As exercise for our Final Major project proposal submission, we have been asked to reverse engineer an existing design project and create a project proposal for it. The project which I chose to analyse is Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc. by Jennifer Morone, RCA Design Interactions graduate.

Within a list of few projects proposed to analyse, I immediately chose this one, which besides being very smart and original, it’s quite related to my research on privacy, data collection and surveillance systems.

Title:
Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc.

Field of Study:
Speculative design and finance.

Context:
Actual capitalist society, where the value of information and data has no price.
Currently, we do not own our identity nor control our data shadows that are created and captured by modern technology and sold for profit by governments and industry.
We are in an era of data slavery, where governments which were created to protect people and their rights are actually making efforts to better track and monitor our actions to get a clearer picture of how to better target our consumptive behaviour. In this time of crony capitalism security and protection is way less important than economic success and so also technologies thought for something else such as surveillance are now mainly used for monetary purposes.

Rationale:
Using data as a means of power, the intent is to create an extreme solution to overtake the capitalistic tendency to collect everybody’s data.
The data a person creates should be considered their property: it has a monetary value in the economic system that our lives are structured around. Data can be seen as a resource that people create and that is currently being exploited. Instead everybody should be getting their fair share.
Furthermore there’s irony on several levels: to illustrate the exploitative aspect of capitalism on resources and what this looks like at the extreme level of and by the individual; the ways in which we are conditioned to use our bodies and what we are ‘allowed’ to do with them; and the fact that you can potentially sell anything as long as there’s a willing buyer.

Now that I have incorporated myself, I have legally created another person with my name in the eyes of the law. In the USA my corporate self now has not only the same but even more rights and benefits than I do as an individual. My corporate self takes on any responsibility and I am not liable for its actions or debt, only my initial investments. This is why we see companies able to go bankrupt, get bailouts or get away with ruthlessness without anyone being charged or responsible for what happens.
I think that there will always be perversion as long we need to gain or earn money, or some form of currency, to meet our basic needs.

Methodology/Methods:
– The starting point of the research is the current economical situation and how companies make money out of data, how they track data and if, eventually there is any possibility for people to protect their information transparency.

– Arrived to the point that against current surveillance and monitoring systems there is nothing a single person can do to safeguard its leak of information, the research focuses on alternative ways for people to escape from this data slavery, getting at least some profit out of their personal data.

– The conclusion of this first part of research is that a corporation as more rights than a person and it can protect all its assets giving them a price. For this reason, the idea is to register a single person as a corporation.

– At this point the research deepens into the financial field, understanding how to create a corporation, its legal and financial implications.

– Then it must be looked into the details to incorporate: choose the business name; decide what kind legal entity you want your business to be, whether be a C-corporation S-corporation for example; figure out where to incorporate; find a registered agent.

– Following the registration of corporation it’s needed to define and evaluate all the assets of the person.

Predicted Resolutions:
To turn a person into an Incorporated Person, to register her as a corporation and turning over her skills, capital, possessions and intellectual property to it and these become her assets and increase her value. The person identity (name, appearance and IP addresses) become the brand and are trademarked; her mental abilities (knowledge) as processes and strategies; her physical abilities as equipment; her biological functions as products, her data is the corporations property and the shares are her potential. These all become assets that the person can now capitalise on. Her debt is turned into the corporations liability, which actually increases the company’s value if it were to be sold.
By issuing shares person/corporation can raise capital, based purely on her potential success. In exchange the shareholder has partial ownership of the corporation.

The other outcomes are an explanatory video and website and an App called DOME, Database of Me. This App will ensure that users identity and data can be collected and stored for them and only them.

Organisation:
The overall project time is 8 months.
The first 3 months will be mostly of research and reference.
Next 2 months are spent on the bourocracy processes, in order to register the corporation.
The next 3 months are spent creating the outcomes: 2 minutes explanatory video, website and draft of the app.
The App will be further developed after the project deadline for future use.

REFERENCES:

– Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc, the girl who became a corporation – we-make-money-not-art.com

– www.jenniferlynmorone.com