Any jurisdictional zones so set up would be green-field projects, entirely opt-in from the start.
The county mentioned in the article where this seems to most likely result in a project only has 4000 people in it.
I'm excited to see what, if any, experimentation results from this.
("We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.)
> "We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.
That's not a clever or insightful dismissal.
Why not? That’s what it is.
Even if you just focus on the idea that a company town had a single employer for in-person work, and now we work online for anyone via the internet, this doesn't even have the basic parallels.
They aren't establishing a new country, just like everyone else in Nevada they are subject to state and US federal law.
I think we've all read about ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ and how that ended.
Maybe something useful will come out of it and I am definitely in support of thinking outside of the box. But there are probably some major downsides to this...
It is, however, an accurate one you can’t simply breezily dismiss because you don’t want to engage with it intellectually. This is no different in the power dynamic and will have similar failure modes in the absence of legal countermeasures: as the most obvious example, if you disagree with your boss you now have to worry about your kids being kicked out of school and losing your home at the same time. If they pay you in company block-scrip, they control the rates and where you can redeem it. You might naively think that having internet access helps but that’s assuming that the company-approved ISPs allow full unfettered access and don’t have terms of service banning unapproved usage.
Again, none of this is certain but history and other parts of the world show that it’s likely to happen to some extent if companies are granted power without strict democratic oversight. Just think about how companies have asserted their right to control who you sleep with, what family planning choices you should make, which political party you support, etc. Giving them more power will not make those intrusions less likely.
Do you think we'll get some theme parks out of this?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
I think my biggest hang up is the draft proposal that allows the formation of the defacto county commissioners to be chosen by the companies. But like the article says, the draft could change, so the final proposal might not be the same. I think if they were elected from citizens I'd be a lot more excited.
Philadelphia is 400+ years old. If we had just put away 1% a year of our budget into a endowment, we would be making more money on it each year than our entire yearly budget. Cities are long lived, but the financial side of it is so short lived because there's no city-state, there's no expectation that the city needs to be able to bail itself out. We're always looking for state and federal funds.
It's a shame, Philadelphia could be the nicest, richest city in the world if we had something just like this.
It's about the fact that they have additional incentives that are directly related to what the people in a certain jurisdiction want that are missing for a company.
> uninhabited
Yes, by humans... and. There probably were natives there. Until we killed them.
AND. Otherwise... It's inhabited by billions of organisms.