The Yes Men
The Yes Men are a group of culture-jamming artist-activists led by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos. They came to prominence during the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle when they created a fake WTO website. Through parody, the Yes Men aim to raise awareness about problematic social and political issues. They espouse a belief that corporations and governmental organizations often behave in dehumanizing ways toward the public, which can be partly combatted with mocking humor. To date, the group has produced three films: The Yes Men, The Yes Men Fix the World, and The Yes Men Are Revolting. In the films, the Yes Men impersonate corporate and government entities that they dislike, a practice they call "identity correction."
The Yes Men operate under the philosophy that lies can expose truth. In addition to maintaining fake websites, their "hijinks" sometimes entail elaborate props. The group's antics have brought them media attention and invitations to conferences and TV talk shows. Over the years, Servin and Vamos have collaborated with other like-minded comedic artists, including Improv Everywhere, Andrew Boyd, and Steve Lambert.
Background
According to their web page, the Yes Men originated in 1996. In a 2009 interview, Servin recalled the group's key formative event when they posted a parody website spoofing the World Trade Organization during the 1999 WTO conference in Seattle. To the surprise of Servin and Vamos, many people believed the site to be authentic, and the two were contacted to speak at a conference in Austria. As Professor Joan Donovan writes:Since then, the Yes Men have continued performing large-scale hoaxes, in what they describe as a collaborative effort with journalists to help the media tell important stories.
Servin and Vamos utilize various aliases, most commonly Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, who are credited as co-directors of their films. Servin/Bichlbaum is also an author of experimental fiction, and was known as the prankster who inserted images of men kissing in the computer game SimCopter. Vamos is an associate professor of media arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The two men have been assisted by a global network of supporters, including part-time member Rocco Ferrer, and "Yes Woman" Whitney Black.
The Yes Men often pose as a powerful entity and make ridiculous and shocking comments that caricature the ideological position of the organization or person. Given that corporations and governments admit they use "spin" and PR to shape public perceptions, the Yes Men say they are simply deploying spin to their own advantage, and using media outlets to disseminate an anti-corporate worldview. A sense of humor and shock value are usually employed to make these issues more palatable to the public and to bring media attention to stories of interest. Among the Yes Men's more shocking suggestions are to blatantly sell one's vote, and to solve world hunger by having the poor consume recycled human waste. But the Yes Men say that many of their most outlandish proposals hardly evoke any public outrage.
The Yes Men have posed as spokespeople for the WTO, Dow Chemical, McDonald's, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Rifle Association of America, The New York Times, and Shell Oil. On occasion, the Yes Men's phony spokesperson will make announcements that represent "dream" scenarios for members of the anti-globalization movement, or for opponents of corporate crime. This tactic has often resulted in false news bulletins, such as those reporting the demise of the World Trade Organization, or the announcement that Dow Chemical was paying compensation to the victims of the Bhopal disaster.
The comedy group's experiences were documented in the film The Yes Men, distributed by United Artists, as well as in the Info Wars documentary, and the book The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization. Bichlbaum and Bonanno also directed a 2009 film entitled The Yes Men Fix the World, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2009 they launched their online video channel on Babelgum. Their third film, The Yes Men Are Revolting, premiered at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.
The Yes Men encourage other activist and student groups to make their voices heard through crashing conferences, creating fake websites, and getting arrested.
Projects
George W. Bush
One of the Yes Men's first pranks was the satirical websitegwbush.com, established for the 2000 US presidential election to draw attention to alleged hypocrisies on Bush's actual website. When asked about gwbush.com in a May 1999 press conference, Bush responded that the site had gone too far in criticizing him.In 2004, the Yes Men went on tour masquerading as the group "Yes, Bush Can!". They encouraged supporters to sign a "Patriot Pledge" agreeing to keep nuclear waste in their back yards and to send their children off to war. The Yes Men appeared at the 2004 Republican National Convention, and drove across the country, initially in an RV with a George W. Bush body wrap, and then in a painted van.
Ice Age Petition
The Yes Men posed as workers in the 2004 Bush-Cheney reelection campaign. They circulated a petition asking for signatures to support global warming because America's competing countries will suffer, while America will only bear minor side effects.Dow Chemical
On December 3, 2004, the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, Andy Bichlbaum appeared on BBC World as "Jude Finisterra", a Dow Chemical spokesman. Dow is the owner of the Union Carbide Corporation, the company responsible for the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India on December 3, 1984. An estimated 3,800 people died immediately from the hazardous chemicals and thousands more were killed by the plume from the UCC plant during the next few days. The Indian government reported that more than half a million people were exposed to the gas, leading to numerous early and late health defects. The Bhopal Disaster became one of the worst chemical disasters in history and the name Bhopal became synonymous with industrial catastrophe. Immediately after the disaster, UCC began attempts to dissociate itself from responsibility for the gas leak. The Indian Supreme Court eventually mediated a settlement in which UCC accepted moral responsibility and agreed to pay $470 million to the Indian government to be distributed to claimants as a full and final settlement. The average amount to families of the dead was $2,200. Warren M. Anderson, who led Union Carbide during the Bhopal disaster of 1984, died in 2014 at the age of 92 after fleeing to the U.S.; his wife Lillian stated that her husband Warren had suffered "25 years of unfair treatment."On their fake Dow Chemical website, the Yes Men said that Dow Chemical Company had no intention whatsoever of repairing the damage. The real company received considerable backlash, and both the real Dow and the phony Dow denied the statements, but Dow took no real action.
The Yes Men decided to pressure Dow further, so as "Finisterra", Bichlbaum went on BBC World News to claim that Dow planned to liquidate Union Carbide and use the resulting $12 billion to pay for medical care, clean up the site, and fund research into the hazards of other Dow products. After two hours of wide coverage, Dow issued a press release denying the statement, stating that they had no employee by that name and he was an impostor, ensuring even greater coverage of the phony news of a cleanup. In Frankfurt, Dow's share price fell 4.24 percent in 23 minutes, wiping $2 billion off its market value. The shares rebounded in Frankfurt after the BBC issued an on-air correction and apology. In New York, Dow Chemical's stock were little changed because of the early trading.
After the original interview was revealed as a hoax, Bichlbaum appeared in a follow-up interview on Channel 4/BBC. He was asked if he had considered the emotions and reaction of the people of Bhopal when producing the hoax. According to the interviewer, "there were many people in tears" upon learning of the hoax. Bichlbaum said that, in comparison, what distress he had caused the people was minimal to that for which Dow was responsible. The Yes Men claim on their website how they were told by contacts in Bhopal that once victims got over their disappointment that the news wasn't real, they were pleased about the stunt and thought it had helped to raise awareness of their plight.
At a banking conference in London on April 28, 2005:
In February 2012, it was reported in the Stratfor email leak that Dow Chemical had hired private intelligence firm Stratfor to monitor the Yes Men.
WTO
One of the Yes Men's most famous pranks is placing a "corrected" WTO website atNew Orleans and HUD
The Yes Men appeared on August 28, 2006, at a "Housing Summit" in New Orleans, taking the stage along with New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco. Before an audience composed mostly of real estate developers, one of the Yes Men gave a speech in which he claimed to be Rene Oswin, a fictitious "assistant under-secretary" at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In his speech he claimed that HUD would reopen public housing facilities that had been closed since Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. He announced this false claim because HUD had recently decided to only rebuild a third of the subsidized housing stock after Katrina, and made plans to demolish four of New Orleans' ten public housing developments, leaving thousands of city residents without homes. This decision was contested locally, nationally, and internationally. So, the Yes Men proclaimed that HUD had changed its mind, and it would not tear down the housing projects in order to replace them with mixed-income developments.HUD called this prank, which was intended to bring attention to the lack of affordable housing, a "cruel hoax". A former resident of the community was quoted by Bichlbaum as saying, "do whatever's most effective, do it, don't worry about how it affects us. If it draws attention to this, we can handle it. That's all we want, and if there's a few hurt feelings, we can handle it." HUD spokeswoman Donna White said no one named "Rene Oswin" works for the department. White commented, "I'm like, who the heck is that?"
The fictitious Oswin also announced that the big oil companies would contribute some of their record profits to rebuild the wetlands destroyed by the construction of oil tanker canals to prevent the city from being inundated by future hurricanes.