Silicon Valley’s curious obsession with building old-fashioned communities 

It’s a peculiar thing about billionaires: they don’t half have a weak spot for building ideal communities from the ground up. You could call it pluto-utopianism.

The latest manifestation of this is California Forever. A number of ultra-wealthy Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs have been quietly buying up 55,000 acres of farmland in Solano county, California, and at the end of last week they launched a website revealing what they planned to do with it. Behold, the future of rural America: a new community rising from the empty earth, the vision for which is set out in a series of watercolour-style illustrations.  

What’s striking about the pictures is that, for a proposed community whose founding investors are almost all from Silicon Valley’s bleeding-edge tech firms, it looks (solar panels aside) like something dreamt up by Norman Rockwell, albeit with a telling flavour of Soviet social realism.