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The
Power Jokers By Matthew
Yeomans Posted Thursday, Feb. 3, 2000, at 4:30 p.m.
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At the 1996 Democratic Party convention in
Chicago, the only thing more titillating than Dick Morris' spectacularly
sordid demise was the Smart Ass, a hilarious political fanzine that
skewered Dems and GOPers alike with bawdy and vicious takedowns. Where
else would you find a sex-channel spoof called "RNC After Dark" featuring
the hard-bodied trio of Pat Buchanan, Ralph Reed, and Ollie "I'm looking
for more than a few good men" North?
What a difference the Internet makes. Today,
dozens of political spoof sites litter the Web, be they in the form of Buchanan2000.com (no surprises here,
Pat's a fascist!) or the more informative but equally smug nhprimarysource.com.
Amid all this binary humor, two sites really
stand out. They are gwbush.com and YesRudy.com, two satirical powerhouses that
launched as exact mirror images of George Bush and Rudy Giuliani's
official Web sites, but with the actual text replaced with confusingly
deadpan indictments of the candidates. At first, many surfers had no
inkling of the joke. But both sites bore the hallmarks of the established
masters of online satire—a digital agitprop outfit known as
RTMark.
"With gwbush and
YesRudy, we were able to focus on the corporate influence on politics,"
says Ray Thomas, an alias for one of the four key members of RTMark. "One
of our goals is to stir things up and get more engagement in the political
process," adds Frank Guerrero (yes, another alias). Their motives are
those of the classic gadfly: to lampoon those in
power.
RTMark began as a BBS
in the early 1990s and took its cultural mischief to the Web in 1995. The
quartet, along with a wider network of other members, acts as a
clearinghouse for art and activism. But for all its tomfoolery, RTMark is
a registered company and runs its Web
site—tagged "Corporate Consulting for the 21st
Century"—in a businesslike fashion. Collaborators are encouraged to go to
RTMark's site and to suggest creative anti-corporate projects. The group
will then seek investors to fund projects and workers to execute them.
Thomas estimates that only 20 percent of the projects posted actually need
real money to execute, but he says "the aim is always profit, cultural
profit."
The group has an
impressive track record. Before entering politics, RTMark made a name for
itself through the Barbie Liberation Organization, a wicked project that
switched the voice boxes in over 300 Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls. Kids
around the nation were surprised to hear G.I. Joes announce, "Want to go
shopping?" Most recently, it has also been the shadowy, enabling hand
behind art group etoy.com's now infamous David vs. Goliath battle with
eToys in the legal battle to keep its name.
RTMark can, in fact, function only in the
shadows. Not only do all the members work under aliases, but some of the
core members have never even met each other. "Like a corporation," says
Thomas, "we hide behind a corporate veil. This limits our liability and
the liability of our investors."
With good reason. Last April, when RTMark launched gwbush.com with
computer programmer Zack Exley, who had registered the domain name and had
approached RTMark with the project, the Bush camp went ballistic at the
mirror image of its official georgewbush.com site. Not only did candidate
Bush famously attack the site, but his lawyers issued a cease-and-desist
letter.
"We like to embrace
these cease-and-desist letters," says Guerrero, "They prove something is
working." Less happy was 30-year-old Exley, the only member of the project
whose real name was known. But Bush's legal threats worried him less than
the tactic of misleading Web surfers. Exley says he "wanted to do a more
straightforward parody of the Bush campaign," adding that "parody is the
best way … to convey a political message." With RTMark's satirical mirror
approach, Exley believed, "people were confused."
"We thought people were smart enough," to get
the satire, says Thomas. But in June 1999, Exley took complete control of
gwbush.com, and "we were urged to walk away," says Thomas. "Sure," he
notes, "we were using subterfuge, but just as Jonathan Swift was with A
Modest Proposal. It's sort of, like, the difference between Swift and
Saturday Night Live."
Subterfuge—like nature—abhors a vacuum, so when, as Thomas puts it,
"a source with inner knowledge of the Giuliani campaign" told RTMark that
Rudy Giuliani's campaign team had failed to renew a YesRudy domain name it
had earlier registered, the group found a new cause. At the time, the
Republican candidate's official site, RudyYes.com, was "classic Giuliani
one-way communication," says Guerrero. "There was no way for giving
feedback." RTMark designed a mirror site, alerted the media, and waited
for the Giuliani camp to bite. "We were waiting for a cease-and-desist
letter," says Guerrero, "but we didn't get one." Giuliani wasn't about to
make the same mistake as Bush. As Bruce Teitelbaum, head of Giuliani's
exploratory committee, told the Village Voice, "There's nothing we
can do to stop people parodying our site."
Six months later, YesRudy is still being refined
by RTMark and, with the New York Senate campaign heating up, may soon have
some new material to play with. So far, RTMark has no plans for launching
any other political sites, but as Guerrero says, "Each time we think we've
had enough of these mirror sites, another opportunity crops
up."
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Matthew Yeomans is a writer living in Brooklyn,
N.Y.
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