Today as part of an assignment for another class (Ethics in Media) I attended a screening of The Yes Men Fix The World.

For those of you who don’t know who the “Yes Men” are, they’re more or less a team headed by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, and they like to pull pranks on big corporate organizations (or government ones) who they feel aren’t living up to their duties: such as taking responsibility for damages or looking out for regular citizens instead of their bottom line.

Namely these pranks consist of pretending to be business executives or assistants to executives, and then either saying things they hope will shock and disgust other business executives — or saying things that it would be great to hear in a more ideal world. For example, they were part of the group behind the fake NYT print that was released earlier this year.

Interestingly enough (and more relevant to this class), despite impersonating high-level officials, or designing webpages that carefully and diligently mimic those of major corporations (these pages are what they have used to “draw in” unsuspecting media sources to pose for), Mr. Bichlbaum reports that they’ve never actually been on the receiving end of a lawsuit — for copyright infringement or otherwise.

Overall, it’s definitely worth looking in to if you’re at all into culture-jamming… which I guess is sort of like when artistic expression skips over the bother of justifying itself under Fair Use and just embraces its punk-rock subversiveness instead.

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