Mother Jones Interviews the Yes Men

MJ: How did you become the Yes Men?
Mike: I founded the Barbie Liberation Organization. Just before Christmas of '93, we bought a bunch of Teen Talk Barbie dolls and talking G.I. Joes, switched their voice boxes, and then snuck them back into stores. When people opened them on Christmas Day, they found Barbies saying things like, "Dead men tell no lies." And coming out of the G.I. Joes were things like, "I love to shop with you!"—which was kind of shocking coming out of a G.I. Joe. It should have been just as shocking coming out of a Barbie.
Andy: I was a programmer, and I inserted these kissing boys into a video game; 80,000 copies got shipped to store shelves, and it became a big media brouhaha. It became obvious that this was an interesting way to get media attention for causes.
Mike: Back in 1999, we were working on a project called rtmark.com, which was a website where people could meet and work on anticorporate activist projects. Through one of the fake websites that Andy had set up—gatt.org—we got an invitation to attend a trade conference as the World Trade Organization. When that happened, we split off and formed the Yes Men.