A few weeks back, I was wondering aloud what had happened to the anti-globalisation movement. By way of a partial answer to that question: some of them became the Yes Men.
You might remember Adbusters, the Canadian collective who published satirical spoofs of advertisements, which they called ‘subvertisements’. The Yes Men go one step further: rather than ripping off brands, they pretend to be representatives of the company in question. At conferences; on television; in the street.
So, for instance, we find one of the intrepid impostors on BBC World, passing himself off as a spokesman for Dow Chemical – parent company of Union Carbide, which was responsible for the Bhopal chemical disaster. And, no doubt to the consternation of any real Dow staff who may have happened to be watching, the spokesman takes full responsibility for the disaster. As the Yes Men themselves later recount,
We expect the story to be retracted immediately, but Dow takes two hours to notice that alas and alack, it’s done the right thing. The full interview therefore runs twice, and for two hours the story is the top item on news.google.com. CNN reports a Dow stock loss of 2 billion dollars on the German exchange. After Dow notes emphatically that it is not in fact going to do right by those non-shareholders in Bhopal, the retraction remains the top Google story for the rest of the day.
