Pullman, Illinois had a church the company owned, houses the company rented, and a currency the company printed. Historians call it a company town. You carry a smaller one in your pocket, and the rent is due every time you tap an icon.

The phone is not a device anymore; it is a jurisdiction. Two firms own the land, and every business that wants a storefront pays them tribute — thirty cents on the dollar in the famous arrangement, negotiated down for barons, never for cobblers. The post office inside your pocket reads the mail. The bank inside your pocket sets the exchange rate. The company store knows what you bought before the bag is packed.[1]

Scrip with a rounded rectangle

Company scrip worked because it could only be spent at the company store. Watch the modern equivalent: subscription entitlements that evaporate if you leave the platform, gift cards that only clear in one ecosystem, in-app currencies with exchange rates set by the issuer and adjusted without a legislature. It is legal, it is audited, and it is structurally identical to the thing we were taught to be horrified by in coal country.

The rent is due every time you tap an icon.FIELD NOTES ON JURISDICTION

The mining museum has a gift shop

Defenders point out, correctly, that the town works. The streets are paved. The apps are smooth. Pullman said the same thing about his sanitation, and he was right about the sanitation too. The question was never whether the company could run a town. The question was whether a town should be a company.[2]

There is no rail line out of this one, only a longer contract. But the exits are being surveyed — sideloading statutes, interoperability mandates, the slow boring work of regulators who learned the vocabulary a decade late. Company towns fell when the residents stopped calling the scrip 'money.' Start there.

NOTES & ERRATA — FILED BY THE DESK

  1. The 30% figure is the rack rate; both major landlords now operate a graded tribute schedule, which is how tribute schedules have always worked — the duke pays less than the peasant. ↩
  2. Pullman also charged rent on the church pews. The precedent for monetizing every surface of civic life is not new; it is merely well-lit now. ↩