The Outer Worlds 2

A player arriving in one of the frontier settlements of The Outer Worlds notices, before any character has spoken, that a single logo is doing an enormous amount of work. It is stamped on the tinned food in the vending machine. It is stamped on the door of the bunkhouse where the worker sleeps. It is on the sign above the store where wages are spent, on the jumpsuit of the clerk who takes them, and, in the settlement's small cemetery, on the markers. One company grows the food, sells the food, owns the bed, prints the paycheck, and, when the arrangement has finished with a body, supplies the grave. The brand is Spacer's Choice, the discount house whose own slogan cheerfully concedes that it is the inferior option, the thing bought not because it is good but because it is what the company stocks. The settlement is Edgewater. The joke, delivered with Obsidian's usual dryness, is that a single corporation has enclosed a human life from the ration tin to the headstone.

The reading this invites, and the reading most players supply, is exaggeration. Science fiction enlarges. The genre's license is to take a familiar anxiety, in this case corporate power, and inflate it past the point of realism so that the outline becomes visible. On that reading Spacer's Choice is a cartoon, and the pleasure is the pleasure of caricature: recognizable, distorted, safely unreal.

The argument of this essay is that the reading is wrong, or rather that it is a generation's forgetting mistaken for a genre's invention. The company town is not an exaggeration of the American economy. It is a memory of it. Obsidian has not enlarged anything. The studio has reconstructed, with more historical fidelity than the science-fiction framing lets most players notice, a form that was once ordinary in the United States: the town owned outright by the firm that employed everyone in it, where the same company paid the wage, held the lease, ran the store, stocked the store, and set the price. Take the satire as history rather than fantasy, which is what its accuracy asks, and it stops being a joke about the future and becomes a claim about the past, and then, less comfortably, about the present.

The clearest single case is Pullman, Illinois. In the early 1880s George Pullman, whose company built the railroad sleeping cars that carried his name, laid out a town on the prairie south of Chicago to house the people who built them. It was, by the standards of nineteenth-century industrial housing, clean, planned, and handsome: brick row houses, a library, a church, parks, an arcade of shops, water and gas laid on. It was also owned, in its entirety, by the Pullman Palace Car Company. The workers did not own their houses; they rented them from Pullman, with the rent deducted from the wages Pullman paid them. They bought their necessities in a market Pullman controlled. The library charged a subscription. The church stood empty much of the time because no congregation could afford the rent Pullman set on it. The design was not accidental. Pullman believed, with the confidence of his class and his moment, that a controlled and wholesome environment would manufacture a controlled and reliable worker, and that manufacturing the worker was a legitimate extension of manufacturing the car.

The theory failed in public and at speed. When the depression that followed the Panic of 1893 cut demand, Pullman reduced his workers' wages by roughly a quarter and left their rents exactly where they had been, since the rent was his revenue and he saw no reason to subsidize it. Workers whose reduced wages were further reduced by an unreduced rent found themselves with paychecks approaching nothing. In 1894 they struck. The strike spread when Eugene Debs's American Railway Union took up their cause and refused to handle trains carrying Pullman cars, and what had begun as a local grievance became a national paralysis of the railroads. President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops, citing interference with the mail. Men were killed. The strike was broken, Debs was jailed, and the model town's model stood exposed as a mechanism for returning the wage to the employer through the rent and the store.

Four years later the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to sell the town. Owning the place where one's workers lived, the court reasoned, was no part of a manufacturing charter and was incompatible with the institutions of a self-governing republic. Pullman was absorbed into Chicago and became an ordinary neighborhood. The verdict is worth holding onto, because it states plainly what the company town is. It is not a housing arrangement. It is a private government, and one a court eventually judged to be at odds with the public kind.

Pullman was the genteel version. The extractive version ran on scrip. Across the Appalachian coal patches and the Southern mill villages, employers paid not in national currency but in company scrip, a private money redeemable only at the company store, often at prices the company set to its own advantage. The arrangement had a name, the truck system, and a logic: a wage that can only be spent back into the firm that paid it is not fully a wage, and a worker whose scrip runs short before the pay period ends can be advanced credit against future work, which is to say bound to it. Debt at the company store became a common form of American unfreedom, familiar enough that a mid-century hit like "Sixteen Tons" could make the miner's debt to the store a national shorthand for a life owned in advance. The company store was the point of the company town. It was the machine that turned the payment of the wage into the recovery of the wage.

Hardy Green, in The Company Town (2010), sorts the American examples into two families, and the sorting is useful. There were the paternalist towns, the industrial Edens of his subtitle, built by men like Pullman and Milton Hershey who believed they were uplifting their workers by governing every hour of their lives. And there were the purely extractive towns, the satanic mills, built by operators who wanted only the labor and the recovery of the wage and dispensed with the uplift. Green's point across the range is that the company town was not an aberration or a scandal at the edge of American capitalism. It was a standard instrument of it, deployed wherever an employer was large enough and a place remote enough that the firm could become the town. It rose with heavy industry, and it declined not because it was outlawed but because the automobile, the highway, and the mortgage let workers live somewhere the boss did not own. It declined, in other words, for logistical reasons, and logistical reasons can reverse.

This is the history Obsidian has rebuilt. The colony of Halcyon in The Outer Worlds is governed not by a state but by the Board, a coalition of corporations that holds the political authority a government would ordinarily hold, and the 2026 sequel returns to the same premise on a new corporate frontier. Its towns are company towns in the exact nineteenth-century sense: the firm employs the residents, houses them, provisions them, brands their food and their leisure, and treats the people themselves as entries in a ledger to be balanced. The comedy is real comedy; the writing is genuinely funny. But the comedy lands because the target is remembered rather than invented. Caricature works by distortion, and there is less distortion here than the laughter assumes. The studio has changed the typeface and kept the structure.

The reason this matters past the game is that the logistical conditions have begun to reverse. The company town declined because workers gained the mobility to live outside the employer's property; the present is returning some of that property. The most visible form is the town organized around a single warehouse, where one logistics company becomes the dominant employer, the dominant tax base, and the effective author of the local economy, so that the fortunes of the place and the decisions of the firm are once again the same fortunes and the same decisions. Employer-provided housing, which the postwar decades had made to seem archaic, has returned in several registers: the seasonal fulfillment workers who live in recreational vehicles in lots beside the warehouses that employ them for the season, the guest agricultural workers whose visas bind their housing to their employment, the technology campuses with dormitories, the firms that, facing housing costs their own wages cannot meet, have begun to build housing for their workers and thereby to become their landlords again.

The sharpest return is structural rather than geographic. The platform economy has reassembled the roles the company town once combined in a single owner, and reassembled them inside a single application. The platform is the worker's boss, dispatching the labor and rating the performance. The platform is the marketplace where the wage is spent, and increasingly the instrument through which the wage is paid, loaded onto an employer's card or advanced through an employer's app against hours already worked, for a fee, which is scrip with a better interface. No single firm has to own a town to occupy the position Pullman built a town to occupy. The roles have been unbundled from the place and rebundled in the software, so that a worker can be employed, provisioned, and paid inside one corporate perimeter that has no walls and needs no land, the wage collected on its way out and recovered on its way back.

The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson gave this arrangement its proper name in Private Government (2017). The firm, Anderson argues, is a government. It exercises authority over the people subject to it that is more detailed, more continuous, and less accountable than most of what the state does, and it does so without election, representation, or appeal. It can govern speech, movement, the body, and increasingly the hours after the shift, and the citizens of this government have, in the usual case, only the right to leave. We notice the tyranny of the state, which we have spent centuries learning to fear and to check. We have no comparable vocabulary for the tyranny of the employer, which we have been trained to experience as freedom because we signed something. The company town is what Anderson's private government looks like when it stops being a metaphor and acquires a map. It is the firm governing not merely the eight hours of labor but the sleep, the meal, the marriage, and the funeral: the whole of the life, on the firm's land, under the firm's authority, with the wage circulating inside the firm's walls.

David Graeber, in Bullshit Jobs (2018), supplies the other half of the mechanism. Graeber's subject was the strange proliferation of work that the people doing it privately believe to be pointless, and his explanation was that a great deal of modern employment is not organized around producing anything. It is organized around occupying people, around maintaining hierarchies and the relations of subordination that hierarchies exist to enforce. Work, in this account, has become a form of discipline that has partly detached from output, a way of holding a person inside an institution and inside a role. That is precisely the ambition the company town made physical. Pullman did not build a library and a church because his workers produced more sleeping cars with a library and a church nearby. He built them because the point was never only the sleeping cars. The point was the worker, governed whole, and the town was the instrument for governing the whole of him. Graeber lets us see that the ambition did not die with the form. It survived into the managed office and the monitored warehouse, waiting for the conditions that would let it reacquire the town.

This is why the satire of The Outer Worlds travels, and why its laughter carries an edge the genre's usual corporate villainy does not. The joke is legible the instant the frame is named, because the reader is not being shown a fantastical future but a photograph of something the culture used to know and has half forgotten. A player who has never heard of Pullman still feels, watching one logo cover a life from the food to the grave, that the arrangement is not quite science fiction, that it rhymes with something. The rhyme is history. The best satire of corporate power is not prophecy and not exaggeration. It is memory work, the return of a repressed and specifically American arrangement to the surface where it can be looked at, and it lands hardest on the readers whose own economy has begun,, to rebuild the thing being satirized.

The frame the essay wants to leave, in its shortest form: when a game imagines a single company owning a whole town, the question to ask is not whether the picture is exaggerated but where the picture already existed and whether it is coming back. Almost always the answer to the first is Pullman, or the coal patch, or the mill village, and the answer to the second is a town somewhere in the present organized around one warehouse, or an application that is at once a worker's employer and market and, through the card the wage is loaded onto, the modern edition of the store. The satire is a test of historical memory disguised as a test of imagination. Most players pass the imagination test and fail the memory one, and the failure is the joke's actual subject.

Return to the logo. It is on the ration and the bunk and the store and the jumpsuit and the marker over the grave, and the science-fiction costume invites the player to read it as the future arriving. It is the opposite. One brand covering a single life from the food to the headstone is among the oldest industrial images the country produced. It is a photograph of Pullman in the 1880s and the coal patch in the 1920s, developed slowly and held up to the present, where the outlines in it are beginning, again, to resolve. The company town never went away. It waited for the roads and the mortgages that had scattered it to be replaced by an application that could gather it back, and it is being gathered.