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The Corporate Egregore

  
 
LVX23
05:14 / 02.08.04
Here's an excerpt from an article I've written over at Key23:

An egregore is a magickal entity that functions with its own will. It is unique from a deity or godform in that it is explicitly a human creation, rather than an inherent archetype or psychic representation. It is given life by the intent of its creator and is initially designed to fulfill a certain goal. This is typically the role of a servitor as a servant to its master. But if the servitor gains enough power it can become an egregore, independent from the will of its creator. It takes on a life of its own. When the Nike execs go home for the evening, the egregore lives on in media, in the minds of consumers, and in its product set behind glass windows, walking the streets, sitting in our homes. Indeed, if successful it will persist through generations, drawing devoted servants into its halls - servants who will work hard to extend its presence in the noosphere.

Satire and cultural appropriation are indicators that a meme has grown beyond the scale of its original intent. As it passes through more and more heads its identity expands further into the global mind. As the egregore yields more of its identity to the mass culture, it grows beyond the control of its servants. They must simply respond and adapt to the consumer climate. There is a subtle feedback loop here. The egregore influences culture, which in turn sets greater demands on the egregore and its product.

Brand association with genres, lifestyles, and cultural identity bring meaning and depth to the inherent soullesness of the corporate egregore. It’s power grows as it occupies more bandwidth in memespace, and as it clothes itself in emotional aggregates, feeding on dreams & desire. As pop culture evolves, so too will the masks of the egregore, enlisting celebrities and popular trends to peddle its product. Even after the inevitable demise of its material foundation, the egregore lives on as a relic of antiquity - a memory of pop culture.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
06:06 / 02.08.04
I'm impressed though I must state that you are likely to have Gypsey Lantern disagree with you, if memory serves me right

I believe it was about a month or so ago that I brought up a thread about Egregores, Servitors and such. I too believed that Servitors, sufficiently empowered could attain Egregore status but (and I hope I am not misquoting him here) GypseyLantern thought they were two seperate and pretty much mutually exclusive entities

For me , I still have trouble distinguishing between a Group Servitor and an Egregore but your assertion that an Egregore has a 'will of it's own' does strike me as a distinguishing feature, irrespective as to who is right or wrong over this issue

Sorry to bring this up and if I am misquoting Gypsey Lantern, then i sincerely apologise

I thought your article read very well though
 
 
trouser the trouserian
13:34 / 02.08.04
LVX
That's a well-argued and well-written essay. So here's some observations.

My general problem with the commonly-expressed idea that egregores are 'group minds' and therefore in order to influence the behaviour of the group one can just 'tap into' the egregore directly is IMO, rather simplistic, if only as the supposition seems only to get applied to others, and not to ourselves. If someone were to announce that they had tapped into "the Barbelith Egregore" and declare that through doing so, they were manipulating our behaviour, would we accept this? I certainly wouldn't! It seems to me that its too easy, by drawing on ideas such egregores, to paint "other people's" behaviour as simplistic, whilst retaining the fantasy that "ours" is of course, complex (because we of course, are magicians).

The corporation is unified in its focus, executes on its desires, and manipulates resources in accordance with its intent. It is in many ways an individual composed of many cooperative cells. Like the human body, the corporation maintains its identity and function in spite of the continuous recycling of its cells.

But do corporations really function like this? A discussion by Fenwick Rysen proposes that:
Corporations gain and lose CEOs. Would the corporation be any better with a different man at the helm? Very rarely is this the case.

Debatable to say the least, as there are numerous cases where corporations have got into serious difficulties due to changes at the helm, or through irresponsible behaviour by CEOs.
Its true that legally, corporations are considered to be seperate from their owners and shareholders, but its quite a leap to say from that basis that they "behave" as autonomous individuals. Rather, one can view them as complex systems interacting within other larger, complex systems.

As you say later on, corporations are quite fragile in some respects:

Conversely, the most terrifying reality of the corporation is that it is impermanent. It’s always struggling against market factors, shareholders, and fickle customers; employee negligence & stupidity; corporate watchdogs and bold journalists.

All of which provides of approaches for attacking them, such as: attempting to magically influence a companies' share price; attempting to magically empower the 'exposure' of a company's unethical behaviour so that it receives wider attention in the media, or even taking magical potshots at the companys' mainframe. Observing a companies' behaviour and current state can suggest numerous courses of action for those inclined, but you don't have to take on board this "theory of corporate egregores" in order to do so.

Some links which might be useful:

here's an interesting article on how a small township has passed ordinances that restrict corporate behaviour. Also of relevance:
Deb Bodeau's Metabeings and Individuals, L.S. Bernstein's thooughtful essay Egregors or Paco Xander Nathan's Chasing Egregors and Previous thread on magic against corporations here

more later.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
14:49 / 02.08.04
LVX
I just came across the ideas of Joel Bakan, which seem germane to this thread.

Joel Bakan, ( University of British Columbia law professor) author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power posits that corporations are 'metaphorically' psychopathic:

I think the metaphor of the psychopath is very helpful for underlining an institutional feature that all publicly traded corporations have, that is that they are required to always and only pursue their own self-interest. A second institutional feature corporations have is that they are deemed by law to be persons. So what we do is say, if the corporation is deemed to be a person, what kind of person is it? It’s a person that’s structured and required by law to be purely self-interested. Well, if that person were a human being, and were structured to be purely self-interested, and unable to be concerned about others, we would call that person a psychopath. So the metaphor is quite powerful in underlining those two institutional features of the corporation. It’s important that we not take the metaphor too literally and think we’re going to be carting corporations off to institutions, and we’re not suggesting that the individuals in corporations are psychopaths. We’re simply saying, this is a fact about how corporations are put together, and the psychopath metaphor is a useful way of illustrating that fact, in a cheeky way.

Interview here

Interestingly, in view of yr comments regarding the lifespan of corporate entities LVX, Bakan says later:

I think that all dominant institutions ultimately have a certain narrative or life arc. They start small, they get big, and they diminish again. The Communist Party is a good example of that. The church is a good example. The Egyptian empire doesn’t exist any more, nor does the Roman empire. These institutions, at the time they were at their peak, seemed invincible, it seemed like they would be around forever. So if you look at history, to suggest that the corporation is somehow immune to that process is a bit odd - the idea that corporate capitalism is the first system through which we organize ourselves that is somehow going to last forever. Because none have lasted forever.

Review of The Corporation:The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
 
 
LVX23
16:59 / 02.08.04
Some good points here... I'll try to respond more when I have time. For now, check out this article by John Perry Barlow about protesting the upcoming RNC:

Excerpt:
Besides, anyone with an explicit intention to protest
Republican policies, anyone carrying an anti-Bush
sign, indeed, anyone wearing neither a smile nor a
Bush button, is likely to be corralled into one of the
remote "Free Speech Zones" that Mayor Bloomberg will
graciously provide his guests, there to vent his fury
upon his fellow infuriated. None for me, thanks.

I have another idea, and you can help. Indeed, as
wild, fun-loving BarlowFriendz, I'm counting on you to
help.

I want to dance in the streets.

I don't want to confront the Republicans. I want to
discombobulate them. I don't want to argue with them,
which would only convince them further, I want to
throw them off their game. I don't want to be
aggressive in my discontent. God knows there's been
plenty of that on all sides. I want to be genial. But
disconcerting.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
18:51 / 02.08.04
*bump*

There was a discussion along these same lines in the Switchboard, regarding whether Branding has won or not. I made a comment about corporations being organic entities, and thus susceptible to the same durations as any other organism. Which seems, "metaphorically" or not, to be Bakan's point.

here (new window)
 
 
trouser the trouserian
15:08 / 03.08.04
This is typically the role of a servitor as a servant to its master. But if the servitor gains enough power it can become an egregore, independent from the will of its creator. It takes on a life of its own.

LVX
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be making a distinction between a servitor and and an egregore in terms that the servitor 'isn't' independent from its creator, but given enough 'power', it takes on a life of its own and is treated as if it had an independent 'will'. So perhaps one could say that a servitor isn't considered to be 'sentient' (in terms of having a 'personality' perhaps) but an egregore is considered to be sentient - at least from the point of view of a magicians' interaction with it. Does that make sense?

I generally tend to view servitors as a magical equivalent of a background program - something that - once launched - you can basically forget about, although having said that, if some event occurrs which I have decided to interpret as a 'sign' of that servitors' activity, I focus on the servitor momentarily and say "thank you". I've had a 'book finding' servitor active for about 10-11 years now. So t'other day, popping into a bookshop just on the offchance of finding something worthwhile, I found myself thinking "There was something I thought I'd be interesting to read - what was it ... oh yes, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Now do they have a copy? Oh yes. Oh, it's a heavily commented edition. Don't want that one. Let's see if I can find an edition where it's just Sanskrit-English." After hunting around for about an hour I found a very slim volume which was just what I wanted. Now, both the initial "prompt" (me remembering a book I wanted to read) and the event of "finding" exactly the edition I wanted, I attribute to the activity of the book-finding servitor. This increases my 'confidence' in the servitor's ability to do its job. Just as an aside, the servitor seems to function most effectively when I am just browsing on the offchance (i.e. I'm in a 'drift' frame of mind) - if I'm actively seeking a particular title, I find that it's not much help.
So what?
What have I done here? I've taken an intention - "finding books" and decided to identify a bunch of criteria/events associated with that with the activity of an autonomous 'entity' which is little more than a name, a visualised image, and some associated behaviours that I carry out when I decide that the "servitor" has been effective. I don't consider it 'sentient' any more than I think of the FTP client on my desktop as being 'sentient', but equally, I consider it to be autonomous from me in much the same way that I'd consider a desktop application I'd written to be autonomous.

Now, if I share the 'source code' for that servitor, then anyone who wants to make the identification between it and "finding books" can do so, and we assume that the more people use it, the more effective at carrying out its instructions the entity becomes. However, unless people let me know that they've been using it, there's no way that I can know this.

When I've been involved with creating group servitors, there's usually been some kind of means of collecting feedback on people's individual experiences with the servitor concerned - usually with the effect that striking successes are 'talked up' as 'proof' of the servitors' effectiveness, whilst 'failures' get quietly ignored. So for group servitors, there's a process of selective attribution of meaning/significance going on amongst participants, which, IMO contributes to the overall experience. We once 'tested' how group processes help 'shape' magical experiences by giving a control group an object that - we told them - had been used in a ritual, and asked them to 'psychometrise' it. They came up with a highly-detailed 'account' of the ritual and what part the object had played in it. Of course, the object hadn't been used in a ritual at all, and when this was revealed, the group were quite angry about it, but it led to an interesting discussion about the processes by which the group arrived at its collective belief. I mention this as I feel that the usage of the term "egregore" to describe the seeming 'collective' aspect of group behaviour 'hides' a whole heap of other stuff going on, that isn't well understood.

W.E. Butler The Egregore of a school (1970) writes, concerning the egregore:

You may have come across the word in books, more particularly in books issued in Europe, where the term is much more common than it is here in England. It may best be defined as a "collective group mind", in both its conscious and sub-conscious aspects, which is formed by the united thinking and feeling of a number of like minded people.
and
As a general rule the thought-form is built around some person or group of persons, and as the numbers admitted increase, so the power and range of the Egregore increases, and a peculiar reciprocal action takes place. Each member of the group pours energy into the collective thought-form but, equally, into each member there also passes the influence of the group as a whole.

Interestingly enough, Butler comments towards the end of the article:
Nevertheless that Inner Plane assisstance has been and still is being given to the Egregore of the SOL course. ...I may say however, that one of these helpers is The Master of Magic to whom we referred in the book "The Magician, His Training and Work". Our Egregore is contacted on the Inner Planes, and on the outer levels.

Now, if we cast aside the 'inner' interpretation of "group minds" that Butler is spinning,
we can think of egregores in terms of the sense of collective participation/identification (the feeling of "we-ness") that arises between individuals. In my experience of working in magical groups, this 'feeling' is very fragile, and once it gets shattered, no amount of magical ritual directed at the egregore (rather than the interpersonal issues involved) will bring it back. And being honest, this is one of my problems with the whole "egregore" concept - that it's far easier for some magicians to try and deal with interpersonal conflicts by 'giving energy to the egregore' than to sit down amongst themselves and discuss just why the group is falling apart and no one trusts each other any more.
 
 
LVX23
22:03 / 03.08.04
AofG wrote:
So perhaps one could say that a servitor isn't considered to be 'sentient' (in terms of having a 'personality' perhaps) but an egregore is considered to be sentient - at least from the point of view of a magicians' interaction with it. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying.

Later you talk about an egregore as an intentional manifestation of a group mind. In this definition the egregore is strictly defined and operates within the parameters of the group.

What I'm talking about is when the egregore gets away from the original focus of intent, when it moves into a much larger space where it continues to be fed without any control.

Imagine that one of the group members grows disatisfied and breaks away, then forms a new group that engages the original servitor. In their workings they modify its original behavior/intent to accomodate a new set of goals. Then suppose one of the new members is a graphic designer for an advert company and uses the egregore sigil in a major ad campaign. Now it's flooding through the culture and tied to a popular brand of soap, or a type of car. Once it's been injected in the cultural memespace anyone can access it, feed it, and influence it. Indeed, many people do all of these unconsciously.

Basically, the more people that "touch" the servitor/egregore, the more it grows and can take on autonomy.
 
 
gravitybitch
01:12 / 04.08.04
The article from John Perry Barlow has generated a bit of excitement - it's worth checking out, and worth volunteering to dance if you're in NYC! (Or elsewhere - if you look at #49, it looks like smartmobs elsewhere are also encouraged).
 
 
trouser the trouserian
07:40 / 04.08.04
What I'm talking about is when the egregore gets away from the original focus of intent, when it moves into a much larger space where it continues to be fed without any control.

Okay. At the start of the thread you described egregores as ...given life by the intent of its creator and is initially designed to fulfill a certain goal.

Which I read in terms of egregores being deliberately created. But are corporations deliberately creating egregores? I'm pretty sure that the company I work for doesn't have one. But, if one accepts this proposition that "corporate egregores" move into larger spaces, isn't that what they're supposed to do anyway?

Can you be more explicit about this issue of "control"? Whenever this issue comes up in relation to "servitors getting out of control" - which seems to be a very widespread belief - I can only fall back on my own experience. In over 20 years of creating servitors - as an individual and in groups both open and closed - I can't honestly recall any instance of a servitor "going out of control", nor have I had any direct feedback from colleagues to suggest that this happens on a regular basis. So, whilst not discounting the possibility that it could happen, I mostly view this notion of "servitors going out of control" as the occult equivalent of an urban legend. The only recent example I can find (online) of this phenomena is various fragmentary accounts of Fenwick Rysen & co.'s Fotamecus entity, which according to them, began as a sigil, then grew progressively into a servitor, an egregore, and now, a god. (see article here)

There's an interesting line in the above article:
There were even times when he was strong enough to get us to our destinations before we had left for them. Certainly not the work of a puny servitor!

Maybe its just me, but assertions like this might just indicate that there's perhaps a degree of winding-up going on here, or at the very least, excessive 'talking up' of an experience? In any case, from reading the various accounts, I very much get the sense that here, a bunch of people 'decided' that Fotamecus had evolved, neatly 'proving' the theory, of course.

Here's an amusing anecdote that for me, illustrates some of the problems of magically attacking egregores. There once was a magical organisation who saw themselves as inheritors of the Western Esoteric Tradition, and very "white light". One day, one of their big cheeses opened a small press pagan 'zine and found that "someone" was advertising - horror of horrors - "chaos jewelery" and trading under a name that just happened to be the same as the acroymn that the order's name collapsed into. So letters were dispatched to the various magazine editors who were running these ads asking them to reject any further ads 'cos the order felt it would ruin their image to be associated (however tenuously) with (shudder) chaos magic. Of course, most of the 'zine editors told them to get stuffed. A few months later, this same big cheese sent a circular to initiates of a certain grade telling them that this company was actually a front for a black-magical organisation (I believe the phrase was "Left-hand path adepts") and could they please gird up their armour and collectively invoke the powers of the Light to destroy them. Still later, the big cheeses announced that the operation had been a success, the left-hand path orders' egregore had been "destroyed" and it had been a major success for the order. Treble sherrys all round!

Well. There was no 'black magical order' (and so, no egregore). Just two guys in a flat in North London flogging chaos rings by mail order. How I got to find out about all this was that a friend who edited a pagan 'zine showed me the letter she'd had from the order. A few years later, I met a bloke who'd been a member of said order, and happened to mention the letter to him, and he recounted the rest of it. Needless to say, the guys selling the chaos rings were highly amused by the whole affair.

More later. I'm glad you brought up the issue of corporate branding as I think its an area worth exploring in some depth. As a graphic designer I get to manipulate hundreds of company logos, often on a daily basis.
 
 
Joetheneophyte
09:57 / 04.08.04
my experience with Fotamecus was that he shaved about 20 minutes off a journey that usually tooko 70 minutes

Whilst I can accept that I may just have been walking faster...I was not conscious or fit enough to explain that type of time compression/saving etc


I was impressed but nothing like the people in the article originally claimed. I never got there before I set off or anything
 
 
trouser the trouserian
12:10 / 04.08.04
from the article:
The sigil can be further re-engineered by altering it to have a satirical or contradictory message. It can then be re-associated in trance & ritual, or printed on t-shirts & bumper stickers. Then send them to the employees. Use agitprop to re-image the corporate meme in a way that is counter-productive to its goals. Reveal it’s hidden secret in public satire.

I guess a good example of this would be the furore over mikerowesoft.com (article on CNET) last August. Mike Rowe says that he received over $8,000 in donations to his legal fund and eventually got from Microsoft ...a subscription to MSDN, a trip down to the Microsoft campus for the annual Microsoft Tech Fest, a fully paid for Microsoft certified course to take... His forum has nearly 5,000 members. Microsoft were seen as behaving stupidly (again) and retreated. Mike Rowe later flogged a copy of the legal documents & letters sent by Microsoft on ebay.

What's interesting about this story is that Microsoft were pretty much in a no-win situation as soon as the story "broke", especially as under US Trademark law they had to go on the attack (Linus Torvalds on Linux and Trademark Law

Adbusting, by groups like The Billboard Liberation Front and SavageCentral has long been utilised as a way of attacking corporate structures. Here's an article about the spoof Dow Chemicals website, which managed to 'fool' quite a few journalists.

Corpwatch is another good resource, as is McSpotlight

But of course this kind of stuff isn't directly 'magical' in the sense of the "I do it all on the astral plane so I won't get caught" ethos.
 
 
illmatic
12:30 / 04.08.04
"I do it all on the astral plane so I won't get caught" ethos".

That's my problem with a lot of magico-politcal stuff. People feel that they're powerless when faced with political/coporate/whatever interests (correctly, a lot of the time) and reach out for magickal solutions - often it seems to me because they seem easiest, and don't require the time and commitment of good old fashioned activism. A|t it's worst this lets you engage with an imaginary enemy, while still giving you the satisfaction/ego-boost of feeling like you've done something. This isn't to say that political magick is also ineffectual - II can see for instance how public rituals etc could play part of an anti-corporate/political campaign, or one could engage with the "subvertisment" of logos and ads, something that people have been doing since the Situationists onwards.

My fave one of these is the Encyclopedia Psychedelia cut out Maggie Thatcher doll with instuctions on where to insert needles to open her chakras! Arguably, though this didn't work.... she's still an evil old bitch...
 
 
Joetheneophyte
13:18 / 04.08.04
In light of your comments......and whilst still subjective, has anybody on here got any experience that they are convinced 'proves' that their magicakal work influenced an 'evil' corporation or corrupt politician?

The recent NO BUSH 2004 mentioned how the Egregore of the USA and the founding fathers being members of the Rosicrucians and various Freemason Lodges, probably created Egregores that protect the President and the USA

as such, it would take a pretty powerful magician to affect an entity of this magnitude

Thoughts anyone?
 
 
Gypsy Lantern
13:55 / 04.08.04
Interesting thread. I've been away for a few days so work is nuts, hence still ploughing through it and won't really have enough time to comment much till tomorrow.

Just wanted to clarify this though:

I too believed that Servitors, sufficiently empowered could attain Egregore status but (and I hope I am not misquoting him here) GypseyLantern thought they were two seperate and pretty much mutually exclusive entities

I think you are misquoting me a bit there. I think the problems I had in that other post were around the idea of a God/dess evolving from a Servitor. I'd suggest that the factors by which God/desses are formed are far more complex than a simple matter of "feeding" or "charging" a Servitor entity with "energy". I'd say that a Servitor can conceivably evolve into an egregore, but an egregore is not quite the same thing as a God/dess. Don't want to derail the thread with this, cos its ground we've covered countless times on here. But if you want an insight, or at least an alternative perspective, on the sophisticated process and complex interplay of factors by which the personality of a God/desses is shaped over time, I'd reccomend Karen Davies book "Mama Lola", the biography of a Haitian Vodou Priestess living in Brooklyn. Fascinating stuff, and a world away from the simplistic evolutionary notions of sigil>servitor>godform that are much touted in chaos circles.
 
 
trouser the trouserian
15:33 / 04.08.04
...has anybody on here got any experience that they are convinced 'proves' that their magicakal work influenced an 'evil' corporation or corrupt politician?

That's a very good question. To give a 'hypothetical' example: Let's say a sorcerer decides to attempt to induce a significant drop in share prices for a company within a set period, and lo and behold, the company's shares take a nose-dive within the time-frame that the sorcerer has decided to interpret as indicative of "success". Can the sorcerer just go "Looky here, I did that"? Possibly, but of course in complex systems, simple 'cause-and-effect' relationships are very hard to determine, given the number of factors influencing any given process. At best, IMO, the sorcerer could possibly allow that his or her intervention 'aided' that developing 'event' - gave it a 'nudge' as it were. Occasionally one comes across people who publically announce that some spell they've worked is totally responsible for a major world event (I met a group of magicians in Germany who seemed convinced that they'd started Gulf War I by invoking Typhon), but IMO, to do so is to invite hubris, with all the blindness and delusion it entails.

The recent NO BUSH 2004 mentioned how the Egregore of the USA and the founding fathers being members of the Rosicrucians and various Freemason Lodges, probably created Egregores that protect the President and the USA.

Yeah, but you could also argue that because every U.S. president ever has been a robot controlled by space aliens, and they're not subject to magical attack. It's still supposition. But if there is an "egregore" protecting US presidents, it doesn't seem to be highly effective if you consider how many of them have been assasinated - Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield (was shot but not fatally - had a heart attack 80 days later), and Kennedy.
 
 
LVX23
17:17 / 04.08.04
First off, magickal activism is no excuse not to engage in sociopolitical activism. People should use any tactic that is helpful. IMHO, magickal rebranding or attacks on institutions serve more to disengage the mage from their effects and to re-educate the society about their evils, rather than physically affecting the corporate entity itself.

I'm looking at "corporate egregores" as consensual psychic constructs that inhabit the psyches of everyone exposed to them. This is slightly different than as an explicitly magickal entity created by a group of robed magicians. I'm trying to extend the idea of a demon or magickal entity to include anything that occupies memespace (human thought & imagination - the aether). The idea of the thing is in some ways more powerful and flexible than the thing itself.

To use Nike as an example, just think of how much psychic real estate that idea occupies in the minds of the world. In its employees, in the cities where its factories are located, in media space, in our own heads. It is highly distributed and each one of those minds brings another facet of meaning (and longevity). At some point the collective understanding of Nike became greater than simply the focus of its ad campaigns.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
21:03 / 04.08.04
Magic is not an excuse for ANYTHING. If so, it's escapism and a retreat from whatever you're supposedly confronting.

This is different from deliberately internalizing yourself in order to confront your demons, angels, and whatever memes you run across during the voyage.

This latter is the bulk of anticorp magic - delving inside yourself to discover what is there and deal with it as necessary. But this should be complemented by practical action. They're not separate things. Magic, if anything, is empowering the practical with the...er...other (spiritual, noospheric, etc etc). For example, the POTUS sigil: sure, on its own it'll have a strong effect. But it will be all the stronger if you're running about hanging it in public spaces, discussing its symbolism with others, and spreading the message on the material plane. There's no reason for this to be any less magical than ritual work. Make friends and influence people. It's one of the hardest tricks in the book and easily as much of an inner confrontation as anything else.

We're tossing words about - egregore, mainly - attempting to describe just what a corporation is and why it can so efficiently occupy imaginative space. I agree with LVX in extending magical terms (such as egregore) to anything that occupies memespace and ALSO agree with Gypsy that such things are distinct from dieties and spirits.
Dodging flying vegetables and diving into TOTAL speculation here - dieties and spirits are not human creations. They are organic in that sense, growing as part of the whole world-universe-picture. Corporations have also grown "naturally" but OUT of the human organism, from a synthesis of human minds and intentions. They may even be an embodiment of the Modernist project itself.
As such they can occupy the same, "imaginary" space that spirits/dieties can, but are in essence COMPETING for it. And pulling out many a gain as well. Their presence quite literally makes it harder for people to imagine anything outside the corporate-controlled space. It's not thinking logos constantly; it's having dreams, inventions, abstract and spiritual concepts all influenced by various corporate factions.

(Spirits and corporations all may be competing for noosphere space for all I know, in some giant aetheric bar brawl. My money's on Mab, by the way.)
 
 
Joetheneophyte
06:05 / 05.08.04
when I get a chance I will look up Mab and Potus


the Nestle entity must be massive if that entioty exists on some other plane
 
 
trouser the trouserian
12:48 / 05.08.04
LVX
Thanks for that restatement of what you mean by the term "egregore" in the context of your article. Much clearer, IMO, than what you originally said in the article. I have no problem with magical terminology and concepts being extended, however I do think doing so can be problematic, in that in magic, as with many other modes of knowledge, we're not all reading from the same page, as it were. Re-reading my earlier posts I think its fairly obvious that my 'reading' of the term "egregore" has been shaped by my earlier encounters with the concept in a variety of specific contexts, which have contributed to my current opinion of the term and its associated range of meanings. Yet despite having formed a largely negative opinion of the concept, I've still got a commitment to engage with a discussion on the subject. Why? Because, I'm interested in the wider contexts within which the concept gets used - group dynamics, organisational dynamics and practical sorcery being just three of them. The reason I'm going through all this is that IMO, it illustrates the complexity of an individuals' relationship with an idea. Obviously, if I had no prior engagement with the subject, I wouldn't be posting.

Now I can apply the same reasoning to my interaction with a 'brand'. I work a lot with company logos & brands as part of my daily routine of postflighting & designing adverts, but for most part, I have no engagement with the actual product. So I'd argue that my relationship with those companies is relatively weak, apart from occasionally thinking "Company X, they're idiots, they always send their material in the wrong format." A company with which I have a far more complex relationship is Microsoft. If I can possibly avoid using a Microsoft Product I will. Like many techies, I will quite happily wax lyrical for hours on end about how 'evil' they are. Yet I can't avoid using Microsoft products professionally. A third example might be Google - who are particularly interesting as they've recently achieved that lofty status of their brand becoming a generic term in a similar fashion to Xerox, Kleenex, Spam and Hoover (British folk tend to call all vacuum cleaners "hoovers"). I enjoy using Google (& its various products) and so have quite a positive attitude to them as a company.

Understanding how these complex relationships affect the perception of a brand is of course of some considerable interest to companies. In googling around the net I came across a word.doc entitled The Hermeneutics of Branding which attempts to analyse the relationship between corporate brands and how they are perceived in terms of Hermeneutics. The 3 hermeneutic concepts they apply to the analysis of brands are: intention, reception, and horizon of expectation.
Intention refers to the meanings that the brand creators are attempting to project.
Reception examines the way in which audiences construct meaning around a brand, and how the current perception of a brand is influenced by its history. One of the authors' examples here is of how a 'corporate crisis' colours a brand by "embedding an historical event in its future interpretations." An instance of this process might be the Dow Chemicals spoofing I mentioned upthread, which drew attention to - and thereby reinforced the relationship between Dow Chemicals and the Union-Carbide Bhopal disaster.
horizon of expectation refers to the cultural context that further shapes the perception of a brand - what assumptions the audience make on interacting with a brand. All 3 factors are inter-related.

This model is interesting from a magical perspective as it provides a set of interpretative tools for getting to grips with the complexities of corporate branding. One point that the authors make is how 'bad management' can destroy the economic value of a brand, whilst leaving its symbolic value in place. There's been some spectacular occurrences where brands have been severely 'damaged' if not destroyed when a CEO has been caught out saying something stunningly stupid about his own products. Gerald Ratner springs to mind, famous for describing one of the range of sherry decanters his company produced as "total crap" - a remark that pretty much wiped out Ratners as a company, although Ratners is still 'remembered' as a brand of jewellery. So perhaps an appropriate magical approach would be, when one is assessing a corporate structure in order to determine possible weaknesses to exploit (i.e. 'nudge') - to encourage a key exec to drop a huge gaffe in front of a microphone. Just a thought.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
19:26 / 05.08.04
Quick response team GO!:

"Mab" refers to Queen Mab. see here for recent contexts. POTUS is the sigil/entity? Chad designed for recent political workings.

Anyhoo.
 
 
Skeleton Camera
19:39 / 05.08.04
Absence - first off, you're awesome. Thank you for the continued and hyper-intelligent posts.

Second of all, I was thinking of something along the lines of the "horizon of expectation" today, though I didn't know of the term. If corporations are organic entities then they are dependant upon other entities. A corporation is dependant upon the people/groups who consume its products and fellow corporations that support it (in whichever ways may apply - financially, politically, etc). Thus some of the most severe and dramatic damage can be done to a corporate entity by altering its dependant relationships.

Speaking of, how is the "enlightened CEO" (don't remember the name nor the corp.) faring?
 
 
trouser the trouserian
10:17 / 06.08.04
Seamus
Yes, dependency relationships are worth looking into. For example, take outsourcing. Companies outsourcing Call Centres & IT divisions to India has very much been in the news of late (and China's being tipped as another possible country of choice). The figures look good - wage rate differentials are as low as 10% of what a company would have to pay a call centre employee in the UK or US. But what research there's been thus far indicates that the moves haven't been very popular with end-users. As one consultant put it:
The main problem so far has been the interpretation of the English language and the way it is used. For instance, in India there is a reluctance to admit to, or be perceived as, not understanding a question or requirement and consequently misunderstandings occur. The management of these operations have done a great deal in trying to resolve these language problems by taking Europeans and US teachers out to India to provide language coaching. But it is still the biggest reason for companies reverting to their own country.

John Kemp analyses how outsourcing call centres can negatively impact on customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. I feel that if one's interested in AntiCorp magick, it's worth being aware of these kinds of developments.

If you liked the Hermeneutics article, you may be interested in another interpretive tool - hype cycles. Developed by Gartner, the "Hype Cycle" analyses the responses to the introduction of "new technology", particularly with respect to media "hype".

Another example of a potentially useful model is Hutchin's concept of ecological hyperspace which was originally used by ecologists to map the interactions between different species occupying niches within an ecosystem. Hyperspace in this context being a "theoretical" n-dimensional space. Its also been used by organisational theorists to examine dependency relationships between companies. However, I was first introduced to the concept by Barry Patterson, author of Finding Your Way in the Woods: The Art of Conversation with the Genius Loci, who proposed that we 'borrow' the notion of ecological hyperspace (it's a good buzzword, after all) and consider the 'genius loci' of a site as an emergent property of a locale's ecosystem (which includes weather systems, rock composition etc.,), history, and other factors. Here's what he says in the online version of his book:
A Glade is no more a closed system with discrete edges than is any ecosystem, plant community or, for that matter, human being. When you enter a Glade you become one of its parts. Remember that property of a hologram by which any part contains the information to make the whole thing? The Glade experiences itself through you in a number of different ways & energy exchange takes place in a variety of dimensional contexts, some of which human thought & language cannot categorise.
 
 
Saturn's nod
08:19 / 10.04.07
The recent hideousness of Epop's splatterings over the board space has made me wonder about how people relate to Barbelith at the moment in the dimensions of imagination. So here's a kind of hasty ramble about my worldview and where Barbelith fits in - I hope others of you might also share your views of Barbelith and how it fits with your trajectory of navigating towards the sustainable future?

I love Barbelith (at the moment) and the kinds of things I associate with it are really good quality learning prompts: I think Barbelith reflects back to me what I most need to learn. For example with Epop, he might have some high quality stuff going in his day job, but Barbelith collectively reflected back to him what he needed to learn and change - his communication skills, inability to respect others, problems with the unresolved intellectual debris of his traumatic experiences and so on. When I've done stupid things in this public space and got called on them, I've chosen to treat it as a learning experience which was basically for my benefit about how to interact effectively and successfully with others, how to get over the previous limits I had.

It might be obvious that I too am prone to grandiose ideas, but I have a love for Barbelith as a co-educational hobby. I feel that I learn a lot here, and I do my best to pass on what I've learned as well, in case it's helpful to others. I have a sense that in my story-writing imagination Barbelith can be this interdimensional placenta, which is pulling all of us through towards the good future and our own highest potential.

Communicational skills seem to be crucial for the future - I think it's our ability to reach towards truth together, testing out our thinking, that makes us strong and powerful: it's my own impression that those communication skills are at the heart of conflict transformation, and when we have effective conflict transformation we're starting to cut out the roots of war. Barbelith seems to me to be reasonably intolerant of people who are not prepared to learn interaction protocols and negotiate together towards agreement, which is maybe why a certain kind of person who thrives on their story of 'me alone and mighty' tends not able to participate effectively? Because to participate in the collective learning process it's necessary to develop communication together and collaborate and demands a certain amount of humility I think, and that means not holding to cold war zero-sum models of power.

I also love the image of a secret world government satellite (I have a hazy impression that's what Grant Morrison's Invisibles comics had the name Barbelith standing for, please correct me if I've got that wrong as I haven't read them?) because I think every bit of thinking and discussing about the important stuff in the world is useful, and I know I sometimes take along the thinking I experience here when I meet my MP or wrangle ideas with people in the civil service or do my trustee work or whatever, so it obviously has a rippling-out effect in my life.

If any of our analysis and discussion here gets some really solid critical status, it's almost bound to be infectious. I know I tend to jabber about stuff I've read on here to my work colleagues, often without being conscious it was written by one of you here rather than elsewhere in the internets, because much as I try I'm not always yet able to trace the source of my thoughts. The magicks you put in your words, stuff you want to bring to people's attention - that's certainly going out of my mouth towards the people I encounter, in case you wonder.

I guess I passionately believe that good quality thinking can help the world make progress towards that future of sustainable inhabitation of earth. And that the culture we are making with this place has a strong basis for testing some of those moves towards the future: whether they are truly democratic and liberatory, in the sense of interactive and participatory, not denying the reality of others. I'm not prepared to accept that sustainable human life on earth could be based on sexism and racism, it's my own belief that the mechanisms necessary to steer towards sustainable life are very much in common with those necessary to dismantle male dominance and white supremacy. It's tasty ideas with clear appeal to others that are powerful enough to move us all towards the sustainable future, not top-down imposition and continuation of dominance/control. I have a strong conviction that the good future can only be a participatory/democratic one even though a green dictatorship might look like a shortcut.

For the record - this might be obvious - I'm not all about Grant Morrison, have not really engaged with comics as a medium for world-changing thought or otherwise. I don't think this place has been much about Morrison's work for the years I've been on here, though that's few vs people like say Lurid Archive, and obviously my choices of thread and fora to read affect that - I don't think there's much about GM in Headshop, Switchboard, Policy, Lab, AF&D - maybe the comics forum is more about him but I don't think I've ever read a thread there. I understand Barbelith started from a group of people involved in an Invisibles fan project, but necessarily to prosper has become something other than that. I want to find out whether my impressions about that stuff are v skewed wrt those of others.
 
 
Quantum
13:47 / 10.04.07
Great post. "when we have effective conflict transformation we're starting to cut out the roots of war." I'm going to steal that and use it.

I agree with you, the metaphor I would use for Barbelith-at-it's-best is Iain Bank's Culture. I hope we're trying to work out what a community that doesn't propogate the power dynamics of the past would look like and how it would work. If we can have a culture that attracts people because they want to have high-level discussion in a place where tolerance is enforced, and still be able to have a laugh and talk about bumblebees, then that's a win if you ask me and might encourage similar models elsewhere. It's nothing to do with the Invisibles, that was just epop's projection onto the board, due to not reading it and assuming everyone was like his mental pic of a Barbelithian. Which, I think, tells us more about him than the board. I think U and ME can agree he's an ASS.
 
  
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