RIP Corp Charts & Leisure

This episode of RIP Corp is about the gap between the nostalgic personal memory of Sierra On-Line and the labor and financial calculations that ultimately shaped the company’s rise and fall. What can the Sierra story tell us, if anything, about how the game industry works today?

Corporate researcher, and proprietor of The Trade Journal Cooperative, Tim Hwang joins Ingrid for a nostalgic look back at 2023's notable corporate losses.

The history of the commercial application of tantalum is a story of labor exploitation, suppressing militant organizing, state-backed development of global supply chains, the ups and downs of corporate raider capitalism, environmental damage and legal chicanery. It’s a story of technological development deeply bound up with, and used to perpetuate colonial violence. And it might have something to tell us about the current era of mineral supply chain anxieties in the United States. Our research into the history of the tantalum capacitor brought us to the U.S. National Archives, old electronics magazine collections, eBay, and ultimately to the subject of this episode: Fansteel

We invited Katie Way, a former Vice reporter and current writer-editor at Hell Gate, a worker-owned news site in New York City, to help us through a deep dive into Vice's bankruptcy documents.

For this episode of RIP Corp, we’re looking at corporate personhood as a concept. How did corporations become people? How did this weird legal fiction become such a powerful defining force in the world? And what would it really mean for a corporation to subvert its Prime Directive ... if that’s even possible.

For this episode of RIP Corp, we take a closer look at Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and integrated circuits. After its well-documented breakthroughs, the company that helped invent an entire industry, and arguably the single most technologically significant one in the 20th century, failed to remain competitive. We explore how the way we understand Fairchild’s story (or don’t) matters for how we think about the past, present, and future of chip manufacturing.