By Francisco Delatorre
Fuckedcompany.com is an interesting experiment in interaction. Ostensibly,
the idea behind the site is to predict, given the recent trends of
the last year, when and how various large companies will lose size,
money, power, and influence. This can mean anything from a slight
dip in stocks or a round of layoffs to the death of the entire company.
When this takes place, the players who correctly predicted the tank
are awarded points, and the players with the most points are listed
on the front page.
You earn points in two ways. First, if you choose a company that
few people have chosen, its point value goes up because it means that
only the more savvy followers were able to sense the market direction.
If, for example, 80% of users predicted pets.com's downfall, it would
be worth approximately 20 points. If it were 20%, the value would
be closer to 80 points. Secondly, more points are awarded depending
on the severity of the fucked company. A full company downfall is
worth 100 points, where a round of layoffs or managerial reconstruction
might bring it closer to 10 or 15 points.
On a larger scale, however, the site seems devoted to coddling the
victims of these fucked companies' downsizings and belly-ups, providing
a forum for those twentysomething hipsters to lick their wounds and
wax bitter about the state of e-business in general. I realized this
when reading the threads regarding some of the latest "fucks"
on the "happy fun slander corner." It was clear from reading
some of the posts ("remember these names: [list of obscure names].
If you see any of these names on a dot com contract, run like hell!)
that the posters were more intimately involved in the world of venture
capital and ethereal content than the casual passer-by. In addition,
the contest has a few very large problems. For one, the novelty wears
off very quickly. Where sites like the Hollywood Stock Exchange offer
consistently changing, sophisticated (albeit fabricated) information,
fuckedcompany is dealing with the real world; not always the most
interesting subject. The dot com deadpool, as they refer to it, is
plateauing right now; the fad of venture capital prizes for dubious
quirky concepts has proved undesirable, the trend of dot com deaths
has leveled off, and we're starting to see these business treated
as any other flesh-and-blood and brick-and-mortar business in terms
of difficulty to start up, and frequency of failure. How many sites
do you see devoted to failing family restaurants? See? It's not interesting
enough.
So the main attraction here is its bitter posters, from the ringleader,
pud, to all his sarcastic, cynical members. In addition to the fuck
archive and happy fun slander corner, there is an entirely separate
messageboard devoted to more pedestrian topics like the most annoying
commercial on tv and random swearing. A new Flash game serves as a
sort of Doom-style aggression release for the recently relieved; you
are the president of a dot com, and are threatened with stock plunges
as your employees find out about the numerous slush funds your company
controls. To prevent these employees from sending email notification,
you must shoot them with a high powered pink slip gun. Frustrated,
anyone?
On the more practical end, there is a job offer board for the newly
unemployed, wireless communication of your picks' status (via pager
or cell phone), and of course merchandise.
Clearly more devoted to the veterans of the online nuclear winter,
this site is relatively uninteresting for the newcomer, and the novelty
is quick to wear off. Although, if you register, please don't choose
kozmo.com because when they tank I need those points!