"Are you really who you say you are... Richard?" "Erm... yes, I am."
You see, The Yes Men know all about bending the truth. 'Andy' and 'Mike' (not their real names) have become notorious in the USA for their satirical pranks that highlight the absurdities of our economic condition.

Mike started his prank career by switching thousands and thousands of voice boxes in GI Joes and Barbie Dolls. Andy coded the game SimCopter where pictures of handsome young men kissing and hugging would flash on the screen at random. Since then, as The Yes Men, they have made a film of their exploits, and their next film, The Yes Men Fix The World, will be showing on More4 in the Autumn, and in selected cinema's across the UK. The film shows how The Yes Men crash business conferences, pretend to be major companies, and suggest some pretty outrageous ideas, like it's OK to kill people for profit.

Five years ago, Andy pretended to be a Dow chemical spokesperson live on BBC World; his claim was that Dow was going to take full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster in 1984 (which left thousands of people dead, and many more homeless and ill) - a prank which wiped billions off Dow's stock market value. The Yes Men have also landed in hot water with the New York Times when they distributed thousands of 'Good News' New York Times; a fake paper, which appeared identical to the real NYT, except the stories reported the end of climate change, the end of big oil and the end of the Iraq war (headlines that activists around the world want to hear). This CV of activism goes on, and on...

With Ctrl.Alt.Shift on a mission to breed the next generation of activists, I seized upon an opportunity to hear how it's done, and what's the next step, by the legendary injustice-fighters themselves, The Yes Men:

Do you see yourself more as activists who pull pranks, or pranksters who happen to be political?
Andy: It's creative activism. It starts when you're a small child - not with wanting to be an activist, but with hiding your relatives' keys, or rearranging their furniture if they're blind. I've never done that, but an Apache Medicine Man told me he had done that to his uncle.

What advice would you give to a young person wants to do this form of creative activism?
Andy: Go for it. Don't think about it, make it happen. Figure out how you're going to do it before hand, but it's not that hard. We're hoping to set up a social network which is all about developing ideas and helping people do what we do. But just figure it out and go for it, go to an event, dress up, pretend you're from Ctrl.Alt.Shift to blag an interview.

Lets not get suspicious again. What do you think holds people back from being activists and pulling off stunts and pranks?
Mike: I think there's a little bit of fear, and a little bit of apathy. Everyone has these stupid ideas, and it's just a matter of doing it, and doing it as precisely as you can, and taking pride in it.
Andy: I think it's peer pressure. You have to develop peer pressure with each other, like how peer pressure can make you smoke or drink, but have the peer pressure to make you carry out your crazy ideas. If there's a group of people talking about your idea, you're much more likely to carry your idea out. So if you have a great idea, share it with people, talk about it.

Is that why The Yes Men is a duo?
Andy: Yeah, because it is harder to go it alone, because you feel you have safety in numbers. You can tell each other lies like "There's no risk here." And don't ask lawyers. Most lawyers will tell you not to do it. But you can look for a lawyer who will says it's okay, and then you just keep asking that same lawyer. That's what we did.

If your lawyer could give you the green light for any one stunt, if you had all the money you needed to pull it off, what would that one stunt be?
Mike: If we had unlimited funds, or unlimited resources, the stunt we'd pull off would be unreal. It would instigate a zero-growth economy, for a sustainable future for the planet, so we could survive climate change in the long term. Then sort out justice, and equality.
Andy: Muster a lot of people to abolish lobbying in Washington. Then once you've abolished corporate lobbying in Washington, you could get a lot of great laws passed. You could change things for the better.

When you do your stunts and pranks, you meet the people who are doing the lobbying, and destroying the planet and blocking laws. How do you stop yourselves from heckling these people and arguing 'till you're blue in the face?
Andy: The weird thing is, these people aren't arseholes. The thing is, what they're doing is arsehole-ish, but often they are very affable. At the Halliburton convention, I had an invite from one guy to go canoeing. They're very friendly, they're just part of this system that is completely inhumane. We always know we are having an argument with them, they just don't realise it. We let them hang themselves when they're feeling safe in front of the camera.

Do you meet a lot of people who are cynical about what you do? My mum called you "unsavoury characters", for example.
Mike: Tell your mum we're sweet, not savoury. We're part of this bigger movement that is trying to change the world. There are thousands, millions even, of people fighting to make the world a better place. The environmental movement has achieved great things in the last decade. When we pulled off the BBC stunt, there were 600 articles in the USA press about the issue, but it still didn't make Dow do the right thing - but there is this big movement that is going to make Dow do the right thing. So we just hang round with more activists than cynics. The cynics are no fun.

Do you think what Dow does, and what other companies do (where profit, the bottom line, is the ultimate end) - is that inherently corrupt? Putting money before everything else?
Andy: That's what we want to change in a nutshell. We want to make a different bottom line. And we can do it, we're the ones who should be in control of the law and the business.

What other activists do you think people should be paying more attention to?
Mike: There's this great guy called Tim Dechristopher, who went to a land auction in the US. Basically, as a final parting gift to the oil industry, the Bush Administration put up all this oil-rich (but protected) land up for auction so companies could drill the land. Dechristoper was going in to protest and was asked if he was a bidder, and he said yes. The next thing he knows, he's bought tons and tons of land with money he didn't have. The auction had him arrested, but because it had caused so much confusion, the auction had to be cancelled. Then when Obama came in he permanently cancelled it. So this guy, by being in the right place at the right time, he managed to stop all this land being destroyed by the oil industry. It's inspirational.
Andy: If he hadn't have done that, all that land would have been lost. The one guy's action enabled Obama to do the right thing. That's what people need to do - they need to show leaders what they want, and enable the leaders to deliver.

What's next for the Yes Men?
Mike: We've got some big plans. Big, luminous, ballsy plans.

Cue mischievous laughter. Big, luminous ballsy plans. You heard it from Ctrl.Alt.Shift first.
 

Find out more about The Yes Men at <a href="www.theyesmen.org">www.theyesmen.org</a>

Screenings of the film are listed here: http://theyesmenfixtheworld.com/screenings.htm

To get your seat, call 0871 224 4007.