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They Rule

They Rule: Golden Nica / Net Excellence

Who rules the world? Who controls most of the resources? On the website 'They rule' by Josh On (NZ/USA) you can examine the interlocking membership of people on corporate boards. It has been awarded the Golden Nica of 'Net Excellence' of Prix Ars Electronica 2002.

They Rule is a launchpad for investigating corporate power relationships in the United States. The website allows users to browse through a variety of maps that function as directories to companies such as Pepsi, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. They Rule depicts the connections between companies through diagrams of their power structures, specifically their boards of directors. The minimalist symbolism of these diagrams - CEOs are represented as an iconic male or female holding a briefcase - highlights connections and gives the ruling power elite a kind of uniformity. The directors’ weight increases proportional to the number of boards they sit on. Users can run web searches on CEOs by clicking on their briefcase and accessing information about them, the donations they have made, or their companies. They can also add to a list of URLs relevant to that company or person or save a map of connections, complete with annotations, for others to view.

On’s piece invokes C. Wright Mills’ book The Power Elite (1956), which documented the interconnections among the most powerful people in the US at that time. They Rule utilizes the Internet’s potential for access and transparency of data to create a qualitative description of these relationships. At a moment when growing e-commerce turns us into transparent customers, They Rule subverts the use of the Web as a mere marketing tool and invokes its original promise as a democratizing medium.

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