6 ms·

This is a horrible idea. Mainly because companies operate like an elected monarchy at best, dictatorship at least. Any “company government” would look no diffe

This is a horrible idea. Mainly because companies operate like an elected monarchy at best, dictatorship at least. Any “company government” would look no different than a dictatorship to the outside. In India, there are blocks of corporate housing for contractors and employees of fortune 500s. If they lost their jobs, they lose their residence. If the company lets them go, they lose their residence. Imagine for a moment, you’re a 10x dev working on a financial platform under contract. The contract is pulled due to funding. You are benched and told “we’ll find you something else to work on”, then a few months later they let you go and you have to move. Government is for people, corporations are for profit, those two are not compatible.

karl11 6y ago
What better way to find out whether or not this is true than with a real experiment? This is a fantastic idea, because we could see what alternatives actually look like. If you don't want to live there, you just simply don't live there.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  “If you don’t want to live there, don’t live there” - the siren song of inhumane exploitation.
  - jonathankoren 6y ago
    “Anyone can buy OCP stock, and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?” Robocop 2 https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro
- rodgerd 6y ago
  We've already done this. They were called company towns. I realise that a lot of modern tech culture would rather re-invent the world from first principles while making 10,000 years of human mistakes at high speed in preference to acknowledging the existence of disciplines outside of STEM, but history, economics, anthropology, town planning, they're all right there with many of the answers.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    And if you look at the track record for company towns - it is mixed. Not every company town exploited workers and paid in scrip. Some company towns were successful, humane endeavors that had higher standards of living and more upward mobility than the surrounding region. Modern federal and state law already effectively prevents the worst sort of abuse that employees had to deal with in the worst company towns of the past, so I don't foresee the same kind of exploitation happening.
    - gabereiser 6y ago
      Can you cite an instance where this actually worked?
      - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
        Jamshedpur comes to mind (from Tata). Sun City, Arizona is also a good example. Gurgaon ,India - but note there are private (company) areas and public areas. In fact that may offer a nice comparison, but from my understanding the seed stage was 100% company-backed. The Woodlands, Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas I think Ciudad del Este gets pretty close although thats a FTZ charter city, not exactly a "company" charter city. When you look at these cities you need to select local comps that make sense.
- newbie789 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town Here you go!
  - Nicksil 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
- Arrath 6y ago
  The experiments already happened, though. And they were a bloody mess, often literally if the residents dared talk about forming a union.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  Sure, we could also try giving people arsenic to determine if it's toxic to humans. We've done both experiments already, and we should learn from the extant data rather than repeating unethical experiments.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Why repeat a several-times-over failed experiment?
- leesalminen 6y ago
  Pretty sure this has been tried time and time again over the past 150 years [0]. It didn't end well then; why would it now? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
- babelfish 6y ago
  Of course this has happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
- ruined 6y ago
  last time company towns were commonplace, America had a minor civil war (10k+ combatant pitched battles, air raids) that dragged on for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
lumost 6y ago
This also dramatically increases the leverage employers have over their employees. If you live in a company town, your kids go to the company school, your spouse will either work for the company or be dependent on the company for their business. If you're terminated, or simply want to negotiate for better terms - the company already has you beat. The company knows that you won't go home and tell your kids they have to move and your partner that they need a new job for a 5% raise.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  This isn't exactly rare in towns as is, and we absolutely shouldn't make it worse. My home town has a truly deplorable organization I still hesitate to openly criticize as I know it could result in problems for my parents.
nostrademons 6y ago
If you don't like it, don't live there. I certainly wouldn't live in a city run by "Blockchain LLC" - but I'm excited to see what other alternative forms of governance could be dreamed up. A requirement for these new local governments is that they operate on undeveloped, uninhabited land. More generally, there are two ways that people deal with dissatisfaction - "Voice" or "Exit". When things are bad, you can either try to reform them from within, or just leave and start a new system. Democracy is the former, freedom is the latter, and both are embodied in the U.S. system of federalism. Democracy tends to work better when things are "a little bad", freedom works better when things are "very bad", and I'd argue that the level of corruption and dysfunction in today's government might argue for the latter.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  >if you don’t like it, don’t live there Is privileged thinking. There are large portions of populations that lack resources to move. Democracy works when everyone at the table has their head about them, sadly lacking in today’s current affairs.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    ...and that's why freedom of movement should be a fundamental right. Which it technically is, under U.S. law [1], but there have been both economic (like housing policy) and legal [2] barriers enacted against it recently. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit... [2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/right-to-free-movement.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/right-to-free-mo...
- frongpik 6y ago
  Such a law would give competitive advantage to evil businessmen who will own these plantations. Imagine you run a sandwich shop and pay respectful salaries to your employees. Then I open a shop across the street, but use slave labor, pay next to nothing and sell sandwiches twice cheaper.
EGreg 6y ago
As a left-libertarian, I see a lot of promise in this idea because I see it less as a company running a town, and more as replacing government and companies with a permissionless technology like TCP-IP, BGP, or SMTP or HTTP or Ethereum. Whenever that happens, new wealth and innovation is unleashed and costs go down. For example, VOIP has brought costs down tremendously versus phone companies and governments trying to break them up. Representative democracies are the best we could have done before computers, but now we can replace institutions by autonomous networks taking care of the infrastructure. Clay Shirky gave a great talk about “institutions vs collaboration” back in 2004 (Google it). As a left-libertarian I’d prefer gift economies and collaboration over competition, but either one would be better than the current Feudalism we have. I’m envisioning the currency, monetary and fiscal policy, energy grid, telecommunications being run by an autonomous network determining prices. The community would democratically vote on how much UBI to give, and how much insurance to give. In fact, I have literally been BUILDING this kind of thing with my company since 2017, and the code is all open source. This is exactly what it would look like and how it would work; Take a look and tell me what you think... https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications UBI: https://intercoin.org/ubi https://intercoin.org/ubi VOTING: https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-defi-votingcontract-and-governance/ https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-defi-votingcontr... PS: In my experience this kind of comment gets heavily downvoted by people who say nothing. I have posted all the materials backing up my points, including HOW it would work, and even the source code for you to try. Why don’t you actually engage with the substance of the topic and add your perspective below!
- tzs 6y ago
  I did not down-vote. I would guess that those that did in this case are doing so because your comment is about replacing current government and companies with something completely different, which is not really what the proposal in the article seems to be about. They see it as off topic. What the article seems to be talking about is a government that is a lot like existing governments, except it is run by a company. The company would, according to the article, "carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties".
IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
We should welcome any opportunity for competition with county cartels. Let them experiment, crash and burn. Or maybe they will surprise you. Let the explorers and the innovators take the first step and innovate. If we based our execution of ideas on conventional thinking, America would have never been discovered. The beauty of this is that no one is forcing anyone to participate in any dictatorship.

karl11 6y ago

What better way to find out whether or not this is true than with a real experiment? This is a fantastic idea, because we could see what alternatives actually look like. If you don't want to live there, you just simply don't live there.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
“If you don’t want to live there, don’t live there” - the siren song of inhumane exploitation.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  “Anyone can buy OCP stock, and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?” Robocop 2 https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro
rodgerd 6y ago
We've already done this. They were called company towns. I realise that a lot of modern tech culture would rather re-invent the world from first principles while making 10,000 years of human mistakes at high speed in preference to acknowledging the existence of disciplines outside of STEM, but history, economics, anthropology, town planning, they're all right there with many of the answers.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  And if you look at the track record for company towns - it is mixed. Not every company town exploited workers and paid in scrip. Some company towns were successful, humane endeavors that had higher standards of living and more upward mobility than the surrounding region. Modern federal and state law already effectively prevents the worst sort of abuse that employees had to deal with in the worst company towns of the past, so I don't foresee the same kind of exploitation happening.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Can you cite an instance where this actually worked?
    - IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago
      Jamshedpur comes to mind (from Tata). Sun City, Arizona is also a good example. Gurgaon ,India - but note there are private (company) areas and public areas. In fact that may offer a nice comparison, but from my understanding the seed stage was 100% company-backed. The Woodlands, Texas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woodlands,_Texas I think Ciudad del Este gets pretty close although thats a FTZ charter city, not exactly a "company" charter city. When you look at these cities you need to select local comps that make sense.
newbie789 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town Here you go!
- Nicksil 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Arrath 6y ago
The experiments already happened, though. And they were a bloody mess, often literally if the residents dared talk about forming a union.
ncallaway 6y ago
Sure, we could also try giving people arsenic to determine if it's toxic to humans. We've done both experiments already, and we should learn from the extant data rather than repeating unethical experiments.
moron4hire 6y ago
Why repeat a several-times-over failed experiment?
leesalminen 6y ago
Pretty sure this has been tried time and time again over the past 150 years [0]. It didn't end well then; why would it now? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
babelfish 6y ago
Of course this has happened before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism
ruined 6y ago
last time company towns were commonplace, America had a minor civil war (10k+ combatant pitched battles, air raids) that dragged on for decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars

lumost 6y ago

This also dramatically increases the leverage employers have over their employees. If you live in a company town, your kids go to the company school, your spouse will either work for the company or be dependent on the company for their business. If you're terminated, or simply want to negotiate for better terms - the company already has you beat. The company knows that you won't go home and tell your kids they have to move and your partner that they need a new job for a 5% raise.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
This isn't exactly rare in towns as is, and we absolutely shouldn't make it worse. My home town has a truly deplorable organization I still hesitate to openly criticize as I know it could result in problems for my parents.

nostrademons 6y ago

If you don't like it, don't live there. I certainly wouldn't live in a city run by "Blockchain LLC" - but I'm excited to see what other alternative forms of governance could be dreamed up. A requirement for these new local governments is that they operate on undeveloped, uninhabited land. More generally, there are two ways that people deal with dissatisfaction - "Voice" or "Exit". When things are bad, you can either try to reform them from within, or just leave and start a new system. Democracy is the former, freedom is the latter, and both are embodied in the U.S. system of federalism. Democracy tends to work better when things are "a little bad", freedom works better when things are "very bad", and I'd argue that the level of corruption and dysfunction in today's government might argue for the latter.

gabereiser 6y ago
>if you don’t like it, don’t live there Is privileged thinking. There are large portions of populations that lack resources to move. Democracy works when everyone at the table has their head about them, sadly lacking in today’s current affairs.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  ...and that's why freedom of movement should be a fundamental right. Which it technically is, under U.S. law [1], but there have been both economic (like housing policy) and legal [2] barriers enacted against it recently. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_United_States_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit... [2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/right-to-free-movement.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/right-to-free-mo...
frongpik 6y ago
Such a law would give competitive advantage to evil businessmen who will own these plantations. Imagine you run a sandwich shop and pay respectful salaries to your employees. Then I open a shop across the street, but use slave labor, pay next to nothing and sell sandwiches twice cheaper.

EGreg 6y ago

As a left-libertarian, I see a lot of promise in this idea because I see it less as a company running a town, and more as replacing government and companies with a permissionless technology like TCP-IP, BGP, or SMTP or HTTP or Ethereum. Whenever that happens, new wealth and innovation is unleashed and costs go down. For example, VOIP has brought costs down tremendously versus phone companies and governments trying to break them up. Representative democracies are the best we could have done before computers, but now we can replace institutions by autonomous networks taking care of the infrastructure. Clay Shirky gave a great talk about “institutions vs collaboration” back in 2004 (Google it). As a left-libertarian I’d prefer gift economies and collaboration over competition, but either one would be better than the current Feudalism we have. I’m envisioning the currency, monetary and fiscal policy, energy grid, telecommunications being run by an autonomous network determining prices. The community would democratically vote on how much UBI to give, and how much insurance to give. In fact, I have literally been BUILDING this kind of thing with my company since 2017, and the code is all open source. This is exactly what it would look like and how it would work; Take a look and tell me what you think... https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications UBI: https://intercoin.org/ubi https://intercoin.org/ubi VOTING: https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-defi-votingcontract-and-governance/ https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-defi-votingcontr... PS: In my experience this kind of comment gets heavily downvoted by people who say nothing. I have posted all the materials backing up my points, including HOW it would work, and even the source code for you to try. Why don’t you actually engage with the substance of the topic and add your perspective below!

tzs 6y ago
I did not down-vote. I would guess that those that did in this case are doing so because your comment is about replacing current government and companies with something completely different, which is not really what the proposal in the article seems to be about. They see it as off topic. What the article seems to be talking about is a government that is a lot like existing governments, except it is run by a company. The company would, according to the article, "carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties".

IG_Semmelweiss 6y ago

We should welcome any opportunity for competition with county cartels. Let them experiment, crash and burn. Or maybe they will surprise you. Let the explorers and the innovators take the first step and innovate. If we based our execution of ideas on conventional thinking, America would have never been discovered. The beauty of this is that no one is forcing anyone to participate in any dictatorship.