How to Fix the World: An Interview with Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum
For the last ten years, The Yes Men have been trying to save the world from the scourge of unchecked capitalism. Their primary weapon: fake websites, which manage to get them continually invited to speak at a variety of conferences where they pose as representatives of the world's largest corporations--Dow, ExxonMobil, and the US government--in the interest of pulling off hoaxes that make these groups look almost as ridiculous as they really are. So far, the results of the battle have been mixed, but it's hard to deny that their stunts,which include passing out candles purportedly made from human remains to a hotel full of oil executives, make for headline grabbing entertainment of the most socially conscious sort.
The second documentary about the group, The Yes Men Fix The World, starts a week long run at the Northwest Film Forum tonight, and Yes Man Andy Bichlbaum will be in attendance all weekend. Seattlest got to speak briefly with Bichlbaum about The Yes Men's mission, the state of the world ten years after the WTO protest in Seattle, and how much fun it is to get sued by the Chamber of Commerce.
You’re coming to Seattle 10 years after the city’s famous WTO protests. Ten years later, have those protests really changed anything?
They sure changed my life, and a lot of peoples' lives. They basically created The Yes Men. We wanted to be there, everybody wanted to be there, but we couldn’t, so we set up this fake WTO website and started getting invitations for the WTO, because the WTO reacted, and it got into the search engines and all that. Now whether we’ve done anything is debatable, but we’ve gotten a lot of attention for things and we’ve made at least a few people be a little more on edge. I don’t have any idea whether it radically changed the way business is done, I don’t think so, but it’s certainly been critical for setting the stage for all kinds of things. As far as drawing attention to things, it’s done that in a massive way.
You mentioned keeping CEOs and executives on edge. Is that a goal of The Yes Men?
No, no, it’s totally unimportant and trivial and tangential. The goal is to basically do what the Seattle protests did, which is to let people know that they need to take to the streets, that we need to create pressure on our leaders. It doesn’t go any good to complain about our leaders unless we’re ready to put pressure on them and take to the streets, stage sit ins, and basically do what it takes to get them to be who we elected them to be. That’s a really critical part of democracy that’s sort of missing... Our work is about raising awareness by any means necessary, and about making life uncomfortable for leaders as a way of supporting them and being who we need them to be and being who they really want to be. Big companies are making life uncomfortable for leaders all the time. They’re making life pretty uncomfortable for leaders who want to do something good, they’re pressuring them very strongly not to do good, and we’ve got to make life uncomfortable for them in the other direction.
We were going to ask how you guys stayed out of legal trouble, but the Chamber of Commerce [who recently filed a lawsuit naming members of The Yes Men, among others] kind of boned that question.
We’re not in legal trouble. We’ve got great lawyers and we’re having a good time with it!
And now that the COC has started using this lawsuit to raise money for itself just how post-modern is this thing going to get before it comes to a head?
Either post-modern or dada, I’m not sure which. A little more dada, I think. It’s really weird. I don’t know how they can accuse us of using this to make money or whatever they’re saying in their lawsuit, and then go out and try and use it to make money. It’s hilarious. I think they must be doing it on purpose just to torture us or something.
What was the most fun stunt you pulled in the movie?
Oh, I don’t know, they were all pretty fun. The adrenaline at that sort of incident is always really extreme, so it’s always hard to remember which one’s better. They’re all really fun. It’s like asking ‘Which bungie jump was the best?’ They were all crazy fun.
