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Comment by albertshin | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Googleville.

It's been a while since I've read cyberpunk novels like Cryptonomican, but I feel like the reality of corporations becoming villages and societal entities is slowly getting there anyways.

Your move, We.

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Yes, but Google isn't the one that created this problem. You should be drawing the opposite conclusion: that the problem is so bad, even a company town would be an improvement!

Yup, corporate development isn't a substitute for cohesive publicly funded policies, particularly with issues like housing. Companies will do just enough to keep people from guillotining the execs (or just raising taxes), meanwhile eroding the public services we do have. Company towns are definitely going to be making a comeback.

I think you might mean Snow Crash though :)

I'd put this more on Snow Crash than Cryptonomicon.

Right, don’t they live in shipping containers in snowcrash. A few years back I heard there was a movement in Oakland to build shipping container villages. Nothing new since the 90s except for Facebook.

Ready Player One is the shipping containers.

Actually I'm pretty sure Hiro also lived in a shipping container at least at one point during the book. Though it's been years since I read it (something I need to correct).

Ready Player One is stacked manufactured homes.

Snow Crash is storage units.

I am not aware of any sci-fi story that predicted people living in ISO shipping containers prior to its real-world occurrence.

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