How false information creates true events

From monochrom: An article by Klaus Schoenberger — who is doing pop-culture research at the University of Hamburg, Germany — featuring the Yes Men and their Union Carbide/Bhopal hoax in 2004.


Activists use fakes and hoaxes to communicate information by speaking in the name of someone else – persons or institutions invested with power. With the spreading of Internet communication, this pattern of action and communicating has acquired additional power as a means of political and social protest. Within the framework of Guerrilla Communication, with its specific understanding of politics, faking develops into an efficient form of political articulation.

Read the entire article here.


Editor’s note: See also April Media Fools, March 30, 2005, by Rory O’Connor for MediaChannel.org