ABSTRACT
In 2012, CEO Tony Hsieh moved Zappos’s headquarters from suburban Henderson, Nevada to Downtown Las Vegas. Most tech giants move from suburban locations to city centres to attract talent, but Hsieh uses the talent to make a city, “transform[ing] Downtown Las Vegas into the most community-focused large city in the world.” In doing so, Downtown Project meets religious studies scholar Timothy Miller’s three criteria for an intentional community: shared purpose, space, and resources. DTP’s self-styled version of authenticity permeates all criteria, which participants articulate and promote on DTP’s various online platforms. Through a bimonthly visual, content, and discourse analysis of all DTP’s emergent media produced (e.g., website, social media) from December 2013 to August 2014, this chapter asks, what can the intentional community’s online communication teach us about contemporary community developments, particularly those positioning themselves as authentic? I find: (1) authenticity is the very driver of DTP’s shared intentionality; (2) that notion relies on three discrete notions of authenticity, all of which DTP leadership promotes online; and (3) in this online messaging, we see a “right” kind of DTLVer who embodies and performs DTP’s authenticity. In this way, DTP shows how communities might use online platforms to construct physically gateless, but virtually gated, communities, or what I call “intentional gated communities.”
