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\nLike George Pullman and Milton Hershey, the tech industry\u2019s elites take all prisoners in their respective campaigns to expand, absorb, and dominate. The tech company town, that most contemporary of neofeudalist wangles, is the next step in West Coast corporate behemoths\u2019 quest to lure employees into a twenty-four-hour working existence\u2014the totalizing successor to bottomless Indian food spreads, on-site bike-repair shops, and Frank Gehrized habitats. Its premise deviates not at all from that of its antecedents: a genial, painstakingly aestheticized service to workers, where beneficent corporate hands take the reins of the public good for the well-being of the community. This time around, though, that community will be bridled with <\/span>union<\/a>\u2013busting<\/a> <\/span>and data-harvesting apparatuses sure to make even the most paranoid techno-tyrant salivate.<\/p>\n
Certainly, the megalomaniacs who aim to populate municipal fixtures with registered-trademark logos will expect cities to genuflect at every turn. Bezos has exemplified this in Seattle, whose recent measure to \u201ctax the rich<\/a>\u201d drove him to seek another location in which to build Amazon\u2019s second headquarters. While residents of its hometown grapple with a commandeering leech that \u201csuck[s] up our resources and refus[es] to participate in daily upkeep<\/a>,\u201d Amazon will soon attempt to prime another city to be sapped. Meanwhile, the smooth-faced metallic vampires of California have just begun to cosplay as frontiersmen, raring to follow Bezos\u2019s lead. Drunk on glib TED Talk propagandizing, and accustomed to dismissing the civic inconveniences of corporate regulations and poor neighborhoods, our technosettlers feel little need to heed the lessons of the past when their chief interest is to monopolize the future. Taxing the techie billionaires is a start, but only when cities refuse to be their hosts will they cease to be their parasites.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n