The Myth Of The 'Facebook Company Town'

Anton Menlo

Perhaps you saw the headlines, like this in The Wall Street Journal: ' Facebook's Company Town.' Many other publications covered the news that Facebook was developing a $120+-million, 394 unit housing complex with so many amenities - a pub, doggy day-care, a bike path to the Facebook campus - that it resembled a company town.

Cool story, but only one problem: it ain't quite true. Though Facebook will benefit from it, the development doesn't belong to Facebook, and the only hard investment it is making is a subsidy for 15 units. But the 'frame' of the story - company town - might have made it difficult for reporters to get other facts right. 53 units will be below market rate, not just the 15 subsidized by Facebook. All 394 units will be open to the public, not just a few (though Facebook employees will hear about them first). But the big one for me is the frame of the story itself, for it reveals a few things about us all. First, we all - especially writers - have the tendency to make a story fit a narrative that's simple and compelling. So much so, we are willing to ignore pesky details that subvert the narrative. Second, it's even more compelling, when the narrative is surprising. It's what can make a feature story news, and an ordinary news story a top story.

But, for me, the most interesting thing about the Facebook-company-town myth is what it reveals about our desire - not Facebook's - for the underlying premise of the narrative to be true. The premise is that in the vast suburban sprawl that defines our environs there might be a path back to the small town that never was. Whether Anton Menlo - the name of the proposed development - strikes you as utopian or dystopian, it is likely to provoke a feeling of nostalgia. And like Don Draper of Mad Men famously observed in the final episode of the first season, nostalgia - a 'twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone' - is 'potent.' So potent in fact we can miss the forest for the trees, and the meaning of the signs on construction sites when we see them from our cars. We are living in the post-Facebook economy, and the offline matters more today than ever. That Facebook could be playing a small part in making offline life more livable for employees and others in the area - that perhaps was the real story. But I doubt it would have created so many headlines.