About Despair, Inc.

It began with one man's dream. A dream of the perfectly-realized American company.

A company that would create dissatisfied customers in the process of exploiting demoralized employees while selling overpriced and ineffective products to remediate the problems caused by the very process itself.

A company that would become the bold embodiment of every shortcoming rife within corporate America. A business dictatorship with draconian tendencies. A company grossly obsessed with margins. A soulless machine for converting individual human beings into nameless little people.

On March 23rd, 1998, the dream became a reality, when Despair incorporated.

Around the world, individuals trapped inside other incorporations of despair began to hear of the dream. In a random email from an old friend. In small, nervous gatherings in a break room. On a poster on the wall of a disaffected college student. Overcome with surprise they themselves had to see if the company was for real, if the products were for real, if the spin was for real. An in discovering that they were in fact as real as any other company's, they submitted to become customers themselves.

But as time wore on, something unexpected happened. They began to realize that they were not only customers of Despair, Inc., they were employees, and always had been. Unhappily trapped inside high-tech startups, financial institutions, college dormitories, government agencies: but ultimately employees of Despair itself. With bittersweet lucidity, they wondered why they hadn't known this all along. For they had acknowledged their final employer's very logo, :-(, in their unhappy communications for years.

It began with one man's dream.