The company town was a tidy arrangement: the mine owned the houses, the store, the school, and the church, and paid wages in scrip you could only spend in the store it owned. Historians describe this as a labor relations strategy. Your phone is running the same playbook with better industrial design.^[1]

You are paid — in streaks, in likes, in the small warm electrical hum of being seen — in a currency minted by the platform and redeemable only inside the platform. You cannot take your reputation with you. Your followers are scrip. Your memories are scrip. Ten years of photographs are scrip.

Sixteen tons

The genius of the arrangement is that the mine follows you home, because the mine is the home screen. Company towns at least had a gate; the shift ended. Your shift ends when the battery dies, and you have been trained to experience that as a personal emergency.^[2]

You don't log off the company town. The company town logs off you — briefly, to charge.— RAW SIGNAL, ISSUE № 142

The old company towns fell for boring reasons: antitrust, unions, the automobile. The car mattered most — the moment workers could drive somewhere else, the scrip stopped working. The equivalent of the car, for your attention, is embarrassingly available: a browser, an RSS reader, an email address, a boring little site with black borders.

Nobody is coming to unionize your home screen. The exits are not blocked; they are merely unglamorous. Walk out through the bookmarks bar like it's 2005 and do not look back at the store.