Couple that with the competition for talent, right? You know, the fight for the best and the brightest. So there’s this ongoing and sort of escalation of talent acquisition, which Google and Facebook and the other Silicon Valley companies are all competing, and they keep raising the salaries for engineers and designers coming out of school. I mean, we’re a design studio at GoInvo, and the starting salaries at the Silicon Valley firms, you know, far out-price what we can offer. I mean we offer other things, namely, you can go home at the end of the day, but this is getting out of hand.

Because the municipalities aren’t able to keep up with sort of this combination of high-salaried employees looking for housing, and all this demand that it’s creating, Google and Facebook have taken it upon themselves to start solving this problem locally, and that starts with scooping up areas for development, and like any other developer, they’re putting together plans and proposals in Silicon Valley to create their communities, which will largely be populated by their employees, as you might expect. So these communities are going to have, it’s going to be mixed-use, there’s going to be lots of condos, there’s going to be all sorts of restaurants and shops. On that level, it seems benign, but at the same time, this is company housing. This is creating a culture around work and attaching yourself to a corporate entity that sort of goes beyond what we’re used to currently, which is that there’s some demarcation between where your work life ends and your personal life begins. And creating this housing just sort of binds you ever more tightly to companies.

Dirk, this is an issue that you’ve been think about a bunch. What’s your initial take on the new company town?

I mean Silicon Valley, it’s incredibly expensive to live. I mean even if they’re paying, let’s pretend that an engineer, a really good engineer is hired out of school and are hired for $120,000, right? I think that kind of thing is happening. That person cannot buy a home that is over a million dollars. Even if they were making 120,000 living like a pauper for a decade, assuming their salary wasn’t going up, they still couldn’t afford a home for over a million dollars. I’m not super-wealthy, but my income is in the top couple percent, and I can’t afford a home for a million dollars. As a mid-40-something now, so it’s just sort of insane, and the fact is people want affordable housing. They don’t want to be worried about a rat race where you’re paying insane amounts of money for an apartment that are just draining any benefit you would get from your high salary, or can never afford a house.

To me it makes perfect and total sense in this weird, real estate bubble of Silicon Valley most specifically. You know, the same thing could stretch to other places, some like New York City, it’s not really an option to build housing in the same way. It makes sense. It is something that has the potential to be a real good for your employees. The problem is corporations, their goal at the end of the day is the bottom line, it’s very simply income minus expenses, you want the number at the end to be as big as possible. So in the process of heading down a path that has the theoretical potential of real wholistic good for the employees, for the community, and for the company, you know, it’s going to be twisted in a different way. On paper, it sounds great, in reality, probably won’t end in the best way for the people involved.

Now that’s not probably the purpose behind housing lots of employees in a particular area. It’s not to politically take over any of these towns I’m sure, but the inevitable consequence-

I mean there is that potential at a certain point as these companies that are richer than nations start to build out the infrastructure of towns and cities. Of not wanting to be within the jurisdiction of some other random, stupid, slow, bureaucratic entity. They want to control for themselves, so I mean that’s the kind of sort of interesting, unexpected consequence. Unexpected to the masses, at least, that could come out of from some of this stuff.

There is an interesting power shift going on. I don’t know what it means because of course, we’ve seen similar things before, but not these exact circumstances. You know, in the gilded age there was a check, a hard check that came in the form of the US government, and then also just the economy tanking, right? There will be consequences to it, and we don’t know this time around what they ultimately might be. But this is a symptom of shifting power dynamics in the 21st Century and one thing is for sure, these shifts are going to happen a lot more quickly than they ever did a century ago, because there’s this amplification that comes from technology that just supercharges these trends. So we may find ourselves at more extremes a lot more quickly because frankly, the check of government can’t react that fast, it’s just not keeping up. These dynamics are different. The system is different, and we’re getting this power shift at a time when it may not be checked as well. Who knows?

Dirk, your thoughts on that.

There are differences, really, between what was happening then and what’s happening now at a macro level that we should think it would be any different now. I mean at the end of the day, you have people who are motivated by wealth acquisition and selfishness, who came up with the idea, who are pulling the strings, who are driving it forward, and it’s the exact same thing that we have today. So, I’m not, it’s funny, because if I was a younger person, even at my own age, if I wasn’t married with kids and have, you know, if I could go to a company like Google and get into this cool place with lots of like-minded people and get a big salary and have my housing taken care of in this neat community, I’d sign up. Like absolutely! It’s great for me as a participant over a short-term period of time living my life. But in the macro, in the systems that can build from that and where it can go, and the downstream damage in ways that we’re not thinking about as we’re living the high life on those benefits. I mean, that’s where the concern really is.

The issue, I think, are, I don’t even know if issue is the right word, but in general, what we can expect is that the people who are more deeply immersed, the people who are going out in part of the mothership, and part of the core, those are going to be the people who are becoming the wealthiest, who are most privileged by their employment with an organization like that. And as for the other companies in the world, once you move away from this upper crust, you know, I mean, they’re just trying to tape and string it all together the best they can anyway. So, the B-class companies and below, are always going to be looking for random chuckle-heads like us, you know, whether we’re located hither or yon.

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Dirk?