Are you employed by a corporation you'd like to sabotage? Would you like to be paid cash money to perform acts of sabotage against your employer? Perhaps you'd rather help finance corporation sabotage and subversion. Or maybe you simply have a brilliant subversive scheme which you'd like other, possibly like-minded people to see and act upon. Interested? Welcome to the world of the ®™ark Corporation. ®™ark (say ART-mark) is a privately owned legally registered corporation which employs familiar corporate and free market methodology to subvert and sabotage corporate control. It acts as a clearing house for ideas and acts of anti-corporate sabotage, connecting planning, funding, saboteurs and thorough public relations media promotion. This 35 minute video contains several short promotional presentations describing how ®™ark works, it's history, and the ideology under which it operates.

All the material that ®™ark generates, either in this video, or on their website , conforms to standard corporate production values. Their logo glows and spins impressively. Talking heads deliver polished sound-bites of information. Canned inspirational music underscores every computer animated sequence rendered in ugly, futuristic graphics. These people understand Power Point and are not afraid to use it. Any of the segments from the video could blend seamlessly with any CNN business report. Images and simple concepts are hammered home through repetition. It's easy to forget that ®™ark acts in opposition to corporate culture when it uses that culture so effectively, but that's the beauty part. And when clips of official media (NBC, CNN, Dutch TV) coverage of ®™ark actions are inserted, any ironic distance vanishes. The ®™ark corporate virus looks like any other; you have to listen closely to see the difference.

In 1993, ®™ark helped organize the sabotage of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls by the BLO, or Barbie Liberation Organization. A factory worker was paid with funds channeled through ®™ark to switch the voice boxes of the two toys, causing Barbie to gruffly kick-ass and Joe to eagerly shop for a new dress. 300 dolls were sabotaged and sold, and ®™ark has aggressively publicized the event ever since. They've publicized the sabotage of a popular computer war game by incorporating homo-erotic actions into game play. And they've produced an illegal resampled CD of Beck songs, which they promoted by informing Beck's lawyers and the media, incriminating themselves immediately upon release. While the pig system of corporate control may remain unshaken by these actions, ®™ark is in it for the long haul. The amount of media coverage they've gotten already promises an exciting future as more potential saboteurs become aware of the ®™ark system.

One of the attractions of ®™ark lies in it's anonymous nature. We don't meet the CEO. The only "personality" is Andrei Codrescu, a regular NPR commentator, who heads up one of ®™ark's "Mutual Funds." Codrescu delivers some great sound-bites, like "corporations should be assumed guilty until proven innocent," but the viewer never really gets a sense of who is behind ®™ark. The mystery makes it interesting. There is a scene where two ®™ark representatives, their heads obscured by giant black balloons talk at length about ®™ark's methods. But they simply reiterate what is explained elsewhere in the video. It's a classic public relations exercise; the press conference that regurgitates the brochure. In another scene, we see masked workers packaging videos for a mass mailing. It's a terrorist image, as if the videos were bombs, but speech of the revolutionary as he affixes labels and explains where the hundreds of videos are going, repeats the ®™ark ideology without offering much insight into the personality behind the actions. Are there hundreds of people working at ®™ark, or only two? Can't tell, and it only makes the story more interesting.

The video offers a little historical background on the 14th amendment to the Constitution, which as they explain, conferred the rights of individuals to corporations without any corresponding responsibilities. I haven't read the Constitution in a while, so I'm not sure if that's spelled out point blank (I remember the 14th amendment as the "free the slaves" amendment right after the civil war) or the result of a Supreme Court ruling. But it's the basis of what ®™ark does. Their argument is that by granting citizen status on huge, potentially eternal, profit gathering mechanisms like corporations, individual citizens are at a hopeless disadvantage. Politically, this is certainly true, as activism has been reduced to fund-raising. And this is why the trade unions were formed at the turn of the last century, to organize labor in opposition to the force of capital. By organizing and acting as a corporation itself, ®™ark provides a way for individuals to "privatize" their discontent and put it into action. This involves fund-raising and direct actions, but what ®™ark seems to be best at is consciousness-raising. The ®™ark corporate cloak hopes to make you aware of all the other, more insidious corporate entities that surround and influence us. Watch this video.

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