The Yes Men: A Case Study

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History

The Yes Men (YM) began with two friends seeking to create political satire on corporate crime and globalization. Inspired by the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 the two YM Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno sought to create a website to criticize then Governor George Bush. The two were given the domain name gwbush.com in 1999, right before his campaign for presidency. From this website they decided to make a website similar looking to Bush’s official one, and made it a satire on his policies. The site set out to criticize the soon to be president for apparent hypocrisies in his platform. Bush campaign sent threats, which YM flipped to the media to grow their image. Famous “there ought to be limits to freedom” quote was directed at these guys.

From this site another individual gave the domain gatt.org to the YM. Gatt is the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a WTO treaty. The individual gave the site over to the YM in exchange for their word to make a satire of the WTO, much like the one they created on Bush.

Once these websites were up and running, emails came in inviting them to conferences to speak on behalf of the WTO. The organizers clearly thought the sites were official and gave the ym an opportunity to speak. This is when the YM’s original idea to prank the people in attendance, using satire to bring awareness to world issues.

As an example, the first conference attended by the YM under the guise of being WTO spokesmen. At this conference, the WTO spokesmen “Dr Andreas Bichlbauer”, Andy of the YM, would promote absurd ideas such as doing away with culture altogether in order to bring everyone in line with the same standards and even more incredible the actual selling of individual votes to the highest ...

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... a fake edition of the New York Times with articles outlining a sort of utopian future. Headlines proclaimed the end to the Iraq war, Patriot Act repealed and even more ambitious the passing of a “Maximum Wage” to help in the creation of a ‘sane economy’.

Conclusion

While the success of the YM can be argued, they none the less actively fight for a social change they believe in. While their method of “identity correction” may not be a traditional tactic of social movements it none the less is another weapon in the anti-globalization war. It goes without saying that education of any social movement among the masses is critical for its success. In this context, the YM provide a valuable tool for the anti-globalization movement. While there isn’t widespread approval of their methods within the movement, it’s hard to fault the YM for their active participation.

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