
Zucktown, USA - prostoalex
https://thebaffler.com/latest/zucktown-usa-tveten
======
apsec112
This article's main topic is just "tech companies are building big offices",
dressed up in some purple prose. And they're also to blame for high rents. But
if they build apartments to help ease the housing shortage, that's a "company
town" and we can't have that either. And Amazon is a "commandeering leech"
which "suck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep",
but when Google offers Mountain View neighborhood benefits, that proves it's
"seeking to wrest control of the city from its government".

I suppose the next step is to blame the Google buses for being "elitist" and
"gentrifying", while in the next paragraph, blaming Google for putting cars on
the road and making traffic worse....

“Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, a priest who heard the confessions of
condemned witches, wrote in 1631 the Cautio Criminalis (‘prudence in criminal
cases’) in which he bitingly described the decision tree for condemning
accused witches: If the witch had led an evil and improper life, she was
guilty; if she had led a good and proper life, this too was a proof, for
witches dissemble and try to appear especially virtuous. After the woman was
put in prison: if she was afraid, this proved her guilt; if she was not
afraid, this proved her guilt, for witches characteristically pretend
innocence and wear a bold front. Or on hearing of a denunciation of witchcraft
against her, she might seek flight or remain; if she ran, that proved her
guilt; if she remained, the devil had detained her so she could not get away.”

~~~
avar
The article is a badly written opinion piece that meanders through various
topics, but your critique of it is beating a strawman.

It's not making the "you can't win" argument that tech companies should be
critiqued whether or not they build housing.

Rather, it's that they're supposedly constructing "company towns" in the sense
that the housing stock they build won't be for sale, and presumably only
rented to employees. If you get fired you also get evicted.

Furthermore they'll own the nearby retail space as well. Will an Oculus
competitor be for sale in the Facebook-owned chain of stores? Will someone
trying to organize a Facebook union be allowed to use the meeting spaces at
the Facebook town hall?

~~~
humanrebar
> If you get fired you also get evicted.

If you get fired, you basically lose your healthcare, which in many cases is
much worse. Though quite a number of Americans seem fine with that arrangement
for some reason.

~~~
TrickyRick
If I'm a healthy individual then the risk that I need my healthcare insurance
are low (But it has a big impact on my economy if I do need it). However the
risk that I need some form of housing is 100% and the impact of not having it
is huge which to me makes it a bigger risk. However YMMV depending on your
situation.

~~~
Spooky23
Circumstances change quickly.

I'm married, things happened, and we ended up having a baby. Due to various
circumstances beyond our control. That cost $100k.

As a healthy guy in my 20's, I suffered an injury through no fault of my own
that led to me needing a serious back surgery. Net cost -> $250k.

Rolling the dice on something that fundamentally life altering, and expecting
society to pick up the tab for the consequences of your risk management is
bullshit. It is a good illustration of why you can't treat healthcare as a
market driven thing unless you're willing to drop the moral obligation to
preserve human life (and expect the providers to "absorb" it).

~~~
greedo
So you had a baby due to circumstances beyond your control? And you had an
injury, again through no fault of your own? And the sum of those are over
$350K.

Who is responsible for your health? I'd argue that the baby is entirely on
you, and $100K for a delivery is insane unless you had incredible
complications.

And if the back injury wasn't your fault, you could seek redress from whom is
responsible. If it's work related, then work should pay. If it's an accident,
then whomever is negligent should pay.

Unfortunately, no one wants to take responsibility, and expects "society" to
make an individual whole after a loss.

~~~
lawrenceyan
How do you feel about people with debilitating genetic diseases/disorders?
Through no fault of their own other than being born into this world, and no
health care provider wants to anything to do with them. They are guaranteed
money losers, and if insurance companies didn’t have to deal with pesky
regulations, they would happily find and drop these patients.

I make no judgements on your moral character, but to follow your philosophy
requires a fundamental acceptance that certain human life has less intrinsic
value than other human life.

~~~
greedo
I have no issue with society picking up after people who truly have
catastrophic illnesses (though that's really what health insurance SHOULD be,
not the way it is currently.) My issue is with people expecting society to pay
for health care that's not catastrophic nor "accidental." If I choose to have
a child, I should expect to pay for it. My partner and I had to have IVF, and
we paid for it.

~~~
Spooky23
You paid for the IVF.

You likely didn’t pay for the prenatal care after the first trimester, and
likely didn’t pay for the delivery beyond coinsurance.

------
princekolt
HN is criticizing the article wording but completely ignoring its point. This
article coupled with the other one on the dystopian reality of San
Francisco[1] have me feeling completely disgusted at the current state of the
tech industry.

Simply put: these tech giants are making too much money. They are losing touch
with the average people and simply put with reality itself. It wouldn't
surprise me if that's exactly how all "evil" companies of the past became evil
themselves.

[1]: [https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-
wit...](https://www.mhudack.com/blog/2017/10/1/san-francisco-now-with-more-
dystopia)

~~~
zaptheimpaler
Making money is not evil. Wall street makes money, pharma makes money, lawyers
make money, insurance makes money, automobiles, consumer goods, real estate -
all huge industries. Now that tech is being used on a massive scale of course
the tech companies are making money. So what? It doesn't make sense to equate
rich with evil - either for companies or for people.

SF (and many cities in the US and across the world) have always had poor
people. The world has always been very unequal with kings and paupers and
everything in between. Now some of them are in the same town and it freaks
people out.. welcome to the real world. Anyone who has ever lived in NYC has
seen the same inequality.

~~~
jonbarker
Making money is not evil, but social class increases likelihood of
utilitarianism. Being a tech elite in the valley arguably makes one more
likely to be more of a utilitarian.
[https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-
rich...](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psyched/201304/the-rich-are-
differently-moral). Large scale usage does not increase likelihood of profit,
either. There aren't any hard disk drive billionaires, for example. Also they
aren't in the same town; those who are trying to make it or work in the
'supporting cast' take BART from oakland or richmond, or do extreme commuting
from the san joaquin valley.

~~~
Bartweiss
This argument seems a little surreal. Is the take here seriously
"utilitarianism is so intrinsically bad that wealth is evil because it causes
utilitarianism?"

Utilitarianism is an exceedingly broad category; hedonistic, rule, preference,
and negative utilitarianism all recommend different behaviors. But none of
them equate to selfishness or abuse of others.

I mean, the article does give us "Piff’s earlier work suggests Richie might
act in a way that neither a utilitarian nor a non-utilitarian would support,
benefiting himself at the expense of others." But that's a completely
different, contradictory argument being thrown in as though it bolsters the
main point about utilitarianism. Also, it relies on a truly wild series of
leaps from "people taking anti-anxiety drugs" to "psychopaths" to "rich
people".

(That older paper linked is setting off all my alarm bells for shitty social
psych research. The second one doesn't look promising, but is paywalled.

\- "We derived the ethics of the rich from an online quiz" is a bad sign.

\- "We didn't control for education" is a problem in its own right.

\- PNAS is a bad sign.

\- 'Neutral primes' versus 'greed is good primes' is a disastrously bad sign,
it's not even clear if those things work.

\- Human-coding of driver behavior is questionable at best.

\- Deriving human ethics from groups of ~100 Berkeley students is almost
cartoonishly bad.

My baseline here is "forking paths plus massive bias risks got us a catchy
headline".)

~~~
jonbarker
You are biased against social psych research, as I think we all should be, but
I'm not sure singling it out is the best strategy. The issues of
reproducibility and 'p-hacking' among others are a big problem in a variety of
disciplines right now, and there is a good synopsis of just one aspect of the
problem in hard sciences here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
For a non-paywall link to the original research this is better:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short](http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.short)

------
Houshalter
Oh Lord. A bunch of poor 19th century miners in a remote town is not the same
as this at all. These are some of the richest and easily employable workers in
the country living in one of the most populated regions.

They wouldn't have to do this if the local government wasn't so restrictive
either. These companies don't care if their employees own their own homes or
not. But unfortunately big companies are the only groups with enough power and
resources to push through new housing development.

~~~
emodendroket
Well, there are a couple responses there. Obviously the mining towns are the
most extreme expression of the problem, but is it not reasonable to say you
might see smaller echoes of this in the tech companies' case? White-collar
workers in general are working longer hours, etc., so I don't think we can say
they write all the rules.

But perhaps a bigger question is, what about all the people who work at Google
or Facebook who are not in-demand engineers? It seems like once you've
established the principle it's easier to expand it to less prestigious
positions.

------
rdtsc
And you'd go to Zuckshop and buy Zuckbread:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store)

It would be creepy having to live in a employers' housing unit. But if it is
subsidized enough many would jump on it.

The interview process at many of these company is already geared to bring in
college graduates. So a dorm of sort would make sense. Then they could outfit
them work spaces so you could live there and maybe work remotely (but only
from a company provided housing unit).

How about just letting people work from home to begin with so they don't all
have to be crammed into one town or one building so that they can then all
type on a computer? It is rather interesting I think these companies sell
digital connectivity, collaboration, -- but when it comes to themselves they
like to shove everyone into buildings.

~~~
rtpg
Japan has a lot of this, but it's usually a building in the middle of a city
so you're not like... completely surrounded. But your neighbors are probably
from the same company.

~~~
mercurysmessage
Can you expand on this? I've spent a lot of time in Japan, but have never
heard of it.

~~~
rtpg
Many companies have appartments to rent for their employees, especially bigger
companies in things like civil engineering. They'll usually let you rent for a
super low rate (like $100/month), and though obviously your salary is given
with an understanding you'll stay there.

------
vadym909
With an average tenure of < 2 years at these companies now, subsidized housing
may force people to stay in companies longer especially if they have families.
I'm not sure they can recreate Kodak/Rochester type place as there are so many
rich companies vying for the same people.

~~~
ssttoo
> With an average tenure of < 2 years ...

citation needed :)

~~~
htormey
[http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-
top-t...](http://www.businessinsider.com/employee-retention-rate-top-tech-
companies-2017-8?utm_content=buffer30d08&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer)

Matches my experience at FB & Apple. I spent about 2 years at each.

------
moonka
The wording makes this really hard to read.

~~~
gniv
I cringed at this: "Its CEO and founder, Jeff Bezos, has vowed to acquire four
million more over the next five years, a muscular move meant to complement his
midlife-crisis physique."

~~~
Bartweiss
Is it just me or is Bezos' fitness a _bizarrely_ common topic for tech-skeptic
pieces? I swear I see it written and meme-d about more than basically any
other single human-interest factoid about executives.

If that's true, it raises the question of _why_. The look isn't all that
exceptional, he's just somebody who works out a fair bit, and didn't when he
was younger. He's not exactly Erik Prince. So the focus on it, and the
frequently malicious tone, sort of parse as "he doesn't look like nerds do
anymore, that's suspicious".

This could all be apophenia, obviously. It just raises an eyebrow since I've
seen athletic programmers greeted with "but you don't _look_ like a
programmer!"

------
emodendroket
On a related note, another recent Baffler piece concerning Facebook had some
new-to-me information about Facebook helping to enforce blasphemy laws:
[https://thebaffler.com/salvos/military-messaging-complex-
zak...](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/military-messaging-complex-zakaria)

------
Cthulhu_
It's exactly these biggest companies that should take moral responsibility and
relocate / redistribute their work to various cities on the one hand, and if
they want to go through with the idea of company towns, campuses etc, they
need to move way out of the SF area - there's huge wads of unused space in the
US, they could found their own city if need be. Probably not something very
attractive to their employees, but it is one possible solution; especially if
they can build it near SF, with e.g. only a 30 minute hyperloop or maglev
train trip required to get to HQ.

~~~
humanrebar
> Probably not something very attractive to their employees...

I keep hearing this meme and I'm skeptical. Far more people live outside the
Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor saps who are waiting to move to
Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out how?

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Far more people live outside the Bay Area than inside it. Are they all poor
> saps who are waiting to move to Silicon Valley but haven't yet figured out
> how?

Usually when people claim that companies should try to recreate Silicon Valley
in some cheaper "heartland of America", they are talking about flyover
country. And demographically, many people still in flyover country may well be
poor saps who haven't yet figured out how to move to the coasts, as statistics
show a steady drain of young people to the coasts or at least a few major
metropolitan areas in their part of America.

~~~
humanrebar
Or maybe they're just moving to where the money and career- building jobs are.

I think the causality is at least more complex than the aforementioned meme
implies.

------
z3t4
Last time I checked, Facebook, Google et.al where not philanthropic
organizations. For it to be less evil they should build the houses, then sell
the properties, not rent, for below market prices.

------
ashwinaj
This is such a ridiculous impasse. Why don't the authorities do what most
sensible countries do i.e. build multi-storied apartments with decent public
transportation? Yes I know in the US that equates to the ghetto/projects/low
income housing (which is a mindset that needs to change).

As far as the bay area goes this is possible since most residents are
foreigners or 1st and 2nd generation Americans who are probably more open to
the idea of living in a skyscraper.

------
trhway
news from near-by Google-town:

[http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/02/google-backs-down-
from...](http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/02/google-backs-down-from-threat-
to-cancel-mountain-view-housing/)

"Google has backed down from a threat to deny badly needed housing in Mountain
View if it isn’t given more office space for its futuristic new “Charleston
East” campus."

------
chis
The linked anti-union article is more interesting than the original article
IMO. [http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/silicon-
valleys...](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/silicon-valleys-anti-
unionism-and-class-warfare.html)

I would tend to agree with the tech-ie opinion that unions are becoming
obselete in the US. Unions existed to protect workers who were unskilled and
interchangeable; the endgame of tech is to automate all those jobs. But
obviously I’m not a labor scholar and this is just an unfounded opinion.

~~~
humanrebar
> ...unions are becoming obselete in the US...

They don't make sense for knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are rarely
interchangeable, so standardizing contracts, job titles, pay schedules,
working conditions, etc., makes little sense. There is also the chance for
protectionism (closed shops) that runs counter to the freelance culture in
tech.

 _Some_ sort of worker-administered group could make a _lot_ of sense. But
maybe a guild or cooperative instead.

Services that would be useful, especially (or only) if employers weren't
paying the bill:

* Personal negotiation agents

* Career consultants. Lots of engineers are very underpaid and need some help holding their boss accountable. Or finding the next job.

* (Re)training. Engineers shouldn't specialize themselves into early retirement.

* Lobbying and marketing. Do you want BigCo telling your congressman what _you_ think?

* Independent research and reporting on work environments. Some push back on penny-wise, pound-foolish facilities decisions.

* Charitable technology work not under a corporate brand

* Insurance, modulo whether competitive tax advantages can be arranged. Setting up pools for disability and life insurance, at least. Maybe healthcare if the tax advantages can be worked out.

~~~
ForHackernews
A guild is just a union by another name. The Screenwriters Guild, the Screen
Actors Guild, and the various professional sports unions (e.g. NFLPA) are all
good examples of unions representing highly-paid, non-interchangable workers.

~~~
humanrebar
I actually had those in mind as close to what might make sense. Though agent
responsibilities might be assumed by the guild as well.

However, the organizations you list have gone in strike as leverage in
collective negotiations. That is an aspect I doubt makes sense for tech
outside of basic health or ethical concerns. Both the collective bargaining
and the striking.

------
yahna
Maybe instead of complaining about how facebook and google have the made the
area popular, you should take aim at the entrenched owners who refuse to allow
higher density housing to actually relieve the pressure on the market.

