For this week strategy i picked the Yes Men duo. Mainly because of their way to show injustice generated by corporate companies, and how they turned a blind eye to any disaster generated. A clear example of this companies is Union Carbide/Dow and the Bhopal incident.
I relate their strategy to use movies to transmit their message:
“The reason to do a movie is because it can have even more of an impact than media stories do. People pay attention to media stories for a few minutes or an hour and maybe remember them a couple days later, if you’re lucky. But a movie can stick with you for life.”(2)
similar to the AgitProp in the Soviet Union where “the only effective propaganda was that which could be understood by its audience”(1), being at that time most lower class people illiterate the content had to be highly visual. I think that even now most of the people are “illiterate”, that nowadays we see so many injustice in the media, but after a week goes by we forget it and let it go without doing anything, like if we’re accepting that theres nothing to do about it.
Im always curious if this kind of strategy could be later hazardous for them, for example their appearance as part of Dow saying they gonna give money to Bhopal tragedy, put the company on the spot light in USA media, and affecting the stock value of the company.
- Brown, Kevin, “Agitprop in Soviet Rusia”
- Lambert, Steve, “The Yes Men”