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

hands of the white, Anglo-Saxon establishment – could become a buttress blunting the disruptive
effects of ethnic diversity.” 128 Similarly, Vamos and Servin feel that television started life as a
democratic medium, but because of “subsequent corporate use,” it has been hijacked from its
original intention. 129 This same logic can also be applied to the Internet. Originally a government
endeavor created to protect the military infrastructure during the Cold War, now the Internet is
awash with commercialism, with the consumer losing the great “information war” being fought by
“subtle electric informational media – under cold conditions, and constantly.” 130 A Marxist
analysis of the Internet user’s experience and accompanying condition of “allatonceness” would
highlight the alienation of the user not only from tangible results of his labor –– as the Internet is
a huge (and very real) abstraction –– but from other users as well. So Internet activism is not
always successful, in large part because there is no psychological impact on the target the way
there is in actual space: “Some of the qualities of a symbolic demonstration are lost when there is
no public to view it.” 131 Without the visualization of thousands of demonstrators banding
together, such as the footage of the Seattle riots in 1999 against the WTO, the emotional impact
of the Yes Men in their attack against the WTO struggles to take effect.
128 McLuhan and Powers, 88.
129 RTMark, “Globalization and Global Resistance,” http://ww.rtmark.com/globalization.html, accessed on February
20, 2005.
130 McLuhan and Fiore, 138.
131 Jordan and Taylor, 70-71, 80.
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