Company towns were entirely opt-in too, at the start. The problems with concentrating power only rear their head down the road when conflict arises. Instead of worrying about getting fired, now you worry about getting simultaneously fired, evicted, jailed, and censored. Even if you are officially protected, how much can they do unofficially?

> "We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.

That's not a clever or insightful dismissal.

Nothing suggests that the company operating the jurisdiction would be the sole, or even a significant, employer.

Given that cities often are responsible for zoning, and the company is taking on the role of city governance, a company could do a lot to ensure its the only employer in town. Obviously this depends on the particulars of the bill, but it doesn't seem far fetched that companies could put some serious disincentives towards other companies forming.

Ok, strike "fired" from the list. Maybe. It's still a concentration of power and the same rules apply. Attractive at first, but then it goes sour when the people with concentrated power start using it for their own ends.

> ("We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.)

Why not? That’s what it is.

Blockchains aren't companies, scrip isn't a thing anymore, DeFi renders it interoperable even if it were, we all have smartphones and internet now, webapps and networks change the entire marketplace for information labor, no part of this suggests that the company offering the civic services would be an employer or the only employer, company towns were for in-person work, et c.

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.

The company owns the wires and radio bands. Maybe by a funny coincidence using alternative blockchains and working remotely for other companies creates an 'unfair to the other users' drain on bandwidth.

No, that would be the Nevada public utilities commission and the FCC.

They aren't establishing a new country, just like everyone else in Nevada they are subject to state and US federal law.

I wonder if this is just a straight-up "bad idea"

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...

Right! I get it that Nevada is struggling economically, but could they be making a rash decision? It's kind of hard to undue a town once it's been established.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, while certainly titillating, suffered from extreme reproducibility issues. It was also wildly unethical, and any conclusions drawn from it are not scientifically sound in any meaningful sense.

I wonder if these techno-governments will have similar reproducibility issues.

> ("We already tried this, they are called company towns" is not a clever or insightful take.)

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.

While it's true that most of Nevada is uninhabited, a lot of it is almost certainly uninhabitable (at scale) because of lack of water and other reasons. The example in this article in hardly an uninhabited area; it's an industrial park right off the highway on the outskirts of Reno. It's a lot different from creating even a small city in the middle of nowhere, Nevada.

I'm a bit scared of this. There are so many horror stories out there to the tune of, "Google banned my account, now I can't get into anything, and there's zero ways for me to get in touch with a human to talk about any avenues to fix it." and then extrapolating that to government.

Yeah, I don't want those either.

I'm kind of in the 'we already tried this' camp, because life is messy and things like fire departments and courts aren't usually felt to be 'core competencies' of corporations. The closest modern example I can think of is Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District [0][1], but lots of corporations delegate their cleaning, cafeteria, security, even their real estate out. I'm interested in why they would choose to take them back on.

Do you think we'll get some theme parks out of this?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...

[1] https://www.rcid.org/

I agree. At the same time I'm torn by the idea of private companies being there own sovereign entities like a city or county. But at the same time, honestly, are city councils and county commissions any more moral than private companies?

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.

If my city were owned by its residents, were its shareholders, it would be an abysmal stock to hold.

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 isn't about morality.

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.

Cities and counties aren't sovereign entities either. They have to abide by state and federal law.

Elected officials that can be fired by the company. Yeah, much freedom.

That may not be a clever take, but is there any reason to believe it's not an accurate take?

This is the naivete of a modern human.

> uninhabited

Yes, by humans... and. There probably were natives there. Until we killed them.

AND. Otherwise... It's inhabited by billions of organisms.