Take your lead from movements you respect

Pretty much every Yes Men project has taken its lead from a movement or campaign we respected.

At the very start, in 1999, the (looming) Seattle protests inspired us to set up our very first fake website to mock the emblem of global capitalism, the WTO... which led to torrents of email meant for the WTO and, eventually, every other project we've done!

In 2002 and then 2004, too, we followed the lead of a campaigner at Greenpeace... and found ourselves in a surreal TV appearance that's still our most effective action to date.

We also took cues from Occupy Wall Street—consciously at first, egged on by a revolutionary who'd helped bring down a dictator, and then because every progressive in America was taking cues from that movement or the campaigns that followed. We can now say that most of the actions we've been involved in since 2011 have been in some way related to OWS.

It just makes sense.

Instances in which we learned this lesson

One leak, and over a 48-hour period we scuttled Chevron's campaign... and then many friends scuttled it a lot more. It remains scuttled today.
Here's a sketchy timeline of the Yes Men's most mammoth project, a collaboration with the Anti-Advertising Agency and many other groups and…
Together with our brand-new police escort, we all headed towards the Wall Street Bull a few minutes south. When we got there, the protest changed…
So how did we end up speaking to 350 million people on behalf of Dow Chemical? It's a pretty long story—much longer than what we could tell in our…
Off we went to Salzburg, Austria—to speak as reps of the WTO. What we'd encounter would change our lives forever.