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

of RTMark (pronounced “artmark”), the forerunner of the Yes Men, through the pair’s latest
works as the Yes Men. 5
Researching this topic proved rather difficult. Though there is an abundance of written
information about the group, mostly available through the World Wide Web, there has been very
little academic documentation (as of this writing) about the Yes Men. The substance of the
source material referenced in this essay comes from the Yes Men themselves: through their book,
The Yes Men (Disinformation, 2004), their feature film, The Yes Men, directed by Dan Ollman,
Sarah Price, and Chris Smith (MGM, 2004), published interviews, and personal email
conversations. The largest general pool of information on the group is from journalistic sources,
usually only a few paragraphs in length and varying little from article to article. Most of the
sources offer only a brief mention of the group and an abbreviated version of their hoaxes, and
almost all of the available sources are more anecdotal than analytical, focusing more on the actions
of the Yes Men than the reasons behind their behavior. Their feature film also spotlights the
group’s actions rather than their intentions, following the pair’s charade posing as the World
Trade Organization (WTO), but not going below surface value with the stunts. The nature of the
sources is important to point out since part of the aim of the Yes Men is to garner media
exposure about their schemes, and hopefully to foster dialogue about the issues their schemes
address. Yet, with mostly concise journalistic articles of less than five hundred words being
written, and with these articles focusing not on the issues, but on the moral implications of their
works, the Yes Men may not yet be getting the coverage their works warrant.
5 RTMark is usually written as “®ark,” but for the purpose of this paper, it is written as “RTMark.”
3