History
The Yes Men (YM) began with two friends seeking to create political satire on corporate crime and globalization. Inspired by the Seattle WTO protests in 1999 the two YM Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno sought to create a website to criticize then Governor George Bush. The two were given the domain name gwbush.com in 1999, right before his campaign for presidency. From this website they decided to make a website similar looking to Bush’s official one, and made it a satire on his policies. The site set out to criticize the soon to be president for apparent hypocrisies in his platform. Bush campaign sent threats, which YM flipped to the media to grow their image. Famous “there ought to be limits to freedom” quote was directed at these guys.
From this site another individual gave the domain gatt.org to the YM. Gatt is the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a WTO treaty. The individual gave the site over to the YM in exchange for their word to make a satire of the WTO, much like the one they created on Bush.
Once these websites were up and running, emails came in inviting them to conferences to speak on behalf of the WTO. The organizers clearly thought the sites were official and gave the ym an opportunity to speak. This is when the YM’s original idea to prank the people in attendance, using satire to bring awareness to world issues.
As an example, the first conference attended by the YM under the guise of being WTO spokesmen. At this conference, the WTO spokesmen “Dr Andreas Bichlbauer”, Andy of the YM, would promote absurd ideas such as doing away with culture altogether in order to bring everyone in line with the same standards and even more incredible the actual selling of individual votes to the highest ...
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... a fake edition of the New York Times with articles outlining a sort of utopian future. Headlines proclaimed the end to the Iraq war, Patriot Act repealed and even more ambitious the passing of a “Maximum Wage” to help in the creation of a ‘sane economy’.
Conclusion
While the success of the YM can be argued, they none the less actively fight for a social change they believe in. While their method of “identity correction” may not be a traditional tactic of social movements it none the less is another weapon in the anti-globalization war. It goes without saying that education of any social movement among the masses is critical for its success. In this context, the YM provide a valuable tool for the anti-globalization movement. While there isn’t widespread approval of their methods within the movement, it’s hard to fault the YM for their active participation.
Existing within the movement must be a leader or leaders, as well as a large number of committed followers or members. Additionally, social movements have “organizations or coalitions” working as a guiding backbone for collectivity and regulation (Stewart,
Polletta, Francesca and James Jasper. “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 27.1 (2001): 283–305. Print.
Buechler, Steven M., & F. Kurt Cylke, Jr. Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues . Toronto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1997.
The television show Two a Half Men focuses on three self-centered family members, two uncles’ men and a kid in the middle of a divorce, who now lives part time with millionaire friend/uncle Walton. The trio consists of Walton who is the millionaire whom bought the beach house after Charlie passed away after having problems with the actual producers, Allan, Charlie’s original brother who now lives with Walton because he feels bad and Jake, Allan’s son who lives with the two of them every weekend. Each episode involves the two men bringing back women to the house and the shenanigans that go down during the weekend with women and parties all while the younger son, Jake is watching all. During the episode “You Know What the Lollipop Is For,” Walton and Alan try to restrain themselves from hooking up a hot Miley Cyrus or the character she plays, Missi, while she is staying a few nights in at their Malibu beach house. This show contributes to the world’s idea that is okay to be hitting on younger teenagers at an older age. By joking about such situations the two of them show the real problems going on in the world with women marrying so young.
Fallows writes that this is an age of “truthiness.” The age of mass misinformation is upon us. I remember reading about the age of yellow journalism for a high school history class. We were assigned to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. We all know the story Sinclair tells. Like his book, the news of those times was written to support a certain viewpoint or perspective. I have often wondered where are the critics of today’s yellow journalism. How is Fox News that much different from the Hearst version of news in 1916? The difference is not apparent to me. However, Americans are less likely to care. We have much lower standards for everything. It is almost as though Vietnam and Nixon were the beginning of the end of American optimism and a sense of real decency. It is as though those two pivot...
Wendt, Alexander. Social theory of international politics. 9. printing. ed. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006. Print.
...s by linking this sense of a moral code to the economy by boycotting the companies who benefitted from racial discrimination. The International Relations Theory coupled with a social movement leads to global transformations resulting from mobilization. Mobilization Klotz argues is a necessary tool for the transformation of normative foundations globally. These movements in particular challenged present social systems and found its success in identifying with a moral discrimination issue. It here that when a social movement creates alliances with various discriminated and non-discriminated but financially supportive actors that the movement is more likely in challenging and overthrowing the elites of society as well as changing socioeconomic and political foundations. Social movements indeed have the ability to span globally and alter economic and political policies.
Historically, the Anonymous has been engaging in activities that qualifies the group as hacker group as opposed to troll organisation. The group began its operation on December 2010 by attacking the MasterCard for blocking the Wiki Leaks website donations (Coleman 1). In January 2011, the Anonymous group attack the Tunisian government website for using illegal means against protesters. In February...
Polletta, F., & Jasper, J. M. (2001). Collective identity and social movements. Annual review of Sociology, 283-305.
The 1999 Seattle protests brought the apparent proliferation of anti-globalization grassroot sociopolitical movements into the limelight of the world stage. Transnational social movements (TSMs), international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), as well as the loose transnational activist networks (TANs) that contain them—all these came to be seen as an angry and no less potent backlash that's directed at the powerful states and increasingly towering economic IGOs such as the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank. In the field of international relations, some regard this as a prophetic watershed event that signals the weakening and perhaps even collapsing of the state-centric system of international relations, while many others insist that Seattle is but an eventually insignificant episode in the book of globalization and state power, as evidenced by the Doha success.
(Turner and Killian 1987) cited in (Diani 1992, p. 4) define social movements as a “collectivity acting with some continuity to promote or resist a change in the society or organisation of which it is part. As a collectivity a movement is a group with indefinite and shifting membership and with leadership whose position is determined more by informal response of adherents than by formal procedures for legitimizing authority”. Turner and Killian regard a social movement as a peculiar kind of collective behavior that is contrasted to regularity and institutional behavior. Additionally, Turner believes that social movements do not necessarily coincide with movement organisations, although these organisations can carry out a large part of the movement tasks and it is often help to control and speak for movements (Diani 1992).
In Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken illustrates to the reader how groups of organizations with similar principles and ideals are coming together to form what Hawken defines as a “movement.” In the chapter “Blessed Unrest,” Hawken explains the vast problems that plague the globe, such as loss of water for agriculture or theft of resources from third-world countries by government and corporations. He writes that due to these problems the world today is facing a task exponentially more difficult than the abolition of slavery, the restoration of the planet. However, Hawken also describes in the chapter those who are eager to address and protest against these dilemmas. Individuals who are willing to come together under common goals in order to necessitate environmental and social change in the world. Hawken, as his primary point, illustrates how groups of organizations and individuals are coming together to form a “movement,” which Hawken describes as a new form of community and story focused on three basic ambitions: environmental activism, social justice initiatives, and indigenous culture’s resistance to globalization.
Frieden, Jeffry A., David A. Lake, and Kenneth A. Schultz. World Politics. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2013. Print.
Another important factor promoted globalization is called the ‘World Politics’. Foreign policymakers are facing a challenge of a fundamental change in nowadays ...
Baylis, Smith and Patricia Owens. 2014. The 'Standard' of the 'Standard'. The globalization of world politics: An introduction to international relations. London.