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Company Towns — wherein a single firm provides most or all necessary services, from housing and employment to commerce and amenities to a given community — have dotted America since before the Civil War. As we near the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, they're making a comeback with a new generation of ultra-wealthy elites gobbling up land and looking to build towns in their own image. 

And why should only terrestrial workers be exploited? Elon Musk has long talked of his plans to colonize Mars through his company SpaceX and those plans don't happen without a sizeable — and in this case, notably captive — workforce on hand. The same Elon Musk who spent $44 billion to run a ubiquitous social media site into the ground, whose brain computer interface company can't stop killing monkeys and whose automotive company can't stop killing pedestrians, wants to construct entire settlements wholly reliant on his company's largesse and logistics train. Are we really going to trust the mercurial CEO with people's literal air supplies?

In this week's Hitting the Books, Rice University biologist and podcaster Kelly Weinersmith and her husband Zach (of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame) examine what it will actually take to put people on the red planet and what unforeseen costs we might have to pay to accomplish such a goal in their new book A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

Penguin Random House

Excerpted from A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Published by Penguin. Copyright © 2023 by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. All rights reserved.

On the Care and Feeding of Space Employees

One of the first things to know about company towns is that companies don’t appear to want to be in charge of housing. In our experience, people often think housing was an actively pursued control tactic, but if you look at the available data and the oral histories, companies often seem downright reluctant to supply housing at all. In Dr. Price Fishback’s economic analysis of coal towns in early-twentieth-century Appalachia, Soft Coal, Hard Choices, he found that companies able to have a third party supply housing typically did. This is hard to square with the idea that housing was built specifically with sinister intentions.

There are also good theoretical reasons to explain why companies build housing and rent it out to workers. Suppose Elon Musk is building the space city Muskow. Having wisely consulted the nearest available Weinersmith, he decides he shouldn’t own employee housing due to something or other about the risks of power imbalance. He looks to hire builders, but immediately runs into a problem: very few companies are available for construction on Mars. Let’s consider the simple case where only one company is willing to do it.

Well, guess what. That company now has monopoly power. They can raise home prices or lower home quality, making Muskow less attractive to potential workers. Musk can now only improve the situation by paying workers more, costing him money while lining the pockets of the housing provider.

If he wants to avoid this, Musk’s ideal option is to attract more building companies, so they can compete with each other. If that’s not possible, as was often the case in remote company towns, then the only alternative is to build the housing himself. This works, but the tradeoff is that he’s now managing housing in addition to focusing on his core business. He’s also acquired a lot of control over his employees. None of this setup requires Musk to be a power-hungry bastard — all it requires is that he needs to attract workers to a place where there’s zero competition for housing construction.

Historically, where things get more worrisome is in rental agreements, which often tied housing to employment. Even these can partially be explained as rational choices a non- evil bastard might non- evilly make. Workers in mines were often temporary. Mines were temporary, too, existing only until the resources were no longer profitable. This made homeownership a less compelling prospect for a worker. Why? Two reasons. First, if a town may suddenly fold in fifteen years because a copper mine stops being profitable, buying a house is a bad investment. Second, if you own a home, it’s hard for you to leave. This is a problem because threatening to leave is a classic way to enhance your bargaining position as a worker.

Once you have people whose housing is tied to their job, the potential for abuse is enormous — especially during strikes. Rental agreements were often tied to employment, and so striking or even having an injury could mean the loss of your home. When your boss is also your landlord, their ability to threaten you and your family is tremendous, and indeed narrative accounts refer to eviction of families with children by force. If employees either owned their homes or had more secure rental agreements, power would have run the other way. They could have struck for better wages or conditions and occupied those homes to make it harder for their employer to bring in replacements.

It may be tempting to see this as a purely capitalist problem, but very similar results occurred in Soviet monotown housing. Employees tended to get reasonably nice company-town housing; if they lost their jobs, they had to go to the local Soviet, which provided far worse accommodations. As one author put it, “Thus, housing became the method of controlling workers par excellence.” This suggests that there’s a deep structural dynamic here — when your employer owns your housing, they’re apt to use it against you at some point.

In space, you can’t kick people out of their houses unless you’re prepared to kill them or pay for a pricey trip home. On Mars, orbital mechanics may preclude the trip even if you’re able to afford it. In arguing with space-settlement geeks, housing concerns are often set up as binaries — “Look, they’re not going to kill the employees, so they’ll have to treat them well.” In fact, there’s a spectrum of bastardry available. A company-town boss on Mars could provide lower-quality food, reduce floor space, restrict the flow of beet wine, deny you access to the pregnodrome. They could also tune your atmosphere. We found one account by a British submariner, in which he claimed to adjust the balance of oxygen to carbon dioxide depending on whether he wanted people more lethargic or more active. Whether it’ll be worth the risk of pissing off employees who cost, at least, millions to deliver to the settlement is harder to say.

This overall logic — companies must supply amenities, therefore companies acquire power — repeats across contexts in company towns. To attract skilled employees who may have families, the company must supply housing, yes, but they also must supply other regular town stuff — shopping, entertainment, festivals, sanitation, roads, bridges, municipal planning, schools, temples, churches. When one company controls shopping, they set the prices and they know what you buy. When they control entertainment and worship, they have power over employee speech and behavior. When they control schools, they have power over what is taught. When they control the hospitals, they control who gets health care, and how much.

Even if the company does a decent job on all these fronts, there may still be resistance, basically because people don’t love having so much of their lives controlled by one entity. Fishback argued that company towns, for all their issues, were not as bad as their reputation. In theorizing why, he suggested one problem you might call the omni-antagonist effect. Think about what groups you’re most likely to be angry at during any given moment of adult life. Landlord? Home-repair company? Local stores? Utility companies? Your homeowners association? Local governance? Health-care service? Chances are you’re mad at someone on this list even as you read this book. Now, imagine all are merged into a single entity that is also your boss.

In space, as usual, things are worse: the infrastructure and utility people aren’t just keeping the toilet and electricity running; they’re deciding how much CO2 is in your air and controlling transportation in and out of town. Even if the company is not evil, it’s going to be hard to keep good relations, even at the best of times.

And it will not always be the best of times.

When Company Towns Go Bad

Unionization attempts on September 3, 1921, reporting on the then ongoing miners strike in West Virginia, the Associated Press released the following bulletin:

Sub district President Blizzard of the United Mine Workers . . . says five airplanes sent up from Logan county dropped bombs manufactured of gaspipe and high explosives over the miners’ land, but that no one was injured. One of the bombs, he reports, fell between two women who were standing in a yard, but it failed to explode.

“Failed to explode” is better than the alternative, but well, it’s the thought that counts.

Most strikes were not accompanied by attempted war crimes, but that particular strike, which was part of early-twentieth-century America’s aptly named Coal Wars, happened during a situation associated with increased danger — unionization attempts.

Looked at in strictly economic terms, this isn’t so surprising. From the company’s perspective, beyond unionization lies a huge unknown. Formerly direct decisions will have to run through a new and potentially antagonistic committee. The company will have less flexibility about wages and layoffs in case of an economic downturn. They may become less competitive with a nonunion entity. They may have to renegotiate every single employee contract.

Whether or not a union would be good per se in a space settlement, given how costly and hazardous any kind of strife would be, you may want to begin your space settlement with some sort of collective bargaining entity purely to avoid a dangerous transition. A union would also reduce some of the power imbalance by giving workers the ability to act collectively in their own interest. However, this may not happen in reality if the major space capitalists of today are the space company-town bosses of the future—both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos kept their companies ununionized while CEOs.

Economic Chaos

Another basic problem here is that company towns, being generally oriented around a single good, are extremely vulnerable to economic randomness. Several scholars have noted that company towns tend to be less prone to strife when they have fatter margins. It’s no coincidence that the pipe-bomb incident above came about during a serious drop in the price of coal early in the twentieth century. Price drops and general bad economic conditions can mean renegotiations of contracts in an environment where the company fears for its survival. Things can get nasty.

If Muskow makes its money on tourism, it might lose out when Apple opens a slightly cooler Mars resort two lava tubes over. Or there could be another Great Depression on Earth, limiting the desire for costly space vacations. So what’s a space CEO to do? In terrestrial company towns, if a Great Depression shows up, one option is for the town to just fold. It’s not a fun option, but at least there’s a train out of town or a chance to hitchhike. Mars has a once-every-two-years launch window.* Even a trip to Earth from the Moon requires a 380,000-kilometer shot in a rocket, which will likely never be cheap.

The biggest rockets on the drawing board today could perhaps transport a hundred people at a time. Even for a settlement of only ten thousand people, that’s a lot of transport infrastructure in case the town needs to be evacuated. Throw in that, at least right now, we don’t even know if people born and raised on the Moon or Mars can physiologically handle coming “back” to Earth, and, well, things get interesting.

The result is that there is a huge ethical onus on whoever’s setting this thing up. Not just to have a huge reserve of funding and supplies and transportation, so that people can be saved or evacuated if need be, but also to do the science in advance to determine if it’s even possible to bring home people born in partial Earth gravity.

There is some precedent for governments being willing to prop up company towns. Many old Soviet monotowns now receive economic aid from the Russian government. We should note, however, that keeping a small Russian village on life support will be a lot cheaper than maintaining an armada of megarockets for supplies and transportation.

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It was never going to last. Ever since it was launched this week, the Beeper Mini app, which let Android users get iMessage text support, was expected to be in trouble as soon as it caught Apple's attention. And catch Apple's attention it has. Yesterday, the entire Beeper platform appeared to be on the fritz, resulting in speculation that the iPhone maker had been shutting down the iMessage workarounds. As of this morning, Beeper Mini was still posting on X (formerly Twitter) that it was working on and potentially fixing the outage, but with an announcement from Apple today, all that may be for naught. 

"We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage," Apple said. "These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users."

Though Apple does not mention any apps by name, it stands to reason that, given the timing of Beeper Mini's launch and recent troubles, that this refers to the loophole the platform was using. 

Beeper's method sent users' texts to Apple's servers before moving on to their intended recipients, and was thought up by a high-school student. Would-be messengers wouldn't even need an Apple ID to access iMessage via Beeper Mini, though the Android app did offer end-to-end encryption for conversations between those on both operating systems. 

Apple also said today that it's unable to verify that messages sent through unauthorized means that pose as having valid credentials can maintain end-to-end encryption. Beeper had anticipated that this workaround might one day be shut down, and it looks like the Android-iOS messaging divide remains intact. For now.

Amazon filed a motion on Friday in the Western Washington district court asking a judge to dismiss the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust lawsuit against it. The FTC along with 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon in September, alleging the company uses monopolistic practices that are unfair to both its competitors and consumers. Amazon is now arguing that the FTC did not provide evidence that its practices have driven up prices or harmed consumers, according to Bloomberg.

The FTC’s lawsuit claims Amazon uses illegal tactics to crush its competition — like punishing sellers who list their products for better prices elsewhere by burying them in search results, and coercing sellers into using Amazon’s own fulfillment service by tying it to Prime eligibility. It also accuses Amazon of inflating prices from 2016-2018 using an algorithmic tool codenamed Project Nessie. These increases added up to more than $1 billion, according to the suit.

In Amazon’s motion for dismissal, per AP, Amazon said it’s only engaging in “common retail practices” that “benefit consumers and are the essence of competition.” Amazon attorney Heidi Hubbard wrote that the suit “implausibly, and illogically, assumes that Amazon’s efforts to keep featured prices low on Amazon somehow raised consumer prices across the whole economy,” according to Bloomberg.

OctoML says it has ended its business relationship with Civitai days after an investigation by 404 Media revealed the text-to-image platform was being used to generate images that “could be categorized as child pornography.” Civitai previously relied on OctoML’s OctoAI for image generation. While OctoML initially indicated it would continue working with Civitai and introduced new measures to curb the creation of harmful images, 404 Media reported on Saturday that it has now decided to cut ties with the platform altogether.

According to 404 Media’s December 5 report, internal communications showed that OctoML was aware some Civitai users were creating sexually explicit material that included nonconsensual images of real people and pornographic depictions of children. In a followup report this weekend, the publication noted that OctoML rolled out a filter to block the generation of all NSFW content on Civitai before announcing its decision to pull out. Civitai also added new moderation methods in response to the investigation earlier this week, including a mandatory embedding called Civitai Safe Helper (Minor) that bars the model from generating images of children if “a mature theme or keyword is detected,” according to 404.

Andreessen Horowitz-backed Civitai has previously come under scrutiny for its “bounties” feature that challenges users to generate realistic images of real people for rewards. In November, 404 Media found it was being used to make nonconsensual deepfakes of celebrities, influencers and even a private citizen that were, in many cases, sexual in nature. The subjects were primarily women. According to 404 Media, Civitai has since added a filter to prevent the creation of NSFW content featuring “certain” celebrities.

Nevertheless, OctoML — which uses Amazon Web Services’ servers — no longer wants to be involved. In a statement to 404 Media on Saturday, OctoML said, “We have decided to terminate our business relationship with Civitai. This decision aligns with our commitment to ensuring the safe and responsible use of AI.”

The Beeper Mini team has apparently been working around the clock to resolve the outage affecting the new “iMessage on Android” app, and says a fix is “very close.” And once the fix rolls out, users’ seven-day free trials will be reset so they can start over fresh. Beeper Mini was released earlier this week, and seemed an especially promising entrant due to its unique approach to bridging the iMessage-Android gap. The app, reportedly the result of a 16-year-old’s work to reverse-engineer iMessage, routes messages directly through Apple’s own servers, making it more secure than some of the other options out there.

But, only days after its release, Beeper Mini users on Friday found that they could no longer send and receive messages, sparking questions about whether Apple intervened and put a stop to it. In an update posted on social media, the team said it’s deregistered users’ phone numbers from iMessage while it works to fix the issue. That may not be the end of the immediate headaches caused by the outage, though. “Annoyingly, the iPhone Messages app ‘remembers’ that you were a blue bubble for 6-24 hours before falling back to SMS,” the Beeper Mini team wrote, “so it’s possible that some messages will not be delivered during this period.”

While Beeper says a fix is coming soon, it may still have a greater struggle ahead if Apple actually was behind the shutdown. The chat app costs $2 a month after the seven-day free trial and offers end-to-end encryption for messages sent between Android and iMessage users. In a statement to Engadget yesterday, Beeper co-founder Eric Migicovsky said, “If it's Apple, then I think the biggest question is — if Apple truly cares about the privacy and security of their own iPhone users, why would they try to kill a service that enables iPhones to send encrypted chats to Android users?”

Between Fortnite’s propensity for big-name concerts and Epic’s purchase of Harmonix two years ago, the inclusion of some kind of music-making feature in the game was inevitable. What Epic is releasing today is actually far grander: an entirely new mode called Fortnite Festival, a social space where players can team up to perform their favorite songs or jam together on new mixes.

There are two options, or stages, for users to play in the new mode. The main stage, or championship stage, is basically the Rock Band experience recreated inside Fortnite. You’ll form a band with friends and choose a song to perform. Then you play the song using the standard music game format where notes slide down vertical bars, hitting the correct button when the note reaches the bottom. Players can, of course, hear the song as they play it, which can be embarrassing if you’re not that good. Each performer earns points, which in turn leads to XP and character progression in the greater Fortnite ecosystem.

While the main stage may be old-hat to anyone present during the zenith of music games in the 2000s, the jam stage draws from Harmonix’s more recent (and less popular) mixing titles, Dropmix and Fuser. While both of those games had competitive modes, they were a lot more fun as music-making toys, where players could just throw different parts of popular songs together and see what comes out. Jamming in Fortnite Festival is pretty much that, but collaborative.

Epic Games

When you first drop into a jam, your avatar will be standing in a virtual world full of stages, clubs and green spaces. It has an amusement park-like feel, similar to Disney World’s long-gone Pleasure Island. Despite the world’s appearance, you don’t have to climb on stage to play music, you can start jamming wherever you want by pulling up the emote wheel. The actions here have been replaced with song options. Just pick a song and instrument, and your character will start playing. It’s not the entire song, but rather one particular piece of it. To assemble something more complete, you need to collaborate with other players.

Jamming with other players is incredibly easy. All you need to do is walk up to someone who’s already playing (helpfully indicated by a wavy circle) and activate your own emote wheel. The system will automatically mix the two songs together no matter the genre or style. You want to add the vocals from The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” to the synth from “Gangnam Style?” Go right ahead, and don’t be surprised when someone else drops in the beat from The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.”

Instruments can be swapped out on the fly, and the key and tempo can also be tweaked to make a slow song fast or vice versa. There’s a lot of room for creativity here, as well as cacophony as the levels fill up.

While Fortnite Festival draws heavily on Dropmix and Fuser it has one key advantage over those two titles, one that could lead to success where its predecessors failed: it’s free. All three of the new Fortnite modes will be free, but Festival is a standout since it relies so heavily on licensed music. One huge barrier to entry for music games has always been the additional costs, especially the song packs. $2 for your favorite Nirvana or Bad Bunny tracks might not seem like much at first, but it adds up, and any online cost can be insurmountable to a kid without a credit card. The fact that this is a music game that anyone can download for free on their computer, console or mobile device without being bombarded with ads means it has the potential to make music games popular again.

Good morning. Do you want this customized PS5? You'll have to work the sunset years of your career at Sony then. That is, apparently, the only way. I'm also taking bets on which chatbot will be the chatbot we all depend on. It's like Yahoo (our parent company) or Google or Facebook. Who's going to get there first? This week's YouTube-coated cry for help features two of the biggest chatbot competitors, Google and Microsoft. And some Engadget editorial team in-fighting. 

This week:

Google’s Gemini is the biggest threat yet to ChatGPT

Microsoft upgrades its chatbot, too

Lenovo’s huge handheld PC is here

And read this:

Researchers have made an under-the-skin implant to treat Type 1 diabetes. The new implantable device could change the way Type 1 diabetics receive insulin without the need for needles or pumps. A thread-like implant is an “islet device” derived from the cells that produce insulin in our bodies naturally. This secretes insulin through islet cells that form around it, while also receiving nutrients and oxygen from blood vessels to stay alive.

However, the devices eventually need to be removed, so researchers are still working to extend their longevity before testing the devices, eventually, in patients. No sassy quip here – just pretty cool news?  

Like email more than video? Subscribe right here for daily reports, direct to your inbox.

The Washington Post reports that after a marathon 72-hour debate European Union legislators Friday have reached a historic deal on a broad-ranging AI safety development bill, the most expansive and far-reaching of its kind to date. Details of the deal itself were not immediately available. 

The proposed regulations would dictate the ways in which future machine learning models can be developed and distributed within the trade bloc, impacting its use in applications ranging from education to employment to healthcare. AI development would be split among four categories, depending on how much societal risk each potentially poses — minimal, limited, high, and banned. 

Banned uses would include anything that circumvents the user's will, targets protected groups or provides real-time biometric tracking (like facial recognition). High risk uses include anything "intended to be used as a safety component of a product,” or are to be used in defined applications like critical infrastructure, education, legal/judicial matters and employee hiring.

“The European Commission once again has stepped out in a bold fashion to address emerging technology, just like they had done with data privacy through the GDPR,” Dr. Brandie Nonnecke, Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, told Engadget in 2021. “The proposed regulation is quite interesting in that it is attacking the problem from a risk-based approach,” similar what's been suggested in Canada’s proposed AI regulatory framework.

The EC had previously addressed the growing challenges of managing emerging AI technologies through an variety of efforts, releasing both the first European Strategy on AI and Coordinated Plan on AI in 2018, followed by the Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in 2019. The following year, the Commission released a White Paper on AI and Report on the safety and liability implications of Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and robotics

”Artificial intelligence should not be an end in itself, but a tool that has to serve people with the ultimate aim of increasing human well-being," the European Commission wrote in its draft AI regulations. "Rules for artificial intelligence available in the Union market or otherwise affecting Union citizens should thus put people at the centre (be human-centric), so that they can trust that the technology is used in a way that is safe and compliant with the law, including the respect of fundamental rights.” 

“At the same time, such rules for artificial intelligence should be balanced, proportionate and not unnecessarily constrain or hinder technological development," it continued. "This is of particular importance because, although artificial intelligence is already present in many aspects of people’s daily lives, it is not possible to anticipate all possible uses or applications thereof that may happen in the future.”

 Developing...

Beeper Mini, the chat app that reverse-engineered Apple’s iMessage for Android, is having problems. 9to5Google reported Friday the entire Beeper platform is seemingly broken right now, leading to the obvious speculation that Apple has stomped on the bootleg iMessage workaround. Beeper posted on X that it’s “investigating reports that sending/receiving is not working in Beeper Mini.”

Engadget emailed Beeper to ask whether the outage could have been triggered on Apple’s end. We’ll update this article if or when we hear back. Although it’s easy to jump to conclusions, given the iPhone maker’s preference for absolute control over its entire ecosystem, there’s no direct evidence at this stage suggesting it’s behind today’s problems.

Beeper’s crafty solution — surprisingly — seemed to work well. The app automatically scans for messages from iMessage users and changes them to blue bubbles, apparently routing them through Apple’s servers. The wizardry is the product of a 16-year-old high school student, who reverse-engineered it by jailbreaking iPhones and digging into them to learn how iOS handles iMessages. It even included end-to-end encryption between iPhones and Android phones.

Co-founder Eric Migicovsky, the former Pebble smartwatch founder, described the service to Engadget’s Lawrence Bonk this week as a “scale-up.” The original (pre-mini) Beeper depended on a Mac mini server farm to relay chats through Apple’s system. Whether Beeper Mini is going the way of the dodo (or the Sunbird), we’ll have to wait and see.