[On this day a year ago the preliminary injunction of a Los Angeles
court to shut down www.etoy.com launched a very complex social Internet
sculpture and the most expensive performance of art history.

eToys, an eCommerce toy vendor, was at that time one of the brightest
stars on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The declared and achieved aim of the
etoy campaign to bring eToys's stock value down to zero - during the
campaign they lost half of their market cap and, a drab since then,
touched the $ 1 share prize last week - cleared the declared attempt of
eCommerce to totally take-over the Net.

With a forty-page entry full of leaded email addresses of Toywar
campaigners the etoy campaign won an Honorary Mention with Ars
Electronica 2000. Glimpse on a small detail of the entry form at
http://www.netzwissenschaft.de/toywar/prix00e.htm and read below my
Toywar Laudatio published with Hannes Leopoldseder and Christine Schoepf
(eds), Cyberarts 2000: Prix Ars Electronica, Vienna and New York:
Springer 2000, pp48.]

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agent.NASDAQ aka Reinhold Grether
The Toywar Platform as a Monument to World Culture

With Toywar, net art has attained the power of global agency, and net
culture has passed a decisive test of endurance. For this reason, the
Prix Ars Electronica award anonymously honors everyone who took part in
any way in the etoy campaign. Formally it recognizes the 1800 agents of
the Toywar platform, as the competition entry consisted of nothing other
than a 40-page print-out of their e-mail addresses, typographically
scrambled for reasons of data protection.

Toywar was a magnificent condensation of the feeling of life at the end
of the 20th century. An abundance of scenes that had turned the Internet
into a medium of world culture during the nineties, combined with
unbounded imagination, left a hostile takeover attempt of the Net by
e-commerce no chance. The online toy vendor eToys lost five billion
dollars worth of equity in 81 days, sponsoring the most expensive
performance in cultural history to celebrate the marriage of its own
network.

etoy, one of the most fascinating formations of surreal net exploration,
honored as etoy.CREW with the Golden Nica in 1996 for the Digital
Hijack, and as etoy.CORPORATION a producer of first class world cultural
capital, exposed the conflict with eToys over trademarks and domain
names to public attention as decisive for the future of the Net. They
played cat and mouse with the immediate opponent on various levels and
developed one of the most complex community platforms of the net within
a remarkably brief period of time. RTMark, the world class brokerage for
anti-commercial sabotage published one of its most dreaded and most
successful financial instruments with the "etoy Fund" and brought about
the complete collapse of the eToys strategy with incomparable
sophistication. Electronic Civil Disobedience, spearhead of the testing
and implementation of virtual forms of protest since the Chiapas
uprising, created a script family in international collaboration, which
was used to conduct strategic virtual sit-ins at the eToys web site
repeatedly throughout the entire etoy campaign, thus revealing the
opponent's infrastructural vulnerability. Thing.net, mother of all net
and media arts, achieved a masterpiece of logistics in the background
and provided a plethora of campaign elements with unlimited bandwidth.
Last but not least, there were the two-thousand subscribers to the
leading mailing list for media and net art, Rhizome, who, as an equally
tenacious and flexible base network, spread the campaign throughout the
entire net, organizing it and leading it to victory.

The Toywar platform remains a monument to world culture for all times.