I’d taken a break from my cut-and-run company and she was doing the same from another logging outfit on the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii).

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, company town, high-speed rail, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, railway mania, refrigerator car, side project, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, urban sprawl

Two gangs would then work in unison, one on each side of the track, lifting the rails, and setting them in place. Another team would follow, spiking the rails in: three hammer blows per spike, ten spikes to the rail, 400 rails to the mile. As the Union’s tracks were pushed west, the whole show moved along with them. Temporary company towns, ‘hell on wheels’ as they were called by a visitor, were created, complete with saloons, brothels and expensive railroad-owned shops and, of course, the accommodation for the workers, largely tents or flimsy shacks. These towns were probably more dangerous to the workers than the sometimes perilous conditions on the tracks as gun battles and saloon fights were frequent and no less violent than those portrayed in Westerns; the bloodiest, in Laramie, in the eastern foothills of the Rockies, claimed five lives and resulted in fifteen injuries.

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Pullman who was fiercely anti-union, died in 1897, his health having been weakened by the strain of a particularly bitter and rancorous labour dispute in 1894, the worst ever in US railroad history, which involved 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads and culminated in pitched battles, resulting in the death of thirteen strikers. He was, in fact, an old-fashioned paternalist in the Rowntree or Cadbury mould, creating a company town with pleasant housing and good amenities for his workforce who, in return, were expected to conform to his rules which included a ban on public speeches, town meetings and independent newspapers, and a requirement to keep their homes clean. He died as one of the richest men in America but because of his intransigence during the strike, one of the most hated, with the result that his lead-lined coffin had to be covered in cement because of fears that his grave would be desecrated by unionists.

Frommer's Seattle 2010 by Karl Samson

airport security, British Empire, company town, flying shuttle, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, land bank, machine readable, place-making, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence

The centerpiece of this resort is the historic Hotel de Haro, which was built in 1886 and overlooks the resort’s marina and a gorgeous formal garden. Because the old hotel has not been renovated in recent years, its rooms are the most basic here. To fully appreciate Roche Harbor’s setting, you should stay in a suite (the Quarryman Hall suites are among the finest rooms on the island), a Company Town cottage, or one of the carriage houses or cottages on the green. The condominiums, although dated, are good bets for families. The waterfront dining room has a view of the marina, and the deck makes a great spot for a sunset cocktail. In addition to the amenities listed below, there are moped rentals, whale-watching cruises, and sea-kayak tours. 248 Reuben Memorial Dr.

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If you’re interested in seeing Poulsbo from the water, you can rent a sea kayak from Olympic Outdoor Center, 18971 Front St. ( 80 0/592-5983 or 36 0/697-6095; www.olympicoutdoorcenter.com), which charges $14 to $19 per hour or $50 to $70 by the day. If you have time and enjoy visiting historic towns, continue north from Poulsbo on Wash. 3 to Port Gamble (www.portgamble.com). This community was established in 1853 as a company town for the Pope and Talbot lumber mill and looks like a New England village dropped down in the middle of the Northwest woods. Along the town’s shady streets are Victorian homes that were restored by Pope and Talbot. Stop by the Port Gamble General Store and Cafe, 32400 Rainier Ave. NE ( 36 0/297-7636), a classic general store that is home to the Of Sea and Shore Museum (www.ofseaandshore.com).

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

“We feel it’s a crime against humanity to ask men to work in that hell-hole of a heat at Boulder Dam for a mere pittance,” the American Federation of Labor (AFL) wrote to the US secretary of labor. Workers claimed they were underpaid compared with laborers throughout the Southwest. They were charged half their wages to live in unsanitary conditions in the company town. Indeed, although the government contract estimated wages of $5.50 a day, workers were paid an average of $4. Meanwhile, racism and anti-Semitism were rife, and Asians and African Americans were barred from employment. Bechtel and his partners blamed the workers’ dissatisfaction on outside Communist rabble-rousers, and the Hoover administration was obsequious toward the contractors.

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Undeterred by what he called “a telegraphic bombardment,” Ickes ordered Six Companies to pay its workers in dollars, charged it with seventy thousand violations of the eight-hour day, and fined the group $350,000. But Kaiser’s Washington glad-handing paid off, and the fine would eventually be reduced to $100,000. “Flooded gorges and an unsavory company town led to more than a hundred dead, violent labor unrest, and bloody racial bigotry,” one history drew the final conclusion. Still, Six Companies made a profit of more than $10 million, and Dad had gained a national reputation as a rough, often callous, operator. * * * “This is a good time to see what the rest of the world is doing,” Dad told his partners in the summer of 1933, claiming to have been invited by Joseph Stalin’s government to visit the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

It is building world-class facilities that will enable smart-city innovation and economic growth in the future, but has balanced it with upgrades to community centers and public spaces. The citizen card has enormous potential to change the nature of citizenship. None of these pieces alone is a silver bullet. But together they are a “platform for innovation,” as Sarasa describes it. This is no company town rising in an open field, an enclave of iPhone-toting hipsters, or a bid for headlines as an election approaches. It’s a real city, with real problems, thinking and investing long-term in the most promising set of tools at hand. For all its promise, Zaragoza has a rough road ahead. As the Digital Mile moved into the second half of its first decade, Spain’s economic crisis went from bad to worse.

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We might heed the words of the late William Mitchell, the former dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and a pioneering thinker on smart cities, who wrote, “our job is to design the future we want not to predict its predetermined path.”5 This is, I hope, the beginning of a new phase in our collective conversation about how to do that. Opt In to Smart The commercial success and cultural ascendance of the Internet lends an air of inevitability to the idea of smart cities. But are we too eager to ask engineers to solve every urban problem? The technology industry’s hard sell on smart depends on this. But only the company towns of the twenty-first century will see technology as the end goal. The first tenet of our new civics is that we should never default to smart technology as the solution. It’s tempting to think that new gadgets always offer better solutions to old problems. But they are just another set of tools in an already well-equipped box.

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

First and foremost, their task was to address conditions in the chawls, where population densities ran as high as twelve hundred people per acre. In response, the trust built new model chawls. Constructed from brick or concrete rather than the usual wood, the trust’s sturdy new three- to five-story structures offered ten-by-twelve-foot rooms—nearly twice the square footage of the slumlord and company-town chawls that plagued the city. Through such developments, the trust hoped to reduce population density to five hundred people per acre. The pith-helmet brigades also rebuilt entire neighborhoods, evicting and temporarily rehousing thousands while new chawls were built and streets were cut. In the bazaar area behind Victoria Terminus—the old Native Town in the days of the British East India Company fort, whose haphazard, cheek-by-jowl layout had lost whatever antiquarian charm it possessed with the overcrowding of the industrial age—the trust essentially rebuilt the entire neighborhood between 1901 and 1905.

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On a parcel of land that was once no different than the desert superblock where the luxurious Arabian Ranches was built sits the Sonapur labor camp (meaning “City of Gold” in Hindi). In Sonapur, the construction workers of Dubai—the ragged army of brown-skinned men in blue suits who, numbering close to half a million, constitute roughly a quarter of the city’s population—are housed in a string of twenty-first-century company towns. In Sonapur, with its trash-strewn paths of packed dust in place of sidewalks, the vaunted ultramodern Dubai infrastructure of superhighways and computerized, conductorless metro trains seems in another country rather than another neighborhood. And all of the lifestyle freedoms that Dubai markets to tourists and professionals are nowhere to be found.

The Hour of Fate by Susan Berfield

bank run, buy and hold, capital controls, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death from overwork, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, new economy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, the market place, transcontinental railway, wage slave, working poor

Coxey and a co-leader were sentenced to twenty days in prison for damaging the congressional lawn. Workers walked off the job at the Pullman factory outside Chicago later that month. They built the sleeping coaches the wealthy traveled in, decorated with thick carpeting, glass chandeliers, wood-paneled walls, and baroque, upholstered armchairs. More than eight thousand40 people lived in a company town built by George Pullman, in residences that reflected their status: apartments for unskilled workers, row houses for the foremen, modest Victorians for the executives, and, for visitors, a luxurious hotel named after his daughter Florence. Pullman oversaw the one church, which charged a rent so high it was unoccupied.

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“Everything here”: Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier, 324. 39. “Heed the voice”: Details about Coxey’s March from Jack Kelly, The Edge of Anarchy, 29–31; Lucy Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 33, 36. 40. More than eight thousand: Details about the company town from Richard Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” Harper’s Weekly (February 1885): 452–66. 41. More than two hundred thousand: Details from Kelly, Edge of Anarchy, 109, 123. 42. Simmering violence: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 281. 43. “Put forth its efforts”: Eugene V. Debs, “Proclamation to American Railway Union,” June 1, 1895 in Debs: His Life, Writing and Speeches, 292. 44.

Hawaii by Jeff Campbell

airport security, big-box store, California gold rush, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, company town, creative destruction, Drosophila, Easter island, G4S, haute couture, land reform, lateral thinking, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, risk/return, sustainable-tourism, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, wage slave, white picket fence

If you call ahead, the gate will be left open and you can drive in, but you are also welcome to park here (without blocking the gate) and walk the rest of the way to the heiau (about 15 minutes). The alternative route is to drive toward ′Upolu Airport, then turn south on the coastal dirt road. This rough 4WD road is impassable after rain. Return to beginning of chapter HAWI pop 940 Little Hawi (hah-vee), which is a former sugar-company town, has been remade into a rustic, picturesque two blocks of artful, upscale fun exuding a certain northern California vibe. Even a rainy day doesn’t spoil the pleasure of walking among the attractive shops (browsing for cigars, fudge, Japanese tea and handcarved koa bowls) and getting a gourmet bite.

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Within a few years he owned 98% of the island (a holding that has remained almost unbroken through various owners to this day). In 1922, Lana’i passed into the hands of Jim Dole, who fatefully started a pineapple plantation that was soon the world’s largest. Under Dole (and later its corporate successor Castle & Cooke), Lana’i was not just a company town but a company island. Early managers were de facto dictators, who were known for spying on residents from their hillside mansion and ordering guards to discipline any deemed to be slackers. In the 1980s Castle & Cooke and its hard-driving main shareholder David Murdoch made plans to shift Lana’i from pineapples to tourists.

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When you fly in, you pass over the ghostly outlines of vast fields that once produced one out of every three pineapples consumed worldwide. Much of the land – and island – now lies fallow. Coming to terms with that past is an ongoing issue for the island today. Lana’i City is still very much the charming company town built by Jim Dole in the 1920s, but like the fields that were once its reason to exist, its very essence is in danger of going fallow. The stately order of vintage buildings around Dole Park is threatened by time and replacement. New buildings out of step with the old are proposed – and some are constructed (such as the current post office, which could be in Wichita).

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food by Steve Striffler

clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, longitudinal study, market design, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Immigrants’ relationship to their Mexican communities becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. They live as a foreign, dark-skinned, “other” that is isolated and at times targeted by mainstream America. And, above all, processing chicken destroys their health. Esteban, from Veracruz, Mexico, took a job in “live hanging” at a poultry plant in Bay Springs, Mississippi. If a company town still exists in the twenty-first century, Bay Springs is it. Peco Foods employs about eight hundred of the thousand residents of this small southern town.28 108 A New Worker Esteban’s job in live hanging pays slightly better than other jobs, but it is a tough way to earn a living. As I described in the Preface, in one poultry plant where I worked, one of the largest slaughterhouses in the world, the live hanging area was massive.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

(Most of the rest is steep forest upland, hiding pronghorn antelope, mouflon sheep, feral cats, and deer, and with thousands of the Norfolk Island pines that the Royal Navy in its sailing days favored felling for mainmasts; or else it is ringed with steep coastal canyons, spectacular but unusable.) Lana’i City, laid down in a perfect grid in the cool and shaded upland center of the teardrop-shaped island, was very much a company town, with small tin-roof houses that were home to the Filipino plantation workers, and larger establishments for the Japanese and haole overseers who kept them slaving away in the fields. H. Broomfield Brown was the best remembered and least liked of Jim Dole’s overseers. He spent his days astride his horse up on the Munroe Trail, scanning the fields below with his telescope: if any one of the broad-hatted, goggle-wearing Filipinos seemed to him to be slacking, he’d gallop down the network of laterite paths and give the hapless fellow a tongue-lashing, maybe cut his Dole Company pay; and if a persistent layabout, the man would be tossed out of his Dole Company house, transported to the Dole Company dock, and sent packing back to the mainland and likely deportation home to Manila.

…

He spent his days astride his horse up on the Munroe Trail, scanning the fields below with his telescope: if any one of the broad-hatted, goggle-wearing Filipinos seemed to him to be slacking, he’d gallop down the network of laterite paths and give the hapless fellow a tongue-lashing, maybe cut his Dole Company pay; and if a persistent layabout, the man would be tossed out of his Dole Company house, transported to the Dole Company dock, and sent packing back to the mainland and likely deportation home to Manila. For those who didn’t slack, life was quite agreeable. “Have happy workers, grow better pineapples” was the Dole mantra for many years—and with free Dole schools and free Dole doctors, and men who mowed the lawns and weeded the gardens around your house so that Lana’i City looked as pretty a company town as possible, the island had a utopian quality to it. A million “pines,” as they were called, shipped out of Lana’i every day. But the fruit became increasingly expensive to grow: the workers were unionized; fresh irrigation water was scarce; and electricity, imported by underwater cable from Maui, was costly.

The death and life of great American cities by Jane Jacobs

book value, company town, Golden Gate Park, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, work culture

Nathan Glazer has summed up the vision well in Architectural Forum: “The image was the English country town—with the manor house and its park replaced by a community center, and with some factories hidden behind a screen of trees, to supply work.” The closest American equivalent would probably be the model company town, with profit-sharing, and with the Parent-Teacher Associations in charge of the routine, custodial political life. For Howard was envisioning not simply a new physical environment and social life, but a paternalistic political and economic society. Nevertheless, as Glazer has pointed out, the Garden City was “conceived as an alternative to the city, and as a solution to city problems; this was, and is still, the foundation of its immense power as a planning idea.”

…

In real life, barbarians (and peasants) are the least free of men—bound by tradition, ridden by caste, fettered by superstitions, riddled by suspicion and foreboding of whatever is strange. “City air makes free,” was the medieval saying, when city air literally did make free the runaway serf. City air still makes free the runaways from company towns, from plantations, from factory-farms, from subsistence farms, from migrant picker routes, from mining villages, from one-class suburbs. Owing to the mediation of cities, it became popularly possible to regard “nature” as benign, ennobling and pure, and by extension to regard “natural man” (take your pick of how “natural”) as so too.

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

According to Pullman’s publicity for the introduction of this facility on the Penn sylvania Limited in 1887, “Ladies may now make social calls or wander at will, may even take long walks for exercise or to relieve monotony, so perfect are the arrangements and appliances.”4 It was not just the coaches that were luxurious. Pullman set a standard for service that increased his renown and did so by retaining control over every aspect of his business, which was entirely integrated. He did everything from manufacturing the cars—which eventually took place in a company town covering a massive thirty-six hundred acres at Lake Calumet on the outskirts of Chicago—to ensuring that all the right linen was available. Pullman was, in modern parlance, a control freak, as indeed were most of the early railroad pioneers who were, in essence, establishing capitalist disciplines for the first time over an industry spanning huge distances.

…

The Pullman Company, which was dependent on the economic health of the railroad companies that hauled its cars, announced redundancies at its factory along with cuts to the remaining workers’ wages, claiming that these moves were necessary to maintain profitability. That was bad enough, but the workers were particularly angered by Pullman’s refusal to reduce rents on the houses in the company town where most of them lived. In May 1894, Pullman workers, who had formed an active American Railway Union local branch, started walking off the job, and soon 3,000 were on strike, bringing the works to a halt. They asked Debs, who was a cautious and conservative trade unionist, to support them, and, though reluctant, he had no choice but to throw the weight of the union behind them.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

Through these and other measures, including numerous on-campus services (haircuts, laundry, free meals, gyms, massages) that normally would require someone to interact with non-company employees, social-media companies have succeeded in privatizing swathes of California’s Bay Area, making it into a series of company towns. These are steps toward the kind of digital agora sought by adherents of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s Californian Ideology. It’s a vision that’s been cultivated over decades and that has a very real effect on the types of products and digital environments these companies create, from the personal chauffeurs of Uber to the parlous world of online influence.

…

See user agreements Seven on Seven conference, 362–63 Sex and the Ivy Web site, 75–76, 79 sexuality on the Internet Clementi’s sexual encounter, 142–43 pornography, 28–29 shaming for, 76–77, 78–82 women writing about their sex lives, 75–76, 78–79 shadow work, 271–72 shaming consequences for shamed, 174–75 doxing equated to, 168–69 for expressions of sexual freedom, 76–77, 78–82 on MyEx.com, 210 reasons for, 170–73 worthy targets, 173 shareability, ix Shared Endorsements, Google, 33 sharing and authenticity, 48, 164 confessionalism or over-sharing, 22–23, 23n, 75, 78 dissent and, 24 endorsements, intentional or unintentional, 32–33, 34–35, 58–60 Facebook’s premium on frictionless sharing, 12–13, 60, 151, 268–69, 293 and money trail, 197 negative sentiments, 24, 31, 203–4, 305 positive sentiments, 24–26, 27, 203–4 reading to glean ideas to share, 61–62 reviews, 190–92 taking time off from, 343–44 Upworthy’s push for, 121–22 urge to share, 47–49, 61–62 sharing economy as companies’ outsourcing labor and risk to consumers, 235–36, 238–39, 243 and consumers, 244–45 corporate support for, 238–39 escape from, 245–48 fractional workers in, 236–37, 244 human beings as rentable commodities, 234–35 negative aspects, 239–40, 243–44 and Peers, 238–39, 244 portraying as a populist operation, 238 and shadow work, 271–72 taxi-like companies, 240–42 See also Airbnb; labor markets; money trail Short, Adrian, 12 Shreateh, Khalil, 354–55 Silicon Valley and abusive labor practices in Asia, 266n as aspirational ideal, 323 Bay area as a series of company towns, 250 dreams of secession, 249–50 and full array of a user’s life, 314 innovations from, 274–75 need for ethics, 327 and U.S. government, 251 Silverman, Jacob Jeopardy! win, 149–50 search for long lost friend, 207–8, 217 as writer in a social-media-based sea of writers, 258 Simon, Taryn, 362 Sina Weibo, 84 single log-ins, 165–66, 182 Singularity, 5 Slee, Tom, 239 slut-shaming, 76–77, 78–82 smartphones BRICKiPhone, 359–60 cameras, 41–42, 55, 57 data from, 131–32 deeper meaning of, 320 and fractional work, 228–29 personalized deals delivered to, 301–2 and social-media culture, 61 and sousveillance, 137–38 targeting individuals by tracking, 301, 306 and taxi-like service, 235 Smith, Ben, 110–11 Smith, Logan, 172–73 Smithsonian Institution, 262 Smith, Winston, 142 Snowden, Edward, 129–30, 150, 153–54, 369 Social Burst Web site, 88 social capital, 61–62 social engineering, 7, 8–9, 12, 167.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

It also cut the investment in its beleaguered: “Amazon Is Preparing to Close a Chinese E-Commerce Store,” Bloomberg, April 17, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-17/amazon-is-said-to-prepare-closing-of-chinese-e-commerce-store?sref=dJuchiL5 (January 25, 2021). The company slowed down the introduction: Mike Rosenberg and Angel González, “Thanks to Amazon, Seattle Is Now America’s Biggest Company Town,” Seattle Times, August 23, 2017, https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/thanks-to-amazon-seattle-is-now-americas-biggest-company-town/ (January 25, 2021). Retail executives were ordered: Laura Stevens, Sharon Terlep, and Annie Gasparro, “Amazon Targets Unprofitable Items, with a Sharper Focus on the Bottom Line,” Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-targets-unprofitable-items-with-a-sharper-focus-on-the-bottom-line-11544965201 (January 25, 2021).

Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities by Witold Rybczynski

benefit corporation, big-box store, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, City Beautiful movement, classic study, company town, cross-subsidies, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, edge city, Edward Glaeser, fixed income, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Seaside, Florida, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Forest Hills was intended to demonstrate “how the thing can be done tastefully and at the same time with due regard for profit.”37 The project, interrupted by the First World War, did not become a model for the suburban expansion of New York City, as de Forest had hoped, but its national influence was significant. Garden City ideas showed up in the design of a number of company towns, or “industrial villages,” as they were called: Olmsted planned Kohler in Wisconsin for the plumbing manufacturer; Atterbury laid out two industrial villages, one in Worcester, Massachusetts, the other in Erwin, Tennessee. During the First World War, Olmsted served as manager of a government agency that built housing for war-industry workers, and several of the new suburban worker communities built in 1918—Yorkship Village in Camden, New Jersey; Union Park Gardens in Wilmington, Delaware; and several projects in Bridgeport, Connecticut—clearly owe a debt to Forest Hills.

Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Foreign prospectors had been sniffing around for some time, and moved quickly to capitalize on Chilean land gains. Beneficiaries included British speculator John Thomas North, who went on to take control of the railroads and more or less dominate the region’s postwar economy. The nitrate boom was uniquely explosive here. Nitrate oficinas (company towns) such as Humberstone, also known as the salitreras, flourished in the early 20th century and became bubbles of energy and profit in the lifeless desert. Large port cities such as Antofagasta and Iquique also began to flourish. However, the swift rise of the industry would be followed by a sharp fall.

…

The elliptical pit measures an incredible 8 million sq meters and has a depth of up to 1250m. Most of the ‘tour’ is spent simply gazing into its depths and clambering around an enormous mining truck with tires more than 3m high; information is minimal, although the bilingual guide answers questions. Chuquicamata was once integrated with a well-ordered company town, but environmental problems and copper reserves beneath the town forced the entire population to relocate to Calama by 2007. The ‘city of Chiquicamata’ is not much more than a ghost town these days. CHUQUI THROUGH THE EYES OF CHE Over 50 years ago, when it was already a mine of monstrous proportions, Chuquicamata was visited by a youthful Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

…

A good gravel road runs east along Bahía Inútil to the Argentine border at San Sebastián; allow about four hours. From San Sebastián (where there’s gas and a motel), northbound motorists should avoid the heavily traveled and rutted truck route directly north and instead take the route from Onaisín to the petroleum company town of Cerro Sombrero, en route to the crossing of the Strait of Magellan at Punta Delgada–Puerto Espora. Timaukel POP 420 Located south of Bahía Inútil (the Useless Bay), the region of Timaukel occupies the southern section of Chilean Tierra del Fuego. It is eagerly trying to reinvent itself as an ecotourism destination – a far rosier option than being logged by US-based Trillium Corporation, which was the plan some years back.

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, company town, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton

As Ford would later do, he integrated his business vertically, buying forest land, laying railroad track, operating his own sawmills, and building his own machine saws, steam retorts, and iron molds. He even manufactured the bricks that were used to build the worker housing, schools, and libraries in his company towns. He must have been something of a benevolent despot, for he required his workers to use “Thonet currency” in the company stores. The firm’s offices were housed in an ornate seven-story block on fashionable Stephansplatz in Vienna. From there, the family directed its international operations. There were showrooms in all the major European cities: London, Paris, Berlin, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Brno.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

All this required production and distribution plans for, and thus highly detailed information from, every enterprise, with the level of detail required ever more granular. By the time the Second World War began, there were twenty-one different industrial people’s commissariats. One could say, and indeed many analysts have, that the USSR began to operate as a single factory, a company town stretching across one-sixth of the world. By the early 1930s, political contestation had disappeared. As repression increasingly became the normal operating procedure of the party, the hundreds of bureaucrats involved in crafting the plans, as well as the managers of any factory, mine or railway, feared for their jobs, their families and their lives.

Top 10 Greek Islands by Dorling Kindersley Publishing Staff

centre right, company town, G4S, the market place

Streetsmart Left Ferry to Límnos Centre Yachts at an anchorage Right Road signs in Greek and English of the Road * Rules Driving is on the right, with priority from the right at junctions. Observe speed limits and be especially careful while driving in mountainous areas or villages. Highways tend to be in good order. Children under 12 must not travel in the front. ( By Bus Most bus services are operated by local companies. Town harbours usually house bus stations. A journey can feel a little like stepping back in time, as many vehicles are older models. There are intercity buses linking major island capitals to Athens, which include the cost of the ferry. Taxi ) By It is generally easy to find a taxi on any of the islands.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

In fact, I would not be surprised if Google soon installs dorms on or near the Googleplex, since this move would be the next logical step in the complete breakdown of the home/work distinction. (Or maybe before dorms Google might allow cats at work; currently only dogs are ‘welcome.) In short, Google approximates a “total institution” perhaps more than any other private corporation since the days of company towns run by mining interests. A total institution is a social environment where the participants experience all aspects of their lives—meals, sleeping, grooming, socializing, recreation, and so on. Common examples of total institutions are military barracks, prisons, mental hospitals, and university campuses.

Great American Railroad Journeys by Michael Portillo

Alistair Cooke, California gold rush, colonial rule, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, invention of the telephone, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, railway mania, short selling, the High Line, transcontinental railway, union organizing

PULLMAN THE PATRIARCH In 1880 Pullman bought land outside Chicago to build a town named after him. He believed he could provide decent accommodation for workers in the locality of a new factory. So far, so benevolent. Pullman succeeded in selling his coaches to British railway companies. However, the homes were strictly hierarchical, reflecting a feudal society in this company town. And, after the Panic of 1893, when Pullman cut jobs and wages, he continued to charge the same rents to his workers, despite curbing their income. On 11 May 1894, 4,000 workers went on strike under the banner of the American Railway Union. More than 30 people died as a result of sabotage and riots as the union organized a boycott of Pullman coaches nationwide.

Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States by Bernadette Hanlon

big-box store, classic study, company town, correlation coefficient, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, feminist movement, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, McMansion, New Urbanism, Silicon Valley, statistical model, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, transit-oriented development, urban sprawl, white flight, working-age population, zero-sum game

The population of these suburbs was largely Hispanic, with each experiencing an increase in the number of immigrants. Lennox, which lies close to Los Angeles International Airport, is a hub that draws immigrants from across the globe to work in nearby hotels, restaurants, and other poorly paid service jobs. Lennox was once described as a “late Twentieth Century company town” where a “Third World servant Different Types of Inner-Ring Suburbs / 131 class of maids, waiters, and others” live to serve and cater to the international tourism hub of the Los Angeles area (McDonnell 1995). Poor and struggling, Lennox is similar to other ethnic postwar suburbs in Los Angeles.

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Charlotte’s leaders have made some good moves over the years, but in the midst of the crisis of 2008 and 2009 the city had something less tangible—and more valuable—than that: a run of good luck. But there is one class of places that has weathered the storm better than any other. And as the next chapter will show, they could not be further from the freewheeling centers of market-based capitalism. Chapter Eleven Big Government Boomtowns Remember company towns?” Newsweek asked rhetorically in March 2009. “From Detroit to Wolfsburg, Germany, home to Volkswagen,” it continued, “they used to be places where you could count on a job for life. Now, they are mostly places where you count your unemployment checks. But as the global economy shrinks…and the public sector expands to cope with the fallout, there’s a new kind of boomtown—the government town.”

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, centre right, clean water, company town, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, jitney, jobless men, Kibera, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, megacity, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent control, structural adjustment programs, surplus humans, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, working poor

Number (millions) 37.8 193.8 India 55.5 158.4 Brazil 36.6 51.7 Nigeria 79.2 41.6 Pakistan 73.6 35.6 Bangladesh 84.7 30.4 Indonesia 23.1 20.9 Iran 44.2 20.4 China Philippines 44.1 20.1 Turkey 42.6 19.1 Mexico 19.6 14.7 South Korea 37.0 14.2 Peru 68.1 13.0 USA 5.8 12.8 Egypt 39.9 11.8 Argentina 33.1 Tanzania 92.1 11.0 11.0 Ethiopia 99.4 10.2 Sudan 85.7 10.1 Vietnam 47.4 9.2 The fastest-growing slums are in the Russian Federation (especially ex-"socialist company towns" dependent on a single, now-closed industry) and the former Soviet republics, where urban dereliction has been bred at the same stomach-churning velocity as economic inequality and civic disinvestment. In 1993 the UN Urban Indicators Programme reported poverty rates of 80 percent or higher in both Baku (Azerbaijan) 14 These estimates are derived from the 2003 UN-HABITAT case-studies and an averaging of dozens of diverse sources too numerous to cite.

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Big enough to sell globally and have an established brand, but not so big that it falls into the commodity deathtrap of razor-thin margins and scary overexposure to economic swings and the changing taste of fickle consumers. By contrast, China’s Foxconn, which makes Apple’s iPhone and many of the other mass-market electronics you buy today, has about a million workers, which makes it the second largest non-state company in the world (after Wal-Mart) by employee count.40 It runs entire company towns, and its workplace conditions (including suicides) make headline news. Foxconn doesn’t develop its own product; it does outsourced manufacturing for others. But that means tiny margins. Economists estimate that it gets only $6.50 for the work of assembling a phone that sells for $300.41 Likewise for most of the Asian suppliers that make the components that go into an iPhone.

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

I get to decide how I am going to show up. Every day. We celebrated wins any chance we got. Our communications team, headed by Matt Furman, was actively searching and sharing nuggets of good news. Look, we are growing in Chicago! And look at how well our small appliances are doing! At every team meeting and every company town hall, we highlighted what was going well. This all sent a fabulous message throughout the ranks. We adopted the same approach with our investors. In our November 2012 presentation, we started our diagnosis by highlighting Best Buy’s great strengths, such as the innovation driving growth in our consumer electronics market and the fact that we accounted for the largest single share of sales in that market.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

It too was home to a major research university and lots of knowledge-economy jobs, its tech scene a strange mix of straight-arrow aerospace types and Vietnam-era lefties, a place of early adopters and ambitious technophiles. Yet Seattle wasn’t an isolated Galapagos. During those formative postwar decades it was Boeing’s company town, busy and connected. Even after its early-’70s bust, it didn’t develop the Valley’s teeming petri dish of VCs and lawyers and PR flacks. It didn’t need them. Only a two-hour hop on a Boeing 737 would take a person like Charles Simonyi or Dave Marquardt from one place to the other, able to make a day trip to close a deal or broker a new partnership.

…

Those modest bungalows built in the first postwar boom now cost upwards of $3 million, and that was before you updated the kitchen. Already facing criticism for the pressure their growth had placed on the housing market, Facebook and Google announced that they would build apartments and town houses to house their employees nearby, company towns in the mold of Pullman and Ford, updated for the twenty-first century. As if in call-and-response to the new welfare capitalism, campaigns to organize tech workers gained momentum, pushing to expand white-collar tech’s perks and pay to its massive, contingent workforce, the shuttle-bus drivers and gig workers and coders for hire.

An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood by Neal Gabler

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, company town, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, haute couture, Louis Pasteur, Norman Mailer, power law, security theater, Upton Sinclair, working poor

Publicly, everything was as genteel as could be. For here, life not only imitated art. Here, among the Hollywood Jews, life became art itself. Among the many ways the Hollywood Jews rejected the eastern establishment, which they felt had rejected them, was to pretend that it didn’t really matter. “Hollywood was a company town, with me not in the company,” wrote Ella Winter, wife of screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. “Everyone talked movies, inhaled movies and inevitably went to movie parties. After dinner, if there was a projection room at a producer’s house, movies were shown.” “Even my doctor had as his clientele mostly movie people,” said screenwriter George Oppenheimer.

…

Bob Thomas, King Cohn (New York, 1967), pp. 183–84. 30 “Bird in a gilded cage.” WG. 31 “The more things I gave my wife …” Lasky and Weldon, p. 234. 32 “After she was married for about fifteen years…” William Schaefer, interviewed by author. 33 Sol Wurtzel and his wife … PW. 34 “Hollywood was a company town…” Ella Winter, And Not to Yield (New York, 1963), p. 233. 35 “Even my doctor …” George Oppenheimer, The View from the 60s (New York, 1966), p. 104. 36 One visiting potentate … Pandro Berman, interviewed by author. 37 Hollywood Four Hundred. Mary Pickford, quoted in Wagner, p. 13. 38 “I marveled at this new world…” Eddie Cantor, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York, 1928), p. 271. 39 “The food was good …” Mary Astor, A Life on Film (New York, 1971), p. 66. 40 “We attended swimming parties …” Jesse Lasky, Jr., Whatever Happened to Hollywood?

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“You have mass displacement, you have homeless people being pushed from one neighborhood to another,” Miguel Carrera, the housing justice organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness, told me. “And the mayor throws a party.” This is in many ways exactly what the city asked for. The tech industry here is for the most part greeted with open arms. People recognize the problem of gentrification, but this is a company town, and anything perceived as anti-tech gets blasted by well-funded industry groups, by the mayor and most of the city council, and usually by many of the city’s residents. A ballot measure that would have limited Airbnb rentals in an attempt to preserve housing for people who actually live in the city failed to garner enough votes in 2015.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

The culture of Washington also creates a worse environment for harassment whistleblowers than in the corporate world. Politics has a tribal nature, so that if you speak against a member of your own “team”—maybe a congressman or staffer who employed you—you are seen as handing a public relations gift to the other side. It can be career suicide in Washington, the ultimate company town, to speak out in this way. “Don’t talk to the press” is one of the most important commandments for virtually anyone who works in government or on government-related issues. Unlike in Hollywood, the women in Washington with power tend to be older, and the younger women just don’t have much of a voice or ability to command the attention of the media or to speak with credibility.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything by Jason Kelly

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, antiwork, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, call centre, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, diversification, eat what you kill, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, income inequality, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, late capitalism, margin call, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, place-making, proprietary trading, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty

Location also proved useful in pursuing deals that no one else was interested in, in a town where finance is far from the most important line of work. “If we’d been in New York, we’d have been slogging it out with everyone else,” said Allan Holt, the co-head of U.S. buyouts who joined the firm in 1992. “Washington is a company town, but it’s politics, not finance. I still go to social functions and people hear Carlyle and say, ‘Now what is it exactly that you guys do?’” The interplay among the founders is by most accounts, including their own, integral to what Carlyle has become. Each founder claims they’ve never raised their voices to each other, and yet there are checks and balances inherent in the triumvirate.

Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper by Geoffrey Gray

airport security, Boeing 747, company town, D. B. Cooper, Google Earth, industrial robot, off-the-grid

He looks out the window and sees the lights on the wing illuminate the rain streaking by. He feels the plane move. Another loop. The jet banks again, over Everett, where Boeing’s 747 factory is located. The 747 was a gamble that nearly bankrupted the company. In the recession, Boeing has been forced to lay off more than half the workforce. A company town, Seattle has the highest unemployment rate of any American city since the Great Depression. It’s over 12 percent. Aeronautical engineers with advanced degrees are forced to mow lawns to feed their families. Foreclosure rates skyrocket. Homeless shelters are at full capacity. Across the board, local budgets are slashed.

Hawaii Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, bike sharing, British Empire, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Easter island, Food sovereignty, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, James Watt: steam engine, Kula ring, land reform, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, Peter Pan Syndrome, polynesian navigation, Silicon Valley, tech billionaire

Waimea (Kamuela) Pop 9212 The misty rolling pastureland surrounding Waimea is perhaps Hawaiʻi's most unexpected face. This is paniolo (cowboy) country, and nearly all of it, including Waimea itself, is controlled by Parker Ranch, the fifth-largest cow-calf ranch in the USA. But don’t leap to any conclusions: this is no company town. For its size, Waimea contains extraordinary depths, and one of the joys of visiting is to plumb them. From the highway all you see are bland strip malls, but closer inspection finds an extraordinary art scene, a long list of dining options, outstanding shopping, farmers markets and a rich cowboy heritage.

…

Within a few years he owned 98% of the island (a holding that has remained almost unbroken through various owners to this day). In 1922 Lanaʻi passed into the hands of Jim Dole, who started a pineapple plantation that was soon the world's largest. Under Dole (and later its corporate successor, Castle & Cooke), Lanaʻi was not just a company town but a company island. Early managers were de facto dictators, who were known for spying on residents from their hillside mansion and ordering guards to discipline any deemed to be slackers. In the 1980s Castle & Cooke and its hard-driving main shareholder, David Murdock, made plans to shift Lanaʻi's focus from pineapples to tourists.

…

In a fact that only a booster could love, the world's largest rubber-lined reservoir lies at the base of the hill. Its 1.4 billion gallons of water are piped in from the rainforests of eastern Molokaʻi and it is the only source of water for the Hoʻolehua Plains and the dry West End. In the 1930s the headquarters of the Del Monte pineapple plantation were located here and a company town grew. Pineapples ruled for nearly 50 years, until Del Monte pulled out of Molokaʻi in 1982 and the economy crumbled. While farm equipment rusted in overgrown pineapple fields, small-scale farming developed: watermelons, dryland taro, macadamia nuts, sweet potatoes, seed corn, string beans and onions.

Colorado by Lonely Planet

big-box store, bike sharing, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Columbine, company town, East Village, fixed-gear, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, megaproject, off-the-grid, payday loans, restrictive zoning, Steve Wozniak, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, young professional

Set on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, it’s helpful to stop by Dinosaur Depot to buy a brochure with a terrific self-guided tour of the site. Prospect Heights HISTORICAL SITE (4th St; ) When United Artists were making John Wayne Westerns in Cañon City, this is where they lived and worked. A turn-of-the-20th-century Colorado Fuel & Iron company town before Hollywood came and went, Cañon City was legally dry, so the drinkers, like Wayne and cowboy actor Tom Mix, came down to this area to drink and fight. You’ll see remnants of the old stone jail and brick storefronts. To get here follow 4th street from Main over the river and across the tracks.

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An ensuing clash saw the tent city raised and three strikers – two women – killed. This well-executed stone monument, just north of Trinidad, was dedicated by the United Mine Workers to tell the story. Displays include testimonials of those involved with the strike and tent camp, and a timeline of the mine workers struggle. There’s also a display about company towns and a practice used by management to create a climate of indentured servitude. Southside Park SKATEBOARDING, DISC GOLF (Trinidad Community Center; 719-846-4454; www.historictrinidad.com; 1309 Beshore Dr; 8am-10pm; ) This viable community center at the south end of Trinidad has acres of athletic fields, a public pool, and, according to the legendary Tony Hawk, one of the top skate parks in the US.

Frommer's New Mexico by Lesley S. King

Albert Einstein, clean water, company town, Day of the Dead, El Camino Real, machine readable, off-the-grid, place-making, post-work, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, SpaceShipOne, sustainable-tourism, trade route, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

This town and neighboring Cerrillos were in a fabled turquoise-mining area dating back to prehistory. Gold and silver mines followed, and when they faltered, there was coal. The Turquoise Trail towns supplied fuel for the locomotives of the Santa Fe Railroad until the 1950s, when the railroad converted to diesel fuel. Madrid used to produce 100,000 tons of coal a year and was a true “company town,” but the mine closed in 1956. Today, this is a village of artists and craftspeople seemingly stuck in the 1960s: Its funky, ramshackle houses have many counterculture residents who operate several crafts stores and galleries. The Old Coal Mine Museum and Old West Saloon (& 505/438-3780) invites visitors to peek into a mine that was saved when the town was abandoned.

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Thar’s Copper in Them Thar Hills Southern New Mexico has carried on its mining legacy into the present, with two fully operating mines. 12 miles south of Silver City on NM 90 is the Freeport-McMoRan Tyrone Inc. Open Pit Copper Mine (& 575/538-5331). Some 60 million tons of rock are taken out every year. Former mine owner Phelps Dodge consolidated its Tyrone holdings in 1909 and hired famous architect Bertram Goodhue to design a “Mediterranean-style” company town. Tyrone, later referred to as the Million Dollar Ghost Town, was constructed between 1914 and 1918. A drop in copper prices caused it to be abandoned virtually overnight. After a pre–World War II incarnation as a luxurious dude ranch, Tyrone lay dormant for years until the late 1960s, when the town made way for the present-day open pit mine and mill.

Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Joan Didion, land reform, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, Ronald Reagan, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, yellow journalism, young professional

To work other lands not rented out, the mill owners imported cheap, seasonal labor from Haiti and islands of the British Caribbean. In sugar boom years, up to fifty-eight thousand workers arrived for the season from Haiti and Jamaica. The companies built barracks to house them. In fact, they built whole company towns around the sugar mill. To some observers, these US-owned central factories—with the town and workers’ barracks that adjoined them and the vast expanses of cane fields that stretched in all directions—were like foreign kingdoms occupying more and more Cuban territory.7 Of the twenty most productive sugar centrales in Cuba in 1925, only one (Gómez Mena) was Cuban.

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It boasted the first twelve-roller mill on the island and an initial capacity of two hundred thousand bags (forty thousand tons), or 10 percent of the island’s entire sugar crop in 1900. When the company purchased an adjoining mill, Delicias, in 1910 and began running the two as a single unit, the property became the largest sugar estate anywhere in the world.10 By the 1910s, Chaparra’s company town consisted of almost six hundred homes, a combination of modest houses and elegant chalets. It boasted wide avenues, a hotel, as many as ten schools, three movie theaters, a Masonic lodge, a dry cleaner, a dentist, a pharmacy, a post office, a company hospital, even a YMCA. Chaparra issued currency—tokens—that could be used in stores on its property.

How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, autism spectrum disorder, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, company town, crowdsourcing, Eben Moglen, game design, hype cycle, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day

Bronfman promoted Morris to run all of MCA Morris replaced Al Teller, who resigned due to “philosophical differences.” That same day, Michael Fuchs, the man who had fired Morris at Warner, was coincidentally also let go. Including Ertegun at Atlantic and Robert Morgado at Warner, Morris had now outlasted his four previous bosses. For details, see Chuck Philips, “Company Town: Music Industry Shake-Up,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1995. a New Orleans rap conglomerate by the name of Cash Money Records Morris’ A&R team, consisting of Jocelyn Cooper, Marc Nathan, and Dino Delvaille, first brought Cash Money to his attention. For details, see Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop (New York: Penguin, 2011), 574.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Called Valley Green II, or VGII, the building was a large, low-slung Spanish-style stucco structure surrounded by a few small trees and a big parking lot. Not far from Apple’s main campus, Valley Green Drive is on the other side of De Anza Boulevard, the main road through the center of Cupertino. Almost all of the buildings in the area are leased by Apple, making this part of Cupertino look like a company town. Apple’s first office, on Bandley Drive, is just around the corner. Brunner took over half of the building, a big open space with twenty-five-foot-plus ceilings. He would share the building with Apple’s Creative Services group, known as Apple’s “In-House Design Consultants,” who were called on to produce things like brochures, manuals, in-store posters and displays and video promos.

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places by Bill Streever

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, company town, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Exxon Valdez, Mason jar, Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, refrigerator car, San Francisco homelessness, South China Sea, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, University of East Anglia

The Alaska Pacific Consolidated Mining Company eventually owned eighty-three claims that covered thirteen hundred acres. More than eleven miles of tunnels extended below the surface. On the surface, they built a town. By 1941, more than two hundred men worked in the mine. Twenty-two families lived in what amounted to a company town in the frozen mountains, many very difficult miles from Anchorage, which in the mine’s early days was itself a muddy and isolated community. But the miners’ children had their own schoolhouse, and the mountains gave up more than a ton of gold, worth more than twenty million dollars on today’s market.

vN: The First Machine Dynasty (The Machine Dynasty Book 1) by Madeline Ashby

big-box store, company town, iterative process, natural language processing, place-making, retail therapy, synthetic biology, traveling salesman, urban planning

"I'll go back inside if you quit standing on that rail." One dimple appeared in the corner of his mouth. "You're on." He made it his usual game of chase, bounding across the riveted steel, one foot on a blue container and the other on a yellow one, or maybe green or red or just rust. They flitted over the names of companies and company towns they didn't know, places where things were built. Once upon a time, the container ships that crossed the Pacific were stacked solid with cargo; not even a finger could slide between the units. Not so, these days. Trenches gaped open between the unevenly stacked containers. Javier enjoyed hiding in those hollow spaces, the little nooks and crannies.

The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business cycle, clean water, company town, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, Edward Glaeser, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial deregulation, flying shuttle, full employment, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, Mahbub ul Haq, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, McJob, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, pension reform, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, spinning jenny, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, two tier labour market, very high income, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, working-age population

Nourishing the Grass Roots In his fine and funny documentary Roger and Me the American journalist Michael Moore pursues the then chairman of General Motors, Roger Smith, for an interview about the massive job cuts the company had imposed in Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan. He never managed to confront the elusive executive, but Moore’s quest illustrated the human cost of those redundancies in what had been a company town. One episode, both hilarious and poignant, concerns a former GM worker who had retrained as an image consultant. She visited other women in their homes to advise them on their best ‘colours’ and make-up. Not only did she get the colours wrong and come back on camera to admit it, but it was also a doomed enterprise in a depressed town where so many people were unemployed.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Allentown, by contrast, was alive with cross-cutting relationships, giving residents—or, at least many of them—the wherewithal to transition into a new industry and a new career.27 Years earlier, Safford’s mentor, Richard Locke, had noticed a similar split when researching how Italy’s two major car companies, Fiat and Alfa Romeo, had responded to pressure to rein in production costs during the 1970s and 1980s. As Locke explained: Since Fiat is located in Turin, a highly polarized, one-company town lacking a vibrant associational infrastructure, information-sharing and cooperation between moderate groups within both the company and the local union movement proved fleeting. . . . As a result, disagreements over the company’s restructuring efforts escalated into an all-out struggle between the local unions and the company and resulted in massive layoffs, the decimation of the local union movement, and major social dislocation, especially among laid-off automobile workers.

The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Winters Keegan

call centre, Colonization of Mars, company town, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, drop ship, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the payments system

“It’s tough to be diplomatic with stupid people,” he confesses. Their wildly different dispositions would combine uniquely in their son, who became equal parts calculating gearhead and romantic artist. When their first child was born, the Camerons were living in an apartment in Kapuskasing, a cold, remote company town in northern Ontario where Philip worked as an engineer at the local paper plant. Shirley had trained as a nurse in Toronto but was now a somewhat restless homemaker. On August 16, 1954, James Cameron arrived in the world one month late and screaming, an image Hollywood studio executives will have no trouble picturing.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Some industries were growing quickly, of course, and others were in decline, but whenever an industry was concentrated in a city at first, it tended to decline more quickly than elsewhere or grow more slowly than elsewhere. Industries seemed to thrive in a diversified city environment and wither away in company towns. Both Porter and Marshall would predict the reverse: Strength builds strength, according to their theories, so that a traditionally dominant industry should grow even faster. Jacobs, at least according to this evidence, wins the argument. Porter and Marshall seem to have been wrong to believe that innovative strength came from specialization.

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

What some describe as a roomier interior—the familiar two-aisle arrangement, and its attendant five-seat middle block, home to the most undesirable middle seat possible— was really the consequence of building a hold wide enough for two standard shipping containers to sit side by side. The struggle to build the 747 nearly bankrupted not only Boeing (“within a gnat’s whisker,” its president said) but the company town in which it was based, so much so that Seattle’s Japanese sister city Kobe sent relief supplies of food and money in 1968. A year earlier, JAL had been one of the first airlines to place an order for three 747s, and three years later introduced them on Pacific routes. It was bad news for Anchorage—the world’s passengers would no longer have much use for an air crossroads—but for Tsukiji, Boeing’s innovation was a godsend.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement by David Graeber

Bretton Woods, British Empire, company town, corporate personhood, David Graeber, deindustrialization, dumpster diving, East Village, feminist movement, financial innovation, George Gilder, John Markoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, Lao Tzu, late fees, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, Occupy movement, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, planetary scale, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, working poor

” (The irony was many of the picketers on this occasion were Black Bloc veterans, dressed in largely Black Bloc clothing, some actually waving anarcho-syndicalist flags. The next day, though, the warehouse owner just paid off the commanding officer and his men drove us all off from a perfectly legal picket with sticks, resulting in several injuries.) In a company town like New Haven, even student activists are treated with kid gloves if they’re protesting the local university, because they’re assumed to be working with the unions. However, this is true mostly in cases when police have discretion: when protesters confront only an individual officer, or a low-ranking commander with only a few men under his charge.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco

Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, dumpster diving, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, food desert, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, union organizing, urban decay, wage slave, white flight, women in the workforce

It was once a bustling coal town built and operated by the Pocahontas Fuel Company. The road into the holler that shelters Jenkinjones—named for the coal baron who was one of the founders of the company—is bordered on either side by a desolate row of chimneys that stand over charred wrecks of clapboard houses. The brick and concrete structures that were the anchor of the company town, including the old payroll office downtown and the company store with carved letters reading Pocahontas Fuel Company 1917 over the entrance, are hollow shells. Piles of rubble line the floor inside the three arched doorways of the company store. We kick our way through the debris. A mangy gray dog slinks past us, tail tucked between its legs, head lowered, teeth bared.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Harvard Business Review, April 2011. Applefield Olson, Catherine. “Online Retailers Slash DVD Prices—Competition Over New Format Heats Up in Cyberspace.” Billboard, May 16, 1998. Arango, Tim. “Time Warner View Netflix as a Fading Star.” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2010. Arnold, Thomas. “Company Town: Virtual Video Chain Builds Its Presence on PCs.” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 12, 1998. Bathon, Mike. “Movie Gallery Files for Bankruptcy.” Bloomberg, Feb. 3, 2010. Bazeley, Michael. “Pair Attempt to Change Law Pushing for More Charter Schools.” San Jose Mercury News, Feb. 2, 1998. ———.

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

Polman still believed the company—which made everything from Dove soap to Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—had a bright future and strong brands, but he also knew Unilever needed a hard reset. And to do that, he tried to return to the company’s roots. Unilever was founded by Lord William Lever, a late-nineteenth-century British entrepreneur. Lever set up a factory in Port Sunlight, in southern England, where he began mass-producing soap, and built a company town where his employees enjoyed health care, benefits, and entertainment. “He built Port Sunlight before the factories were fully running to provide houses for his employees,” Polman said. “He had the highest number of volunteers in World War I because he guaranteed the wages and the jobs, and he helped the wives when the men were gone.

Fodor's Big Island of Hawaii by Fodor’s Travel Guides

Airbnb, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, Easter island, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, off-the-grid, polynesian navigation, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

Large populations of the Hawaiian hoary bat inhabit the area, which, in totality, encompasses 25,000 acres of forest reserve. Restrooms and picnic areas are available. EHwy. 11, north of mile marker 81, Naalehu P808/974–6200 wdlnr.hawaii.gov/dsp AFree. Pahala TOWN | About 16 miles east of Naalehu, beyond Punaluu Beach Park, Highway 11 passes directly by this sleepy little town, once a booming sugar plantation company town but still inhabited by retired cane workers and their descendants. You’ll miss it if you blink. There is a Longs Pharmacy, a gas station, and a small supermarket, but not much else in terms of conveniences. Beyond the town, past a wide, paved cane road, is Wood Valley, known for a Buddhist temple set amid a peaceful area.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before. The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject.

…

On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before. The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

For example the Bovril company from 1908 owned 1.5 million acres of the Argentine province of Entre Rios – three English counties’ worth – in Santa Elena on the river Parana. There it had a company town and meat works – which produced corned beef and meat extract and from the 1930s chilled and frozen meat. The Liebig Extract of Meat Company owned estancias on both side of the river Uruguay and had company towns and slaughterhouses on either side – at Pueblo Liebig and Fray Bentos. Just as New York got its meat from Chicago by rail so London got its fill from the River Plate, and beyond, by ship. In the interwar years one British group owned by the Vestey family created an integrated global food operation supplying the United Kingdom, the only British rival to the US meat trusts, which themselves also supplied the British market from South America and Australasia.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

To educate the next generation, Washington-area universities offer majors in the specialties required by the intelligence agencies, too—cybersecurity, emergency management, advanced IT, geographic information systems. If there were a style to mark all this success, it would not be the glitter and bling of a Beverly Hills or the European sleekness of the Upper East Side of New York City. It would be an understated Middle Americanism of a company town where the company can’t be mentioned. “If this were a Chrysler plant, we’d be talking Chrysler in the bowling alley, Chrysler in the council meetings, Chrysler, Chrysler, Chrysler,” said Kent Menser, a Defense Department employee helping Howard County adjust to NSA’s local growth. But in Top Secret America’s suburban heart, silence and avoidance are everyday practices.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, company town, index card, microaggression, natural language processing, obamacare, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, why are manhole covers round?

Pron citations come from three main sources: broadcast media (which includes radio, TV, movies, and cable), audio or video on the Internet (YouTube and podcasts being the big generators), and human contact (phone calls, the aforementioned office polls, and face-to-face conversations). Steve Kleinedler, who handles the pronunciations for The American Heritage Dictionary, has occasionally sent me links to promotional videos pharmaceutical companies have put together for various products. Both Josh and Steve regularly call up companies, town halls, and famous people (mostly Nobel Prize winners and presidents) to ask them how they say the name of their product, their hometown, or themselves. If there’s more than one pronunciation and Josh isn’t sure which one to list first, he might go around with a clipboard and an index card for an office poll to see if he can get a better sense of which pronunciation is more common after making us all say something in our raspy, unused voices.

The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River by Dan Morrison

airport security, colonial rule, company town, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, off-the-grid, Potemkin village, Rubik’s Cube, satellite internet, Silicon Valley

This reduction in elevation had been countered by the annual Nile flood and the silt it left behind, but silt hadn’t reached the Delta since the High Dam went up. Without it—those five billion cubic meters now on the floor of Lake Nasser, the Delta was falling and the sea was invading. Geologists say the Nile Delta has now entered its “destruction phase.” Still, the only sinkage I could discern was metaphorical. My train north took me past dusty company towns and emerald fields where water buffalo pulled plows. Thick with the human, agricultural and industrial waste of Egypt, the Nile water here was as brown as the water at Lake Victoria was clear. A young Winston Churchill famously imagined a day when the Nile waters would be “equally and amicably divided among the river people, and the Nile itself, flowing for three thousand miles through smiling countries, shall perish gloriously and never reach the sea.”

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

On Freelancer they can do your back office, your logo and so forth. I mean, really—now you can be one guy sitting in a room with a few thousand dollars and off the back of a credit card you can build a multimillion-dollar company.”12 Case Study 2: Tongal—Genius TV Commercials at One One-Hundredth the Price13 L.A., where I live, is something of a company town, with Hollywood being the company. As a result, every coffee shop and bus stop is packed full of scriptwriters, producers, and directors. Mix that incredible talent density with the plummeting cost of 1080p high-definition cameras and the awesome editing software available on every Mac and you have the making of a video production revolution.

Why the Dutch Are Different: A Journey Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the Acclaimed Guide to Travel in Holland by Ben Coates

Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, company town, drug harm reduction, Easter island, failed state, financial innovation, glass ceiling, invention of the printing press, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, megacity, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, short selling, spice trade, starchitect, trade route, urban sprawl, work culture

One of the relatively few major Dutch multinationals, Philips was a source of considerable national pride, offering (along with Unilever and Shell) proof that the country’s relaxed outlook and generous welfare state were not incompatible with profitability. Philips engineers were said to have played a major role in inventing technologies including the tape recorder, CD, DVD and Blu-ray. In recent years, however, Philips had fallen on harder times, announcing enormous job losses that hollowed out what had long been a one-company town. The signs on the ring roads welcoming visitors to the lightbulb-producing ‘City of Light’ now carried a touch of grim irony. The disembodied voice of the train conductor wished passengers a fun carnival and I disembarked, stepping from the carriage into a steady stream of revellers flowing towards the city centre.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Coming off a wave of acquisitions, investments, and partnerships that brought a vast array of bike-share, car-share, and scooter-share services under its umbrella, Khosrowshahi was well on his way to delivering on this bold vision. It is, for all intents and purposes, MaaS. But instead of haggling at an open bazaar, your experience will be more like shopping at the commissary in a company town. There’ll be no apples-to-apples comparison. Instead, there will be only one kind of apple on sale—Uber’s apples. It’s this possibility that raises the greatest risks. As they grasp at any hope for profitability, giant companies like Uber are moving into position to control the marketplace for mobility services.

Heavy Metal: The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers by Michael Fabey

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, company town, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Floyd, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, Minecraft, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, union organizing

The deal would yield no time savings in the actual construction of the carriers, but Petters and the yard could retain the workers from one carrier to the other, instead of losing them and their experience as the shipbuilder usually did when it built one carrier at a time. In addition, contracting for two ships at one time meant the yard would save money by buying the steel, pipes, and other materials for two carriers at a time—a boon and guaranteed source of income for small manufacturers throughout the country and life-preserver work in a single-company town. Geurts told everyone to be prepared to wait until at least the end of the year for such a contract. In the halls of Washington, they stepped up the pressure. Rick Giannini, chairman of the Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition lobby group, publicly claimed that the navy would save more than $2 billion on the two carriers by buying both under one contract.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Cows were spaced six feet apart and the lines were slowed down. However, the distance between the cows was quickly returned to the standard two feet. In response, Greeley workers spontaneously walked off the job, a strike unsanctioned by their union, the UFCW. The walkout drew some bad press for the company and a wave of community support in the company town. “We were spreading the virus in town, too,” Anthony said. “A lot of people wanted it shut down for their own safety and ours. But they also knew that nobody was gonna pay for that,” he said. “That’s why they supported us.” Some workers whose jobs entailed extra face-to-face contact got a small pay bump after the walkout.

Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Mike Massimino

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Gene Kranz, imposter syndrome, James Webb Space Telescope, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic, Yom Kippur War

Then Gabby was born, and having her brought life into focus and reminded me why I was doing what I was doing. We bought a house in Clear Lake, the suburb southwest of Houston where the Johnson Space Center is located. After a lifetime in the Northeast it was a rough adjustment, but we’d stumbled into a wonderful community and we slowly got acclimated. Clear Lake is a company town. Nearly everyone is tied to NASA and the aerospace industry in some way or another. Our neighborhood was right off Space Center Boulevard, about five minutes from the entrance to the Johnson Space Center. It was like living in Astronautville. My whole life these guys were my heroes. Now they were my neighbors.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

The project is still to be approved, if at all, by Mountain View city council, and so we shall have to wait and see what is actually built to compare the real environmental platform to that proposed.58 By contrast, looking at Frank Gehry's early proposals for a new Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park (nicknamed “Zee Town” after company founder, Mark Zuckerberg) we see a plan for a more traditional corporate campus, designed, it appears, to ensure the managed serendipitous contact between employees in motion. In this encapsulated “company town” winding pathways and strategic lines of sight connecting interior and exterior views are embedded in a multilevel landscape where sub- and superterranean greenery twists and turns onto and under the collection of buildings.59 At their desks, the aggregate social graph of the on-site employee/resident population is framed and displayed to itself as it moves and involves itself within itself in airplane hangar–scale open-plan work space.

…

As this book was going to press, we learned that the Mountain View city council voted for Linkedin's alternative proposal for the site, perhaps preventing at least delaying, the eventual construction of some version of Ingalls’ and Heatherwick's plan. See Conor Dougherty “Google Loses to Linkedin in Silicon Valley Headquarters Pitch,” New York Times, May 6, 2015, http://nyti.ms/1F68CMI. 59.  Adam Greenfield compares “Zee Town” to company towns of years past in “Is Facebook's ‘Zee Town’ More Than Just a Mark Zuckerberg Vanity Project?” Guardian, March 10, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/mar/10/facebook-zee-town-mark-zuckerberg. 60.  See Kirk Johnson and Nick Wingfield, “As Amazon Stretches, Seattle's Downtown Is Reshaped,” New York Times, August 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/26/us/as-amazon-stretches-seattles-downtown-is-reshaped.html. 61. 

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

Jonathan Rothwell and others, “Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and Its Metropolitan Areas” (Brookings, 2013), p. 12. 23. Joshua L. Rosenbloom, “The Geography of Innovation Commercialization in the United States during the 1990s,” Economic Development Quarterly 21 no. 3 (2007), p. 4. 24. Peter Applebome, “Despite Long Slide by Kodak, Company Town Avoids Decay,” New York Times, January 17, 2012. 25. New York City, Office of the Mayor, “Mayor Bloomberg Announces City Received 18 Submissions from 27 Academic Institutions for New Applied Sciences Campus,” press release, March 17, 2011. 26. Patrick McGeehan, “By Deadline, 7 Bids in Science School Contest,” New York Times, October 31, 2011. 27.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

British Empire, carbon-based life, company town, conceptual framework, coronavirus, invention of radio, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, optical character recognition, out of africa, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, the High Line, trade route, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Beyond them, by the early 1990s, forests that survived had filled with radioactive roe deer and wild boars. Then moose arrived, and lynx and wolves followed. Dikes have slowed radioactive water, but not stopped it from reaching the nearby Pripyat River and, farther downstream, Kiev’s drinking supply. A railroad bridge leading to Pripyat, the company town where 50,000 were evacuated—some not quickly enough to keep radioactive iodine from ruining their thyroids—is still too hot to cross. Four miles south, though, you can stand above the river in one of the best birding areas today in Europe, watching marsh hawks, black terns, wagtails, golden and white-tailed eagles, and rare black storks sail past dead cooling towers.

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

According to data from IHS Screen Digest, revenue from U.S. DVD and Blu-ray sales and rentals was $21.9 billion in 2004 but fell to $16.3 billion in 2010. As recently as 2008, it was $19.3 billion. 5. Dawn C. Chmielewski, “Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger Outlines Role of Modern Studio Chief,” Company Town (blog), Los Angeles Times, October 17, 2009. 6. Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply, “In Hollywood, Grappling with Studios’ Lost Clout,” New York Times, January 18, 2010. 7. I didn’t go to Cham; the description of the RapidShare office is from Dirk Von Gehlen, “RapidShare—der unbekannte Web-Star,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 16, 2008. 8. 2009 Global Broadband Phenomena (Sandvine, October 20, 2010). 9.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Without really having it ourselves, we pretend to export democracy to those unfortunates who are otherwise governed... provided they inhabit lands with petroleum futures. What we are really doing, is crusading to infect the world with our own rampant consumerism... even as the planetary well runs dry. A Real Green Village I settled my family several decades ago in the tiny coastal California village of Caspar “the friendly ghost town” — a redwood company town where the Victorian-era mill fortunately shut down before millworkers started pouring toxic chemicals on the ground. In our backyard the mill rusts and rots benignly as Nature slowly reclaims the land. 256 Colophon The mill closed in 1955, and the town was repopulated by a new breed, Casparados.

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Our co-workers shouldn’t have to worry that each time they open their mouths to speak in a meeting, they have to prove that they are not like the memo states, being ‘agreeable’ rather than ‘assertive,’ showing a ‘lower stress tolerance,’ or being ‘neurotic.’” Internally, Google executives engaged in an intense debate about what to do. Within a few days of the memo’s release, Damore was fired. Pichai promised to hold a company town hall to discuss the situation. But, just thirty minutes before the meeting, he canceled it, citing security concerns (some employees said they were being harassed after their questions were leaked online). The next day—while nuclear tensions ramped up between the United States and North Korea—the most popular article in the New York Times was an op-ed calling for Pichai’s resignation.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

She also took advantage of the base’s PX, or Post Exchange, as a one-stop shop for the sensible and, most important, tax-free clothing that my sister and I were constantly outgrowing. Perhaps it’s best, then, for readers not raised in this milieu to imagine Fort Meade and its environs, if not the entire Beltway, as one enormous boom-or-bust company town. It is a place whose monoculture has much in common with, say, Silicon Valley’s, except that the Beltway’s product isn’t technology but government itself. I should add that both my parents had top secret clearances, but my mother also had a full-scope polygraph—a higher-level security check that members of the military aren’t subject to.

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

Labor Markets and Monopsony: The Power to Underpay Just as monopoly exists when there is only one seller, monopsony exists when there is only one buyer; here we are particularly concerned with only one buyer of labor. The term monopsony was coined by one of economics’ most eminent women, Joan Robinson,25 a pupil and collaborator of John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge, and a major thinker about how competition works. A company town is an example of pure monopsony. As in the case of sellers, there may be only a few employers, each with some power to lower wages; this is oligopsony. Monopsony or oligopsony means that firms have power over wage setting, in contrast to perfect competition, where there is a going wage for workers, and anyone who tries to pay less will be unable to hire any employees.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

It is, for better or worse, the peak of the industrial culture that gave birth to the practice of modern design. Yet its power is waning. The Ford Motor Company, founded by Henry Ford, who was no more comfortable a personality than Steve Jobs, used to be the model of the modern corporation, with its company towns, its own orchestra, its own company uniform. Apple and Google have supplanted Ford and IBM as the model corporations that others seek to emulate. And while there are now companies around the globe who have managed to make cars more profitably, and more effectively, than Ford, they are essentially in the business of refining a mature product that may have a limited future.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Of course, the decline in manufacturing and the rise of the service sector is a global mega-trend, stretching decades and affecting the entire industrialized world. But the pace at which people lost jobs in the US manufacturing sector is extraordinary. Between 1990 and 2016, the Financial Times calculated, some 5.6 million jobs were lost in manufacturing.14 The workforce of entire industrial cities was decimated. Some company towns, cities which all but depended on one industrial employer, were particularly hard-hit. And while many of these jobs didn't disappear altogether but were rather offshored to China or nearshored to Mexico, about half of the jobs did get lost because of advancing automation. At best, low-paid service jobs replaced these well-paid blue-collar jobs.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

One thousand more signed the next day. In early April, after more than thirty-one hundred employees had signed, the New York Times published a story revealing what was going on, and, days later, the head of the cloud group invited Whittaker to join a panel discussion about the Maven contract during a company town hall meeting. She and two other Googlers, both pro-Maven, debated the issue three separate times, so that it could be broadcast live to three separate time zones around the globe. In London, inside DeepMind, more than half of the employees signed Whittaker’s petition, with Mustafa Suleyman playing a particularly prominent role in the protest.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Of course, the decline in manufacturing and the rise of the service sector is a global mega-trend, stretching decades and affecting the entire industrialized world. But the pace at which people lost jobs in the US manufacturing sector is extraordinary. Between 1990 and 2016, the Financial Times calculated, some 5.6 million jobs were lost in manufacturing.14 The workforce of entire industrial cities was decimated. Some company towns, cities which all but depended on one industrial employer, were particularly hard-hit. And while many of these jobs didn't disappear altogether but were rather offshored to China or nearshored to Mexico, about half of the jobs did get lost because of advancing automation. At best, low-paid service jobs replaced these well-paid blue-collar jobs.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

By 2020 Google controlled more than three-quarters of the search-advertising market, and it and Facebook, together, controlled more than half of all U.S. digital advertising. YouTube, Amazon, and several runners-up such as Microsoft and Twitter achieved almost comparable dominance in their domains. In the era of Web 2.0, the wild west had become a company town, to the astonishment and consternation of the World Wide Web’s original libertarian constituency. “These tools which I thought were going to be the new gateway … to a new kind of collective human imagination ended up being the opposite,” the media critic Douglas Rushkoff told the podcaster Sam Harris.37 Many people still spoke of the digital media giants as platforms, as if they were passive providers of unstructured information spaces, but in reality they aggressively channeled and shaped information flows, although often without accountability or transparency or even understanding what they were doing.

World Travel: An Irreverent Guide by Anthony Bourdain, Laurie Woolever

anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, company town, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Easter island, European colonialism, flag carrier, gentrification, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Kibera, low cost airline, megacity, off-the-grid, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, ride hailing / ride sharing, spice trade, tech bro, trade route, walkable city, women in the workforce

MÜTTER MUSEUM: 19 South Twenty-Second Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103, Tel 215 560 8564, www.muttermuseum.org (admission $20 for adults, $18 for seniors, $15 for children, five and under free) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania * * * “Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods, each with its own rites and rituals; a patchwork of cultures that took shape over a century ago. Back then, the city was a beacon of hope and possibility for people all over the world, offering the promise of work, prosperity, a new life. Pittsburgh could have been another company town gone to beautiful ruin, but something happened. The city started to pop up on lists of the most livable places in America. It became attractive to a new wave of people from elsewhere looking to reinvent themselves and make a new world.” Of course, economic transition and new ways to generate income benefit some more than others.

The Rough Guide to Chile by Melissa Graham, Andrew Benson

Atahualpa, California gold rush, call centre, centre right, company town, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, feminist movement, Francisco Pizarro, it's over 9,000, Murano, Venice glass, sensible shoes, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, union organizing, women in the workforce

San Pedro has recently begun to lose some of its charm and is lined with overpriced, trendy-looking hotels with questionable cleanliness and poor service. Luckily, you will find exceptions (see reviews, p.213). | San Pedro de Atacama and around San Pedro de Atacama and around E L NORTE GRANDE copper corporation. Codelco also used to maintain an adjacent company town, complete with its own school, hospital, cinema and football stadium, but the nine thousand workers and their families who lived there have now been moved to Calama, making way for further excavation. As a result, the whole area is now an industrial site and visits can be arranged only with the official guided tour (Mon–Fri 1.30pm; free, but donations to a children’s charity supported by the mine are welcomed) that leaves from the former school in the abandoned town.

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Buses Termas de Cauquenes runs buses to the termas, leaving at 11am and 5pm from | Termas de Cauquenes Termas de Cauquenes THE C E NTRAL VAL L E Y You aren’t allowed to just turn up and visit, but group tours can be arranged in advance by contacting Codelco, Millán 220 in Rancagua (T 72/292000 in Rancagua, T 2/787 7710 in Santiago, W www.codelco.com). The half-day tours (from CH$12,000 per person) include a visit to the abandoned company town of Sewell (W www.sewell.cl), staggered in dramatic tiers up the mountainside. After this, you don protective gear and go down the shafts to the gloomy underground tunnels. VTS, Manuel Montt 192, Rancagua (T 72/210290, W www .vts.cl), also organizes trips to Sewell for a similar price. A few kilometres north of the mine, and ranging from 2300m to 3100m, is the Codelco-owned Chapa Verde ski centre (T 72/217651, W www .chapaverde.cl), initially built for the company’s miners but now open to the public between July and September.

Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Chimney Tree AMERICAN $ (1111 Ave of the Giants, Phillipsville; burgers $7-11; 10am-7pm May-Sep) If you’re just passing through and want something quick, come here. It raises its own grass-fed beef. Alas, the fries are frozen, but those burgers…mmm-mmm! Scotia For years, Scotia was California’s last ‘company town,’ entirely owned and operated by the Pacific Lumber Company, which built cookie-cut houses and had an open contempt for long-haired outsiders who liked to get between their saws and the big trees. The company recently went belly up, sold the mill to another redwood company and, though the town still has a creepy Twilight Zone vibe, you no longer have to operate by the company’s posted ‘Code of Conduct.’

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The museum’s fisheries center (admission free) is remarkably informative – ironic, considering that logging destroys fish habitats – and houses the largest freshwater aquarium on the North Coast. There are dingy motels and diners in Rio Dell (aka ‘Real Dull’), across the river. Back in the day, this is where the debauchery happened: because it wasn’t a company town, Rio Dell had bars and hookers. In 1969, the freeway bypassed the town and it withered. As you drive along Hwy 101 and see what appears to be a never-ending redwood forest, understand that this ‘forest’ sometimes consists of trees only a few rows deep – called a ‘beauty strip’ – a carefully crafted illusion for tourists.

Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

The El Centauro red – named for Pancho Villa – is an excellent estate-grown blend. 8Information Humboldt Redwoods Visitor CenterTOURIST INFORMATION ( GOOGLE MAP ; %707-946-2263; www.humboldtredwoods.org; Avenue of the Giants; h9am-5pm Apr-Oct, 10am-4pm Nov-Mar) Located 2 miles south of Weott, a volunteer-staffed visitor center shows videos (three in total), sells maps and also has a small exhibition center about the local flora and fauna. Scotia For years, Scotia was California’s last ‘company town,’ entirely owned and operated by the Pacific Lumber Company, which built cookie-cut houses and had an open contempt for long-haired outsiders who liked to get between their saws and the big trees. The company went belly up in 2006, sold the mill to another redwood company and, though the town still has a creepy Twilight Zone vibe, you no longer have to operate by the company’s posted ‘Code of Conduct.’

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As you drive along Hwy 101 and see what appears to be a never-ending redwood forest, understand that this 'forest' sometimes consists of trees only a few rows deep – called a 'beauty strip' – a carefully crafted illusion for tourists. Most old-growth trees have been cut. There are dingy diners and a couple of bars in Rio Dell, across the river. Back in the day, this is where the debauchery happened: because it wasn’t a company town, Rio Dell had bars and hookers. In 1969 the freeway bypassed the town and it withered. Upon entering the town from the north, there is a Hoby's Market and Deli located in the Scotia Center (a small shopping center). The best reason to pull off here is the Eel River Brewing Company Taproom & Grill ( GOOGLE MAP ; %702-725-2739; http://eelriverbrewing.com; 1777 Alamar Way, Fortuna; h11am-11pm), where a breezy beer garden and excellent burgers ($11 to $15) accompany all-organic brews.

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

I’ve been hearing Omar talk about Karen for a while now—she was on base when I was here for Family Day back in September, but on that occasion, too, she was bringing in a carful of friends on her own badge and we never quite managed to be in the same place at the same time. Karen is a spaceworker like Omar, which makes sense; the job seems to be so demanding, and Merritt Island such a company town, it’s hard to imagine how spaceworkers could hope to meet anyone any other way. Karen works in the same position as Omar; other than that, I don’t know much about her except that she owns and rides horses. Omar often posts pictures of the horses’ antics on Facebook. When Karen makes her way over to us, I see that she is in her early thirties, about Omar’s age, with sandy blond hair and tanned skin.

This Is Only a Test: How Washington D.C. Prepared for Nuclear War by David F. Krugler

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Berlin Wall, City Beautiful movement, colonial rule, company town, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, full employment, glass ceiling, index card, launch on warning, Lewis Mumford, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, urban planning, Victor Gruen, white flight, Works Progress Administration

However persuasive on paper, dispersal remained unproven in practice—would any American city want to undertake a reconfiguration that couldn’t be easily reversed? Ideally, the first cluster cities needed to arise around a city that fulfilled tasks essential to the nation’s ability to wage war, so that the need for dispersal was obvious. At the same time, this city needed to be a “one-company” town, for if the most important employer moved to the periphery, then employees would follow. And in case dispersal faced opposition, this city would ideally be ruled by unelected officials who could impose drastic change upon the unwilling. As Augur wrote, “the form and size and location of our cities is a matter of national concern, to be set by the mandates of national welfare rather than the whims of individual builders.”10 But America was a democracy built on the bedrock of property rights.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The new configuration often has spillover effects elsewhere because it creates what Arthur calls ‘opportunity niches’ – arenas where an innovation from one place might be meaningfully applied in another.1 Spontaneous development of innovation centres (some regions, cities and towns have a remarkable record for innovation) occurs because, as was long ago noted by commentators such as Jane Jacobs, the fortuitous co-presence of different skills and knowledges of the sort that Arthur regards as necessary for innovation to occur is more likely to be found in a seemingly chaotic economy characterised by innumerable small businesses and divisions of labour.2 Such environments have historically been far more likely to spawn new technological mixes than a single-dimensional company town. More recently, however, the deliberate organisation of the research universities, institutes, think tanks and military R&D units in a given area has become a basic business model through which the capitalist state and capitalist corporations pursue innovation for competitive advantage. But what is strange about Arthur’s otherwise informative presentation on the logic of technological evolution is his avoidance of any critical discussion of the range of human purposes that technologies are supposed to serve.

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

Another French forester, Francis Rougier, oversees his family’s two and a half million acres in Cameroon and Gabon. That’s an area the size of Northern Ireland. Much of Rougier’s land in Gabon is accessed by the Trans-Gabon railway. Built in the 1980s, it runs through 435 miles of jungle from the coastal capital of Libreville deep into the interior to Franceville, Rougier’s company town. Like the Bollores, the Rougiers are close to Sarkozy. Before him, they were intimates of former presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. In early 2010, Sarkozy visited Franceville with Rougier and Gabon’s president Ali Bongo. You have to pinch yourself to realize that the colonial era is over.

Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, double entry bookkeeping, Ford Model T, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, interchangeable parts, joint-stock company, Maui Hawaii, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban sprawl, wage slave, Works Progress Administration

Byrd used to lament that he was kept from his books and paintings by the daily grind of tending ‘that bewitching vegetable, tobacco’; and, looking over his lavish and elegant estate of Westover, he remarked that ‘in the greatest fortune there is the least liberty.’ The plantations, then, were neither villages nor entails attached to a lord of the manor. They were company towns in the country. And, thanks to the peculiar topography, they enclosed every stage of production from planting the crops to shipping them. For a glance at the coastline of Virginia and the Carolinas will show something that was a boon to the prosperity of the plantations once they had found their profitable crop.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor