 |
| > > The Yes Men |
The Yes Men
THE
YES MEN are the corporate children of a website:  http://www.gatt.org/.
Born when the old General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
had already been replaced by the WTO, GATT.ORG has
catalyzed the distracted attention of CEOs, lawyers,
journalists and other splinters of the Western ruling
class. The Men behind the site have proudly accepted
invitations to conferences and TV shows, providing some
Power Point presentations, which have collectively been
called the "Naked Lunch of Globalization" (see in
particular www.theyesmen.org/finland
and www.theyesmen.org/wto).
What follows is a shake of identity net.plays aimed to
spread corporate citizenship in a global consumer
democracy.
FROM
From: The World
Trade Organization <info@gatt.org>
From: Mike
Moore <mmoore@gatt.org>
From: Alice Foley
<afoley@gatt.org>
From: Andreas Bichlbauer
<abichl@gatt.org>
From: Werner Daitz
<wdaitz@gatt.org>
From: Kimppa
<kimppakiva@theyesmen.org>
From: Moishe
Pippikstein <moishe@theyesmen.org>
From: CNN -
Bartle Huickinjag <bhuick@theyesmen.org>
From:
CNN Information Services
<CNNinfo@theyesmen.org>
SUBJECTS
Subject:
Re: CILS Conference, Session on Int'l Trade, Salzburg,
Austria, Oct. 26-29, 2000
Subject: WTO
representative
Subject: Friday lecture in
Salzburg
Subject: investigation
Subject:
Unpleasant announcement, URGENT REQUEST
Subject: Re:
Bichlbauer R.I.P.
Subject: Re: Terrence
Hibbert
Subject: Granwyth Hulatberi-Hulatberi-Smith
BODIES
Dear Mr. Devine,
Thank
you for your kind invitation. I may not be able to
attend personally, but I would like very much to send a
substitute. Would this be possible? Please let me know
and I will begin the search process.
Thank you, Mike
Moore
Dear Susanne,
When Michael Devine
invited Mr. Moore to send a substitute speaker on his
behalf, Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer was kind enough to
oblige.[…]
Best wishes, Alice Foley
Administrative
Assistant to Mike Moore
Dear Professor Campbell,
I was disappointed to hear from Alice Foley that
some people in the audience on Saturday disliked my
lecture. […] Those who were upset by the lecture were
clearly unreceptive to any message departing from the
simple WTO "party line" as it is presented in larger
arenas. […]
Best wishes Andreas Bichlbauer
Dear Mr. Campbell,
Indeed you are correct,
Dr. Bichlbauer was in fact "pied" after speaking at the
Salzburg CILS conference. At present we are not
completely certain of all the details, but it appears
[…] that an agent provocateur planned the pieing from
the start. […]
Best wishes, Alice Foley
Administrative Assistant to Mike Moore
Dear
Delegates,
We apologize for interrupting your
holiday season with this most unpleasant announcement.
Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer, who spoke on behalf of the
WTO at the CILS conference in Salzburg on Oct. 27, and
with whom many of you shared a pleasurable moment or
two, has passed on. He succumbed yesterday, at 16:50
CET, to an infection thought to have been caught from
the rotten pie which was hurled in his face after his
Oct. 27 lecture. […]
Walther Funk
Investigative
Services
Dear Mr. Schroeder,
Indeed, we
have a particular problem that I would like to take up
with you. I think I did mention, did I not, that we had
developed a Management Leisure Suit, a garment allowing
today's CEOs to oversee foreign workforces in
unprecedented detail, all the while engaging in healthy
leisure activities sure to bolster
efficiency?
Well, that was a "white lie": while
we have developed a *prototype* of the suit, we have not
developed the suit itself. It is, in a word, quite
difficult to develop. Here is what it must do:
1.
Perform surveillance of distant factory floors, relaying
information directly into the vacationing manager
(through implanted sensors) of any anomalies, excesses,
excrescences, superlatives, and errors. Thus
information-enabled, the manager can gambol all over
Bermuda, if he/she so chooses.
2. Upon unusual
information excrescence, the MLS must enable the manager
to express upon any given worker, or on all workers
together, electrical impulses that will alert the worker
to the fact that work must be performed more ethically.
[…]
Thank you,
Granwyth Hulatberi
Dear
Mr. Schroeder,
We are gratified to receive your
request to work for the World Trade Organization. Thank
you! What we are is this: an effective organization with
global goodwill and goodwill for the globe. We have
forward momentum; we will hurry humanity into prosperous
futures! […]
At the Malaysian agribusiness
conference, we laid out a radical plan to allow the
Third-World hungry to participate in the miracle of U.S.
fast food by recycling their one-dollar hamburgers as
many times as financially necessary.
On CNBC, we
showed how it would be possible to extend the logic of
"pollution vouchers," whereby countries and companies
purchase rights to pollute, into the field of human
rights violations.
And at a legal conference in
Salzburg we promoted a scheme to privatize
voting--allowing companies to contract directly with
individual voters for a particular suffrage. This would
let politics be run more efficiently, through commerce,
rather than through the clumsy and indirect language of
big-government bureaucrats.
You will find such
examples inspiring, and you will see that there is a
place in our organization for difficult work and
strenuous efforts at communication. Indeed,
communication can help us all travel outside the box, or
even--yes, potentially!--to rupture that box completely,
through spurring and prodding and effort.
Let's
spur! Let's prod! And let's effort: now you tell us
how.
With very best wishes,
Granwyth
Hulatberi
Informatics for Progress Division,
WTO
http://www.gatt.org/
| | |
