If a few people control political institutions, they will rig the economic game in their favour. This, in turn, gives the holders an incentive to fight to preserve power and others an incentive to displace them. The political game will be far less fraught and so more stable under inclusive political institutions, since people can obtain a high standard of living from voluntary exchange.
Category: Uncategorized
Who wants to form a corporation to buy Kenyatta!?! I’m serious! Let’s kickstart this man in the most ethical way possible!
The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood
This is my project proposal for a 2012-13 Rhizome artist commission. I’m going to sell my name to a corporation for three months. They will take over all of my public interactions both online and irl. Kenyatta will become a product. I will not exist.
The Project for Corporate Personhood (aka Kenyatta Co) is a three month performance that explores the topics of “corporate personhood” and personal identity.
The American Supreme Court and some politicians have declared that corporations should be treated as persons. So what happens when a person voluntary assigns their personhood to a corporation? Can it be used to raise awareness of the issue of corporate personhood and create spectacle in the process?
Kenyatta Cheese (creator of Know Your Meme, an artist, an activist, and a person) will sell the exclusive use of his name to a corporation for a period of three months. That corporation will assume both the real world and online identity of ‘Kenyatta Cheese’, reimagining his personhood as a brand with the help of ethnographers, lawyers, focus groups, public relations departments, a creative agency, and friends and acquaintances. During this period, Kenyatta (the person) will not be able to use his name except in the case of emergencies and air travel.
In order to develop Kenyatta Cheese (the product), the corporation will conduct research and development, mining his personal life, online profiles, and browser data for uniquely identifying information. The corporation will hire his friends and family to “be” Kenyatta Cheese at public events, speaking engagements (technology and media conferences), and social gatherings, interacting with people based on their own ideas of how they think Kenyatta Cheese would behave.
These public interactions will be documented through hidden video and interviews will be conducted to capture the thoughts and feelings of the Kenyatta Cheese “betas”. People who interact with these betas will be given a business card directing them to complete a customer service survey online.
This documentation will serve as the basis of standard operating procedures for being Kenyatta Cheese, brand guidelines, and a marketing and media buying plan. The corporation will then hire social media “gurus” to take over and run all instances of Kenyatta Cheese online including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a personal website. Strangers will be hired off of Craigslist to represent the brand at public events in cities around the world (complete with afro wig and business cards). Like the research beforehand, the interactions of these Craigslist hires will be documented and they will be interviewed.
The three month project will culminate in the compilation of a dozen or so interview videos, the creation of the corporate and product documents, the capture of company interactions in social media, and hopefully two public panels: one at SXSW (or similar conference) exploring the topic of personal identity and marketing featuring 4-5 “Kenyattas” and a second panel at the New Museum exploring the topic of identity through the stories of several Kenyatta’s, artists working on similar issues, and representatives from each of the companies involved in creating Kenyatta Co.
Possible Kenyattas will include but not be limited to author Baratunde Thurston, technologist Anil Dash, artist Kevin Slavin, writers Nick Bilton and Clive Thompson, entrepreneurs Nora Abousteit, Know Your Meme co-creators Jamie Wilkinson and Elspeth Rountree, performers Mike Rugnetta and Patrick Davison, actress Michelle Krusiec, sociologist Tricia Wang, and Kenyatta’s mom.
The Kiernans bought their four-bedroom home for $2.025 million, the highest price ever paid for a single-family home in Williamsburg, according to Jonathan Miller, president of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm. That makes this moment for Pat Kiernan a moment for the neighborhood, too.
There goes the neighborhood… 😉
Pat Kiernan Brings a Familiar Face to a Brooklyn Neighborhood – NYTimes.com
The former [NYPD] captains spoke of an unrelenting, often unethical pressure to manipulate crime statistics. In addition, the professors studied [NYPD] police and health data and found weird divergences. [NY] City hospital data shows a 90 percent increase in emergency room visits for assaults from 1999 to 2006. But [NYPD] police data for the same period records a nearly 50 percent decrease in assaults.
An all staff at #wef. (Taken with Instagram at World Economic Forum)
May the FOURTH be with you…
Happy Star Wars Day!!!
I love these #OWS posters. /via #occuprint: posters from the occupy movement.
Did you hear that the enterprise arrived in NYC?!?!
The parties have become more polarized in recent decades, several academic studies have found. The demise of the conservative “Dixiecrats” in the 1960s and ’70s made the Democratic Party more liberal, and Republicans have moved even further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left, the studies show.
Elections like Tuesday’s suggest Democrats may be taking the Republicans’ cue, driven by the same activist forces that pushed them rightward. “In civics class in high school, you learn there are 435 members of Congress, and every one of them could lose in the next election. Now we’re down to less than 100 who can ever get beat in a general election,” lamented Representative Mike Ross of Arkansas, a Blue Dog co-chairman who is retiring from Congress this year. “So the Democrats run to their corner. The Republicans run to their corner, and as a result the country is being run by the extremes.”
“Redistricting,” he added, “has been bad for the country.”
2 House Democrats Defeated After Opposing Health Law – NYTimes.com
The century is going to suck.
SPARQL Pony, a high maintenance content creator who is unprepared for the harsh reality of metadata management.