Studying Culture Jamming to Inspire Student Activism

I did not personally know The Yes Men when Andy asked me to write a teacher guide for their new movie, The Yes Men Fix the World¹. And they did not know me. But I had emailed them that my students loved their first film, The Yes Men, as part of learning about the actions of the World Trade Organization, and the Yes Men needed someone to write a guide. I wound up writing a 65,000 word interdisciplinary resource guide that uses the movie to study satire, the politics of knowledge, media literacy, economic literacy, and art and activism. The guide² uses these studies to inspire students to ‘fix’ some piece of the world through connecting with existing social change groups and thinking together of creative ways to stop business as usual.

This short article gives a glimpse of the culture jamming and other artistic interventions that can be studied to inspire students to participate in struggles for justice. Below I will briefly discuss the work of The Yes Men, outline the structure of the teacher resource guide, and present a framework for thinking about the myriad kinds of artistic interventions that “jam up” our taken-for-granted assumptions, and detail some specific interventions.

The Yes Men

“We need to be devious in order to achieve a condition of honesty.”

—The Yes Men

The Yes Men, political performance artists whose work stems from their tactical media skills, characterize much of their satire as “identity correction—impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them.” And by “criminals” they mean corporate criminals “who put profits ahead of everything else.” Further, The Yes Men view their work as a “form of collaboration with journalists,” since issues that the corporate media ignore get reported when The Yes Men perform their interventions.

In their first movie, The Yes Men, they explain that economically and politically powerful institutions like the World Trade Organization characterize their work as benevolent and just. In spite of the evidence that their collective actions have led to catastrophe for hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of people, these organizations speak as if they are promoting social justice. The Yes Men, by impersonating officials who speak for those organizations, and speaking from the evidence of the havoc wrecked by those organizations, are correcting the identity of these groups, showing how hideous, and far from any concept of justice, the consequences of their actions really are. The trouble is, The Yes Men’s audiences, most of whom are connected to those organizations, many of whom are implicated in perpetrating those consequences, do not get it. They see The Yes Men’s recounting of those organizations’ activities as good and clever and just.

The Yes Men Fix the World explores why our world is broken, why those who broke it do not see the shattered people and planet, why those of us who do see should not be silent, and what we can do other than scream. The movie gives examples of what The Yes Men think is broken—the continuing toxic poisoning in Bhopal, the continuing post-Katrina racial “cleansing” in New Orleans, and the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate disruptions. Using satire, they are anything but silent. And they address specific outrages as inter-connected consequences of structures that value profits over people. The movie is a wonderful vehicle for teaching about these connections, and for encouraging activism that turns up the volume.

Brief Overview of the Resource Guide

The first part of the guide suggests learning activities to prepare students to understand the movie at a deeper level by thinking about satire and its uses in addressing political issues, and about the different kinds of underlying frameworks—conservative, liberal, and left—people can use to make sense of what is going on in the world. The second part of the guide focuses on student reactions to the film and their reflections on some of the major themes in the film—media literacy, the real-world consequences of an unfettered free-market world-view, whose intellectual work ‘counts’ as worth considering in fixing the...