By Matthew Teague
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune

My, my -- you little devil.

After the days stacked into years, there behind your desk, in your cubicle, in the corner, on the 13th floor of the vast concrete bunker that is corporate America, you decided to Fight Back: You smeared rubber cement on your boss's phone receiver.

Pretty funny stuff. But now what?

So you goofed your boss. Cute, but small-minded. It was an impish smirk, not a sinister grin. You need something stronger, something to scratch the itch of rebellion, to cure the ennui, to make Wednesday a little spicier than Tuesday. You need something darker than an office-intercom page for "Mr. C.U. Nappin," and smarter than polluting the office coffee pot.

You need the sinister grin, my friend.

You need RTMark.

RTMark (pronounced "art-mark," and a play on "registered trademark") is a self-described corporate "sabotage" outfit run by nameless, faceless shadows in New York and California, and is fronted by Andrei Codrescu, a famous New Orleans poet and novelist.

But what is RTMark? What exactly does it do? And why would a poet dabble in sabotage? All excellent questions. Hard questions. Which is why we must ignore them for now.

First, put aside all questions, turn off your beeper, push back from your desk and try to dream of a corporate world like this: a world where nobody gets a bum deal, where good guys get the bonuses, and instead of calling in sick, you might call in just fine. Where nobody dumps dangerous chemicals in the wrong places -- no, wait -- where there are no dangerous chemicals to dump, and Mom-n-Pop's Shop co-exists peacefully with Mega-Mart.

RTMark seeks to establish such a new world -- even if it means tearing down the current one. Its targets are giant companies who, in RTMark's view, enjoy the privileges of "citizenship" and have all the rights of human beings, but when they screw up, no individual is held accountable. So, according to RTMARK, corporations pollute the water and air -- and kill thousands of people through negligence -- then pay fines and continue on. If individuals committed those crimes, they'd face prison time.

Here's where it gets sticky.

RTMark's goal is to beat the corporations at their own game, by adopting a corporate veil of their own, then committing outrageous acts without fear of imprisonment. They post descriptions of heavy-duty corporate pranks on their Web site, www.rtmark.com, along with the rewards for pulling them off.

For instance, there's $3,000 waiting "for a worker at one of the five biggest mailing and parcel delivery services who can cause several thousand large packages, addressed from one corporation to another, to be delivered instead to social welfare agencies that work with children, during a holiday like Easter or Christmas, with the name and address of the social welfare agencies replacing the originals on the packages."

Or, there's a $2,500 payday coming "for an employee of one of the three largest car manufacturers in the U.S. who causes at least hundreds of cars to be shipped with gas tanks that have a capacity of between half a gallon and a gallon of gas only (the cars should be able to go about eighteen miles before refueling). At least some of the cars must be sold, and the media must report on it."

Most of the pranks are worth only a few hundred dollars, but some are lucrative. Such as this one, worth $45,000: "Create a sophisticated, popular computer game that uses Artificial Life technology to genetically engineer corporations, showing how they evolve and compete with one another and with other biological entities, e.g. people. Game must be very entertaining and be widely distributed. Project is in the beginning stages of development; A-Life programmers (Java or C++) are currently needed."

The most widely publicized prank so far was worth $8,000. The Barbie Liberation Organization made headlines by successfully switching the tiny voice boxes of thousands of talking Barbie dolls with those of GI Joe. Parents in 43 states no doubt were horrified when their children's dolls had the voices and behaviors of the wrong gender: The fey soldier wanted to go shopping, and the valley girl growled, "Vengeance is mine."

Disgruntled workers who don't have the moxie to commit a prank can make donations, to beef up the rewards paid out.

Codrescu, the New Orleans poet, said he got involved because he was tired of hearing bits of poetry creep into corporate slogans. He saw it as another example of big businesses abusing their status as citizens. "Companies have been stealing from poets for a long time," he said. "Poets have always committed sabotage of one type or another, so it seemed natural to steal back the language."

Codrescu has published poetry, memoirs, fiction and essays, and is a frequent commentator on National Public Radio. He also judges RTMark's annual "corporate poetry contest," which aims to make corporations look silly.

For instance, one of this year's contestants, named Daniel Arp, submitted a series of e-mails from Amazon.com. It started when he received a pseudo-personal e-mail from an Amazon executive that began this way: "Dear Amazon Customer, I have an extreme case of spring fever. And Amazon.com's new Lawn & Patio and Kitchen stores have a lot to do with it . . ."

So Arp e-mailed back, stoking the love-letter flames: "Dear Amazon.com: I've got the fever too. For you, Amazon. You feel the spring in the air? I feel it in my step . . . This is about more than consumption, Amazon. It is even about more than obsession. It is about love. There, I said it: L-O-V-E. All I ask in return is your Amazonian love. Sincerely, Daniel Arp."

The return letter from Amazon.com began, "Dear Daniel, Greetings from Amazon.com. What a refreshing message! . . . It is so nice to hear that you enjoy shopping with us so, and you are not afraid to tell us!"

So Arp pushed his next letter to absurdity, sure that the Amazon.com executives would catch the joke: "Dear Amazon: Oh wow. Wow wow wow. Wow wow wow wow. You're so turning me on right now to savings. I want to gobble ‘em up like candy . . ."

The executives wrote back: "Dear Mr. Arp: Greetings from Amazon.com! Thanks you for your kind words and your card. While we appreciate your offer for sending us flowers it certainly is not necessary . . ."

Arp, determined, sent back: "Dear Amazon: And so now these desires drip drip drip like rain off a rooftop, funneling fears of the emptiness of death through a sieve of optimistic purchase. I am death, and you are life, Amazon . . ."

He continued that way for almost a thousand words, and then: "And in closing this time, because my own words seem so poor, allow me to quote a favorite poet, T.S. Eliot, whose collected poems are only $14.70 on your site, a savings of 30 percent off the damnable cover price. Without further ado: ‘Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky . . .' "

Finally, Amazon got the joke.

"The floodgates really opened for poets with the advent of the Internet," Codrescu announced during one of his stints on NPR. "Poets started taking back language word for word."

He likened RTMark to an "extremely profitable mutual fund," financed by private donors more interested in cultural returns than cash dividends.

Maybe those anonymous people are a few wealthy yippies with nothing better to do. Maybe they're just incurable pranksters, and RTMark is the global version of a hand-buzzer. Or maybe they're legions of fed-up, necktied cubicle dwellers, marching in the glow of fluorescent lights and flashing their sinister grins.

Understanding RTMark

-- RTMark bills itself as an anti-big business "brokerage" that uses the "limited liability" principle to support the sabotage, or "informative alteration," of corporate products, from dolls and children's learning tools to electronic action games.

-- Its goal is to punish -- or, at the very least, publicly humiliate -- corporations for what it perceives as unfair, inhumane and culturally degrading business practices.

-- It is funded by private and often anonymous donations, which bankroll cash rewards for successful corporate saboteurs.

-- Its "bottom line" is cultural rather than financial: It aims to improve its shareholders' culture and life, "sometimes to the detriment of corporate wealth."

-- RTMark pledges never to promote a project that is likely to result in physical harm to humans, and it discourages destruction of physical property and "excessively illegal behaviors" on the grounds that such actions are "likely to get one branded a terrorist."

Source: www.rtmark.com

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10/12/00