Blog 11- The Yes Men

When I was watching “The Yes Men Fix the World” I could not help but think of Noam Chomsky and how he fought for the injustices that occurred in East Timor. The Yes Men were fighting for the people of Bohpal, and how their tragedy of the gas leak was not resolved or sufficiently compensated. The Yes Men portrayed executives from DOW chemical company, going as far as making a faux website and waited for invitations to go to conferences or interviews. After getting an invitation to a mass media outlet the Yes Men are able to seemingly right the wrong of DOW and Union Carbide. Although they were eventually discovered the Yes Men were able to bring attention to and shed light on a tragedy that Union Carbide has tried to sweep under the rug. The Yes Men’s other work is similar, take advantage of mass media and use it to assist them in spreading the message that is not commonly heard or known.
The method that they seem to be using is a false consciousness which is accompanied by commodity fetishism. Where the “institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariate and to other classes.” The mass media does this, and the Yes Men use it to their advantage and do it also to show society that they too They also show the disconnect between reality and what the mass media puts up appearances. The mass media “obscures realities of exploitation and domination.” The Yes Men try to clarify the obscurities with their pranks.