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21 May 1999: Texas Governor George W. Bush is running for President.
But a Website in his name (www.gwbush.com) isn't doing his campaign any
favours. It looks identical to Bush's official site (www.georgewbush.com) -- the
same layout and design, the same pictures. But under the slogan "Hypocrisy
with Bravado", the text highlights Bush's refusal to deny having used illegal
drugs: "What, in your own words," it asks, "differentiates George W. Bush's
early use of cocaine and that of the felons who are routinely locked away
for the same offense, sometimes for years and years, or even forever?"
Exploring the site, visitors find invitations to take part in a range of
cultural and corporate sabotage projects, from jumping the fence at
Disneyland to a campaign to rename a chemical weapons incineration
facility after Ronald Reagan. Asked about the site at a press conference,
Bush loses his temper and manages the only memorable line of his whole
campaign, snapping "there ought to be limits to freedom!" |
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Parodies of political Websites look set to become a staple of elections to
come. While gwbush.com is still the best-known example, Hillary Clinton,
Rudy Giuliani, and Al Gore are among others who have so far been
targetted in the US. Jeff Kennett's brochureware campaign site generated
the first Australian example, though one which, perhaps inevitably,
struggled to be as funny as the site it was subverting. Gwbush.com was
initially a collaboration between Boston computer consultant Zack Exley
and corporate/cultural sabotage specialists rtmark (http://rtmark.com)
(pronounced "art-mark").1 Exley had registered the domain name in 1998
in the hope of perhaps selling it to the Bush campaign, but began to see
different possibilities as he learned more about the Bush/cocaine issue.
Familiar with earlier rtmark projects, in which their site would be
disguised as that of Shell or McDonald's, Exley approached the group and
they made a copy of Bush's site, layering their own content underneath. |
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As an online centre for sabotage funding, rtmark coordinate a range of
cultural activities, ranging from Phone In Sick Day to "Corporate Poetry"
contests. They are perhaps still best-known for funding the Barbie
Liberation Organisation, who switched the voice boxes of some 300
Barbie and GI Joe dolls before returning them to toy shop shelves, so that
Barbie would bark "vengeance is mine" on demand.2 Other projects have
included funding a computer programmer to insert homoerotic content
into the SimCopter game, with around 80,000 doctored copies being
distributed, and the anti-copyright Deconstructing Beck CD, featuring
songs constructed entirely from samples of Beck recordings (which are, of
course, themselves heavily sample-driven). |
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A useful perspective from which to approach political sabotage projects
like gwbush.com is that of what Geert Lovink and David Garcia of the
Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam call tactical media
(http://www.waag.org/tmn/frabc.html). Lovink and Garcia use this term to
describe creative and/or subversive uses of communications technologies
by those who feel in some way excluded from access to their broader
cultural environment. In contrast to the fantasy of media impartiality and
objectivity, for Lovink and Garcia, tactical media use is always
participatory, a direct cultural intervention.3 |
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Tactical media have important differences from earlier models of
"alternative" media, such as that of John Downing, which emphasises the
importance of self-management and the development of horizontal
connections between users.4 Media tacticians don't try to consolidate
themselves as an alternative -- they don't try to create a "better" radio
station or paper, or to establish themselves as a "Chinese CNN", (the
stated ambition of diasporic Chinese activists the World Huaren
Federation http://www.huaren.org). Instead, the defining characteristic of
tactical media use is its mobility, its flexible response to events and
changing contexts. Different actions and campaigns use whichever media
vectors are most appropriate at any given time for any given purpose. An
event might call for making a documentary, making an A4 newsletter, or
making a phone call. |
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As well as using the term "tactical", Geert Lovink has variously labelled
this kind of activity as "hybrid" or "streaming" media, which is in itself an
illustration of the refusal of tactical media to tie itself too tightly to any
one discourse or set of practices. But the term "tactical" is perhaps the
most useful in that it highlights Lovink and Garcia's acknowledged debt to
the work of Michel de Certeau.5 In The Practice of Everyday Life de
Certeau argued that the study of cultural production and consumption
needed to be expanded to examine the uses to which cultural products
are put by their consumers, drawing an important distinction between
strategies and tactics. |
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A strategy is what producers use: a business, for instance, that defines its
territory and then uses this as the basis for its relations with others works
from the privileging of place over time. A tactic, on the other hand,
emphasises time -- the moment of opportunity and possibility made
possible as cracks appear in the evolution of strategic place. Rtmark's
rolling agenda of projects offers an excellent example of this: in making a
copy of George Bush's official site and layering their own content
underneath it, for example, as well as through using a legally-registered
domain name in Bush's name, rtmark and Exley illustrate the tactical
approach of exploiting the small cracks that appear in the mediascape
through the rapid evolution of technology and the catch-up process of
regulatory policy. |
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It's worth reminding ourselves that tactical media is not just the domain
of the Internet. With camcorders, samplers, desktop publishing packages,
photocopiers and microradio broadcast technologies, tactical use of the
media is infinitely more possible now than it was when groups needed
access to a TV station or a printing press. Kurdish groups used mobile
phones to coordinate stunning simultaneous protests across several
continents in February 1999. But the Net does offer a whole new set of
possibilities, not only for organising and publicising, but also as the actual
site of action. Besides gwbush.com, examples would include the crisis
netcasting of Radio B92 (http://www.freeb92.net), and the invasion of Shell's
London offices in January 1999 by the camcorder guerillas of
Undercurrents, who uploaded a live streaming video news report using a
digital camera, a laptop and a mobile phone (http://www.undercurrents.org). |
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The other key sense in which tactical media differ from alternative media
is in their orientation to the mainstream. Instead of opposing the media
and trying to create an alternative, the media tactician aims to use the
established media whenever possible. For Exley and rtmark, the real
success of gwbush.com was in the extent to which the Bush/cocaine issue
was subsequently reported and publicised in the mainstream media, with
the hook for wider coverage being Bush's own recognition of the site. His
"limits to freedom" outburst generated enormous media interest --
among those to cover it in the US were ABC news, USA Today, Newsweek,
and the New York Times, as well as international press from Russia to
Brazil. Media tacticians can leverage their causes onto the public agenda
on a digital shoestring. Exley estimates that gwbush.com cost $210 to
create and yet, in the wake of Bush's interventions, it reached more
readers than many of the major US political magazines. The range of
responses by the Bush campaign are, in their own way, just as impressive. |
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14 April 1999: Bush's lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg sends gwbush.com a
cease-and-desist letter, complaining about the use of images owned by the
Bush campaign and claiming, curiously, that gwbush.com contains links to
sites "that promote violence and degrade women". Rtmark are later to
claim they are deluged with complaints from users who are unable to find
the non-existent porn content. Rtmark spokesperson Frank Guerrero
comments that the group "do hope to get more cease-and-desist letters in
the future". A few weeks later, on 3 May, Bush gives a hint as to his likely
Internet policy should he become president, when he makes an official
complaint to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), arguing that the site
is an unregistered political campaign, the implication being that satirists
and commentators should have to register with the government. And,
magnificently, the campaign tries to prevent anyone else from registering
Bush-related Websites by going on a domain name buying spree. Dozens of
Bush URLs are set up as aliases to the candidate's site: at the time of
writing, in April 2000, typing in www.bushsucks.com or www.bushblows.org still
redirects surfers to Bush's official campaign home page. |
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Notes
1
At the time of writing in, April 2000, Exley continues to run his Bush site, although
rtmark are no longer directly involved. A complete archive of the original rtmark
content for gwbush.com, including the huge amount of press coverage and the legal
correspondence from Bush's attorneys is at http://rtmark.com/bush.html.
2
A helpful guide to DIY Barbie-surgery appears in Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert,
eds. Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life. London and New York:
Routledge, 1997. 196-7. You'll need a soldering iron.
3
David Garcia and Geert Lovink. "The ABC of Tactical Media." No date. 14
Feb. 2000 <http://www.waag.org/tmn/frabc.html>.
4
John Downing. "Alternative Media and the Boston Tea Party." Questioning The Media. Eds. J. Downing et al. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 238-52; "Computers
for Political Change: PeaceNet and Public Data Access." Journal of Communication 39.3 (1989): 154-62; Radical Media. Boston: South End Press, 1984.
5
Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1984.
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Citation
reference for this article
MLA style:
Graham Meikle. "gwbush.com: Tactical Media Strike" M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000. [your
date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/gwbush.html>.
Chicago style:
Graham Meikle, "gwbush.com: Tactical Media Strike," M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000, <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/gwbush.html>
([your date of access]).
APA style:
Graham Meikle. (2000) gwbush.com: tactical media strike. M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/gwbush.html>
([your date of access]).
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![[image]](http://www.gwbush.com/goresmokespot.jpg)