A Day in the Life of an Anonymous Corporate Terrorist
by Rachel Greene

Someone in Stuttgart asked: "But aren't corporations made up of humans?
Aren't their decisions, at base, human decisions? Isn't there hope
then?"

The answer is simply no on all three counts.

1: Corporations are made up of urges, essentially–the humans set up the
corporation, a legal construct, to avoid liability. (Originally this was
enabled in law so that port-building and so on could take place without
the concomitant necessary risk falling on individuals' shoulders. Now
it's used to enable criminal or negligent behavior, or the possibility
of it.)

2: The human aspect of corporate decisions, small as it might have been
a few years ago, has been eroded even further: shareholders have sued
(successfully) to eliminate "managerial prerogative," which lets CEOs
and so on make decisions based on sound social reasoning and
conscience–e.g. clean up that toxic spill over by that playground (in
which my daughter plays, perhaps). Shareholders have sued successfully
(so now it's a legal precedent) to make this impossible, saying in
effect "This is our money, you can't determine what to do with it except
with profit in mind." The machine is made ever more machinic.

3: Therefore less and less hope.

-RTMARK, 1998

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RTMARK has made the national evening news with their Deconstructing Beck
CD and some of the campaigns of the Barbie Liberation Organization.
While I had heard of both these projects, I got to know RTMARK last year
when they landed quite firmly in the middle of the net theory community.
Seemingly out of nowhere, like a fresh breath of re-circulated office
air, press releases for a corporation called RTMARK began to appear on
lists like RHIZOME and nettime. Their work reflected a theatricality and
politics that were so right on and so sassy for 98, no one was surprised
that RTMARK became the most popular boys in the net.left.politics class,
at least for a time. Online, RTMARK uses the Web's capacity for audience
and distribution, much like commercial banks and commerce sites do,
advertising investment opportunities that resemble mutual funds, and
facilitating transactions into and out of these funds (which carry names
as sterile and eponymous as Fidelity's Top 10). The rub with RTMARK is
that capital raised by these funds is directed not towards its own
proliferation but is spent on cultural change, in the form of corporate
subversion and sabotage.

Last year, RTMARK was awarded a significant, prestigious prize at Ars
Electronica. Their acceptance speech was a well-timed series of press
releases critiquing the festival for in the same breath awarding prizes
to them and the film Titanic (which cost millions of dollars to film,
and destabilized a small Mexican village called Popolota). For the
actual awards ceremony, RTMARK sent two reps, Frank and Ernest, who
circulated in power suits, without ever giving their real names. When
these two gave a Power Point presentation replete with dumb graphics on
corporate subversion and the effects of Hollywood cinema on Popolta to
hostile festival organizers, it was a moment that captured much of the
spirit of net.art and net.culture in 1998.

Recently I spoke with RTMARK reps Frank and Ernest to find out their
thoughts on digital activism, 1998, and to hear what it's like to be
anonymous, incorporated artivists.

1. How and when did RTMARK start?

The RTMARK history begins in 1991, when several people with vaguely
anarchist politics (as if that existed in the US) got together to
attempt a more vital activism, i.e. theater. In the RTMARK story,
members slowly accrued and fell away, and Frank and Ernest joined in
1995 and 1996, respectively. They did not know each other beforehand,
but both had engaged in more or less traditional leftist activities up
to that point: marches, demonstrations, dissemination of information in
more standard channels. Such activities, they noted, were failing to
bring about macroscopic change in society of the type that would make
the trouble worthwhile, or at least such as would be hoped for.

2. So when was RTMARK legally incorporated?

In 1996 it was decided to adopt some of the protections afforded
corporations, in part as a way of highlighting them when asked exactly
this sort of question. We benefit from and transmit to the user a
"corporate veil" which displaces liability from all concerned and allows
us to do what we will, more or less.

3. How do you identify yourselves? Artists? Activists? Employees?

Frank and Ernest represent RTMARK at various functions; at these
functions, they are RTMARK's P.R. arm. In their private lives they are
employees of corporations, of course, since RTMARK does not support its
members financially (nor, for that matter, in any other way).

4. Why did RTMARK first go online?

The network has proved RTMARK's staunchest ally in the fight to promote
RTMARK projects across the wired world. It is by means of the network
that we convey information about corporations, corporate rights, the
history of those rights, and so on, and by which we are able to
coordinate appearances of members like Frank and Ernest in various
venues the world over. Without it, we would suffer a much slower
accretion of projects and capital. By the same token, it is only a tool,
and if we had vast sums of money we could accomplish the theatrical and
functional ends of the RTMARK outreach effort by other means.

5. What has been the reaction of more established activist communities
to RTMARK?

Often the more established activist communities have taken issue with
RTMARK for our lack of a coherent program. We are not interested in
taking over the world, nor any portion thereof, however, so a coherent
program is beside the point. We believe that the RTMARK system in its
presently extrapolated form brings up important issues, and transmits to
many users the degree and quality of anti-corporate thinking in today's
world. Simply by seeing the RTMARK projects, whether or not the projects
are actually completed satisfactorily, may bring to many users a sense
of the possibilities, sentiments, motivations, etc. that exist in
today's marketplace of ideas. We want to get people thinking "outside
the box" about important issues of corporate power, and feel that
intelligent discussions among like-minded activists are of very limited
interest, beauty, and scope. "Outreach" is our byword.

6. It has been a big year for RTMARK in the new media art
world–presenting at Ars Electronica, etc. What has that been like? Do
you think you will fall out of this world?

It is a bit silly, sometimes, preaching to the converted. While we aim
for outreach with our projects–and succeed, sometimes, in that
sphere–we are invited to speak not, for the most part, to lawyers and
corporate managers teetering on the edge of understanding, but to
artists and activists fully within the womb of thoughtful anger. There
have been only a few exceptions.

At the same time, however, we would like very much to think that
discussion and trading of opinions, while not ends in themselves as the
traditional left often mistakenly seems to consider them, can go some
distance towards impressing useful techniques and reactivities upon the
the substrates they suffuse.

Perhaps one thing we could aim in these new media circles would be a
small amount of very simple education. Actually, the only example I can
think of is hackers–they seem to still think government is the enemy,
the great Orwellian danger. They fight for privacy, but make no
distinction between corporate and human privacy–and privacy laws and
rights are what enabled Chiquita, for example, to act as it did
(criminally for the millionth time) in that Cincinnati voicemail-tapping
case. Why should corporations have privacy? Are they people? Do they
have feelings? Maybe we can get some hackers to think about this. I'm
talking about the politicized ones–most seem to simply be in it for the
fun.

7. What do you think is on the horizon for networked art projects like
the Electronic Disturbance Theater's "FloodNet"? What other kinds of
tactical media projects impress or interest you?

As we do not have a coherent program, it is hard to say what is
appropriate beyond the present few moments–nor would we think ourselves
capable of prescribing anything whatsoever for like-minded groups.

One thing is the Autonome A.F.R.I.K.A. Gruppe's piece in the Nettime
book ["Readme!"], we think it's very good and summarizes some of our
thoughts on problems with the traditional left–rather, we try to
summarize theirs.

8. What is it like to be totally anonymous?

It's not very hard on a practical level. I at least find that new names
just become another layer of misunderstanding, and we're so well put
together ("evolved" as more wired types might say) for misunderstanding
and confusion, another layer is hardly noticeable. Especially in the
corporate world one has to navigate through many fictions, and everyone
does this–"spin is everything now," as someone mourned in _Spin_ (the
movie).

9. I have heard some people say that there is money you could procure,
that you could fund projects and you don't. I think the critique has
been that you're more interested in gesture than political activism.
What do you do with the reading of RTMARK as theater?

Hmm…Whoever thinks we're not procuring as much money as we could
should try it themselves. If they have more success, good for them.
Beyond a few hundred dollars here or there, we find money doesn't come
easily and, surprisingly, neither do ideas.

As for being more interested in gesture than accomplishing goals–I
think "gesture" and "accomplishing goals" need to be defined here. I
don't know that bombing train stations is necessarily more productive
than slightly gumming up the corporate works in fun ways. Hard to tell.
Is real change produced better by other means than ours? If so,
terrific, let it be wrought by those means too. We have no monopoly on
subversion. We don't claim to be perfect, nor are we interested in
defining resistance. I think it's more important to get people thinking
about certain issues in the hope of eventually generating some
change–than in trying to corner the market on effectiveness.

And of course what we do is theater. On all levels. Giving money for
sabotage–what could be more theatrical? We'd have to be pretty naive to
think we could actually bring corporations to their knees, at least
directly.