Friday, March 23, 2018

"In Menlo Park, Calif., Facebook is building a real community and testing the proposition: Do people love tech companies so much they will live inside them?"

NYT:
In the textile town of Lowell, Mass., in 1846, the mill clock slowed down to lengthen shifts and then sped up at night when the workers were off, according to one contemporary reformer. U.S. Steel built Gary, Ind., but took little responsibility for its employees, many of whom lived in substandard housing in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

There were more benign examples too. Milton Hershey began building a chocolate factory in the middle of Pennsylvania in 1903 and then surrounded it with a community where, he pledged, there would be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.” In return for surrendering certain rights — like local elections and privacy — workers in the town of Hershey got medical coverage, a free junior college, parks and a zoo.