Imagine it's 1880. You are a company man living in a company town. Last year, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity came up: working at the Pullman Palace Car Company to design the next generation of sleeper cars. You are a mechanical engineer by training and have developed quite the expertise in rail wheel science. George Pullman himself personally sought out your skills. In return, you were promised legacy in the burgeoning railroad business, building the future of transportation to be used by millions. The piston wheels you design will quite literally propel the American economy forward.
You were one of the first to settle in Pullman Town. It is the first “all brick city”, and you have the privilege of living alongside other engineers of your caliber. Conversation is always lively, and the town is kept in such pristine condition that you have never seen a piece of trash blighting the crimson cityscape. Nor, during leisurely time off, can you find yourself without things to do. You can take the wife and kids shopping at Pullman arcade, enjoy live music at the Pullman theater, or take in some sun at one of the many open-space parks. If feeling introspective, you can leaf through finely bound novels at the Pullman library. Every Sunday, of course, you dutifully take your family to mass at the Pullman Church. Life was good, made simple by the Pullman Company. The media mythologized Pullman as an industrial utopia, so thousands of others just like you flooded into the Pullman Company Town.
Pullman Illinois, 1895
Though the Pullman era may seem a distant memory, its core principles have not disappeared. Instead, they have evolved and found a new home in big tech. In a fiercely competitive job market, tech companies have honed the Pullman Playbook to attract top talent. Company cafes have in-house meals, use the finest organic ingredients, and feature rotating menus to keep things fresh. After breakfast, employees meander over to the company cafe, staffed by seasoned baristas (preferably with plenty of trendy tattoos for a dose of cultural enrichment), for their customary morning latte. Some even offer on-site laundry services.
Modern life is filled with complications, and big tech is more than willing to shoulder these responsibilities so their employees can focus on maximizing productivity. And while the Pullman company church may sound antiquated, tech companies have not shied away from supporting political fads and other secular charades as a spiritual stand in.
The “Breakfast Bar” at Google’s Washington Campus
Living in Pullman, however, was not without its drawbacks. It required strict adherence to a draconian rulebook imposed by the Pullman corporation. All property in Pullman belonged to the company with no path to individual ownership. Something as small as storing a whiskey bottle in one’s private quarters was strictly forbidden and punishable. Public gatherings were discouraged, if not were banned outright. Corporate spies reported on the inner lives of employees to snuff out dissent, specifically searching for any signs of unionization. To that end, company inspectors reserved the right to enter any house in Pullman, at any time, under the pretext of ensuring housing was on par with company standards. The punishments for violating Pullman’s rules ranged from sharp fines to termination and even eviction in most extreme cases. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to describe Pullman as a corporate panopticon.
While the amenity package is undeniably convenient, it should be clear now that the ultimate goal is to exert greater control over employee's time and behavior, both in and especially out of the workplace. From the Industrial Revolution to today, it has been in interest of firms to cultivate an employee dependence that diminishes individual self-reliance.
Pullman should be viewed as a cautionary tale under this light. Because thousands of talented laborers still decided the cost-benefit was worth it. It's somewhat counterintuitive that individuals with enough agency to pick up their stakes and go westward in search of opportunity would so readily give up the same agency that got them there. Indeed, one might argue that it flies in the face of American Exceptionalism. It suggests that once a company can deliver on a certain level of lifestyle security to employees, most people, whether or not they will admit it, will surrender at least a handful of constitutional rights in exchange. Rather poignantly, in the case of Pullman, employees may have surrendered rights their great-grandfathers died to secure.
But big tech is nothing like Pullman a skeptical reader may be thinking to herself. True, perhaps not on the surface, but we can find echoes of the same corporate paternalism at Google, arguably the most beloved Silicon Valley giant by its employees. For instance, in addition to the food, Google offices are adorned with large displays of primary colors, citing research that a bright environment stimulates creativity. However, the truth of this claim is secondary to the fact that decorating an office as a daycare subconsciously infantilizes an adult workforce.
The welcome package for a Google "Adult"
Of course, the parallels extend far beyond office decor, or I probably wouldn't be writing this essay. Company issued laptops come pre-installed with spyware that intercepts every keystroke. Every website you visit using a corporate computer is logged. Periods of inactivity are tracked and may resurface in performance reviews. While perhaps not as impactful as a Pullman inspector barging into your house, Google has entire teams dedicated to employee surveillance — that it happens digitally means they can enter and exit completely undetected. But this is not to suggest this is unique to Google or even to Pullman. Once any corporation assumes roles traditionally reserved for the individual or for the family, it will inevitably assert its fatherly dominance.
As one Pullman employee famously lamented in an interview, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die, we shall go to the Pullman Hell.” While he is clearly aware of his own helplessness, his sense of liberty, his innate drive towards individuality, remain paralyzed by amenities.
Before proceeding further, we must first discuss why this even matters. It matters because anyone who advocates for minimal governance, like myself, must acknowledge the real threat corporate paternalism poses. There are really two choices. Option one is a society that cultivates self-reliance — high agency follows from self-reliance, and a high agency society requires minimal regulation because the populace, in effect, self-regulates. Corporate paternalism isn't a problem because no one buys in. The Antebellum South is a good example of this. Yeoman farmers made up over ninety percent of the population, largely subsisting off their own yields and the local economy, and the legislature at the time reflected this.
Option two is a society that looks more and more like Pullman and America today, where the large majority of laborers are hyper-specialized cogs — indeed, often very talented cogs like engineers and lawyers — but hardy self-sufficient, wholly reliant on stable employment, an economy organized around trusted third-parties, and global supply chains. Of course, while the idealist in me would prefer to live in the self-reliant society, you would have to be either blind or naive to believe minimal regulation will produce a good outcome in the present. So the power once reserved for the individual must be transferred to a regulator class, which, presumably, exists to protect the individual from companies like Pullman that get a little too zealous with their own rules (or the robber barons, who make George Pullman look like a Saint in comparison).
All of this is not to suggest that the Pullman itinerant acted irrationally. In fact, compared to the large majority of his contemporaries, he acted quite rationally, in the same way that studying law today is more rational today than starting a small farm. America was already undergoing a bumpy transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one. Factories demanded long hours, paid low wages, and the working conditions were unsafe (that's putting it mildly). Nonetheless, hungry Americans flooded into already overcrowded cities to fill these roles. The rapid growth vastly outpaced urban development, leaving once beautiful cobblestone streets unrecognizable under piles of trash. So when contrasting the typical living conditions with Pullman’s well-maintained town, stable employment, and amenities, moving to Pullman was a no-brainer.
But it was the Panic of 1893, one of the worst economic downturns in U.S. history, that finally weakened George Pullman’s grip over his employees. The Pullman company saw mass layoffs and reduced wages, yet refused to adjust rent accordingly. Workers felt apprehension about an uncertain economic future. These feelings, coupled with a mounting resentment for corporate paternalism, set the stage for the Pullman Strike of 1894. It grew from a local cause into a national movement, garnering support from nearly 250,000 laborers across 27 states, ultimately concluding the Pullman Town experiment. All residential land-holdings were sold back to the government.
Perhaps the latent ideas of Emerson’s Self-Reliance, a still highly influential piece in that day, stirred awake, encouraging a rejection of corporate paternalism. Indeed, when compared to us, these 1800s Americans were temporally far less detached from Enlightenment ideals of liberty, freedom, and natural rights. Or perhaps the reality was less romantic, and the Pullman Strike would never have occurred if the company continued to deliver on its lifestyle promises.
The situation today, on the other hand, is far more encompassing than a small company town in rural Illinois. In large part due to smartphones and social media, corporate paternalism today is not only limited to employees of those companies.
First, social media's explosion in popularity renders constant connectivity the new norm. As political power is downstream of cultural power, social media algorithms thus act as a centralizing cultural force, breeding a tacit conformity to whatever the algorithm decides to show you. Second, its addictive nature is a blatant affront to one's sense of liberty. Most people will readily tell you that social media is unhealthy and addictive, but like the Pullman employee mourning his situation, as a society, it appears that we lack the wherewithal to quit en masse. Third, the ease with which young people will allow applications to send them "push notifications" is particularly disturbing. We have truly allowed the invisible hand of corporate paternalism, one much more sinister than George Pullman, into our homes. A company may demand your undivided attention at any moment. And while one might argue that he needs his phone to alert him of a new deal, or a flash sale, or an alert about a new match on the dating apps, he fails to realize that his time and attention are priceless.
The overwhelming influence of technology companies exert via social media is reminiscent of this classic Tocqueville quote. However, one minor alteration is made: government is replaced by social media.
The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the social media is the shepherd.
Incidentally, the manner in which technology has centralized is surprising when considering the promise of the early Internet. It promised liberty. It promised self-reliance. Each of us, just by virtue of having an ethernet connection, may lay claim to our own Walden Pond at which we can homestead. The early 2000s Internet reflected this and abounded with microblogs and geeky personal websites, and conversation was free-flowing without the all-seeing and never forgetful eye of social media. Compared to the construction of Thoreau's delightful little cabin, the cost of constructing a website, both in hosting fees and labor, is near zero, so most did it. But just two decades later we find a stunning lack of computer literacy. This, coupled with network effects, has left us siloed into a handful of corporate controlled platforms.
It can feel like the only solution for these problems is regulation. Perhaps merely producing that thought is itself a sign of the times. Part of me feels like this may be the only option in a highly industrialized society. But regulators, however empathic they may seem, are molded from the same clay as common men, and they are no less susceptible than you and I or even companies like Pullman to short-time thinking. And those who rise to the top, by their very nature, are more susceptible to abusing the power the position affords. It is an unfortunate flaw of humanity that those who seek to lead are most unsuited to do it.
I want this essay, therefore, to inspire an alternate path. If we want to avoid the fate of highly regulated life where we trade corporate paternalism for political paternalism, the only choice is to re-engage with our core American values. But we have to do it in a way that abides with the times. While you probably shouldn't run off to rural Arkansas and build a house in your twenties, you can still commit to self-reliance and to independence on a smaller scale.
If you work at a company and subsist mostly on the company cafe, consider cooking for yourself at least once a week. Do a little home upgrade project without the help of a plumber once in a while. Make sure that your cell phone serves you and that you do not serve the phone. If feeling adventurous, go wild and stay with your prepper uncle for a couple weeks and get a taste of that lifestyle. Or for the technically inclined, self-host some infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud computing.
Self-reliance in its purest form is an ideal. So look to invest in localized support systems, which counteract feelings of isolation that the corporate paternalist preys upon.
Whether or not you believe in a higher power, accept that the spiritual decline in this country has opened the door for institutionalized secular dogmas to take the place of the individual and of the family. You may notice that such political fads, therefore, are readily adopted by corporations. Indeed, this is why self-reliance as a philosophical movement was intrinsically religious at its core.
Lastly, an acknowledgment that a vacuum of cultural emptiness opens when young children are indoctrinated to renounce their forefathers. Such statements weaken our shared cultural identity, and by teaching one to reject her identity, she is ripe to also reject values like self-reliance that are core to the American ethos.
By embracing self-reliance and consciously limiting our dependencies on corporations, we can work towards a life of greater meaning, of greater purpose, and towards genuine freedom.
