Marilyn DeLaure
MARILYN DELAURE. How did you first get involved in your form of activism?
MIKE BONANNO. It all began out of a basic compulsion to do mischief. When we first started the Yes Men in the late 1990s, we were operating as a part of the big antiglobalization movement. We didn’t really need to find our exact way of fitting in because there were lots of people doing things that all worked in sync with the movement. Then, after September 11, that movement took a hit. Because of changes to the ways policing was done all over the world, the big street protests became much more sparse, and at that point we naturally started teaming up with NGOs and smaller organizations that had campaigns on specific issues. And then I think we started working more broadly again when Occupy Wall Street started happening.
MARILYN DELAURE. A signature tactic of the Yes Men is “identity correction.” What is that, and how did you invent it?
ANDY BICHLBAUM. Well, like everything we’ve done, it sort of happened by accident. We didn’t set out thinking, “This is the best way to really sock it to them and this is our strategy for highlighting these issues”; it was more a result of using whatever technologies were around at the time and what we knew how to do. In 1999, we knew how to copy websites. So since tens of thousands of people were headed to Seattle, we kind of followed their lead and made a fake website about the World Trade Organization. The WTO seemed like the right target to all of those activists: it was a very high profile body that was making bad decisions for the world.
We were inspired by the antiglobalization movement, and we wanted to contribute what we could, so we made this fake website. And then because the WTO reacted to it, instead of reacting to the tens of thousands of people heading their way—because I think they were a little more embarrassed about the protesters—they chose to react to our website and wrote a press release about it. Nobody read the WTO’s press release about our fake website, and so their head of PR wrote to us directly and said, “You guys should stop what you are doing because you made us write a press release about this.” And so we sent that message on to thousands of journalists and others on our mailing list, and some articles got written about it. At the time, if you searched “World Trade Organization,” search engines would pick up our site as well as the real one because of these articles. And then we started getting mail intended for the WTO, including invitations to conferences. So we started accepting the invitations: the first was for a conference in Salzburg [Austria], and that’s how we started doing what we ended up calling identity correction.
MARILYN DELAURE. You’ve called your central strategy “laughtivism.” Why are humor, jokes, and playful pranks so important?
MIKE BONANNO. Well, for one thing, it’s fun. That should be self-evident. It’s also effective. People like to share things that are funny. And that extends to journalists wanting to write about things that are funny, and funny things tend to fly beneath the radar of the sort of editorial protocols that usually keep certain stories from making it into the press. Because what we’re doing is helping journalists to basically write an interesting story, or giving them a little bit of a news hook.
MARILYN DELAURE. Describe your relationship with mainstream news media. Do they love you? Hate you? Does it depend on the action?
ANDY BICHLBAUM. We’ve been told that they love us. George Monbiot actually said at one point, “It’s really weird you guys fool the media all the time but they love you. What’s up with that?” That was just a very small sample I think he was referring to, but mostly what we do isn’t fool the media. Rather, we provide excuses for the media to cover important issues, so it’s a collaboration. In a way, we are journalists. Other people do the research and hard work and the writing itself, but we provide the little nugget they can use to extract stuff and cover something that hasn’t been getting as much coverage as it should. Or sometimes the issue has been getting lots of coverage, but our action gives them an excuse to add more to it.
MARILYN DELAURE. Tell me about the Yes Men’s most successful interventions.
MIKE BONANNO. Success can be measured in many ways. There’s how much media attention something got: by that measure, probably the Dow Chemical announcement1 was the most effective. It was also particularly effective in hammering their stock price and, I’m sure, making Dow freak out. On the level of counterespionage, or on the level of—what would you call it?—messing with a corporation inside the corporation, I’ve heard that some stuff we did with Shell Oil was also particularly effective.2 Those are sort of harder to measure than just media hits.
And then sometimes you just like the message at the end, or you judge it the way you would a good poem. I mean in the case of the final action of the newest film [The Yes Men Are Revolting, 2015],3 the strength of the idea is just so important. The idea that, first of all, almost everybody is willing to embrace renewable energy and, secondly, ready to embrace renewable energy that’s owned and operated by local communities, not by these big corporations. . . . The idea of addressing social justice at the same time as environmental justice and energy transition makes perfect sense. So that was why that action seemed like a really huge success to me.
ANDY BICHLBAUM. Yeah, I think it was a really big success too. . . . The usual way we’ve measured the success of an action is just how many hits it’s gotten, or how much it’s gotten an issue covered in the mainstream media. And that may not necessarily be the right measure. Having a really powerful conclusion—a moving conclusion—to a movie is success, certainly, because the movie is then seen by people and hopefully prompts them to ask, “What’s stopping us from making change? Why aren’t we making change?” So that’s success.
But usually we just count hits like with the BBC action on Bhopal,4 which got like six hundred articles in the US press mentioning the catastrophe, using the hoax as a way of getting in there, and that’s in a country that usually doesn’t cover Bhopal much. And then the Chamber of Commerce thing came on at a time when there was a lot of stuff going on around the Chamber of Commerce so it added a couple of days of TV coverage to that.5 None of these [actions] is successful in themselves. The individual actions don’t actually change anything, but in contributing to these movements with media coverage, I think they’re successful insofar as the movement is successful.
MARILYN DELAURE. What would you say is most powerful about your form of activism?
MIKE BONANNO. I actually think the most powerful result of the activism often is just getting other people involved. . . . I think the movies are most effective because they get to places you don’t expect, and we get e-mails from high school students who say, “Hey I never even considered thinking about these things and now I’m out on the streets.” With that sort of thing, you can’t underestimate the effects, because you don’t actually need that many people out there; you need some dedicated, excited people to move things forward. There is also another thing often overlooked, and that is the fact that people like to be entertained by poking fun at these things that seem so powerful and so immovable, which proves in some ways that they are not as powerful. And I think our work has been encouraging to a lot of our friends doing more important, but perhaps more monotonous or boring jobs in the movement, you know? Entertaining people who are in the trenches is important.
ANDY BICHLBAUM. I agree. With Occupy Wall Street, a lot of people said that one of the first influences on them was seeing one of our movies when they were younger. This made us feel like we were a part of the movement, even though we didn’t help organize Occupy. Like many people, we just heard in the news about this plan to occupy Wall Street and take it over. . . . We just thought they were nuts, but then when it happened and, you know, had such repercussions, it just felt like, “Wow, okay, we were a part of that,” because all these people came up and told us that they had seen our movie. So the biggest success, I think, is that sort of thing—the way our work enters the culture and makes people think, “Yeah, there are cracks in this system. Yeah, just a few people can really make a difference. . . . And I’m going to be one of them.”
1 In 2004, Andy appeared live on the BBC World News posing as a spokesman for Dow Chemical to comment on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, an industrial gas leak that killed thousands of people. Speaking as Mr. Jude Finisterra, Andy announced that Dow Chemical planned to take full responsibility for the disaster, clean up the plant site, and compensate victims and their families. Though the ruse was quickly discovered, this stunt generated considerable media attention about ongoing problems in Bhopal and shed light on Dow’s refusal to do anything proactive. See www.beautifultrouble.org.
2 In June 2012, the Yes Men helped stage a gala in Seattle’s Space Needle to celebrate Shell’s Kulluk drilling rig, which was about to depart for the Arctic. The party’s centerpiece was a model of the Kulluk nestled on an ice sculpture, meant to dispense cola for drinking. The first glass was to go to the guest of honor, the widow of the rig’s designer (who was in reality eighty-four year-old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey); instead, the display sprayed her in the face. Video footage of the event went viral under the hashtag #ShellFAIL. That same day, they launched a fake website at ArcticReady.com that purported to be Shell’s social media site. It included an image gallery and caption generator with phrases like, “You can’t run your SUV on ‘cute.’ Let’s go.” and “Because Fuck You, Earth. Let’s go.” See www.yeslab.org.
3 Posing as an undersecretary of the US Department of Energy, Andy spoke at a Homeland Security Expo in Washington, DC, in 2013, announcing that the United States would move to completely renewable energy sources by 2030. The wind and solar power plants were to be owned by Native American tribes, as partial reparations for the history of American genocide. Appearing with the Yes Men were Gitz Crazyboy and Tito Ybarra.
4 See note 1.
5 In October 2009, the Yes Men organized a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Speaking on behalf of the US Chamber of Commerce, Andy announced that the Chamber was reversing its position on climate change policy and would stop lobbying against the Kerry-Boxer Bill aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The hoax was revealed when Eric Wohlschlegel, the real Chamber spokesperson, barged into the room and declared the event a fraud. The action was covered by media around the world. See www.yeslab.org.