Serfdom, rebranded as something related to high tech. And there will be enough desperate people who would fill these zones. Tata consultancies and the like hire echelons of h1b workers from India and China and those workers may never see a green card. Moreover, once such zones get a competitive edge by extorting their employees, other companies will have to get out of business or embrace the new business model.
That, or a company like Tesla announces a new city, millions of Americans flock to it, we redevelop a sense of unity and local progress and all live happily ever after.
"you're afraid to take the first step because all you see is every negative thing 10 miles down the road."
And if Tesla goes under or faces some troubles, or for whatever reason decides to close down shop, since everyone's income is nearly perfectly correlated the city collapses all at once and the entire population is now unemployed
Definitely amplify's risk for sure. If the company went under, your whole county would go under and the government is not likely to bail them out like they would a city who had too much debt. Since you may even purchase your house on the company land, you could quite literally lose everything.
Again, if the population thrives the amount of space is hyper-limited. I don't know if there'd be gentrification per say, since it'd be gentrified from the start but the populace would grow fabulously rich off both stock in the company, increased land value and general prosperity for your entire community.
It also changes the incentive structure. You want you company to thrive, so your can community to thrive and vice versa.
Funny, I alluded to this in the other thread that’s now marked a dupe. I read the article and couldn’t believe what I was reading. We are making the mistakes of the past... or to rephrase that, the lords are consolidating
I do think this is a terrible idea, but then again it is one of the benefits of having separate states where each can experiment with ideas, sometimes very strange or ill-advised ideas. They are reminiscent of company towns, and I would predict they will become even worse. Modern "smart cities" are even more than just owning and profiting off of everything, it is about data and analytics and techno-utopians. I would predict that all of the issues about surveillance and control that are appearing in our society would be amplified on a small scale. It has become fashionable for rich technologists to believe they can solve world issues with technology, themselves as masters. This attempt to try to make a perfect society could just make a perfect dystopian nightmare. They aren't even pretending it is democratic; "the company or firm applying for the zone would have significant say over who would sit on that board". This is a regression of hundreds of years in political theory and development.
> Sisolak specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in the area east of Reno that would run entirely on blockchain technology...
I'm trying to picture a municipal fire department, or sewage facility, or street cleaning department, that runs "entirely on blockchain tech".
We're processing the dispatch request for your emergency fire call, we'll get back to you once the transaction is confirmed in the blockchain. Thank you for using FireBlock!
Every discussion of companies acting as local governments need to include Lake Buena Vista, Florida, population 10. You know it as Walt Disney World.
Walt Disney was a proponent of company towns where the employees/residents would be completely dependent on the company. These ideas were expressed in his plans for EPCOT (the unbuilt town, not the theme park we have today). Some of these ideas were later revived in Walt Disney owned and controlled Celebration, Florida.
I wonder how quickly (if this goes ahead) it descends into Kafka-esque cycles of automation resulting in people getting locked out of fundamental services due to the plethora of edge cases that aren't convenient and scalable for the tech company to handle?
It strikes me that governments have a responsibility to handle and account for all of the edge cases (people with disabilities, etc.) which companies often tend to neglect in pursuit of a simpler and cheaper "at-scale" solution that works for 95% of people (but ignores the slightly more complex 5%).
This makes me wonder about a lot of "how will this work" questions. For example will it legally require 100% of taxation be used to provide services, or will taxation become profit center for the owning company?
Another is will they be required to follow certain laws that municipalities are required to operate under? For instance, here in NM it is illegal for a quorum of the governing body to meet without 72 hour advance public notification and agenda and no item may be considered if it is not in that agenda.
And of course the whole statement that the company will have significant say in the makeup of the 3-person board. What exactly does that mean? Can only company approved people run for office? Is this watering down representative democracy? I don't know because for stuff like this, the devil is in the details. (and what happens when the company becomes insolvent?)
I mean, mining companies made local governments before.
I'm skeptical that single-issue regulatory exemptions will have any impact on long-term growth, particularly for areas like AI or block chains, where the level of regulation is already essentially none.
[Edit: I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'm being taken as saying I'm in favor of this idea, despite only really saying it won't work.]
I think some people are missing the point here. In order to charter the corporation you need to be a billionaire.
I doubt it has anything to do with wanting to make 'More money' as opposed to leaving a city as a legacy, under your vision, ideals, etc. I mean, what else do billionaires dream of?
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
Your slave labor will all come work for my sandwich shop, because I give them better wages. Or if there's more good labor than can work for my sandwich shop, some will open their own sandwich shops, which will treat their employees worse than me but better than you, and you will go out of business.
What stops this from happening is usually land-use restrictions and regulation - if your employees can't rent storefronts, then they can't compete with you. When those have been relaxed, this is in fact what happens: all the folks dissatisfied with working for you start food trucks and you get a vibrant foodie scene.
Well, my employees are on special non-transferable visas and they can't just change jobs. In fact, it only takes me a call to department of labor to get any of them deported.
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...
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!
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".
I don't understand where the enfranchisement of the citizens comes from in your description. I read a bit of your page on voting, but it was about securing electronic voting. Why won't the company act as an unchecked tyranny as historically it has?
I think you are overestimating the amount of leverage companies have on their employees.
At this day and age, the contrary to unchecked tyranny is by far the norm, and the trend is clear.
In less than 100 years we have moved from sweat shops and pinkertons to foosball tables, on-site chefs, and summer fridays.
I do not see how you can interpret this trend and assume this will reverse 180 degrees, because companies want to offer even more benefits now under the company county model.
Why does being in the US matter? How are they demonstrating that they've changed their ways if they're still exploiting their workers when given the opportunity?
Either way, though working class conditions have improved over the past century in the US, the trend does not show them willingly rolling out benefits to the workers. As a source, ask your McDonald's server about their generous benefits package.
As for Pinkerton, the company still works in the same field. Here's one example
>>>> Why does being in the US matter? How are they demonstrating that they've changed their ways
it matters a great deal because competition for labor is different by country. If you have no competition, I would agree with you, its a very bad situation for the worker.
>>>>>if they're still exploiting their workers when given the opportunity?
People are not exploited because there are companies. People are only exploited if there is opportunity to exploit.
At the extreme, you have slavery, which was at the root a govt directive. Opportunity is not the natural state of things in free societies. Societies decide how much opportunity to exploit they want to give the powerful. That's why people still flee China to come to the US
>>>> the trend does not show them willingly rolling out benefits to the workers.
Yes, but many companies do. My only point is that the trend is pointing to a healthy society, not that society is perfect. Trader Joes, Costco etc come to mind. This is much better than it was even 20 years ago.
>>>> As for Pinkerton, the company still works in the same field. Here's one example.
Its a very bad example. I just read about it - Pinkerton at its height of power was the largest private security force world.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)#c...
This only reinforces the observation that the general trend is to move away from such services, at least in the USA
> If you have no competition, I would agree with you, its a very bad situation for the worker.
Then why would you want to replace local government with a company that has a clear incentive to limit competition?
>People are only exploited if there is opportunity to exploit.
I don't think having the opportunity forgives their exploitation, but they also can actively create more opportunity.
>Trader Joes, Costco etc come to mind.
Companies completely dwarfed by Amazon and Walmart's continued exploitation. There were good factories a century ago too.
>Its a very bad example
Yes, for some reason the company you immediately associated with past corruption isn't thriving. The domestic industry hasn't declined, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_police_in_the_United_S... and the US has further embraced the idea with private contractors like Blackwater.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Can someone help me to understand: why is a bill needed for this?
Don't "company towns" already exist? Were they illegal somehow? Would it be illegal to build one now (in Nevada, without this bill)?
Or is this proposing something besides a regular "company town" model (i.e. a regular municipality where everyone who lives there is an employee of company X; and there are municipal elections, but all the options on the ballet are, of course, employees of company X; and where the elected government contracts out many services to... company X)?
Is the idea here that the corporation itself would be the municipal government, rather than the municipal government being a regular elected body consisting of company-X employees?
If so, would that not make the election for the corporation's board of directors, a municipal election; and somehow create a link between landholding within the incorporated land area and shareholding in the corporation?
> Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in Nevada, governments that would 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.
I previously worked for Jeff Berns prior to their relocation to Sparks, NV, while this plan was being formulated.
Giving control of local government to Blockchains and Jeff Berns is... not a good idea. Jeff Berns is borderline delusional, off in the clouds, thinks ETH and blockchain are the solution to every problem, whether it exists or not, has awful business ideas, and treated his employees pretty poorly. Well, I mean, he was nice in person when he visited every 3 months. But the comp was flaming garbage, the office was crap, the management imcompetent and ineffective, he didn't give a shit what his employees thought. Everything in Jeff's company was complete and utter chaos. The products themselves were straight up idiotic, to be frank. The fact that Jeff had us abandon products after 3 months to start working on his next "big thing" didn't help, either.
Lastly, Jeff berns has spent a fortune hyping crpyto, because his real fortune IS crypto. The dude owns boatloads of BTC, BCH, ETC, ETH, and many more, and has since ETH was < $1. He is not altruistic. He is a man who believes that under his "guidance", humanity (his friends, really) can make great steps and he is using the crypto community to further his wealth and influence.
TL;DR: Jeff Berns and Blockchains, LLC belong as far away from political/governmental power as possible.
