The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood

To find out if a corporation can be a better me than I can. Click here for more about the project

[kmikeym]

You use the world "we" a lot, describing different things that KmikeyM does. Who is in this "we"?

The “we” is a collective that includes me and all the shareholders. Because I’ve given control to them I am no longer alone. My shareholders are always with me. They guide my actions directly when I ask them questions and also indirectly when I think about what they would want me to do. I do very little, but we do a lot.

[basedpotatochip]

[infoneer-pulse]

Adults make eye contact between 30% and 60% of the time in an average conversation, says the communications-analytics company Quantified Impressions. But the Austin, Texas, company says people should be making eye contact 60% to 70% of the time to create a sense of emotional connection, according to its analysis of 3,000 people speaking to individuals and groups. One barrier to contact is the use of mobile devices for multitasking. Among twentysomethings, “it’s almost become culturally acceptable to answer that phone at dinner, or to glance down at the baseball scores,” says Noah Zandan, president of Quantified Impressions. (A common feint, texting while maintaining eye contact, not only is difficult but also comes off as phony.)

The Decline of Eye Contact - WSJ.com (via infoneer-pulse)

[iamdanw]

Your employer pays you in cash, because there are no electronic payments. Which is just as well, really, because you need cash. There are no automated payments such as direct debits, so you pay all your household bills in cash. Credit and debit cards are no longer accepted anywhere, so you buy all your shopping and petrol for your car with cash. You can’t make phone or internet purchases. If you have more than one account, you can’t transfer money between your accounts. If only one of your accounts has ATM access, once that account is empty, you are stuck with no money.

Coppola Comment: The broken Euro (via iamdanw)

[new-aesthetic]

The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period. This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Opinion: The Internet is a surveillance state - CNN.com (via new-aesthetic)

[iamdanw]

I don’t want to be a designer, a marketer, an illustrator, a brander, a social media consultant, a multi-platform guru, an interface wizard, a writer of copy, a technological assistant, an applicator, an aesthetic king, a notable user, a profit-maximizer, a bottom-line analyzer, a meme generator, a hit tracker, a re-poster, a sponsored blogger, a starred commentator, an online retailer, a viral relayer, a handle, a font or a page. I don’t want to be linked in, tuned in, ‘liked’, incorporated, listed or programmed. 
I don’t want to be a brand, a representative, an ambassador, a bestseller or a chart-topper. I don’t want to be a human resource or part of your human capital. I don’t want to be an entrepreneur of myself.

The anti-preneur manifesto | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters (via iamdanw)

[journo-geekery]

Each Open App, Mouse Click & Keyboard Hit During 2.5 Years - information aesthetics

Original:  Every Day of my Life by digital artist Marcin Ignac.

Infosthetics summarizes:

Each horizontal line represents a single day, while each block stands for a specific use of the computer, such as the color of the most foreground app running at a given moment, a mouse click (red poster), or a keyboard hit (yellow poster). Accordingly, black areas are those periods when the computer is turned off. 

[iamdanw]

A new generation of parents is now taking solutions from the workplace and transferring them home. From accountability checklists to family branding sessions, from time-shifting meals to more efficient conflict resolution, families are finally reaping the benefits of decades of groundbreaking research into group dynamics. The result is a bold new blueprint for happy families.

Run Your Family Like a Business - WSJ.com (via iamdanw)

[new-aesthetic]

What if we could receive real-time feedback on our social interactions? Would unbiased third party monitors be better suited to interpret situations and make decisions for the parties involved? How might augmenting our experience help us become more aware in our relationships, shift us out of normal patterns, and open us to unexpected possibilities? I am developing a system like this for myself using Amazon Mechanical Turk. During a series of dates with new people I meet on the internet, I will stream the interaction to the web using an iPhone app. Turk workers will be paid to watch the stream, interpret what is happening, and offer feedback as to what I should do or say next. This feedback will be communicated to me via text message.

social turkers, project by Lauren McCarthy. (via new-aesthetic)

[sunfoundation]

Every Day of My Life

Every Day of My Life is a visualization of my computer usage statistics from the last 2.5 years. Each line represents one day and each colorful block is the most foreground app running at the given moment. Black areas are periods when my computer is not turned on. Seeping patterns (or lack of them) and time of holidays and travel (longer gaps) can be therefore easily identified.

[topherchris]

[Man gets Romney campaign tattoo on forehead after auctioning ad space]

[corporatepersonhood]

I don't think we'd want to end corporate personhood in the sense that ordinary people, including people in the Occupy Wall Street movement, may want to get together and form groups, which should have respect of the legal process. What we might want to do, and this is what the Occupy Wall Street folks have right, is recognize the different characteristic features of large groups invested with powerful amounts of capital in our political process. What Waite was attentive to in 1886 in the Santa Clara County case was that corporations didn't have to be treated the same as natural persons. They were metaphysical persons. And that fact was something that the law could take into account.

What Is The Basis For Corporate Personhood? : NPR

[corporatepersonhood]

For me, the question isn’t whether corporations are persons, so eager to acquire the rights afforded individuals if not all of the responsibilities, but rather that today’s complex world requires corporations to be more than persons. We need them to be citizens, in the broadest, most far-reaching sense of the word.

Corporations: Personhood Conferred; Citizenship Earned - Forbes

[corporatepersonhood]

The Unincorporated man by Dani Kollin and Eytan Kollin

The Unincorporated Man is a social/political/economic novel that takes place in the utopian/dystopian future, after civilization has fallen into complete economic collapse and been revived. This reborn civilization is one in which every individual is incorporated at birth, and spends many years trying to attain control over his or her own life by getting a majority of his or her own shares—a task made all the more difficult given that modern medicine has created extraordinarily long life spans.

[corporatepersonhood]

Corporations are people, my friend

[corporatepersonhood]

Letting “Singularity” represent, essentially, a buzz word for a future radically transformed by technology, my “Steal This Singularity” notion was simply that the transhuman future should not be dominated by big capital and/or authoritarian government; and that — contrary to the reassurances of many glib futurists — this requires some intentionality, both in terms of programming and activism.

Steal This Singularity: Entry #1 - RU Sirius

[corporatepersonhood]

I’m interested in the aesthetics of the corporate readable world, and their truly alien gaze. Corporations communicate to us through money, press-releases, and advertising, always advertising. For a glimpse of the corporate readable world, look to Twitter’s routinely useless “who to follow” panel, Klout’s laughable ideas about what you are influential about, Facebook’s clumsy attempts to get you to join a dating site, and Google’s demented, personalized, Gmail ads.

On the Leakiness of Surveillance Culture, the Corporate Gaze, and What That Has To Do With the New Aesthetic | Quiet Babylon