Getting to yes: An interview with Igor Vamos

This is so much fun. I’ve been looking forward to it since I’ve been showing your films to my students, many of whom feel like they want to do the right thing and get along in the world without leaving too much of a carbon footprint, but who still want to go into media, marketing, and advertising industries. So very often I’ll show one of your films to media majors who are absolutely horrified by what they see, but also just screaming with laughter.

You know, you just said the word, I think you said carbon footprint. And I just read today Rebecca Solnit's article talking about how that phrase was a fossil fuel industry marketing campaign. They invented “carbon footprint” to displace responsibility for CO₂ pollution to the individual. It's one of those weird “Aha!” things that changes your whole worldview, like, “Oh yeah, THAT is where carbon footprint came from.”

If you can create the vocabulary for the public debates, that's a really powerful advantage.

Thomas Friedman says, if you “name something, you own it.” And I don't often quote Thomas Friedman. It feels dirty.

Let's talk about your work and your background. We both had some formative years at Reed College (Portland, Oregon, USA) in a cultural and political environment that was steeped in conflicts over nature and culture that are that are still bubbling over today from the early 1990s and late 1980s culture wars. We’ve also seen all kinds of innovative forms of political protest and political speech with anti-growth ecology, deep ecology, and radical feminist ecology.

Well, that period is a good place for me to start – in the 1980s. I grew up with progressive parents. My dad was a Holocaust survivor. My mother and my father are both European, the progressive version of those refugees from Europe who came in after the Second World War. But when I grew up in the suburbs, a lot of my early politicization was not conscious, really. There was a lot of rebellion against the conformity of culture – the uniformity of the suburbs, the strip malls, the chain stores. At the time, the only thing that we could do as high school students was go out to the mall or to the McDonald’s or whatever, and so those became the spaces to create interventions, because you didn't really know why you wanted to fuck with it – but you did.

In hindsight, I can look back and say there was definitely a political impulse there, and it was definitely rebelling against corporate culture and the growth of this kind of culture – their replacement of the commons with this kind of commercial space that we imagined still to be the commons. You know, whether it be the mall or actually just the food court.

And, at the same time there are other things happening in that era. The growing concern about the risk of being sued, and learning very early they closed your favorite playground, or took out the most dangerous equipment, put fences at the edge of the cliff you used to sit and dangle your feet over. There was this sort of enclosure based on a kind of a risk assessment that came out of a fear of being sued. The total importance of money and this corporate kind of mentality was another thing to rebel against. That's what I felt, anyway. Even though I didn't know it, I kind of felt it. I had to, it took me like 20 years later to look back and say, Oh – that's what that was about.

Because we’d really fuck with the mall. You know, like, I would climb into a suitcase (I was quite small), and my larger friends dragged me through the mall in the suitcase screaming. You know, that that kind of thing, just until the police would come. Or, you go to Long John Silver's (seafood restaurant) dressed as pirates and demand free food. There was a litany of these sorts of things that I guess you might call “performance art.” But I didn't get more politically awake until I was in college and organizing during the Reagan years and the culture wars. I think that the right was learning how to instrumentalize culture during a wave or peak that de-emphasized the economic issues that made up the traditional left and right, and instead moved into this other territory – moral panics and manifestoes about decency. These touched the art world, especially the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts. I guess I was slowly realizing that what I was interested in was art. Even though I kind of knew it all long I also refused to believe it, until I finally was ready to embrace all the weird things that that meant.

I co-founded a guerrilla theater group on the Reed College campus and we did interventions. Some of them were just fun and silly and weird, and quite a lot of them were politically engaged and public – off the school campus and places like downtown Portland. We went to a Dan Quayle [political] fundraiser and had a “puke-in” that we called “the reverse peristalsis painting.” We ate red, white, and blue colored mashed potatoes and then drank syrup of ipecac and puked the US flag – and so that was the artistic response to this sort of newly reactionary right-wing politics that were playing out in Portland in a dramatic way. And they have continued in Portland because it is this weird tinderbox for clashes between the far right and the left. The Pacific Northwest has been good for that for a while.

But there was also a horrible murder of Ethiopian refugee Mulugeta Seraw by militant skinheads who were thick as thieves in Portland during that era.

Yeah, it was a very weird time for the coexistence of an anarchist left, and a skinhead Nazi right. They went to the same clubs.

You had to dodge those guys. You were talking about the interiorization of childhood and losing the outdoors as a consequence of suburban growth in that long post-war era for Generation X. The homogenization of culture, the idea of a “Negativland,” Reagan, and so on informed certain movements to recognize and accommodate speech and even performative speech like what was happening among you guys in the shopping mall. The Pruneyard Shopping Center case in California (which established First Amendment freedoms in private shopping malls in the US) added some protections for political speech and satire in these hybrid public–private spaces in the US, owing to the partly public nature of the mall. But it took a long time to establish that precedent in the First Amendment law. I’m wondering if you’ve seen an organic growth of those kinds of protections since your early days, something that supports what you’ve built up as an integrated marketing campaign oriented towards pranksterism, which requires protections for free speech and satire in a cultural commons.

Yes, I’ve developed a much more sophisticated understanding of it, of the landscape that allows it in the United States, whereas a lot of other places in the world it's much more difficult. We were fortunate with The Yes Men to be represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who have defended what we are doing as satire. And that's a tough thing, because 9 out of 10 lawyers that you’d ask if you showed them what we do – even IP lawyers – say that we might be breaking the law – even if we’re not. Lawyers are trained to minimize risk for their clients, not to test the limits of freedom, so it's rare to find a truly activist lawyer in that regard. And EFF were willing to defend what we’re doing as protected political speech, even many times when we were using somebody else's trademark.

Yet we never ended up in court for our hijinks. Probably because one legal litmus test for parody is whether a “reasonable person” could believe it to be true. That means that if you impersonate Exxon and they take you to court, they may have to argue that your actions were believably attributable to them. So, for example we posed as Exxon and announced a new biofuel made from the human victims of climate change. In theory Exxon might have to say that it is reasonable to believe that they would do such a thing – which doesn't reflect well on them! You can kind of create a checkmate situation from the jeopardy that a corporation faces by attacking you. That's a tactic that many activists have used and probably the most famous example is the McLibel duo, whom McDonald's sued for handing out pamphlets. A couple of scraggly left-vegan-type activists were pamphleting outside McDonald's, saying that their hamburgers destroyed the rainforest and destroy the environment and people's health. They were doing this in London, which is exactly where you can't do it because the British libel laws are notoriously tilted in favor of whoever has money in power. And so McDonald's sued them to shut them up. It's the classic David and Goliath story where they fought back, and they spent longer in the British libel court system than anyone had in history, fighting this. Of course, every day – instead of speaking to the 50 to 100 people they got to talk to outside McDonald's – eventually they were talking to millions and even billions of people through the media who were buying their message about how horrible McDonald's was for the environment, and for people's health.

During that time, McDonald's of course learned a big lesson in public relations. I think that that was really a watershed moment in PR, where suddenly companies that were thinking about suing small-time activists had to think twice. They do still sue today, but they’ve realized the stakes are higher for people who have nothing to lose, or who are committed enough to the issue to do legal battle with them, as did these those McLibel people who represented themselves in court.

One of the peculiarities of the British libel system is that the burden of proof falls on the offending party to demonstrate its point. The McLibel duo were willing and prepared to go through the entire discovery process on their own. They obliged McDonald's to produce volumes and volumes of evidentiary record in their own defense, and some of it was exculpatory but most of it wasn't. And so the defendants in the case, being the punks, ended up teasing out far more dirty laundry than you’d be able to do through investigative journalism, for instance, or through pilfering documents. They got it all through systemic means.

Yeah, that's something that we have always wanted to do ourselves, but we have been maybe too vocal in saying that we want to be sued and are willing to be sued. It's only happened once to The Yes Men. The US Chamber of Commerce sued us. And then for a moment, it seemed like we might be able to do discovery, but it got withdrawn after four years of sitting on a judge's desk. They didn't want to do it, and I think that's why they withdrew just before it was going to go to court. You know, which was sad for us, but I guess they were scared.

It's fun to look at cases where jujitsu works in the legal system. But it rarely does. It seems like this is one of those slices of public life where potentially you could turn a David and Goliath scenario to the advantage of the environment or to advocacy in other ways.

The enclosure movement that you were describing as accompanying suburban sprawl is also a process that you can see happening in the digitization of media, and you know, copy protections and subscription services and lots of ways to exclude people from access to culture and information.

One thing that I’ve been wondering about lately is search engine optimization. I used to be able to find things really well on the internet and I can't any more. You do a search for something on Google, and you get all this trash, you don't get what you want any more. I used to be able to put in a search and get interesting consistent results that I wanted. Maybe just 10 to 15 years ago, or even 20 years ago, there was a period in which it was just all experimental and it was kind of funny – it worked. And now it seems like, if you’re shopping for underwear, maybe you’ll find that, but I’m not sure. I wonder if that's real or not – or is it's just me being old.

Well, there is a lot of that going around! But there's a media literacy aspect to punching through some of this corporate crap that has been deposited over an area of cultural life that we once took for granted – such as easier access to accurate information or cultural artifacts of various kinds, whenever we wanted to access them. And that's just become more and more difficult both in the technical aspects and also due to misinformation, disinformation and PR.

Are any of these processes related to your ideas about “identity correction?” Before The Yes Men demonstrated it for me, I hadn't really encountered that concept before. Is it part of a broader project to adjust for some willful manipulations of reality by corporate communications, and government communication too?

Yeah, identity correction is basically like flipping the script on identity theft. Identity theft is like a small-time crook stealing somebody's data in order to take money out of their bank account. Identity correction is like targeting the really big criminals – the big obfuscators out there – and then doing something to reveal that they’re lying, or to reveal their untruths, or maybe even to take money from them, if it manipulates their stock market price as per the Dow Chemical action.

Identity correction can demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes. It is a practice of impersonating corporate agencies and going to business meetings and showing up in person and sending press releases as them. But – we discovered there were two effective modes of impersonating the powerful. One was to do something that was super-honest on their behalf, which the public is not used to. Instead of speaking through the greenwashing machine, it was telling the truth – like Exxon Mobil saying, “We don't give a fuck about anybody, we don't care about the environment, we want to hide the facts about climate change because we’re making money, you know, fuck you,” but using corporate speak to sound like them. That was the standard path of satire, like Swift's “A Modest Proposal,” where you indulge the nightmare.

And then the flip side of identity correction, the other mode, is to announce the dream instead of the nightmare. Impersonate the bad actor to announce a “different them,” a Utopian version of what they could be doing if they suddenly had an epiphany about past wrongs. That approach turned out to probably be the more powerful one. If we had the opportunity to be Exxon Mobil, we would say, “We realize we’re wrong. We don't want to cause extinction any more. We did bad and we’re going to embrace – you know – climate policies and convert all our operations to solar and wind and tidal energy, and all within the next five years!”

With those kinds of announcements, people hear it, and it's coming from Exxon—or coming from some important government figure—and people say, “Oh that's great!” and believe it initially. And it's that moment, when you’re believing in that fiction, that's actually a much more sane reality, could be a more sane reality that is quite powerful. There's more power in that moment because that's where you’re daring to dream. In the early 2000s, Lester Brown's Plan B was inspiring. He referred to the war effort during World War II, in which the government made it illegal for the auto manufacturers to make cars, and they had to make machines for the war. The war effort succeeded, but they converted entire industries overnight into other industries. That's the thing that we still have failed to do as a country or as a culture as even as a civilization. We still failed to do that conversion. It is clearly possible if there's the political will, possible because we have precedent for it. It's happened before.

We’ve also run the economy on a war footing for that whole period.

The baseline is economic growth in terms of our decision-making structures.

The ecological emphasis that The Yes Men take has some real resonance with, the 1980s and 1990s German Greens, who were mostly young people involved in new social movements and also hijacking the media. You know, for mass protests they would create media spectacles with costumes and outrageous banners – anything to capture the attention of photographers and particularly international news.

Yeah media with imagery.

Let's talk about the Merry Pranksters. We know them as illustrating American radical politics, alternative living, direct action, and symbolic performance. Tell me about that shtick they did levitating the Pentagon in 1967.

Levitation of the Pentagon, that's a great, great story. It has become very much a part of the library of actions that we refer to and show when we’re doing a workshop or teaching about the history of creative direct action. That's always a super fun one because it's just so wacky, it is fabulous. And you know what I what I love about it is how, through its ritualistic elements especially, it's a summoning. “Out demons, out!”

I always thought that's what the Merry Pranksters were doing, creating a magic circle for mass media audiences.

It's political psychology that was dropped like a “mind bomb,” on the public and the media. It was amazing. Yes, super entertaining and – also not a giant step away from a lot of the basic tactics of civil disobedience, which is basically a kind of provocation like crossing a boundary, crossing a line. Like Rosa Parks sitting down and refusing to get out of the seat on the bus – it's transgressive and breaks the law. But it's a performance in which she was basically cast and rehearsed, and she was exactly in the right place and time. And she wasn't the first to do it, because that same action had been done for ten years already, and possibly before that. Others had done it in fairly high-profile ways. Irene Morgan's case was brought to the Supreme Court a decade earlier in the 1950s.

But Parks’ case was the one that caught the public's attention at the moment. Part of that was the casting she was the older “respectable” woman. The clothes. Tired after a day of work. I mean, it was like a theatrical performance, even though it wasn't – it was real and was happening, but at the same time it was consciously induced. The most famous photo of that event was composed and shot a year afterward by UPI. The white guy in the composed photo is a reporter and wire service guy posed in the bus. Most people have assumed that that was the actual event happening, but it really was just a simulation of the event made on the anniversary a year later, in which the press just joined in to make it happen because they needed an image that worked.

What the Yippies added with the levitation of the Pentagon was this hilarious magic, and the idea that they could levitate the Pentagon. Of course, the funniest part of it is that the Pentagon has to take it seriously – like, what if it's true? What if – they love “what if's” – when a million protesters gather and they link hands around the Pentagon and they tried to levitate, what if it works? You know, they had to think outside the box. They have to take a threat seriously! And that's what becomes so funny, imagining them in that position of trying to figure out what to do.

And in the process of applying for permits to levitate the Pentagon, to have a public protest they had progressive lawyers who were resubmitting petitions when they would get rejected. It's a great story, the legal quandary that it poses to the judge, because the judge has to say, “Well, what is the important thing here? They’re assembling for free speech, but can we block them because they are asking to do something we know to be impossible? Is that a reason to deny them the permit?”

To deny them the permit is to admit the sorcery, that the magic is real. Do you accept the term “culture jamming” to explain what you’re doing, or do you have a special interpretation of the meaning of that expression?

I do have a special interpretation in the meaning of culture jamming, because I think it comes out of this very specific moment in context. I think of it as interrupting a signal, like the original context, which was CB radio jamming. That was the model where you override somebody else's signal, which is what Negativland first called culture jamming. So you’re gonna jam television, radio. Moments happen when there is a disruption or a rupture in this otherwise seamlessly mediated world that seems real until it's interrupted. Billboard alteration fits into that category. I guess I find it to be a little bit narrow kind of direct action, like changing a billboard. Something about the term feels reductive. I hate to say it, but AdBusters overused it. I like AdBusters and everything, but it tried to make it so cool that, to me, it wasn't cool.

Well, the postmodernists loved it and they were picked up by a lot of the Mondo2000 fabulists who wanted ordinary people to be able to reappropriate hegemonic culture.

AdBusters became a glossy magazine. It was a simulacrum of its own critique and intentional on some level. There's some kind of conflict at its core, an intellectual kernel of some kind, some kind of seed.

But speaking of seeds, sometimes it helps to go way back to understand what we’re doing now. Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde influenced my understanding of what it was that we were doing. Turns out, there is a trans-historical, trans-cultural impulse to fuck with people using mischief. It's in every culture's myths or histories and on some level, the trickster who crosses borders or boundaries and smuggles things into other contexts, holds up a mirror to culture. It's a mirror altered to make the invisible visible and create change. We work for – let's call it a progressive goal, in the humanist or posthumanist traditions.

Hacking also has this element of reverse-engineering. One of your newly published videos features Volkswagen, which hacked the Environmental Protection Act and its enforcement mechanisms by reverse-engineering and defeating the emissions sampling machines used to catch polluting cars. They got away with this massive fraud for which they’ve paid some penalties. They welcomed some executive departures and then inaugurated a massive PR campaign to resuscitate their image as a trustworthy auto maker. This is a company that hacked, and then they got hacked back by The Yes Men and the team at the University of Houston at the Houston Art Car parade. Here's the jujitsu again – you were turning back some of this technique back on the perpetrator.

Yep, reverse-engineering is a really good way to describe it. When we put up a fake website for a company, or send out a press release as a company, it's only after you study the way they communicate and the way that they talk. Then you decide whether you’re doing satire in the tradition of Swift's “Modest Proposal,” so you can take it further, know them, and become them. It's a traditional hacking tactic, too, because it's among the tools of hackers to infiltrate. It's definitely interesting to think about how this can be applied to an environmental movement, context, too. We’ve tried different tactics, but I’m wondering what the next thing is.

So that's your challenge, to continue innovating in a way that is unexpected? And capture the element of surprise for when the next opportunity presents itself.

What are the next tactics that keep up with this strange social media environment? That one's been tricky for me – getting ahead of social media algorithms. We used to be successful at getting our message to lots of people through the mainstream media. And now, even if you put something into the mainstream media you’re still not reaching huge amounts of people. There used to be monolithic media and alternative media, and you knew that if you got into the monolithic media you’re reaching most people. And now it's just sort of like all these fractured little zones. Things haven't worked at the scale that that we used to be able to work at, and so I’m kind of wondering how to how to do that. I’m interested in teaming up with some entities that have a bigger reach. I’ve been talking to Adam Mckay who has Hyperobject Industries and just had that big climate change – not climate change film, the asteroid film, Don't Look Up. He's committed to dealing with a climate crisis and social issues in his films – committed enough to start a company dedicated to producing mass entertainment products on those subjects. And so, he asked a couple years ago if we could do some kind of collaboration on a sort of direct action activist group that would do things in sync with those movies, but not like an impact campaign. Impact campaigns really end up being about trying to get people to watch the film. For this project there's already people who are going to watch the film – that's taken care of using huge money to pay various social media influencers to post your shit, and then it gets there. Since that part is taken care of, and direct action is not, then you know it could be really interesting. Ideally the direct action would launch at the same time as the as these films and television programs, but I’m not sure yet what the actual architecture of that would look like.

Maybe ask Michael Moore for thoughts?

I haven't seen him since he worked with Occupy participants in 2012 at NYU. The last picture I know of that he was involved with was called Planet of the Humans. It took lot of heat from activists, because it was basically saying that renewable energy was not enough. It makes me think of James Lovelock, the “Gaia hypothesis” guy who came out in favor of nukes. He said, fuck it, let's go with the nuclear option because I’m gonna be pragmatic about it. Let's just build lots of them, because you know people aren't going to stop wanting this energy. You can sell nukes in our corrupted capitalist framework, because there's lots of construction money in them. They’re super-expensive, so the rich can make more money which makes them more likely to happen. Its cynical, but pragmatic.

Anyway, Michael Moore is a good option for someone to brainstorm with. We need a way where we can make success more predictable. We used to have methods that were very predictable. And now it's very difficult to predict unless you can work with somebody who has a big mouthpiece – and even then, it's not that predictable.

You’ve engaged with the ideas of Tim Morton, who engages with this question about motivation that leads to informed ecological action. But he claims that “the end of the world has already occurred,” so calls to action based on “saving the world” are misinformed or else disingenuous. It's almost like the death of God announcement.

I think it's acknowledging that the war was lost a long time ago. But that doesn't mean that there aren't still battles. We don't have the same planet that we did. We lost that planet already. Things are in a constant state of flux.

So the immediacy requiring us to act now and the urgency we feel and may respond to, is difficult, because you will keep passing the deadlines by which to save the world, and still the world doesn't end. It's ending quickly in geological terms, but for each of us humans it's like this slow burn. If we move outside of the idea of the human being at the center of things and consider that everything has its path and motivation and thingness, then humans are just things – including our hierarchies that we’ve built up as humans over the many years. This philosophy of object-oriented ontology behind this perspective is interesting. But there is something that's lost in it too, in terms of the traditional ways that we’re expected to motivate people, because we naturally want to save people. We want to save ourselves. We want to save poor people. We want to save rich people.

Maybe most of them don't want to save the rich people.

But you know, if there were one falling off a bridge, one of the object-oriented ontologists would still probably grab his hand.

If Jeff Bezos was like, in front of you –

No, not him. I mean, you know, you might think this guy looks a lot like Jeff Bezos.

Well, the world has seen its share of disenchanted activists before, hasn't it? This can't be a novel perspective. Realism, with respect to climate activism or ecology, for example, entails some amount of loss and grief. It is already baked into the worldview.

Yeah, it is for sure. I think you just have to grow up and mature in order to live with it and keep being an activist.

Maybe you just can't be too earnest about it.

You still have to engage in pleasure. You have to do things that people like to do. Morton in particular is still very into enjoying life, art, and music – that's part of his thing: living. You can't just despair and use it as an excuse to give up life, right? I went through a period in 2009, where I was super- ultra- depressed about the climate. It was a breaking point for me. It was the year of the COP 15 in Copenhagen, with a lot of hope that that was the watershed moment. It was a year of great activist momentum. But when it came to the actual event, many civil society groups found themselves essentially locked out, and very little progress was made – the goals that were set were super-weak and most of the buzz was about carbon offsetting, which most of us thought was bizarre dystopian joke (you should look up “Cheat Neutral” to watch videos of a great intervention about that from a UK-based activist group). After that failure – God, I was super down about everything. And then I read Bill McKibben's book, Eaarth. What a weird title for a book! It was an amazingly depressing book about the end of the world as we know it, with this chapter tacked on at the end of the book that was meant to be hopeful but was about how we could find resilience in open-mesh networks in Vermont and sharing among neighbors, you know. Incredible book, but also incredibly depressing. So how did I get out of my depression from a decade ago? Maybe I’ve become comfortable with not-comfortable. I’ve become acclimated to the idea that the world is slowly ending, but it takes a really long time, and it's not a reason not to act – it's a reason to keep acting and keep doing these things. There's a pragmatism and a realism to it. Sometimes personally you feel that you’re failing as an activist to change the world. But sometimes you don't always know the results of what you’re doing when you’re doing it. It could be many years later that you find out that what you did mattered. If you talk to people who were in the civil rights movement, who were successful in the past, and ask them if they knew they were winning, they’ll often say, “No, we thought we were horrible. We lost thousands of times before suddenly we won one, and we didn't even know we’d won. And then, it turned out we hadn't won, because even though they signed this bill creeping Jim Crow laws came back.”

You know, we lost the war. We lost the world. But just because the war has been lost doesn't mean that the resistance should end.