Soul Assassins

Kersten's solution is called Radical Demotivation, a systematic program that helps employees stop engaging "in ego-gratifying, autonomous failure and instead submit to a soul-crushing robotic compliance" with the shareholders' objectives. Now, this is wild stuff. Kersten pushes a high-rise elevator's worth of buttons. And that's before he gets into the hows of demotivating an employee, all with an augustly deadpan delivery. You can forget an employee's name, or at least pretend to. Or you can fixedly refuse to acknowledge the existence, let alone the competing needs, of a spouse or child. Or cast executives as the heroes of every corporate success story and workers as anonymous contributors. Or couch every acknowledgment of a worker's accomplishments with a review of previous errors.

Kersten signals his satiric intent by straightforwardly comparing his demotivation program with a "high-fat, high-sugar, no-exercise diet," whose existence you always doubted because "experts" said it couldn't work. And while all this is supposed to be funny, the reptilian chill that's felt when Kersten discusses the worker class calls to mind Joel Bakan and his recent book The Corporation (Free Press, 2004), in which Bakan points out that corporations, in their single-minded pursuit of profit, embody the clinical definition of a psychopath.

Yet just at the moment when you're about to break into "The Internationale," Kersten's observations about the modern worker's whininess and self-pity -- his presumption that the world owes him a living -- conjure up the faces of petulant colleagues past and present. "He wanted to write a book that was alternately pragmatic and absurd," says Justin Sewell. He has. All of these views make sense, perhaps, because we're all at fault. None of us, it seems, is as dumb as all of us.

Despair Inc. is a product of the great Internet boom of the 1990s. Twin brothers Justin and Jef Sewell were living in Dallas and working for an ISP startup, where they were soon joined by Kersten, a communications professor who had wanted to spend some time in the real world. All three had been lured by the prospect of being compensated for their long hours of labor with stock options, but when the blessed IPO day arrived, all three were stiffed. "This company was started by engineers, and we were part of the non-engineering culture," says Justin. "We were disincluded from the upside. It was pretty crushing for all of us who didn't become decamillionaires." No doubt.

As it happened, the three of them ended up bitching and moaning in Justin's office, where he just happened to have a catalog for motivational goods. "And we just started laughing at these products that celebrated all these virtues that were so utterly alien to the culture we were in," Justin says. They began cracking jokes, and soon started scanning images from a stock-photo catalog, making parodies of motivational posters, and hanging them in their offices. Soon they began making them for colleagues. When in the fullness of time a meager payout did wend its way into our sardonic heroes' pockets, they started a company to make and sell these posters. They had a bumpy beginning, but after Yahoo named its site "cool" and The Wall Street Journal did a story, the orders rolled in.

"I wasn't surprised that people liked the products," says Kersten, "but I was surprised at the intensity with which our customers expressed their displeasure with their jobs and the motivational apparatus. We got emails with the orders saying, 'I'm so sick and tired of seeing those blankety-blank motivational posters, and I'm glad you put out these.' There was vitriol. There was rage."

Today, Despair is a "few-million-dollar-a-year business," says Justin, one that is gradually growing. Not long ago, when Despair realized how much it was spending on fulfillment services, Jef set up a separate company to perform that work and to offer those services to others. Justin says that company is now bigger than Despair.

Undermining corporate America is still the trio's passion. Last year, Despair distributed the special-edition DVD of a short film called More, whose content they found simpatico with the company's general outlook. And now there's publishing. "We figure that if we can sell 50,000 calendars in a quarter, we ought to be able to sell 10,000 books," Justin says.

One field that the company is unlikely to enter is the motivational industry itself, even as the demotivational alternative. "At this point, I don't envision it," says Kersten. "You can't think you're bringing in a motivational speaker and then have me. That would be a recipe for disaster! I can imagine the 400 shocked faces! Whoever invited me would be fired. But even if they knew what I was up to, I don't think it would work. People would then expect to laugh, but I'm not a stand-up comedian."