Andy Nichlbaum and Mike Bonanno of Yes Man are critiques of media that believe that corporations and big businesses make decisions primarily for profit making and not for maximizing other aspects of life such as happiness, environment, and wellness of people.
They do several pranks to demonstrate this theory. One of their pranks was to act like a DOW executive who announced they would clean up their mess in Bhopal and compensate their victims. The stock market ended up dropping 2 billion dollars in 20 minutes, and the market began a contraction. By doing the “right thing,” lots of profits were lost by DOW. This is why companies do not do “the right thing.” It is to protect the money. If profits go down that means less money, and less money means more people will be unhappy. Where do we find a balance between, doing the “right thing” and making money?
Another prank they pulled was saying that some energy Exxon has created was made from a Human body. This kind of represents the same theme as expressed in the DOW prank, where humans life are traded money.
This relates to two concepts we learnt in class. False consciousness and commodity fetishism. False consciousness is represented by the fact that as citizens we know what is going on with Corporate interests but we chose to conceal these facts in our own obscure reality that allow these dominant acts to be executed. Commodity fetishism is represented by the creation of labor as a commodity that is separate than humanity, we can see that the interests of Corporations are for the benefits of labor rather than humanity.
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