Beautiful Trouble, Tactic Identity Correction

To embarrass your target; to correct the public record; to expose corporate malfeasance; to reframe an issue.

When trying to understand how a machine works, it helps to expose its guts. The same can be said of powerful people or corporations who enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. By catching powerful entities off-guard — say, by speaking on their behalf about wonderful things they should do (but in reality won’t) — you can momentarily expose them to public scrutiny. In this way, everyone gets to see how they work and can figure out how better to oppose them.This is identity correction: exposing an entity’s inner workings to public scrutiny. To practice it, find a target — some entity running amok — and think of something true they could say but never would — something that’s also lots of fun. What you say can either be something your target would say if its PR department went absent or berserk (modest proposal), or things they would say if by some miracle they decided to do the right thing (honest proposal). Instead of speaking truth to power, as the Quakers suggest, you assume the mask of power to speak a little lie that tells a greater truth.The modest proposal approach — which the Yes Men and others have used on many occasions to impersonate companies and parody them — can be a hit-or-miss affair. It usually involves an absurd and extreme — but logical — extension of the entity’s current practices, like when the Billionaires for Bush put Social Security up for sale on eBay, or when the Yes Men suggested that CEOs in the West would want to remotely monitor and control workers in factories in Africa via a control panel mounted on a huge golden phallus.

In spite of the emotionally satisfying payoff of antics like those, it’s the honest proposal approach — assuming the identity of a big evildoer and announcing they’re doing something wonderful — that has proven to be the more effective way to embarrass a target. When the Yes Men impersonated Dow Chemical on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe and announced on Dow’s behalf that it was finally taking responsibility for the disaster see CASE: Dow Chemical apologizes for Bhopal; or when U.S. Uncut activists announced that GE was paying its 2010 taxes after all see TACTIC: Hoax; or when activists impersonating French officials announced that Haiti’s debt — imposed when Haiti won independence from France, to compensate French slaveowners for their lost “property” — would at long last be forgiven; or when environmental activists impersonated Canada (in one case) or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (in another) and announced surprising and wonderful things… In all these cases, the consequences were immediate: voluminous news reports about the unlikely turn of events (and, in the Dow and GE cases, giant temporary drops in each company’s stock value). These in turn provided fodder for a wave of other articles about the whole hoax, providing a media platform for the reform programs of campaigners working on these issues.

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