Marco Deseriis
Whether it takes the form of a forged artwork or manuscript, the fake of the modern age is haunted by its double—the unique mark of a supposedly inimitable author. Whereas until the Renaissance the imitation of ancient artworks was a tribute to the classical ideal of beauty, the separation between art and craft that began with the Renaissance laid the ground for the imitation of the art of individual masters. Indeed, without the modern art market’s need to discriminate between copies and originals, the development of a parallel lineage of art forgers would have not been possible. From Giovanni Bastianini’s mid-nineteenth-century fake Renaissance sculptures, to Han van Meegeren’s astounding Vermeers of the 1930s, to Elmyr de Hoyr’s tireless fabrication of Picassos, Matisses, and Modiglianis in the 1950s, the modern forger has thus come to inhabit at least two traditions: that of the masters he seeks to imitate and that of the master imitators who have preceded him (Radnóti 1999).
Such duplicity is inscribed in the ambiguous nature of the term “forgery,” whose etymology can be traced back to Latin words such as faber (smith and falsifier), fabrica (workshop, but also ruse, trick, artifice), and fabricare (to fabricate). Thus, if every artifact might be said to conceal an artifice, it is because craftsmanship and forgery have always been intimately connected. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the relationship between creation and imitation undergoes a dramatic shift as the industrial commodity—what Jean Baudrillard (1993) calls the “second-order simulacrum”—no longer refers back to an original. The rise of cybernetics and networked computing increases the power of reproduction over production, of that which is precoded over that which has yet to be codified.
Thus, if forging presupposes the individual mastery of a techne, mechanical and digital means of reproduction transform the art of imitation from an individual skill to a generalized condition. As all signs become potentially reproducible by anybody by the click of a mouse, the political and ontological status of the fake also changes. Does it still make sense to read the fake as an exemplary critique of bourgeois notions of originality and novelty, when the novel and the original are increasingly under assault? In this essay, I am going to argue that while fakes continue to interrogate the status of the original—and thus, by extension, of the protocols that validate originality—their political function needs to be rethought vis-à-vis the post-scarce information regime of the digital age. In particular, in the current media environment, fakes and media pranks retain a critical edge when they set the conditions for the cooperative production and simulation of authoritative forms of discourse.
The notion that cultural production should not be judged only for its semantic aspects but also and foremost for its ability to mobilize others was first articulated by Walter Benjamin ([1934] 1986) in a renowned essay titled “The Author as Producer.” In this text, Benjamin argues that a truly progressive author not only shows “the correct political tendency” but is aware of her own position in the relations of production. This means that the author cannot stop at generating a progressive or even revolutionary thought, but must consider how her literary production might be “able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators” (233).
Thus, as early as 1934, Benjamin offered a materialist reading of media as means of production and organization that anticipated in many ways the participatory and collaborative media of our time. And yet, in spite of Benjamin’s groundbreaking work, progressive and Marxist media theorists have generally failed to grasp the emancipatory and revolutionary potential of modern media. With the exception of the productivist and factographic experiments of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920s, Bertolt Brecht’s ([1932] 1964) theory of radio, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ([1970] 2000) analysis of the mobilizing power of electronic media, the Marxist media theory of the twentieth century has been strangely dominated by an Orwellian strand that runs from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer ([1947] 2002) to Guy Debord ([1967] 2014), Jean Baudrillard ([1981] 1995), and the French collective Tiqqun (2001). These authors have read the culture industry, the mass media, and even the Internet as the ultimate expression of capitalist standardization, domination, and ideology. This interpretation has been reinforced by empirical and critical studies that have noted how the concentration of ownership in the media industry poses a serious threat to a democratic public sphere (Schiller 1991; McChesney 1999; Bagdikian 2000).
Against this Orwellian strand, this essay attempts to reconnect the fake to a participatory theory of media by detaching it from negative connotations such as the inauthentic, the replica, and the simulacrum. It attaches it instead to three positive qualifiers: the subliminal, the subversive, and the mythmaking—identified here as “the three orders of the fake.”
On a first level, because they have to appear credible to journalists, media fakes put to test the professional standards and fact-checking procedures of media organizations. I refer to these fakes as subliminal for their ability to operate below the conscious threshold of perception of the media and to expose the often invisible mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that underpin the discourse of the media. On a second level, fakes can expose the intimate connection between various forms of institutional power and what Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton (1948) termed the “status conferral function” of mass media. By defying an institution’s ability to control the unity of its public performances, subversive fakes force it to restore the shaken order of the discourse through official disavowals, apologies, or legal threats. Finally, on a third level, media pranksters can open their own stunts to the participation of many. I describe these fakes as mythmaking for their ability to inspire diffused participation in a layered narrative that is open to several kinds of contributions.
Before proceeding any further, I shall add two important provisos. From now on, I will refer to some media fakes as media pranks or media hoaxes. While these terms are not always interchangeable, the hoaxes and pranks analyzed in this context involve a great deal of dissimulation and mimicry, that is, the ability of their executors to disguise themselves as someone else. Second, the three orders of the fake are not meant to designate three distinct categories. Rather they describe features that range from the simple to the complex. In fact, whereas it can be argued that all fakes are subliminal in that they have to pass a credibility test, only some fakes threaten power and its symbolism, and only a few require the participation of many. In this respect, the subliminal, the subversive, and the mythmaking are not mutually exclusive. Rather these qualifiers designate different degrees or orders of complexity, which can sometimes coexist within the same object of study.
Although media fakes may be as old as the media themselves, the 1960s is the decade when the first generation that had grown up with television began to express a systematic critique of media coverage on a variety of pressing social and political issues. In an influential essay titled “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” Umberto Eco (1986) identified in new countercultural subjectivities, such as “hippies, beatniks, new Bohemias, student movements,” the first manifestations of this emerging critical consciousness. The Italian semiotician noted how these “communication guerrillas” did not reject mass communication tout court, but worked for “the constant correction of perspectives, the checking of the codes, the ever-renewed interpretation of mass messages” through the very use of “the means of the technological society (television, press, record companies)” (143–44). Eco went as far as saying that rather than concerning themselves with occupying “the chair of the Minister of Information” or of the New York Times, politicians and educators should aim at “occupying the chair in front of every TV set” so as to shift the terrain of struggle from the strategic control of information sources to a diffused “guerrilla warfare” for the control of interpretation (142).
The notion that the critical interpretation of media messages is itself a form of intervention did not belong only to the counterculture. In the same years as alternative media were emerging, a few media pranksters expressed a critique-in-action of mass media that exploited the very channels it was aimed at. Such is the case of Alan Abel and Joey Skaggs, two of the better-known media pranksters in the United States. Both Abel and Skaggs staged pranks and media stunts that often shared the libertarian and critical ethos of the counterculture. Yet, as we shall see, their ability to produce stories that were highly newsworthy exposed their pranks to the risk of being recuperated by the media circus, thereby blunting, at least in part, their critical edge.
Born in 1930, Alan Abel has schemed and executed, along with his wife, Jeanne, and a small circle of accomplices, dozens of hoaxes that mix humor and social commentary. The first was the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), one of the more elaborate hoaxes of all times. On May 27, 1959, a man named G. Clifford Prout (in reality Abel’s friend and actor Buck Henry) appeared as president of the SINA on NBC’s Today Show to advocate the clothing of all animals’ genitalia. By coining catchy slogans such as “Don’t ever forget, a nude horse is a rude horse” and “Decency today means morality tomorrow,” Prout’s appearance generated a massive public response. SINA stirred such controversy that Prout’s character kept haunting the media for several years. Finally, during an appearance on CBS’s Evening News with Walter Cronkite some CBS employees recognized that Prout was actor Buck Henry. This brought a formal end to the hoax, which was officially uncovered by Time magazine in 1963. As Abel was praised as a genius hoaxer, he exploited the media attention to present the hoax as a satire on US postwar prurient moralism and censorship (Abel 1970).
In the following decades, Abel continued staging numerous hoaxes. These included the “Sex Olympics,” an international sex competition wherein couples were supposed to compete for climax in front of an audience (1971);1 the “Omar’s School for Beggars,” a professional school of panhandling for the unemployed run by an Arab American man (1975–1983); the publication of his own obituary in the New York Times (1980); the orchestration of a mass fainting in the sitting audience of the Donahue Show (1985); the staging of a fake $35 million lottery win bash (1992); the presentation of himself as the man with the smallest penis in the world in the HBO documentary Private Dicks (1999); a national campaign to ban breastfeeding (2000–2005); and many others.2
As one follows Abel’s multiple TV stunts over the course of five decades, it is easy to note that the media kept inviting him even after his hoaxes were exposed. Far from being embarrassed for their own lack of judgment, TV producers understood that Abel’s personas worked, and as such deserved airtime regardless of—or perhaps precisely because of—their fictional character.3 In other circumstances, Abel was coopted for his writing skills. As he explains in an interview with Andrea Juno, the mass fainting at the Donahue Show had been in fact solicited by one of Donahue’s assistants:
I used to write material for Phil Donahue when he was a talk show host back in Dayton, Ohio. Phil went on to Chicago where he remained for eighteen years. Then in 1985 he moved to New York. I got a call from one of his assistants who said, “It’s very important that Phil’s new show gets good ratings in New York. Why don’t you come up with some media stunt, and if it works, and doesn’t kill anybody or hurt anyone, you’ll be well-paid.” I thought about it and came up with this idea. I got a headline in the New York Post and the wire services picked up the story: “Entire Studio Audience Flees Donahue Show!” Donahue was very upset when he found out that it was a hoax, but his ratings started going up so he mellowed. (Abel 1987, 106)
Pranksters’ occasional complicity with media professionals is also evident in some of the media stunts organized by Joey Skaggs. A former beatnik of the New York Lower East Side, Skaggs debuted as a self-styled “conceptual artist” in the 1960s. His first stunts included street performances such as the organization of a hippie sightseeing bus tour in Queens (an ironic twist on the then common practice among suburbanized New Yorkers of touring the Lower East Side in search of hippies to photograph); the installment of a Native American crucifix on the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and a simulated US Army attack on a life-size replica of a Vietnamese village representing the Nativity in Central Park.
In the 1970s, Skaggs began paying more attention to the media effects of his interventions. In 1976, he posted a classified ad in the Village Voice that publicized a bordello for sexually frustrated dogs. The “Cathouse for Dogs” offered “a savory selection of hot bitches,” which were artificially induced into a state of heat by a drug called Estro-dial. As journalists began investigating the announcement, Skaggs hired twenty-five actors and fifteen dogs to provide them with physical evidence of the actual existence of the bordello. One evening, journalists were invited to witness how customers had to fill out a questionnaire on their dogs’ medical history and sexual preferences in the presence of a phony veterinarian while Skaggs lectured them on dog copulation technique (Skaggs 1987, 39–40).
As the news begun mounting—stirring a real campaign to close down the bordello—a journalist from the local Soho Weekly News covered the story twice. “During the second interview, a week after the first article had appeared, the writer suspected it was a hoax. But it was such a good story, [that] he complied with Skaggs’ request to continue the ruse” (Skaggs 1997a; emphasis added). This allowed the news to snowball from the local press to the national and international media.4 When Skaggs was finally subpoenaed by the office of the Attorney General for illegally running a cathouse for dogs, he held a press conference in which he unveiled the hoax.
Skaggs (1997b) describes himself as a conceptual artist “who uses the media as his medium to make a statement.”5 Like Alan Abel’s, Skaggs’ pranks are double-edged swords. On the one hand, they have a demystifying function—that is, they reveal the mechanisms whereby some facts are turned into news even when their truthfulness is dubious. On the other hand, these stunts have a positive function in that they stir public debate over controversial issues that would otherwise receive little media coverage.
In one sense, then, hoaxers and media are foes. Since the media are understandably embarrassed after being fooled, they tend not to retract, or to give retractions very low visibility. That is why the denouement is the most delicate moment of the hoax. Skilled hoaxers such as Skaggs and Abel usually pull the plug when a story has reached its zenith so that the media can hardly avoid a retraction. Another tactic used by hoaxers is to exploit the competition internal to the media system by informing some media outlets that their competitors have been duped.
And yet, pranksters and journalists are not always opponents. Because media pranks have a high entertainment value, media producers can become a hoaxer’s best allies. In fact, even when complicity is not overt, a journalist or an editor who omits fact-checking sets aside a basic deontological principle for a story that is too good to be fake. Within an increasingly saturated media environment, journalists tend to select the stories that are more likely to be aired or published, when they do not fabricate them themselves.6 Furthermore, the dominance of commercial television in the United States and of the tabloid press in the United Kingdom and other European countries (where public broadcasting has partly contained the expansion of commercial networks) has significantly lowered journalistic standards. In the age of the seemingly unstoppable rise of infotainment, soft news, and celebrity culture, facts are routinely sacrificed to narrative or, in the best-case scenario, are framed in a dramatic or entertaining fashion around “human interest” stories (Langer 1998).
In this context, it is no surprise if pranks à la Abel and Skaggs rarely miss their mark. Since those hoaxes provide the media with living personifications of amusing and dramatic stories, newsmakers can hardly ignore them. At the same time, the hoaxer’s ethical position should not be confused with that of ratings-obsessed TV producers and con journalists in search of notoriety. In spite of some collusions, by and large media pranksters remain external to the media apparatus as their ethical commitment lies in unveiling how media often fail to fact-check and apply the very standards that should make them trustable.
In order to disentangle this apparent contradiction between the demystifying function of hoaxes and the dangerous liaisons between hoaxers and media producers, I term this typology of fakes subliminal. In psychology the term (from the Latin sub limen) indicates a stimulus operating below the threshold of conscious perception.7 Likewise, as noted in the introduction, subliminal fakes operate below the media conscious threshold of perception as they challenge the media’s ability to discriminate between reality and fiction, truth and fabrication. By producing enough sensible evidence and background information to turn a pseudo-event into a “fact,” subliminal fakes probe the set of criteria that should guarantee the truthfulness of media narratives.8
Sometimes, failure to implement these standards can seriously damage news organizations, especially in the case of institutions whose reputation derives from their reliability. But with the rise of commercial media and infotainment, the media’s presumed function to discriminate between reality and fiction tends to give way to modes of presenting the news in which the two are increasingly blended. Thus, if in the 1960s and 1970s subliminal fakes revealed something about the inner workings of the media machinery, the rampant dramatization of news has made it increasingly difficult for these media stunts to yield any critical knowledge other than registering a shift in news values toward drama, entertainment, and sensationalism. This does not mean that pranks in the vein of Abel and Skaggs have become useless. But certainly their critical edge was much sharper in a media landscape wherein the power of media was very much attached to their presumed impartiality and objectivity.
To consider how the politics of fabrication might still be effective in the age of infotainment, I will now turn to a typology of fakes whose character is more overtly political. The ultimate purpose of those fakes, which I describe as subversive, is to undermine the Foucauldian order of the discourse—that is, the complex of invisible discursive structures that legitimates both the speakers and the kinds of enunciations that are allowed in the public sphere of communication (Foucault 1969; Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a gruppe, Blissett, and Brunzels 1997). By usurping the position of a powerful subject and sending a blatantly absurd, irreverent, or revealing message, subversive fakes undermine power’s ability to control the unity and coherency of its public performances. As we shall see, this usually forces power to restore the shaken order of the discourse through an official disavowal.
Similar to subliminal fakes, the origin of these fakes lies in the creative fringes of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. Conceived and executed by art-activists such as the Situationists, the Dutch Provos, the Yippies in America, the Italian Indiani Metropolitani, the Kommune 1 and SpassGuerrilla in West Germany, and, later on, the Polish Orange Alternative, these interventions ranged from staging of surreal press conferences and street performances to the announcement of imaginary events to the forgery of seemingly official government documents. For instance, in the late 1970s, the Italian satirical magazine Il Male (The evil) printed and distributed tens of thousands of fake copies of Italian newspapers that announced (and sometimes anticipated) historic events such as the end of the so-called “historic compromise” between the Italian Communist Party and the Democratic Christians, the reunification of Germany, the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, the annulment of the 1978 final of the World Cup, and the arrest of comic actor Ugo Tognazzi as head of the Red Brigades (Vincino 2007).
The spy wars and the suspicious climate of the Cold War also invited the dissemination of false reports and anonymous dossiers. One such renowned case is the “Report from Iron Mountain”, a 1967 forged US government memo that explained how permanent war was a necessary condition of social order and state power. Likewise, the Truthful Report on the Last Chances to Save Capitalism in Italy, a 1975 political pamphlet signed by Censor, a pretended bourgeois intellectual (who was in fact the Italian Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti), persuasively argued that the only chance to save capitalism in Italy was to open the government to the participation of the Communist Party (Autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe 1997). Both publications sparked huge public debates and endless speculations about the identity of their authors.
In 1976, the Italian autonomist, “Mao-Dadaist” collective A/Traverso (Collettivo A/Traverso 2002) summarized this strategy of undermining power’s self-legitimation through fake speech acts in a text significantly titled “False Information May Produce Real Events”:
It is necessary to take the place of (self-validating) power, and speaking with its voice. Emitting signs with the voice and tone of power. False signs. We produce false information that expose what power hides, and that produce revolt against the force of the discourse of order. (Collettivo A/Traverso 2002, 59, author’s translation)
Thus, besides their more overt political content, subversive fakes differ from subliminal fakes in that their primary targets are not only the inner workings of the media, but the discourse of power as such. One of the key functions of modern media is, in fact, to amplify economic, political, religious, and military authorities. Such authorities derive their legitimacy first and foremost from the material and normative structure of their own institutions. As Pierre Bourdieu (1991) points out, “to be able to give an order, one must have a recognized authority over the recipient of that order,” so that while in theory a soldier can give an order to his superior, in practice he is not authorized by the military institution to do so (73). Yet while the media cannot create symbolic power—insofar as such power is rooted in an institutional structure—they can surely extend its reach beyond its originating context. Conversely, when an impostor usurps such power, his action can have unforeseen consequences for the entire order of discourse—that is, not only for the reputation of a media outlet but also for the institutions affected by the prank.
This is particularly true in the networked society, where authoritative forms of discourse and symbolic power are more exposed to unauthorized appropriations than in the industrial information society. As Yochai Benkler (2006) has noted, the networked information economy drastically reduces the amount of physical capital that is necessary to participate in the public sphere of communication. Thus contemporary culture jammers can “emit signs with the tone and voice of power” (to use the words of A/Traverso) without having to mobilize the human and financial resources that are necessary for broadcasting a TV or radio show or printing and distributing a newspaper.
Cyber-squatting for political purposes provides an exemplary case study. Since the 1990s, US culture jamming groups ®TMark and the Yes Men have registered and operated dozens of seemingly official websites of corporations, institutions, and politicians. After creating spoof websites of the Shell corporation, George W. Bush, and Rudolph Giuliani, in 1999 ®TMark begun operating gatt.org, a clone of the official website of the World Trade Organization, which contained critical information about the institution that oversees international trade. This forced the WTO to issue a press release about a misleading website (gatt.org) purporting to be the official WTO site (wto.org). The warning was quickly appropriated by gatt.org, which accused wto.org of being the misleading website.9 The spiral of disavowals and counter-disavowals—combined with the huge exposure obtained by gatt.org in the days of the anti-WTO street protests in Seattle—showed how the jammers’ fake website and witty press releases gave them an edge over the serious and increasingly embarrassed responses of an institution that had no power to silence its opponent.10
®TMark has coined the expression “tactical embarrassment” to describe the technique of forcing a target institution to disown the statements made by a fake spokesperson and of exploiting the official disavowal to increase media exposure. This technique was further refined after the year 2000 when ®TMark handed over gatt.org to the Yes Men, an offshoot of the group, which kept managing the website in the following years. By responding to incoming e-mails and invitations from journalists and conference organizers who had mistaken gatt.org for wto.org, the Yes Men were able to present themselves as WTO spokespersons in various international conferences and even on TV. In the early 2000s, the group gave a series of fake lectures that took neoliberal arguments to the extreme by cheerfully proposing sinister solutions to global problems such as famine, oil shortages, and global warming (Yes Men 2004).11
In the following years, the Yes Men extended this tactic to other websites and began targeting corporations with a questionable environmental record. In 2004, after creating DowEthics.com—a spoof website of the Dow Chemical corporation—the group was able to send one of its representatives to a BBC World News program dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the explosion of the Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India. The phony Dow spokesperson announced that his company (which had acquired Union Carbide in 2001) was now ready to “accept full responsibility” for the disaster that had caused thousands of casualties and was in the process of liquidating Union Carbide to “fully compensate” the families of the victims and clean up the plant site. The news immediately hit the financial market where “Dow’s share price fell 4.2 percent in twenty-three minutes, wiping two billion dollars off its market value” (“Yes Men Hoax,” 2004). This forced Dow to make an immediate disavowal and BBC to retract and apologize to its viewers—a combined intervention that restored the value of the Dow equities. Within a few hours, a DowEthics press release issued by the fake Dow website underscored how the Dow shareholders had nothing to be worried about because the company would have not acted ethically unless forced by law. This final announcement clarified the sense of the hoax: to demonstrate the impossibility for a corporation of the size of Dow to be responsible toward anything other than its bottom line.12
Both gatt.org and DowEthics.com illustrate well how two spoof websites that require limited resources to be managed can undermine the entire order of discourse. In particular, the false BBC announcement showed that reputable media are not always reliable, that their statements can have immediate reality effects, and that social responsibility and financial power are effectively divorced, as the latter rewards only those actions that are economically sound. In this respect, subversive fakes are multipurpose devices that undermine the order of discourse by setting in motion a chain of reactions whose consequences are hardly predictable.
If the primary function of subversive fakes is to expose the order of the discourse, occasionally such fakes take the form of performances that require the participation of many. These mythmaking fakes do not have a merely demystifying function; they also positively call a community, or a network of collaborators, into being.
An exemplary case of radical mythmaking is the Luther Blissett Project. In the 1990s, hundreds of activists from Italy and other European countries shared the nom the plume “Luther Blissett” to author political essays and novels, conduct experimental urban drifts, fabricate artists and artworks, and organize a variety of media pranks (Deseriis 2015, 127–64). The attribution of these interventions to Luther Blissett was meant to cultivate the myth of a folk hero of the information age, whose persona allowed cultural producers to reclaim a social wage while renouncing their individual intellectual property rights. In this respect, as former member of the Luther Blissett Project Roberto Bui points out, the media pranks were functional to the creation of a myth that would enable different groups and generations of activists to recognize each other:
Mythopoesis is the social process of constructing myths, by which we do not mean “false stories,” we mean stories that are told and shared, re-told and manipulated, by a vast and multifarious community, stories that may give shape to some kind of ritual, some sense of continuity between what we do and what other people did in the past. A tradition. In Latin the verb “tradere” simply meant “to hand down something,” it did not entail any narrow-mindedness, conservatism or forced respect for the past. Revolutions and radical movements have always found and told their own myths. (Quoted in Wu Ming 2002, 1; emphasis added)
Whereas the participants in Luther Blissett relied by and large on the Internet to plan and coordinate their ruses, the power of media to mobilize communities of activists and practitioners long predates the Internet. Such power was perfectly understood by Abbie Hoffman (1968) in the late 1960s, when he recognized that the founding of the Yippies party and the development of a model for an alternative society “required the construction of a vast myth, for through the notion of myth large numbers of people could get turned on and, in that process of getting turned on, begin to participate in Yippie!. . . . Precision was sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion” (102).
Hoffman (1968) cites Georges Sorel’s myth of the general strike and Marshall McLuhan’s emphasis on the participatory character of electronic media as sources of inspiration for his idea of mythmaking.13 Answering a question about the famous 1967 rally in which the Yippies surrounded and tried to “levitate” the Pentagon through their psychic power, McLuhan mentioned the role that false information plays in mythmaking: “Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one’s environment. . . . Young people are looking for a formula for putting on the world—participation mystique” (quoted in Hoffman 1968, 103). Drawing on McLuhan, Hoffman underscores the crucial function that media play in mythmaking. Explaining how the Yippies generally encouraged journalists to lie, rather than telling the truth about their own activities, Hoffman acutely points out that “when newspapers distort a story, they become participants in the creation of a myth. We love distortions. . . . It’s a very important point. Distortion is essential to mythmaking” (65).
Distortion or outright fabrication are essential to mythmaking because by saying what cannot be said in the public sphere in a dramatic or entertaining fashion, mythmakers invite journalists to pass on a story that would remain otherwise untold. In this respect, Hoffman’s (1968) suggestion that journalists may be relays of a story whose multiple versions form an open, rewritable myth, allows us to bypass the apparent contradiction between the demystifying function of fakes and their more positive, imaginative side. If the journalist is also a potential mythmaker and co-conspirator, then the question is no longer how to dupe him, but how to allure him into reporting a story whose value resides primarily in its “organizing function,” or, as Benjamin ([1934] 1986) wrote, in its ability to turn “consumers into producers—that is, readers or spectators into collaborators” (233).
Such considerations become all the more relevant if applied to decentralized and distributed media such as the Internet. Because the networked information economy reduces the cost of access to the public sphere of communication, mythmakers can use a range of media to tell stories that have both an imaginative and a pragmatic function. On the one hand, networked media allow mythmakers to exert greater control over the production and circulation of their stories. On the other hand, because these stories are produced collaboratively, they often contain a set of pragmatic rules (the HowTos) that are handed down through the very same media.
To illustrate this concept, I will consider how the Yes Men combine the denotative and pragmatic aspects of storytelling by producing projects that operate on multiple levels. While the group’s impersonations and surreal lectures are usually announced through press releases that are immediately reported by mainstream media, the Yes Men have incorporated many of their stunts in three feature films: The Yes Men (2004), The Yes Men Fix the World (2009), and The Yes Men Are Revolting (2015). Independently produced and distributed, these movies have allowed the group to tell its own stories without having to rely on external relays such as journalists and traditional media, which, however, do play a role in them.
Returning to a traditional medium such as film has another consequence—namely, the multiplication of audiences. In fact, a spectator of a Yes Men film is invited to assess the reaction of the corporate audiences attending their lectures, who also star as unknowing characters in the story. Because those who should be in charge of providing solutions to world problems like global warming and social inequality routinely fail to produce them, the movie viewer herself is invited to assume the ethical stance of searching for solutions. In order to prompt the audience to assume such position—that is, to transform film spectators into collaborators—the Yes Men articulate the pragmatics of their storytelling through a variety of media and venues. For example, the group releases online tool kits for tactical embarrassment and “identity correction,” which reveal the behind-the-scenes of their stunts.14 And it has launched the Yes Lab, a New York–based laboratory that offers training to activist organizations and students.15
The practical knowledge shared at the Yes Lab includes tips for social engineering as well as technical support on how to run spoof websites. In the early 2000s, along with Internet artist Amy Alexander, the Yes Men created Reamweaver, an ad hoc software for the management of mirror websites that allowed them to keep their spoof web sites always updated and faithful to the original. Drawing inspiration from Reamweaver, in 2008 the Italian artist duo Le Liens Invisibles (The Invisible Connections) released another piece of software called “A Fake Is a Fake,” which enabled users to forge and parody authoritative themes such as those of nytimes.com, whitehouse.gov, figaro.fr, repubblica.it, and run them on any Wordpress site. Like Reamweaver, A Fake Is a Fake was freely available for download, along with tips on how to use it.16
In November 2008, one week after the US presidential elections, the Yes Men and Le Liens Invisibles published a fake online special edition of the New York Times, which announced the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the indictment of former President George W. Bush on treason charges, the approval of a publicly funded national health insurance program, and so forth.17 Postdated July 4, 2009, the special edition was written by several dozens of contributors, printed in eighty thousand copies, and distributed by hundreds of volunteers in New York City who had been mobilized through the Yes Men mailing list. The experiment was repeated in October 2009, with a fake special edition of the New York Post entirely dedicated to climate change and environmental activism.18 In the same month, the Yes Men also staged a fake press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, where they spoke on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce, exposing its staunch anti-environmental record. In this circumstance, the presence of fake journalists at the event duped several major news organizations.19
These collaborative interventions show that contemporary media pranksters can fabricate not only a story but an entire media outlet. If in the age of broadcast media a fake story still had to be selected by professionals in order to be consecrated as news, in the age of networked media culture jammers can appropriate authoritative forms of discourse without the formal validation of mainstream media. Media theorist Henry Jenkins (2006) has argued that culture jammers no longer need to forge and parody mainstream media as the Internet allows them to produce their own media.20 Yet my wager is that culture jammers are not merely interested in telling alternative stories. Rather, by tapping into the symbolic capital accumulated by mainstream media, culture jammers open up such capital to a variety of uses and possibilities. Guy Debord ([1967] 2014) once wrote that “the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted” (9; emphases in the original). When the Times’ readers (or a part of them) come together not only to read “All the News that Fits to Print” but also to produce “All the News We Hope to Print,” they restore the sense of possibility that is constantly suppressed by “spectacular” (read: mainstream) media.
From this angle, Benjamin’s idea of the author as producer and organizer allows us to read the mythmaking fake as a productive machine in its own right. Mythmaking fakes express the ability to hack into the symbolic capital that has been accumulated by an institution and return this capital to the social field. It is through such hack—understood here in the etymological sense of performing a cut—that the community redefines the relationship to itself and to the information environment in terms of possibilities rather than restrictions. This productive function of the fake, I would like to suggest, is what enables the unfolding of the virtual dimension of information or its expression as difference rather than repetition (Wark 2004). After all, talk shows, reality shows, and so-called interactive television all revolve around a controlled participatory mystique that seduces spectators with the illusion of agency. The question then is how to remove those controls to truly disclose the production of information to social praxis—that is, to a whole range of possibilities that are invariably suppressed by the heteronomous voices that tell us our identity. My contention is that this search for the true wealth of information can be better pursued once we cease considering the fake as a simple manifestation of skepticism and disbelief, a sudden blackout in the order of the discourse, and we begin analyzing it as a productive machine in its own right.
1 The Sex Olympics were a guerrilla-marketing ruse to promote Is There Sex after Death?, a mockumentary about the sex revolution produced and directed by the Abels in 1971 and whose distribution had incurred in various forms of censorship.
2 A complete and updated list of Abel’s hoaxes is available at www.alanabel.com.
3 Jennifer Abel’s documentary Abel Raises Cain (2006) shows how her father kept performing the role of Omar the Beggar on TV at least until 1987, even though the hoax had been exposed several years earlier. In some circumstances, TV hosts seem to doubt Abel’s real identity. Sometimes they even accuse him of being a phony, but it is precisely this uncertainty that makes the shows interesting and entertaining.
4 WABC TV produced a documentary, nominated for the Emmy Awards, that featured images shot during the night in the cathouse by Alex Bennett, a producer from a New York cable TV station, who, like his colleague from the weekly magazine, had smelled something but “gleefully went along with the hoax” (Skaggs, 1997a, n.p.).
5 Joeyskaggs.com lists most of Skaggs’s hoaxes. Among them are “Metamorphosis,” a miracle pill supposedly extracted from a “superstrain” of cockroaches, which cured arthritis, acne, and menstrual cramps, and immunized against nuclear radiations (1981); the “Fat Squad,” a commando unit that would make overweight customers strictly adhere to their diet by physically restraining them from eating (1986); and the “Solomon Project,” a distributed computing program that would eliminate the need for (biased) juries in courtrooms (1995).
6 Countless examples could be made of stories that are cooked, blown up, or fabricated to be “stickier” than others. Renowned is the case of Stephen Glass, a twenty-five-year-old reporter for the New Republic who published at least twenty-seven stories between 1995 and 1998 that contained fabricated quotations, sources and events. Significantly, after he was fired from TNR Glass became a celebrity: he was invited to various TV shows, his story was turned into a film titled Shattered Glass (2003), and he wrote the autobiographical novel The Fabulist.
7 In the 1950s and 1970s, bestsellers such as Vance Packard’s (1957) The Hidden Persuaders and Brian Wilson Key’s (1973) Subliminal Seduction linked the term “subliminal” to advertising in the public imagination. The public outcries over the possible insertion of hidden messages in commercials to entice consumers to buy specific products and manipulate an unknowing audience reactivated the panics generated by the hypodermic needle theory of media effects in the 1930s. However, after controlled laboratory experiments demonstrated that subliminal messages rarely inform decisions and guide actions, the term acquired a more general connotation to indicate a not fully conscious perception of a stimulus.
8 Daniel Boorstin (1971) has defined a “pseudo-event” as an event that is “not spontaneous,” but “planned, planted and incited.” According to the American historian, the success of a pseudo-event such as a press conference or a PR campaign is measured by how widely it is reported so that “the question ‘Is it real?’ is less important than ‘Is it newsworthy?’” (11). This is to say that in staging fictional media events, pranksters share something with PR professionals, political consultants, and marketing experts. Yet if the techniques might be similar, the motivations and ethos are at odds, as pranksters do not profit from their stunts and in some cases risk legal prosecution.
9 The WTO press release is available at www.wto.org, and ®TMark’s response is available at www.rtmark.com.
10 Some of the press generated by gatt.org is archived at www.rtmark.com.
11 In 2001, at a textile conference in Tampere, Finland, the fake WTO representative unveiled the “Management Leisure Suit,” a golden suit whereby managers can control remote factory workers twenty-four hours a day through a monitor displaying their activities inside a three-foot phallus attached to the suit. In 2002, the group proposed to recycle the body waste of McDonald’s consumers as a solution to alleviate starvation problems in third-world countries before an audience of college students in Plattsburgh, New York. The Yes Men’s stunts as WTO representatives were popularized in a 2004 documentary directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, and Sarah Price, which was distributed in the United States and various European countries. The pre-2010 Yes Men stunts are archived on the Yes Men’s web site at www.theyesmen.org.
12 See “Dow ‘Help’ Announcement Is Elaborate Hoax,” Dowethics.com, December 3, 2004, www.dowethics.com. The behind-the-scenes of the BBC stunt is documented in the the Yes Men’s second feature film, The Yes Men Fix the World (2009; self-produced, distributed by United Artists).
13 For Sorel ([1908] 1999), the general strike was not aimed at reaching immediate and concrete objectives such as higher salaries or better working conditions. Rather the general strike was a nonnegotiable movement for the abolition of all class differences whereby the working class could forge its own revolutionary consciousness. As such, the myth of the general strike was a form of politics that prefigured the entire socialist project.
14 For example, the launch of their second feature film was accompanied by the Fix the World Challenge, a Wordpress blog (now offline) that offered a series of tutorials for aspiring Yes Men on how to “create a ridiculous spectacle,” “crash a fancy event,” “correct an identity online,” “hijack a conference,” and so forth. Users were invited to log into the blog and join online groups for planning and coordinating their own stunts.
15 The Yes Lab is hosted by the Hemispheric Institute at New York University, www.yeslab.org.
16 Both software are no longer available. Documentation of both projects is available at www.rtmark.com and www.lesliensinvisibles.org.
17 The “edition” can be seen at www.nytimes-se.com.
18 The “edition” can be seen at www.nypost-se.com.
19 See Lisa Lerer and Michael Calderone, “CNBC, Reuters fall for climate hoax,” Politico, October 19, 2009. www.politico.com; and Anne C. Mulkern and Alex Kaplun, “Fake Reporters Part of Climate Pranksters’ ‘Theatre.’ ” New York Times, October 20, 2009, www.nytimes.com. For an analysis of the hoax as a form of appropriation art, see Nate Harrison (2012). The US Chamber of Commerce initially sued the Yes Men for trademark infringement, but then dropped the charges in January 2013.
20 In Convergence Culture, Jenkins (2006) erroneously identifies culture jamming with a form of cultural resistance that is an alternative to mainstream media rather than entirely dependent on it: “Too many critical pessimists are still locked into the old politics of culture jamming,” he writes. “Resistance becomes an end in and of itself rather than a tool to ensure cultural diversity and corporate responsibility. The debate keeps getting framed as if the only true alternative were to opt out of media and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses” (248–49). First, it is unlikely that culture jammers would preach offline romanticism. Rather it is their fascination with media that prompts them to appropriate the media’s symbolic power. Second, Jenkins does not even consider that jammers may have desires and objectives that go beyond ensuring “cultural diversity and corporate responsibility.”
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