The International Database of Corporate Commands

The International Database of Corporate Commands is a research initiative of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things.

Research Abstract:

At what scale is power deployed in a "free" society?

The forces of control in our society are deployed at the scale of the micro-, the nano-, the infinitely small. Through sophisticated demographic technologies, marketing and IT departments have succeeded in inventing and colonizing a realm that did not previously exist: the "pre-individual" or "dividual".

Individuals in free-market capitalist societies believe themselves to be "free" though their wishes, desires, values and futures are predicted by expert demographics and engineered by entertainment machines. As a preliminary foray into this territory, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things has targeted Corporate Commands as one manifestation of this deployment of power.

A Corporate Command is an instruction work, a call to action in the form of an imperative: "Just Do It", "Turn on the Future", "Live without Limits", "Tap into great taste", "Think different", "Ride the light".

It is the hypothesis of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things that these commands, largely and consciously ignored by a public over-saturated with advertisements, function at the level of the infinitely small. Tiny events that do not disturb one's consciousness or disrupt one's identity as "free" agents, these commands seep under the surface of the individual and lay claim to the territory of the Deleuzian Virtual. Desire, memory, and future potentiality become territories for conquest and tactics for control.

By compiling, tabulating, concretizing and enacting these commands in the International Database of Corporate Commands, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things seeks to better understand the mechanisms behind this deployment of power and its larger cultural ramifications.

Are companies controlling your every thought? Are the memes leaking into your brain?

Over at the International Database of Corporate Commands their hoping to find this out by collecting advertising slogans and seeing what impact they have on people's lives.

Interesting research at the moment they are in the collection phase, so not much to see.