[Toywar I is over. After 81 days of heavy fighting etoy.com
http://www.etoy.com/ is back with a great victory parade. The german
version of this article was published by Telepolis
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/5768/1.html on February 9th,
2000. You should find the english Web version soon on
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/default.html. Thanks to David Hudson
dwh@berlin.snafu.de for translating this. The first part of the article
deals with the art of etoy, the second with campaign tactics.-RG]

+ + +

Part I: Thank you for flying etoy….

Anyone who logged into the net.art platform Toywar
http://www.toywar.com/ in early February 2000 was met with two watery
graves in the Indian Ocean in which 286 of 1,639 Toywar agents were
buried in Lego-like coffins. Victims of their own lack of participation,
the warriors had succumbed to a sheer undersupply of energy. A net.art
project only exists as long as the nodes of the Net fill it with life.
And now, they waste away in their coffins, having to make do with their
burials as mere artistic artifacts. They won't even end up on the art
market.

They deserve our veneration not because they're dead, but for what
they've done. How often I've observed a magazine article placed at the
top of a Web page while the bubbling of ideas goes on in the bowels of
online forums below. There, the email addresses of eToys' employees and
sit-in scripts were passed around, people met and got to know each
other, then built a protest site together, and a collective
brainstorming session poured forth a cornucopia of proposals, more than
any professional campaign organization could process. Despite all the
naysaying, the Net is offering individuals new opportunities to take
action and giving ideas a better shot at taking hold. It allows and even
encourages cooperation in virtual groups, and in the best of situations,
a self-organizing countermatrix as well that can make short work of a
highly organized and powerful corporation.

Both etoy and eToys exist only on the Web but on different levels of
virtuality. eToys runs www.etoys.com, making hundreds of thousands of
playthings available to millions of children. The Web site is a
turntable spinning real objects into the world. If it was still possible
in the 1980s for Toys'R'Us to present the universe of toys through a
network of giant brick-and-mortar stores, by the late '90s, this
universe was being represented by eToys on a network of computer
terminals as a purely virtual system of signs. Different means of
distribution for the same real objects. Etoy, the artistic third, upped
the level of abstraction to that of a purely virtual existence on the
Net. Etoy's toys are completely encoded as data sets and the group's
only art product for sale is stock, etoy.SHARES, first circulated in
galleries and later via the Toywar platform. Whoever obtains these
shares, either by buying them, doing some recruiting or performing some
other service, becomes part of an art universe that exists only on the
Net.

Art is capital, as Joseph Beuys knew, and in his Schaffhauser
installation "Das Kapital" http://www.modern-art.ch/english/home.html he
placed apparatuses and artifacts of media communication together that
force the observer into perceive them in action, to see his or her own
productivity as capital and himself or herself as an artist. This model
of one's own participation in art gains the dimension of "social
sculpture" only in so far as the imaginative interrogation of the relics
of anthropological media communication infers the history of the
interaction encapsulated within them, thereby opening up spaces for
opportunities for participation in the future. Following Beuys, who, it
should be noted, used all the media available in his day for the
creation of social sculptures, etoy, with its shares concept and the
Toywar platform, develops new formats for participation in art which,
making full use of the networking potential of the Internet, enliven a
virtual space for information, communication and transaction, an
ensemble of tools for action for "interventions in the symbolic
reproduction process of society" (Frank Hartmann)
(http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Frank.Hartmann/index.htm) and an
institutionalizing self-articulation organ for virtuality. So etoy's
efforts seem aimed at carrying the concept of the social sculpture over
to a digital format.

For artistic reasons, etoy could not accept the takeover offer from
eToys, which after all, amounted to a million German marks at the time.
The story would have worked, of course, since "unfriendly takeovers" are
now a common part of doing business. For the first time, net.art would
have brought a newsworthy price and nomadic artists obtain their domains
from various contemporary subversion zones anyway. But without the claim
on etoy.com, the project of the social sculpture would have been out of
reach. It borders on insult and suggests a bad memory when etoy is now
accused of "selling out." They already passed up their considerable
chance to do so.

And so, two representations on the Web stood opposed to one another.
eToys, the parasite-like one, organizing the circulation of already
existing real objects, and etoy, the autochthonous one, using Web-based
tools to pressure virtual as well as real social processes to reveal and
change themselves. Two models of participation were also opposed, one
noting the changing valuations of stocks, and the other honoring
participation with shares in the project. In the same way, it was a
conflict between two lifestyles, one consumerist, giving absolute
priority to acquisition, in this case, a domain, and the other artistic,
declaring the exhibition of complex social practices, rather than art
objects, the object of art. And not least of all, of course, the future
of the Web was also at stake. Should it be reduced to a transaction
platform for ecommerce – or should the possibilities inherent in it for
spontaneous networking, "social information processing"
(MichaelGiesecke), culture jamming, interweaving and penetration and
personal globalization be further developed?

Therein lies the art of etoy, to have expounded upon these polarities in
complete clarity and to have forced the Net population to make a
decision. And although Toywar didn't go up on the Net until a month
after the first court order, Netizens understood the question and
answered it in their own unique way. John Perry Barlow is right when he
says (http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,33159,00.html) we should
all be grateful to etoy. But it's not only the posing of these questions
and the development of Toywar that needs to be recognized, but also the
finessing, invisible to the public, of the juridical problems. What had
to be borne out and built upon in terms of pressures and counterattacks,
threats and intentionally misleading moves is known only to those who
were immediately involved. The legal result, at any rate, is as
excellent as the exposition of the decision-making problem.

Is everything, then, not art after all? Art is a term of attribution
that's constantly changing its rules. The Renaissance, Romanticism and
Modernism all developed countless concepts throwing off aesthetic sparks
from the overlapping of life and art. Etoy stands firmly in this
tradition. Has Duchamp already done it all? Duchamp's readymades retain
the character of objects for the most part; etoy forces the character of
readymades onto social processes, in particular, the making and
marketing of virtuality. What eToys http://www.etoys.com/ and Network
Solutions http://www.networksolutions.com/ do – these are the
readymades of the '00s. Didn't Beuys completely and utterly exhaust the
theme of the social sculpture? Wrong – Beuys developed social
sculptures in the medium of anthropological psychism; only the first
explorations are now being conducted in the medium of transanthropic
virtualism, e.g., Luther Blissett http://www.lutherblissett.net/ and
Toywar (http://www.toywar.com).

Warhol drove the recontextualization of everyday icons with great style,
Koons exposed the pornography of surfaces and the Business Art of the
'80s recast corporate identity to the hilt, so what's left for etoy?
Etoy's perversion lies in uping, measure by measure, the development of
the value of a single icon, their own name, virtually cast as
www.etoy.com (http://www.etoy.com/), in the spiraling attention of the
economic, political, social and artistic, thus reflecting the process of
the creation of value in the financial markets in the excess of self-
exaggeration. So it's not enough to merely simulate an airline, as
Ingold Airlines http://finger-news.com/4issue/fouringold.html does; you
have to chase the take-off and landing slots away from Lauda Air
http://www.laudaair.com/ with the "fucking plugins" from agent.jeff.

Part II: Bringing IT to YOU.

When, back in November 1999, eToys management unveiled its coup and
Judge Shook pored over the files and etoy developed the concept for the
Toywar platform, I had just completed my several-month-long study of the
evolution of stock prices on the "Neue Markt", Germany's vague
equivalent of the US technology index NASDAQ. The bulk of these stocks
for the most part rose dramatically after their initial public offering
and then more or less zigged and zagged along a plateau before plunging
downwards, opening out onto a bland wallowing around the initial
offering price. As they say, these valuations are rather drab. Since
these new companies are just now creating the markets within which they
move, the valuations excuse the most miserable data as long as the story
allows expectations for greater future valuations.

The actual dynamic lies in the story, the fantasy of the market,
which, like Switzerland's warm wind, keeps things stirring as long as
there's enough hot air feeding it. If, over time, the story loses some
of its plausibility, the smart investor grabs his profits, borrowing the
same paper for a limited time, selling high, and if the stock falls,
buys it back and gives it back. Those who anticipate a change in the
market profit whether it goes up or down. The sovereign speculator is
the one with his hand on the course of the story.

As the story turns, so turns the market. The stock falls because a
majority of investors believe they'll earn more if it falls than if it
rises. Rather nasty for those who banking on high valuations. Long-term
investors wait for the next upward trend, others take their losses and
validate the downward trend, while the truly sorry ones are those
forbidden to deal by the rules of the exchange. These are the founding
investors and the company management for the duration of the six months
following the initial public offering. Looking at the toys market, the
general trend on the exchange and overall economic development, literary
critics and economists would not be alone in risking argumentatively
sound statements on the future of the story and the stock exchange.

If two entities are fighting over the same thing, e.g., the domain
www.etoy.com, the one who wins will be the one who can convince the
other that the object of desire is not as desirable as it appears. The
etoy domain was an object of desire, for EToys, because they were losing
20,000 of 300,000 hits a day to etoy.com, for etoy, because the domain
name was the point of reference of their artistic existence. And the
fight was particular heated because the opponents followed different
sets of logic; the economic, on the one hand, which has to do with
numbers and payments, and the artistic on the other, where it has to do
with anything but. The art group was in possession of a double
advantage: for one, the domain was theirs, and for another, far more
important one, the exhibition of the bizarre practices of the financial
world was nothing less than their artistic project. While etoy could
always put both sets of logic into play, eToys was never able to put the
logic of economics to use against its opponent by, for example, burying
the opponent in an avalanche of legal fees, nor could it use a third
logic, for example, the criminal prosecution of Net activists. No one
could hold it against eToys that they couldn't follow the logic of art.

When I developed, without knowing any of the participants, the core of
what became the RTMark campaign http://www.rtmark.com/fundetoy.html with
my "a new toy for you" (all of which is documented at
To:list@rhizome.org [http://www.hygrid.de/etoyrhiz.html]), the point was
to set up an undeniable mirror which would make the moves by etoy.arts
and etoy.politics appear as losses in the market value of eToys. This
mirror was the NASDAQ notation of eToys,
from which I was able to determine that the company had exhausted the
hot air puffing up their story and that the market was looming on the
verge of introducing a downward trend. The idea of focusing the campaign
on the destruction of eToys's market valuation was an act of speculating
on speculation, a metastory, telling once again the parallel story
already autonomously programmed for a fall. As etoy.arts used the
similarity of the domains as a value effect, so did etoy.politics use
the fall in the stock price as a battle effect. "To hype out the hype,"
as Ricardo Dominguez and I coined the tactic in The Thing's BBS chat.

It wasn't a betting game. It was a thought through calculation: The
stock was introduced on May 20, and starting on November 20, the
insiders flooded the market. The valuation reflected the anticipation of
expectations for the Christmas shopping season and was already moving
downward. All etailers found themselves under pressure because the
traditional companies had found their electronic footing. And the
campaign would arouse so much brouhaha that the majority of new
investors would be betting on the slide.

Conceptually and legally, etoy.arts was set up brilliantly.
Etoy.politics followed a few days afterwards. The judge's ink was barely
dry when the first attacks hit the eToys Web site. The spontaneous self-
activation of hundreds and the sheer speed of the flow of information
were the trump cards. A respectable batch of unmoderated mailing lists
such as Rhizome (http://www.rhizome.org/fresh/), where my "urgently
needed" (http://www.hygrid.de/etoyrhiz.html), sent 36 minutes after I
received the news to Nettime and four minutes later to Rhizome - had
long since met with a wave of positive resonance, when Nettime moderator
Ted Byfield (who, by the way, did a great job in the background) let me
know that "we don't send out stuff like this." Even though the point was
to attack eToys immediately, to hit them senseless with attacks just
when they were already overworked with their monumental Christmas
business. The media and net.art scene
http://www.eviltoy.com/endorsements.html subscribed to Rhizome
understood immediately, and shortly after "a new toy," I found myself
hijacked by the art group RTMark http://www.rtmark.com/etoy.html to the
working group furiously toiling away.

When the forms on the Web site, and then the mailboxes of the management
were plastered with protests with the help of Richard Zach's
http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~zach/ estimable Feedbackpage,
eToys was pulled into a press frenzy, and they must have realized in no
uncertain terms that they were facing a powerful opponent with a talent
for grand politics. Etoy made this clear on a legal level, RTMark on the
political, the NASDAQ valuation on the financial and the virtual sit-in
on the infrastructural level.

A virtual sit-in is little more than a collective, simultaneous
requesting of a Web site. If one requests a Web site faster than it can
be transferred and built up on the end user's screen, the server
receives, on the one hand, a message telling it that the first request
is no longer valid, and on the other hand, the new request. Scripts
running on one's own computer or on go-between servers automate this
process, and after a certain number of requests, the server under attack
begins to suffer under the strain. One has to differentiate very
specifically between knocking out a server for private motives and a
political action openly disrupting a Web site for clearly formulated
reasons and for a limited time. That's when it becomes comparable to a
warning strike during wage negotiations, a means of civil disobedience
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/wray/ecd.html signaling that one side has
the willingness and courage to fight. A virtual sit-in risks bringing
symbolic forms of action to bear in a medium of virtuality.

In the case of eToys, great pains were taken to attack the server for
short spans of time only (six fifteen-minute periods on ten Christmas
shopping days) and to avoid completely bringing it down at all costs.
There was a "killer bullet script" which was capable of doing just that,
but its use was unanimously opposed. One participant wrote: "I'm not
ready to trade the distributed, swarming community of activists model
for a single tactical nuke." The point was to get across just how
widespread (http://www.duke.edu/~arg2/solidarity_list.html) the protest
was; it was not about a terrorist attack.

This much can be said of the effect: There were seven or eight rotating
mirrors around the world running five different scripts. Added to this
were several tools circulating around on the Net which can be installed
on personal computers. The combination made it possible to keep eToys's
server busy performing routine tasks. The cleverest script was probably
"killertoy.html", a non-linear script that fills cookies-based shopping
carts to the brim without actually making a purchase. For every new
item, the server would have to refigure the complete list all over
again, a process that would take longer and longer as the cart filled,
and some of the mirrors could generate a hundred thousand or more
requests a day. eToys's server was able to process the simple request
for pages on the first day without a hitch, but the more complex scripts
introduced on the second day gave it a run for its money. Requests for
particular IP addresses were completely blocked, meaning that eToys was
taking itself out of these networks. It was the "super_plus_version" of
the shopping scripts, then, that led to the shut-down of one of The
Thing's Web sites by backbone provider Verio. Here, too, the "hype out
the hype" strategy was at work, further virtualizing eToys's virtual
shopping carts with virtual purchases.

Just as important was the constant presence in all the investors' forums
http://www.rtmark.com/etoysinvest.html that had to do with eToys where
breath-taking, whiplash-like discussions were taking place. At first,
the tone was set primarily by the financial world gloating over those
mourning for the lost domain. But the vocabulary of investors can be
picked up pretty quickly, and soon, the speculators counting on an
upward trend were confronted with all sorts of negative financial data.
When the market made its irreversible dip, the catcalls from investors
betting on the slump out yelled even those from the activists.

The financial press was as surely in eToys's hands as the cultural press
was in etoy's. But the telling difference lay in the fact that one side
publicized the story for all it was worth, while the other side avoided
every instance of publicity. So the financial press, which could hardly
ignore the dramatic fall in the stock price, kept the impact of the
"Internet renegades" as invisible as possible. Up to the point of
eToys's first concession when Bloomberg.com ran the complete press
statement from RTMark. "It's hysterical," one of the founders emailed.

No personal meeting, no telephone contact. Email and Web sites, nothing
else. Mad email traffic early in the evening, and when necessary, early
in the morning. Then, time to think it all over. Shortly after noon,
mails to Rhizome so that the early risers on the east coast were
immediately brought up to speed. Flow, when ten to twenty people were
communicating at once and sending information around the world. Anyone
can do it. You, too.

An email finish with electronic slingshots! Hundreds of Toywar agents
place the eToys management under Toywar fire! Unconditional surrender!!!

Days later, we were confronted with 683 fresh coffins. The coffins of
those who didn't follow the first Toywar.Order, didn't write the warning
email as instructed. The false deaths of Toywar, now revived.

I'd like to know what Mr. Weibel thinks now. At the Center for Art and
Media Technology (ZKM), he opened the exhibition net_condition and
didn't even invite etoy, winner of the .net category of Prix Ars
Electronica in 1996. Perhaps the clever man suspected that the standard-
setting exhibition of the net-condition would be outfitted by etoy on
the Net anyway.