How the Etoy Campaign Was Won
Reinhold
Grether 26.02.2000
An Agent's Report
Toywar I is over. After 81 days of heavy
fighting, http://www.etoy.com/ is back with a
great victory parade. Read an article by agent.nasdaq, first
published in the German Telepolis on February 9th, 2000. The first
part deals with the art of etoy, the second with campaign
tactics.
Thank you for flying
etoy....
Anyone who logged into the net.art platform Toywar in early February 2000 was
met with two watery graves in the Indian Ocean in which 286 of 1,639
Toywar agents were buried in Lego-like coffins. Victims of their own
lack of participation, the warriors had succumbed to a sheer
undersupply of energy. A net.art project only exists as long as the
nodes of the Net fill it with life. And now, they waste away in
their coffins, having to make do with their burials as mere artistic
artifacts. They won't even end up on the art market.
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They deserve our veneration not because they're dead, but for
what they've done. How often I've observed a magazine article placed
at the top of a Web page while the bubbling of ideas goes on in the
bowels of online forums below. There, the email addresses of eToys'
employees and sit-in scripts were passed around, people met and got
to know each other, then built a protest site together, and a
collective brainstorming session poured forth a cornucopia of
proposals, more than any professional campaign organization could
process. Despite all the naysaying, the Net is offering individuals
new opportunities to take action and giving ideas a better shot at
taking hold. It allows and even encourages cooperation in virtual
groups, and in the best of situations, a self-organizing
countermatrix as well that can make short work of a highly organized
and powerful corporation.
Both etoy and eToys exist only on the Web but on different levels
of virtuality. eToys runs www.etoys.com/, making hundreds of
thousands of playthings available to millions of children. The Web
site is a turntable spinning real objects into the world. If it was
still possible in the 1980s for Toys'R'Us to present the universe of
toys through a network of giant brick-and-mortar stores, by the late
'90s, this universe was being represented by eToys on a network of
computer terminals as a purely virtual system of signs. Different
means of distribution for the same real objects. Etoy, the artistic
third, upped the level of abstraction to that of a purely virtual
existence on the Net. Etoy's toys are completely encoded as data
sets and the group's only art product for sale is stock,
etoy.SHARES, first circulated in galleries and later via the Toywar
platform. Whoever obtains these shares, either by buying them, doing
some recruiting or performing some other service, becomes part of an
art universe that exists only on the Net.
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Art is capital, as Joseph Beuys knew, and in his
Schaffhauser installation Das Kapital he
placed apparatuses and artifacts of media communication together
that force the observer into perceive them in action, to see his or
her own productivity as capital and himself or herself as an artist.
This model of one's own participation in art gains the dimension of
"social sculpture" only in so far as the imaginative interrogation
of the relics of anthropological media communication infers the
history of the interaction encapsulated within them, thereby opening
up spaces for opportunities for participation in the future.
Following Beuys, who, it should be noted, used all the media
available in his day for the creation of social sculptures, etoy,
with its shares concept and the Toywar platform, develops new
formats for participation in art which, making full use of the
networking potential of the Internet, enliven a virtual space for
information, communication and transaction, an ensemble of tools for
action for "interventions in the symbolic reproduction process of
society" ( Frank
Hartmann) and an institutionalizing self-articulation organ for
virtuality. So etoy's efforts seem aimed at carrying the concept of
the social sculpture over to a digital format.
For artistic reasons, etoy could not accept the takeover offer
from eToys, which after all, amounted to a million German marks at
the time. The story would have worked, of course, since "unfriendly
takeovers" are now a common part of doing business. For the first
time, net.art would have brought a newsworthy price and nomadic
artists obtain their domains from various contemporary subversion
zones anyway. But without the claim on etoy.com, the project of the
social sculpture would have been out of reach. It borders on insult
and suggests a bad memory when etoy is now accused of "selling out."
They already passed up their considerable chance to do so.
And so, two representations on the Web stood opposed to one
another. eToys, the parasite-like one, organizing the circulation of
already existing real objects, and etoy, the autochtonous one, using
Web-based tools to pressure virtual as well as real social processes
to reveal and change themselves. Two models of participation were
also opposed, one noting the changing valuations of stocks, and the
other honoring participation with shares in the project. In the same
way, it was a conflict between two lifestyles, one consumerist,
giving absolute priority to acquisition, in this case, a domain, and
the other artistic, declaring the exhibition of complex social
practices, rather than art objects, the object of art. And not least
of all, of course, the future of the Web was also at stake. Should
it be reduced to a transaction platform for ecommerce -- or should
the possibilities inherent in it for spontaneous networking, "social
information processing" ( Michael
Giesecke), culture jamming, interweaving and penetration and
personal globalization be further developed?
Therein lies the art of etoy, to have expounded upon these
polarities in complete clarity and to have forced the Net population
to make a decision. And although Toywar didn't go up on the Net
until a month after the first court order, Netizens understood the
question and answered it in their own unique way. John Perry Barlow
is right when he says
we should all be grateful to etoy. But it's not only the posing of
these questions and the development of Toywar that needs to be
recognized, but also the finessing, invisible to the public, of the
juridical problems. What had to be borne out and built upon in terms
of pressures and counterattacks, threats and intentionally
misleading moves is known only to those who were immediately
involved. The legal result, at any rate, is as excellent as the
exposition of the decision-making problem.
Is everything, then, not art after all? Art is a term of
attribution that's constantly changing its rules. The Renaissance,
Romanticism and Modernism all developed countless concepts throwing
off aesthetic sparks from the overlapping of life and art. Etoy
stands firmly in this tradition. Has Duchamp already done it all?
Duchamp's readymades retain the character of objects for the most
part; Etoy forces the character of readymades onto social processes,
in particular, the making and marketing of virtuality. What eToys and Network Solutions do --
these are the readymades of the '00s. Didn't Beuys completely and
utterly exhaust the theme of the social sculpture? Wrong -- Beuys
developed social sculptures in the medium of anthropological
psychism; only the first explorations are now being conducted in the
medium of transanthropic virtualism, e.g., Luther Blissett and Toywar.
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Warhol drove the recontextualization of everyday
icons with great style, Koons exposed the pornography of surfaces
and the Business Art of the '80s recast corporate identity to the
hilt, so what's left for etoy? Etoy's perversion lies in upping,
measure by measure, the development of the value of a single icon,
their own name, virtually cast as http://www.etoy.com/, in the
spiraling attention of the economic, political, social and artistic,
thus reflecting the process of the creation of value in the
financial markets in the excess of self-exaggeration. So it's not
enough to merely simulate an airline, as Ingold
Airlines does; you have to chase the take-off and landing slots
away from Lauda Air with the "fucking
plugins" from agent.jeff.
Bringing IT to YOU....
When, back in November 1999, eToys management unveiled its coup
and Judge Shook pored over the files and etoy developed the concept
for the Toywar platform, I had just completed my several-month-long
study of the evolution of stock prices on the Neue
Markt, Germany's vague equivalent of the US technology index
NASDAQ. The bulk of these stocks for the most part rose dramatically
after their initial public offering and then more or less zigged and
zagged along a plateau before plunging downwards, opening out onto a
bland wallowing around the initial offering price. As they say,
these valuations are rather drab. Since these new companies are just
now creating the markets within which they move, the valuations
excuse the most miserable data as long as the story allows
expectations for greater future valuations.
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The actual dynamic lies in the story, the fantasy
of the market, which, like Switzerland's warm wind, keeps things
stirring as long as there's enough hot air feeding it. If, over
time, the story loses some of its plausibility, the smart investor
grabs his profits, borrowing the same paper for a limited time,
selling high, and if the stock falls, buys it back and gives it
back. Those who anticipate a change in the market profit whether it
goes up or down. The sovereign speculator is the one with his hand
on the course of the story.
As the story turns, so turns the market. The stock falls because
a majority of investors believe they'll earn more if it falls than
if it rises. Rather nasty for those who banking on high valuations.
Long-term investors wait for the next upward trend, others take
their losses and validate the downward trend, while the truly sorry
ones are those forbidden to deal by the rules of the exchange. These
are the founding investors and the company management for the
duration of the six months following the initial public offering.
Looking at the toys market, the general trend on the exchange and
overall economic development, literary critics and economists would
not be alone in risking argumentatively sound statements on the
future of the story and the stock exchange.
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If two entities are fighting over the same thing,
e.g., the domain http://www.etoy.com/, the one who
wins will be the one who can convince the other that the object of
desire is not as desirable as it appears. The etoy domain was an
object of desire, for EToys, because they were losing 20,000 of
300,000 hits a day to etoy.com, for etoy, because the domain name
was the point of reference of their artistic existence. And the
fight was particular heated because the opponents followed different
sets of logic; the economic, on the one hand, which has to do with
numbers and payments, and the artistic on the other, where it has to
do with anything but. The art group was in possession of a double
advantage: for one, the domain was theirs, and for another, far more
important one, the exhibition of the bizarre practices of the
financial world was nothing less than their artistic project. While
etoy could always put both sets of logic into play, eToys was never
able to put the logic of economics to use against its opponent by,
for example, burying the opponent in an avalanche of legal fees, nor
could it use a third logic, for example, the criminal prosecution of
Net activists. No one could hold it against eToys that they couldn't
follow the logic of art.
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When I developed, without knowing any of the
participants, the core of what became the RTMark campaign with
my "a new toy for you" (all of which is documented at www.hygrid.de/etoyrhiz.html),
the point was to set up an undeniable mirror which would make the
moves by etoy.arts and etoy.politics appear as losses in the market
value of eToys. This mirror was the NASDAQ
notation of eToys, from which I was able to determine that the
company had exhausted the hot air puffing up their story and that
the market was looming on the verge of introducing a downward trend.
The idea of focusing the campaign on the destruction of eToys's
market valuation was an act of speculating on speculation, a
metastory, telling once again the parallel story already
autonomously programmed for a fall. As etoy.arts used the similarity
of the domains as a value effect, so did etoy.politics use the fall
in the stock price as a battle effect. "To hype out the hype," as
Ricardo Dominguez and I coined the tactic in The Thing's BBS chat.
It wasn't a betting game. It was a thought through calculation:
The stock was introduced on May 20, and starting on November 20, the
insiders flooded the market. The valuation reflected the
anticipation of expectations for the Christmas shopping season and
was already moving downward. All etailers found themselves under
pressure because the traditional companies had found their
electronic footing. And the campaign would arouse so much brouhaha
that the majority of new investors would be betting on the slide.
Conceptually and legally, etoy.arts was set up brilliantly.
Etoy.politics followed a few days afterwards. The judge's ink was
barely dry when the first attacks hit the eToys Web site. The
spontaneous self-activation of hundreds and the sheer speed of the
flow of information were the trump cards. A respectable batch of
unmoderated mailing lists such as Rhizome, where my "urgently needed",
sent 36 minutes after I received the news to Nettime and four
minutes later to Rhizome - had long since met with a wave of
positive resonance, when Nettime moderator Ted Byfield (who, by the
way, did a great job in the background) let me know that "we don't
send out stuff like this." Even though the point was to attack eToys
immediately, to hit them senseless with attacks just when they were
already overworked with their monumental Christmas business. The
media and net.art
scene subscribed to Rhizome understood immediately, and shortly
after "a new toy," I found myself hijacked by the art group RTMark to the working
group furiously toiling away.
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When the forms on the Web site, and then the
mailboxes of the management were plastered with protests with the
help of Richard Zach's
estimable Feedbackpage,
eToys was pulled into a press frenzy, and they must have realized in
no uncertain terms that they were facing a powerful opponent with a
talent for grand politics. Etoy made this clear on a legal level,
RTMark on the political, the NASDAQ valuation on the financial and
the virtual sit-in on the infrastructural level.
A virtual sit-in is little more than a collective, simultaneous
requesting of a Web site. If one requests a Web site faster than it
can be transferred and built up on the end user's screen, the server
receives, on the one hand, a message telling it that the first
request is no longer valid, and on the other hand, the new request.
Scripts running on one's own computer or on go-between servers
automate this process, and after a certain number of requests, the
server under attack begins to suffer under the strain. One has to
differentiate very specifically between knocking out a server for
private motives and a political action openly disrupting a Web site
for clearly formulated reasons and for a limited time. That's when
it becomes comparable to a warning strike during wage negotiations,
a means of civil
disobedience signaling that one side has the willingness and
courage to fight. A virtual sit-in risks bringing symbolic forms of
action to bear in a medium of virtuality.
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In the case of eToys, great pains were taken to
attack the server for short spans of time only (six fifteen-minute
periods on ten Christmas shopping days) and to avoid completely
bringing it down at all costs. There was a "killer bullet script"
which was capable of doing just that, but its use was unanimously
opposed. One participant wrote: "I'm not ready to trade the
distributed, swarming community of activists model for a single
tactical nuke." The point was to get across just how widespread
the protest was; it was not about a terrorist attack.
This much can be said of the effect: There were seven or eight
rotating mirrors around the world running five different scripts.
Added to this were several tools circulating around on the Net which
can be installed on personal computers. The combination made it
possible to keep eToys's server busy performing routine tasks. The
cleverest script was probably "killertoy.html", a non-linear script
that fills cookies-based shopping carts to the brim without actually
making a purchase. For every new item, the server would have to
refigure the complete list all over again, a process that would take
longer and longer as the cart filled, and some of the mirrors could
generate a hundred thousand or more requests a day. eToys's server
was able to process the simple request for pages on the first day
without a hitch, but the more complex scripts introduced on the
second day gave it a run for its money. Requests for particular IP
addresses were completely blocked, meaning that eToys was taking
itself out of these networks. It was the "super_plus_version" of the
shopping scripts, then, that led to the shut-down of one of The
Thing's Web sites by backbone provider Verio. Here, too, the "hype
out the hype" strategy was at work, further virtualizing eToys's
virtual shopping carts with virtual purchases.
Just as important was the constant presence in all the investors' forums
that had to do with eToys where breath-taking, whiplash-like
discussions were taking place. At first, the tone was set primarily
by the financial world gloating over those mourning for the lost
domain. But the vocabulary of investors can be picked up pretty
quickly, and soon, the speculators counting on an upward trend were
confronted with all sorts of negative financial data. When the
market made its irreversible dip, the catcalls from investors
betting on the slump out yelled even those from the activists.
The financial press was as surely in eToys's hands as the
cultural press was in etoy's. But the telling difference lay in the
fact that one side publicized the story for all it was worth, while
the other side avoided every instance of publicity. So the financial
press, which could hardly ignore the dramatic fall in the stock
price, kept the impact of the "Internet renegades" as invisible as
possible. Up to the point of eToys's first concession when
Bloomberg.com ran the complete press statement from RTMark. "It's
hysterical," one of the founders emailed.
No personal meeting, no telephone contact. Email
and Web sites, nothing else. Mad email traffic early in the evening,
and when necessary, early in the morning. Then, time to think it all
over. Shortly after noon, mails to Rhizome so that the early risers
on the east coast were immediately brought up to speed. Flow, when
ten to twenty people were communicating at once and sending
information around the world. Anyone can do it. You, too.
An email finish with electronic slingshots! Hundreds of Toywar
agents place the eToys management under Toywar fire! Unconditional
surrender!!!
Days later, we were confronted with 683 fresh coffins. The
coffins of those who didn't follow the first Toywar.Order, didn't
write the warning email as instructed. The false deaths of Toywar,
now revived.
I'd like to know what Mr. Weibel thinks now. At the Center for
Art and Media Technology (ZKM), he opened the exhibition net_condition
and didn't even invite etoy, winner of the .net category of Prix Ars
Electronica in 1996. Perhaps the clever man suspected that the
standard-setting exhibition of the net-condition would be outfitted
by etoy on the Net anyway.
Translated by David Hudson