Comment by AlexandrB
7 years ago
I think the opposite is more likely to be true. This sounds creepy because it is creepy and the only place it seems reasonable is in the increasingly disconnected culture of Silicon Valley.
7 years ago
I think the opposite is more likely to be true. This sounds creepy because it is creepy and the only place it seems reasonable is in the increasingly disconnected culture of Silicon Valley.
Many undergraduate, graduate and postgrads live on campus in housing provided by the university, and get paid by the same university. Soldiers in the military live in barracks, even some who would otherwise have the option to live off base. Even expats working for private energy companies abroad sometimes live in corporate housing campuses.
Universities are not top-down controlled institutions - profs have tenure (i.e. independence) and run their labs at a relatively micro scale, so whatever the criticism of tech mega-corps, it probably doesn't transfer because of those differences.
Soldiers in military often have a hard time adjusting to the freedom of civilian life, and it seems that structure is there out of institutional necessity (i.e. society could not exist without a military to protect it), not for the benefit of the individual soldier. Creating corporations that are both single-leader authoritarian and control more aspects of their employee's lives may not be how we want more of in our society. A lot of successful corporations seem relatively all-consuming for their employees (both small and big corps), so it seems like a subject without a solid path toward consensus.
Yes, and socializing students into broader society is a core topic for "campus life" divisions at universities, and transitioning back to civilian life is a significant challenge for many when discharged from the military. These are closed and walled off ecosystems of human engagement, each with their own challenges and failure modes for human psychology.
> Many undergraduate, graduate and postgrads live on campus in housing provided by the university
Last I checked, universities weren’t busy papering the world in surveillance, pretending that’s a moral prerogative, refusing summons to the House of Commons, characterising whistleblowers with contempt, and then lying when they get caught acting unethically.
Universities have their own police forces, surveillance systems (they know every time you badge in or out somewhere, along with video footage and who knows what else) and when I was in college there was talk of installing metal detectors (thankfully the powers that be realized how idiotic this would have been). I'm not arguing that this makes surveillance OK, but from a perspective of housing, this feels overblown.