THE YES MEN AND ACTIVISM IN THE INFORMATION ... - Index of

The Instant Information Age
What makes such Denial of Service attacks successful (or not) is our fairly recent reliance
on instant information. Before the Internet, one had to wait for information to arrive, either in the
form of the ten o’clock news or a letter transmitted the old fashioned way, through the US Postal
Service. For an activist group of the late 1980s to get national or international coverage was
unusual. Even though Gran Fury made press in Italy because of the 1990 Venice Biennale, the
scandal was not heavily covered in the United States. Yet now, in part because of the Internet,
widespread, immediate gratification has become a way of life in the United States as well as most
of the world. From instant mail to instant grits, we have become an impatient culture. This
phenomenon is, however, not accidental. The Yes Men and other hacktivists are often fighting
against what is felt to be the corporatization of American culture, which many believe is
responsible for our current state of global impetuosity. Every bit of mass communication
—including corporate advertising, even the Yes Men’s preferred method of information
dissemination, press releases—is manipulated in order to be manipulative; mass communication
and its calculated appropriation intends to tell its audience what to think and how to respond. 119
Specifically, mass media and corporations manipulate the audience into believing what
corporations want them to believe.
119 Lani Boyd, “The New Original: RayGun Magazine and the Death of Avant-Garde,” working paper, Louisiana
State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 2005.
55