Kembrew McLeod
The Yes Men have regularly made headlines using humorous deceptions to get their political points across since Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos joined forces in 1999. Their actions often follow a similar template: outrageously caricature an opponent’s position, document the performance, reveal their trickery in a press release, and spark a public discussion. Their preferred tactic is “identity correction,” impersonating businesses and government representatives in both online and interpersonal contexts using a variety of pseudonyms. (Oddly enough, Jacques’s and Igor’s given names sound more like pseudonyms than their primary Yes Men names, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno.)
It all began with a book: Pranks! This edited volume, published in 1987 by the independent imprint RE/Search, served as an operator’s manual for a generation of absurdist troublemakers, from the Yes Men to myself. “I had read that RE/Search Pranks! book,” said Mike, recalling the true-life stories of subversion contained in this collection of interviews of various pranksters. “Those things sort of leapt out at me as being really interesting. At the time, I was doing this kind of guerrilla theater—we called it ‘guerrilla theater of the absurd,’ which was a group I founded where I used student activity money to do weird shit at Reed College. So we had done a couple of projects that were sort of weird public art interventions, like, we changed the name of a local street in Portland overnight into Malcolm X Street.”1 Andy followed a similar path that also began with that RE/Search book. “The Pranks! book was really seminal for me,” he said. “In Louisiana, when I was a graduate student, I taught a freshman comp class, and I used it as the book that the kids had to read and write essays [on], based on things contained in it. I was a super fan of that book, and I knew all of the stories. Having read about Alan Abel and Joey Skaggs and all the others in it, Pranks! was super formative for me. It’s interesting to see how important a book can be. Probably without that book, I wouldn’t have thought of doing any of this.”
With this seed planted in his mind, Andy engaged in his first highly publicized act of mischief in the mid-1990s when he was working as a computer programmer for Maxis Inc.’s combat video game SimCopter. He reworked an animated segment in which the heroic helicopter captain was rewarded with the image of women fawning over him, which was typical of these sorts of military-themed games. Instead, it showed the victorious player an animated homoerotic sequence of two bare-chested men in swimsuits making out, something that went undiscovered by the company until after the game had shipped to stores. This alteration likely would have gone unnoticed by the wider public if Andy had not reached out to a journalist acquaintance, who was the first to write about his SimCopter hack.
At first, Andy did not lie to reporters about his motivations or any other details (that came later). “I never made up anything,” he recalled. “I just said, ‘This is what I did.’ I put these kissing boys into a video game, and [a reporter] said, ‘Why did you do it?’ And I think I told him the truth, probably? And he said ‘Might there not be some kind of, like, you know, activist element to what you did? About gay content and how macho these video games are and how they’re just like insanely stupid? And how they appeal to people’s aggression?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ There was no lying, there was no making things up—until later when there was a bunch of press around it, and that was fun. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is kind of powerful. This is an interesting thing.’” Andy’s soon-to-be partner in crime had a similar experience: “It became clear that there’s stuff that I should be doing,” Mike said, “like writing press releases—standard PR stuff, media news releases and stuff.”
Mike’s first high-profile attempt at “cultural sabotage” was the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), launched in 1993 during the Christmas season. He purchased multiple Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, switched their voice boxes, and “reverse shoplifted” them back into stores. Holiday shoppers brought home Barbies that grunted, “Dead men tell no lies,” while gender-bending G.I. Joes gushed, “I like to go shopping with you!” After the BLO sent out press kits to news organizations, the story broke nationally, and Mike learned through trial and error how to engineer stories that news organizations then spread far and wide. “At first, I said I was anonymous,” Mike recalled, “and there were reporters who said, ‘No, I can’t do this story because I can’t cover a story where the source is anonymous.’ And so the next person I talked to, I made up a name. That kind of thing, where you realize, ‘Oh you can just work within the rules and make all this up.’”
Mike quickly learned that the fictions he provided a journalist would often be picked up by wire services and repeated ad nauseam and legitimized as facts. “For the Barbie Liberation Organization, I remember quite distinctly a moment when a journalist asked me how many of these dolls have been altered across the country,” he recalled. “In reality, I had done seventy-two actual surgical swaps of the toys, and maybe about sixty of them ended up on store shelves. When the journalist asked, I just thought, ‘God, that number seems really too small.’ I didn’t want to overdo it, so I said three hundred, and that number just stuck and it became the number. In hindsight, I should have said a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand.” Mike added: “There was a local reporter in Albany where I lived who asked me, ‘Well, what stores are they in?’ Since I knew where he’s from I said, ‘the KB Toys store in Colony Center,’ and he said, ‘Oh great. I’ll go there.’ So I drove over there and I put one on the store shelf, and I saw him walk in the door, right afterwards.”
This became a pivotal moment for Mike. “It was the type of story where you realized, ‘Wow, you can make a lot of shit up.’ It was just this realization of, ‘Wow, there’s a lot that’s possible. You can take steps to ensure that the story that you’re trying to tell has the best chance of getting out there with the help of the media.’” Andy, who was not yet working with Mike, had a similar epiphany after the mischief he made at the video game company. “At the point when the SimCopter hack started to die down,” Andy recalled, “I sort of thought, ‘Well, there is something there that’s very interesting. I just accidentally created a media firestorm around something really, really stupid. Maybe there’s a way that this can actually be meaningful in a bigger way?’ And so I came up with a shadowy organization called RTMark.com that was supposedly funding sabotage of corporate products around the country en masse.”
Andy created ®TMark during the late 1990s in order to entice journalists into covering his weird ideas, claiming the organization would provide a $5,000 grant to any programmer working on a violent and sexist video game who subverted the game’s ideological message. “It had supposedly been around for a very long time on a BBS [bulletin board system] accessed by a dial-up modem,” Andy laughed as he recalled the yarn he spun. “But then suddenly, for reasons unknown, the top levels of ®TMark management, in their hideaway, decided to go public with their manifesto. I thought it would be cool if we created a kind of phenomenon, you know.” Andy and Mike were introduced to each other around this time, and they began working together on ®TMark projects, before morphing into the Yes Men by the end of the 1990s. “The RTMark.com website wasn’t really working to attract donations. There were a few, but they were symbolic, or from people that we actually knew. But the idea that somebody would give money to attack corporations [by] using mischief was very exciting to the press. There were lots of stories. I think there was one year where we had about four or five prominent stories in the New York Times about individual projects from ®TMark, which was crazy.”
The ®TMark project that got some of the biggest coverage was Deconstructing Beck. This CD contained thirteen collages based on the music of Beck, a musician who has been celebrated for his innovative use of digital sampling, particularly on 1996’s Odelay. One piece on Deconstructing Beck, by Jane Dowe, cut up the song “Jackass” into twenty-five hundred segments, making the original only subliminally recognizable to the listener. Deconstructing Beck was released in 1998 on Negativland’s Seeland record label in conjunction with the ®TMark-affiliated label Illegal Art and was sold on the internet for $5. Rather than quietly distributing this CD, ®TMark fired off e-mails and press releases announcing this work, making sure that Beck’s publicist and attorney received a copy. Some corporate music industry sabers were rattled, but ultimately there was no legal action.
“There were these kind of kooky projects,” Mike said. “Deconstructing Beck, it was just an album where a bunch of people sampled Beck illegally and made music. I can’t imagine anybody covering that in the media today, much less the New York Times.” The dynamic duo was learning on the job, so to speak, figuring things out as they went on about their business. “When it was decided that ®TMark was going public as this big shadowy organization,” Andy said, “I sent a press release to the reporters at Newsweek. ‘Okay, I guess that’s what you do, you send out an announcement to people.” Their learning curve ramped up when they began developing satirical websites that employed their “identity correction” tactic, in which they made the positions of their corporate adversaries even more explicitly clear.
One of the Yes Men’s first projects involved registering the web domain name GATT.org in 1999. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, was a treaty governing international trade and was replaced in 1995 by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Mike and Andy set up a website that copied the graphic design and repeated the rhetoric used by GATT and the WTO—with a few glaring differences, of course. “The first major thing we did was copy the World Trade Organization’s site and post a satirical version of it that took the basic logic of the WTO and just pushed it all the way,” Andy said. “We never intended for people to be fooled for longer than a minute. We just wanted people to visit the WTO website and think they’re reading some official WTO statement, and then kind of get queasy and realize how fucked up it is, and then realize it’s a hoax. It was a trick to get them to experience the same queasiness about the WTO that we felt, and that all the antiglobalization people felt. That was our discovery of how it worked—when people didn’t get the joke and started e-mailing us thinking we were actually the WTO, then sending invitations to conferences that we accepted, and then using all that to get press. That became the hook. It wasn’t really like we were trying to fake out the news that much. We were trying to get people to think, and then it became a hook to generate news around the issue.”
In their web pages and press releases, the Yes Men reappropriated corporate-speak—flipping familiar phrases in a deconstructive attempt to show how language conceals power, how bland-sounding expressions can hide unsettling ideas. When the organizers of the “Textiles of the Future” conference in Finland needed a WTO representative to deliver a keynote address, the merry pranksters flew to Tampere in August 2001. Posing as “Dr. Hank Hardy Unruh of the WTO,” Andy delivered a speech that used terms such as market liberalization to favorably compare sweatshops to slavery. During a subsection of his speech, titled “British Empire: Its Lessons for Managers,” Unruh dismissed Mohandas Gandhi as “a likable, well-meaning fellow who wanted to help his fellow workers along, but did not understand the benefits of open markets and free trade.” As was recorded in the 2003 documentary The Yes Men, an assistant removed Unruh’s tear-away business suit at the conclusion of his speech. Underneath was a gold bodysuit with a giant and shiny inflatable phallus containing a video screen that supposedly monitored workers in the Third World, illustrated in PowerPoint. None of the international scientists, businesspeople, officials, and academics did much more than to blink; they just politely applauded.
When they were first starting to work together, Mike and Andy also developed a George W. Bush parody site, gwbush.com, in collaboration with a like-minded computer consultant. “Zack Exley, who still is doing awesome work, had somehow thought to register gwbush.com in advance of the 2000 election,” Andy said. “He had seen our previous stuff with GATT.org and the WTO site, and so we had people write articles for it that were definitely not G. W. Bush’s positions.” They duplicated the layout of the Bush campaign site and filled it with slogans such as “Hypocrisy with bravado” and other absurd spins on political campaign slogans. The parallel-universe political page invited people to engage in acts of symbolic subterfuge, such as inserting “slaughtered cow” plastic toys into Happy Meals or jumping the fence into Disneyland and demanding political asylum. Candidate Bush was frighteningly candid when commenting on his doppelganger site: “There ought to be limits to freedom.” This reaction demonstrates the pedagogical possibilities of pranks, because the Yes Men’s little lie exposed Bush’s true feelings not long before he began dramatically chipping away at civil liberties as president.
“It was a provocation that worked,” Mike observed. “It caused Bush to lash out in a news conference. That spawned, I guess for us, a whole bunch more enthusiasm for making fake websites. Yeah, it’s interesting thinking about that as a sort of proto–fake news thing. It was very easy to get into the game at that time. It was kind of like dirty tricks in politics that have been going on forever, and it was kind of like stuff that the PR industry was doing, except the internet made it possible for us bottom-feeders to do it at a scale that was compared to what they were doing. We had this outsize or disproportional ability to act in an arena that used to be reserved for these huge companies, or these very powerfully connected people, the Roger Ailes of the world. So, for a brief window, we had this possibility of being these really small fish, but having the effect of the bigger fish—at least in terms of the media.”
The Yes Men’s most controversial prank involved Dow Chemical and its subsidiary Union Carbide India Limited. In 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide plant negligently leaked poisonous chemicals in Bhopal, India. Hundreds of thousands of people were exposed, thousands died immediately, and the long-term effects on the population were disastrous. It remains the world’s worst industrial accident, but the corporation’s relief efforts were minimal. Three years after Dow purchased the company in 2001, the Yes Men leveraged the twentieth anniversary of the catastrophe to bring attention to this issue. They started by creating a fake Dow Chemical web page that many journalists mistook for the real deal. The site claimed Dow was going to sell off Union Carbide and use the billions of dollars to pay for medical care and the cleanup of the Bhopal site. BBC World, the British Broadcasting Company’s global news network, invited a Dow spokesperson to discuss the announcement on air. Instead, it got a Yes Man. Andy appeared as “Jude Finisterra,” and within two hours this news fanned out internationally, prompting celebrations in Bhopal. Before Dow had a chance to deny the story, the corporation’s stock plummeted in value by $2 billion.
Even though the Yes Men are often referred to as pranksters, Andy prefers to use the term clownery for what they do, and he is uncomfortable with the word prank. “The thing that bothers me about the word prank is that it’s something like what you would play on your kid brother.” In other words, it’s something you might do in a fun-loving way to someone you are close to, which is certainly not true of the Yes Men’s targets—such as the WTO. “They’re strictly our opponents. If we do something, like a ‘prank’ on the WTO, we’re not trying to be nice or pleasant or friendly. We don’t ever want to be friends with the WTO. They are our opponents, and we want to use this thing that we’re doing—this bit of clownery—to draw the broader public’s attention to the WTO so that we can build to a point where we can change things.”
1. This quote and those that follow are drawn from an interview Kembrew McLeod conducted with the Yes Men via phone on August 6, 2018.