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.
Would
you like to not know more?
®™ark home page
Mission Statement
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