The push into the physical also has implications for the 1.2 million people in Silicon Valley who are teachers, fitness instructors, clerks, baristas — all those who hold jobs that do not come with stock options. As they inch down the clogged streets and bid money they don’t have on miserable houses, they will hear the siren call of Big Tech: We can fix broken communities by building new ones. Trust us.

“Corporations are paying for things that the city or county and state used to pay for,” said Cecilia Taylor of Belle Haven Action, a community advocacy group. “They have a lot of money. A lot of money. More than the city does. And a lot more power.”

On a wall in the Facebook division charged with the company’s growth there is a poster with a classic tech admonition: “Go Big or Go Home.” Facebook is in essence tweaking that to “Go Big at Home.” About 12,000 of its 25,000 employees work in Menlo Park. In a decade, it will have space for 35,000 — slightly more than the city’s current population.

The notion of communities run by and for companies has been a fixture in the United States almost from the beginning. Often these places were exercises in plunder.

In the textile town of Lowell, Mass., in 1846, the mill clock slowed down to lengthen shifts and then sped up at night when the workers were off, according to one contemporary reformer. U.S. Steel built Gary, Ind., but took little responsibility for its employees, many of whom lived in substandard housing in crime-ridden neighborhoods.

There were more benign examples too. Milton Hershey began building a chocolate factory in the middle of Pennsylvania in 1903 and then surrounded it with a community where, he pledged, there would be “no poverty, no nuisances, no evil.” In return for surrendering certain rights — like local elections and privacy — workers in the town of Hershey got medical coverage, a free junior college, parks and a zoo.

Corporate good will, however, had a way of curdling over time.

In Wisconsin, the Kohler family established a plumbing-fixtures factory in 1900 and then created a town around it. Kohler built houses for couples and dorms for single men, financed schools, had a pension plan and paid well. When economic conditions deteriorated during the Depression, however, the employees tried to strike. Kohler responded by arming its deputies with machine guns. In the ensuing clash, more than 40 strikers were shot and two were killed.