Maker Faire Coney Island 2025
Surprise Acquisition
Home: New York, United States of America
In today’s corporate digital media landscape, the Internet is reshaped into a controlled space for profit and consumption. Giants like Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google acquire smaller companies—Apple with Beats, Meta with Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp—rebranding them as their own while stifling innovation and creative freedom. Surprise Acquisition is a media artwork exposing the randomness of these takeovers by likening them to an arcade “claw” machine. As the dot-com era saw companies hoard domain names, today’s strategy is to amass capital to buy rivals and absorb their products. The work underscores how such acquisitions have spiraled into unchecked corporate territorialism, with each “captured” company’s price feeding a growing total that visualizes tech’s escalating greed.
https://www.coin-operated.com/2024/02/10/surprise-acquisition-2024/
Additional Project Photos
Maker
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
What Inspired You to Make This?
I had been wanting to merge the concept of a claw machine with corporate takeovers / greed since the early days of the dot.com boom when larger companies were purchasing domain names and smaller companies with abandon. This project connects the seemingly randomness of corporate takeovers with the arcade claw machine in a fun game for people to try in public space.
