An
interview with the Yes Men, the ultimate 'cyber-hoaxers'
The
Ecologist, November 2002
Tampere,
Finland, August 2001. One hundred and fifty people were gathered at the
Tampere University of Technology for a riveting two-day seminar entitled
'fibres and textiles for the future.' The textile industry delegates
were looking forward to a feast of fibre-related speakers, workshops and
discussions, of which the highlight would be a talk from a
representative of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the future of
employee-management relationships. It sounded too good to
miss.
For the
textile industry delegates, like industry delegates everywhere, the WTO
mattered. Set up in 1995 the global trade policeman, which sets the
rules under which international trade must be carried out, has the power
to open up entire economies, strike down national laws that 'hinder'
global trade and give the nod to punitive sanctions on countries which
fail to adhere to its free trade gospel. Already, in just six years of
existence, it had attracted more controversy (and protesters) than any
other international body in history. To opponents it was an
undemocratic, ideological vehicle for the extension of Western market
values to everyone on Earth; one that had already been used to strike
down national laws on health, safety and environmental protection in
several of its member countries. To supporters, like the textilians of
Tampere, it was a way to ensure expanding global markets for their
products. Whichever way you looked at it, though, the WTO's opinions
were going to be well worth hearing.
Hank Hardy
Unruh, the WTO's speaker, turned out to be American; not surprising,
perhaps, for an advocate of the global free market. He also turned out
to have a large zip running down the back of his business suit, but as
he took to the podium to deliver his lecture, it seemed rude to ask why.
In any case, the WTO's take on labour/management relations soon had all
the delegates engrossed.
In a
powerful and well-argued lecture, accompanied by graphs, slides and
statistics, Unruh looked forward to the efficiently-managed,
market-focused workforce of the future by examining some of the mistakes
of the past. First he argued that the American Civil War - 'a war in
which unbelievably huge amounts of money went right down the drain' -
need never have happened. Fighting over slavery, of all things, said
Unruh, was absurd. 'Left to their own devices' he explained, 'markets
would have eventually replaced slavery with "cleaner" sources of labour
anyhow'. To prove this, he embarked on a 'thought experiment' in which
he compared the likely current cost of maintaining an 'involuntary
imported workforce' in the United States with the cost of leaving the
potential slaves at home in Gabon, to labour instead in sweatshops or
fields of export crops. The latter, he concluded, was much cheaper -
demonstrating that 'by forcing the issue, the North not only committed a
terrible injustice against the freedom of the South, but also deprived
slavery of its natural development into remote labour.'
While the
assembled textilians were digesting the implications of such a
revolutionary application of market theory, Unruh went on to look at
India. Specifically, Gandhi, 'a likeable, well-meaning fellow who wanted
to help his fellow workers along, but did not understand the benefits of
open markets and free trade.' Gandhi's ideal of village
self-sufficiency, Unruh explained, was just the sort of inefficient
protectionist measure that modern India was rightly doing away with.
Finally,
Unruh revealed to the delegates the WTO's vision of the
worker-management relationship of the future. A 'central management
problem', he explained, was 'how to maintain rapport with distant
workers' - particularly important as multinational companies shift their
production around the world, seeking the cheapest labour and laxest
regulations. The WTO's solution was to employ the latest technology. To
the sound of a drum roll, Unruh then ripped off his suit to reveal a
golden, spangly, skin-tight leotard.
'This', he explained to the
open-mouthed delegates, 'is the management leisure suit!' Before they
had time to react, a three-foot golden phallus began to inflate on the
front of the suit, with the aid of a small gas cannister.
'This',
continued Unruh, triumphantly, 'is the employee visualisation
appendage!' Now fully tumescent, he went on to explain that the
'hip-mounted device' was fitted with a telescreen which allowed managers
to monitor the performance of their employees, receive data on their
productivity (from chips planted under the employees' skin) and
administer electric shocks to the less hard-working. 'I'm very excited
to be here!' he finished, perhaps unnecessarily. 'Thank you!' The
audience, it seems, were impressed. As he stepped down from his podium,
the man from the WTO was given a warm round of applause.
*
In an
ex-council flat in north London, the man who co-wrote Hank Hardy Unruh's
speech can't stop giggling.
Surely, I'm
saying to him - surely the delegates didn't really think that Unruh was
from the WTO? They couldn't really have thought that the WTO was
suggesting that CEOs wear a giant gold willy?
'They did!
They really did!' he splutters.
Come on, I
say - really? Maybe they were just being polite?
'No,' he
says, 'you know - it makes some sense. The employee visualisation device
is hip-mounted - it's more convenient that way, it leaves your hands
free. I mean, freedom of movement, less repetitive stress injuries …'
He's still giggling. 'I guess we thought, well, this might not work, but
even if it doesn't, there might be a photo taken of it, and the photo
might be published and it will say 'world trade organisation', and
there'll be this guy in a gold spandex suit with a three-foot golden
phallus … And that's what happened!'
Surreally,
it was what happened. The next day, one of Finland's leading newspapers,
Aamulehti, ran a serious and lengthy piece on the conference
('intelligent clothes and innovative fibres are part of everyday life of
the future') illustrated with a large photo of Hank's, erm, appendage.
In colour.
'It was
totally straight up!' he howls, with no pun
apparently intended. 'There's this picture, and it's like "here's the
WTO!", and there's this massive, great….' He trails off into laughter.
The man I'm
talking to may or may not be called Mike, and he may or may not be from
New York. He's a hard man to pin down; I've been trying to get hold of
him for months, and have corresponded with him under at least two
different names. Mike is one of the Yes Men, the funniest, oddest, most
mysterious and most brazen political activists around, and he has some
explaining to do.
Hank Hardy
Unruh's talk, of course, was a daring spoof. Hank Hardy Unruh himself
was not an official representative of the World Trade Organisation but
Mike's co-conspirator, Andy, who lives in Paris. Mike has a shock of
curly brown hair, a loud Hawaiian shirt and a dose of jet lag - he's on
his way to see Andy, and on the way, he's stopped to explain what the
Yes Men are up to, and why.
'The Yes
Men started by accident,' he says. 'We set up a website - www.gatt.org -
around the time of the Seattle protests [in 1999]. We thought of it as
just a satire site about the WTO, and we hoped people would accidentally
end up there instead of at the WTO site'. Gatt.org, which still exists,
is such an effective parody of the official WTO site that you have to
read it very carefully to see that it's a spoof - one which works by
taking the WTO's real, live aims and actions to their logical extremes,
and thus demonstrating their absurdity. The WTO sent their lawyers
snapping ineffectively at the Yes Men's heels and posted a warning about
them on the (real) WTO website. Mike and Andy thought all this was quite
fun, but didn't think it was much else. Until they started to receive
emails from people who hadn't been paying close enough attention.
'People
started emailing us asking if Mike Moore [then head of the real WTO]
would come and give a talk at their conference or meeting', says Mike.
'The first few we sent on to Michael Moore [the American
anti-establishment comedian]. We thought it might be funny if he went
along instead, but he didn't reply. But then we thought, wait a minute,
we can go ourselves! So the next one that came in, which was to a law
conference in Salzburg - off we went.'
The
Salzburg lawyers' conference was where the Yes Men were born. 'Dr
Andreas Bichlbauer' arrived in Salzburg in October 2000 as an official
representative of the WTO and delivered a PowerPoint presentation about
the obstacles which still had to be overcome if the process of
globalisation was to fully succeed. They included the Italian siesta (an
unfair barrier to trade, since few other nations indulged in it) and
America's one-person-one-vote democracy.
Bichlbauer
explained that the US's campaign finance system, under which
corporations pay politicians to persuade voters to put them in office to
pursue the corporations' agenda was 'grotesquely inefficient.' He
explained to the assembled lawyers, says Mike, 'that the solution was
just to open voting to the markets and allow companies to pay people
directly for votes.' Bichlbauer, like Hank Hardy Unruh, was actually
Andy (who, Mike explains, 'actually becomes these characters - it's a
little scary!) And Bichlbauer, like Unruh, was warmly applauded. No-one
objected to his speech and no one questioned his identity.
'It was
kind of unreal', says Mike. 'We couldn't believe that the lawyers didn't
realise what was going on. We expected to be kicked out, thrown off the
stage or something. We were so shocked that they didn't realise it that
we kept trying to get something more out of them. So we went to lunch
with them, and Andy just kept pushing them, trying to get them to
realise what was happening, trying to get this glimmer of realisation.
So he was saying that Hitler's economic model had a lot to be said for
it. People were a bit sceptical, but he explained he wasn't talking
about the social problems, just the economics, then they came
round.'
Shrewd
observers will by now have noticed that everything the Yes Men's 'WTO'
says is, while hardly likely to be put about by representatives of the
real thing, perfectly consistent with free market economics. In the
reductionist, neoliberal trade-uber-alles ideology of the times,
everything that Bichlbauer and Unruh said in Salzburg and Tampere
actually makes perfect economic sense. Cultural differences are a
barrier to one global market; third world sweatshops are cheaper than
imported slaves; Gandhi's homespun village economy would be firmly
illegal under WTO rules, which ban countries from subsidising,
protecting or promoting their own industries in the face of foreign
competition. Everything that the Yes Men say to their audiences is
merely market logic taken to its most extreme. That, says Mike, is the
point of the exercise.
'The whole
premise is that you're exaggerating and mirroring what the people you're
talking to are already saying', he explains. 'I suppose the point of the
Yes Men is to try and demonstrate how problematic liberal economics is,
and where the trajectory that we're following is leading. Saying, let's
follow the ideas that most of the world is tied up in in one way or
another to their logical extreme, and see where they get us. The idea is
that at some stage, among your audience, there'll be some moment of
realisation. Trouble is, there isn't always. That's what we're realising
- how much crap people will take if it comes from a person in a suit
representing something official like the WTO. The stuff people will
believe in the name of free trade. These people in our audiences weren't
stupid - they've all got PhDs and law degrees and all the rest. And we
can stand there wearing a giant gold member and say that abolitionism
was a waste of time and money - and these guys don't even murmur!'
The 21st
century Emperor, in other words, wears clothes after all - spangly gold
ones, with a giant penis attached. In two, hour-long lectures, a couple
of pranksters had demonstrated, more efficiently than any number of
books, protests and learned texts, how virtually anything can be
justified, to anyone who wants to believe it, in the name of free trade.
What the
Yes Men are doing can be bracketed with other actions in which
dissidents, mischief-makers and campaigners use art, humour or absurdity
to make a point about economics and society far more effectively than
they would be able to if they just marched about waving banners, or
wrote cross letters to newspapers. This kind of thing, from pie-throwing
to billboard-altering to preaching the anti-consumerist gospel in
Starbucks, is often called 'culture jamming', and the Yes Men are merely
taking it to its most absurd - and yet strangely logical extreme. All
this is very post-modern. It's also, says Mike, 'just fun. People like
it, and so do we!' Which sounds as good a reason as any to keep doing
it.
Over the
last few months, the Yes Men have been as busy as ever, responding to
more invitations to talk. ('I guess at some stage, people are going to
rumble us,' says Mike. 'You'd think it would have a short shelf life,
but the invitations to talk just keep coming.') Andy has also done a
live television interview, as a WTO representative, naturally, in which
he announced the WTO's plans to introduce 'justice vouchers', which
would discourage torture by oppressive regimes. Operating on the same
basis as carbon trading schemes intended to tackle climate change,
justice vouchers would 'give countries an economic incentive to give up
torture.' The interviewer was surprised, but since the suggestion made
economic sense, he didn't push the matter.
What
happens next is anybody's guess - it seems unlikely that the Yes Men
know themselves. Since I met Mike, though, the stakes have been upped.
At his latest speaking engagement, in Sydney, Australia, in May,
'Kinnithrung Sprat' announced to a group of accountants the official
winding-up of the World Trade Organisation, and its replacement with a
Trade Regulation Organisation based on the UN Charter of Human Rights.
'There are countless signs in the world today showing us the problems
with our approach to trade', he told them. 'We at the WTO are reacting
to these signs by refounding our work upon new principles-human rather
than corporate ones.'
Unfortunately, the real WTO has failed to follow the Yes Men's
lead. Instead of dissolving itself, it has just appointed a new director
general, Supachai Panitchpakdi, and is currently mulling over the
corporate triumph that was the recent Earth Summit in Johannesburg.
There, to the horror of environmentalists, the WTO was handed the task
of deciding how to 'resolve' the legal conflicts between international
agreements to prevent climate change, protect biological diversity and
clean up the environment, and the WTO's own rules, promoting unhindered
global trade at any cost. No prizes for guessing which will come out
ahead. The Yes Men, it seems, have enough ammunition to keep them going
for a long while yet.
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