*Kinda strange that people these days so easily forget that state power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
"States draw their legitimacy from symbols. Crowns, currency, flags, passports, mythology, monuments, skylines, cultural output – these symbols constitute a state’s power, its brand identity.
"And the brand is a troubled one, with the state increasingly eroded by non-state actors from oligarchs to terrorists and from hedge funds to international agencies. Outside its walls are migrants who want in, and inside there are machete-wielding small-government freaks who want out.
“In economic terms, the government provides a service with a very high barrier to entry (starting your own country) and a very high cost of changing providers (emigration),” says libertarian hacker Sean Hastings in one of the interviews in Uncorporate Identity. “In any industry, this leads to very poor service at very high cost.” (((Sean, individuals exist for the benefit of nation-states, not vice versa. That's why a state can put you in jail but you can't put a state in jail.)))
"Given this apparent crisis, what’s a state to do? One of the answers is to rebrand, to work those symbols, to cultivate that image like a 16-year-old updating Facebook.
"Uncorporate Identity, a fat steak of a book edited by branding agency Metahaven and Marina Vishmidt, uncovers the role design plays in almost every aspect of modern state power, and in doing so makes the case that the rise in profile of the “creative industries” since the 1990s was in fact their wholesale co-option by geopolitics. (((Ever seen an Al Qaeda logo? Me neither.)))
"But to characterise it as a single-minded polemic is misleading – it’s a menagerie of ideas and thinkers, at times bewildering but often brilliant. Four and a half chapters look at, respectively, unrecognised microstates, totalitarian megastructures, terrorism and paranoia, the EU’s boundary, and the branded state itself. These themes are served by essays, dialogues, graphic experimentation, epistolary exchanges and a short story, with contributors from Keller Easterling to China Miéville. (((!)))
"With these guides, all that is solid appears to melt away into a sea of uncertainty. Design (so it seems) is to the state what the curtain is to the Wizard of Oz, screening his puny figure so all we can hear is the booming voice. Sealand (a former defence platform in the North Sea turned into a microstate by an eccentric British family) and Transdniestria (a breakaway region in Moldova) are explored as two “unrecognised” states, clutching the symbols of statehood to them without quite making it into the club. Even the symbols of a state at its most gigantic and dreadful – the gargantuan House of the People commissioned by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and the pyramidal, unfinished Ryugyong hotel in North Korea – waver in front of the eyes...."
