Those wonderful impersonators of free market leaders, The Yes Men, have performed yet another wonderful action at the Heritage Foundation. They pretended to be a neoliberal thinktank so they could sneak into a Heritage Foundation conference, and actually got applause for nominating Ed Meese for president.
It's funny, for the past couple of years every time the Yes Men or Rtmark do something, my friend José and I trade a brief flurry of emails. It starts out with one of us emailing the other with the press release, asking if it's really them, because they do a very good job of hiding their identity, by creating fake domains and wonderfully subtle parody web sites. But, they have a very distinctive way of doing things, so we can usually tell, or at least suspect. Then eventually they add the exploit to the list of past capers on their own site or sites (either rtmark.com or theyesmen.org or both)
and we say "yup, we were right, it's them."
It's great to see them continuing their long campaign to expose the corporate evildoers, but it's almost disappointing to find out they are behind so many of these hijinks. I would prefer, I think, to see that numerous different groups around the world and the internet are engaging in these tactics. Why aren't there more? Actually I'm sure there are more, they're just not as good about publicizing their efforts, and so the questions is, why not?
Perhaps once the Yes Men movie comes out, more people will be inspired to start emulating their tactics. Yes, it's true, an actual movie, released by United Artists and created by the same people that made "American Movie." Coming out this summer. Wow!
Posted by steev at Mayo 5, 2004 08:07 AM