How the etoy Campaign Was Won: An Agent's Report
Author(s): Reinhold Grether
Source: Leonardo, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2000), pp. 321-324
Published by: The MIT Press
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DOCUMENT

How
An

the
etoy
Campaign Was
Agent'sReportWon:

ABSTRACTagent.NASDAQ
aka ReinholdGrether

THE TOYWAR-STORYThe TOYWAR.comresistance game was launched to protect
etoy from aggressive take-overattempts and to win the historic
domain name battle between the etoy.CORPORATION (legendary Internet art giant, incorporated 1994) and eToys Inc.
(one of the biggest e-commerce companies, incorporated
1996). After the etoy.SHAREHOLDERS (art collectors andfans) rejected a ridiculous offer of (U.S.)$516,000 for theeBRAND etoy.com (registered for experimental entertainment and cultural business operations), eToys Inc. filed a naive lawsuit against etoy. The toy retailer accused etoy of unfair
competition, trademark delusion, security fraud, illegal stock
market operation, pornographic content, offensive behaviour
and terrorist activity.This strategy failed terribly:etoy, specializing in and awarded for surreal incubations, cultural viruses
and impact management, decided to strike back and turned
the case into a toy harbor of e-commerce: 1,798 activists, artists, lawyers, celebrities and journalists were selected and recruited between November 1999 and February 2000 to establish a playful toy army. TOYWARworked like a swarm of bees.
Hundreds of well-informed people and media experts contested the aggressor on every level (filing counter court cases,
infiltrating customer service, PR departments, the press, investor news groups and also on the level of the Federal Trade
Commission etc.). More than 300 articles (New YorkTimes,
WallStreetJournal,Le Monde,CNN) reported the story and 250
resistance sites and net-shelters were established. Result:
within 2 months the eToys Inc. stock (NASDAQ: ETYS)
dropped from $67 (the day the battle started) to $15 (the day
eToys Inc. finally dropped the case). TOYWARwas the mostexpensive performance in art history: $4.5 billion in damage!
A glorious victory for the etoy.CORPORATION,which compensated activistswith etoy.SHARES:in March 2000 hundredsof brave TOY.soldiers transformed into etoy.CO-OWNERS
with voting rights.

THANK YOU FOR FLYING ETOY
Anyone who logged into the net.art platform TOYWARin
early February 2000 was met with two watery graves in the Indian Ocean in which 286 of 1,639 TOYWAR.agentswere buried in Lego-like coffins. Victims of their own lack of participation, the warriors had succumbed to a sheer undersupply ofenergy. 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.

? 2000 ReinholdGrether

InNovember
1999,theInternet
inititoystoreeToys.com
ateda trademark
lawsuitagainst"net.art"siteetoy.com.
etoyandotherInternet
activists
respondeda decenTOYWAR,
bylaunching
tralized
on-linemobilization
againsteToys,wagedonfronts
fromshopping
serversto on-line
forums.
Theauthor,
investors'
oneofthe"agents"
participating
inTOYWAR,
offersthisanalysisofthesuccessfulof resiscampaign
outinkeeping
withtance,carried"theexhibietoy'sartistic
project:tionofthebizarre
ofpractices
thefinancial
world."
eToyseventuitssuit,having
sufallydropped
fered$4.5 billion
inloststock
valueintheinterim.

They deserve our veneration
not because they're dead, but forwhat they've done. How often I've
observed a magazine article
placed at the top of a Web page
while the bubbling of ideas goeson in the bowels of online forums
below. There, the email addressesof eToys' employees and sit-in
scripts were passed around,people met and got to know eachother, 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 shotat 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 highlyorganized and powerful corporation.
Both etoy and eToys exist only on the Web but on different
levels of virtuality.eToys runs <http://www.etoys.com/>, making hundreds of thousands of playthings available to millionsof 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-mortarstores, 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, andthe group's only art product for sale is stock, etoy.SHARES,
first circulated in galleries and later via the TOYWARplatform. 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, asJoseph Beuys knew, and in his Schaffhauser
installation "Das Kapital"he placed apparatuses and artifactsof media communication together that force the observer toReinhold Grether, FG Literaturwissenschaften, Universitat Konstanz, 78457 Konstanz,
Germany. E:mail: <Reinhold.Grether@uni-konstanz.de>.
Translated by David Hudson. The German version, "Wie die Etoy-Kampagne gefuehrt
wurde," was published by the netzine "Telepolis" <http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/
on 9 February 2000; the English version appeared in "Telepolis"
inhalt/te/5768/l.html>
on 26 February 2000.
<http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/5843/l.html>

LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp. 321-324, 2000

321

I

perceive them in action, to see his or her course, the future of the Web was also at
own productivity as capital and himself stake. Should it be reduced to a transacor herself as an artist. This model of tion platform for ecommerce-or
one's own participation in art gains the should the possibilities inherent in it for
dimension of "social sculpture" only in spontaneous networking, "social inforso far as the imaginative interrogation of mation processing" (Michael Giesecke),the relics of anthropological media com- culture jamming, interweaving and penmunication infers the history of the in- etration and personal globalization be
further developed?
teraction encapsulated within them,for
Therein lies the art of etoy, to havethereby opening up spaces
opportunities for participation in the future. Fol- expounded upon these polarities incomplete clarity and to have forced thelowing Beuys, who, it should be noted,
used all the media available in his day for Net population to make a decision. And
the creation of social sculptures, etoy, although TOYWARdidn't go up on thewith its shares concept and the TOYWAR Net until a month after the preliminary
platform, develops new formats for par- injunction, Netizens understood theticipation in art which, making full use question and answered it in their ownof the networking potential of the unique way.John Perry Barlow is rightInternet, enliven a virtual space for infor- when he sayswe should all be grateful tomation, communication and transac- etoy. But it's not only the posing of thesetion, an ensemble of tools for action for questions and the development of"interventions in the symbolic reproduc- TOYWARthat needs to be recognized,
tion process of society" (Frank but also the finessing, invisible to theHartmann) and an institutionalizing
public, of the juridical problems. What
self-articulation organ for virtuality. So had to be borne out and built upon in
etoy's efforts seem aimed at carrying the terms of pressures and counterattacks,
concept of the social sculpture over to a threats and intentionally misleading
moves is known only to those who weredigital format.
For artistic reasons, etoy could not ac- immediately involved. The legal result,
cept the takeover offer from eToys, at any rate, is as excellent as the exposiwhich, after all, amounted to a million tion of the decision-making problem.
Is everything, then, not art after all?
German marks at the time. The story
would have worked, of course, since "un- Art is a term of attribution that's confriendly takeovers" are now a common stantly changing its rules. The Renaispart of doing business. For the first time, sance, Romanticism and Modernism all
net.art would have brought a newsworthy developed countless concepts throwing
price, and nomadic artists obtain their off aesthetic sparksfrom the overlapping
domains from various contemporary sub- of life and art. etoy stands firmly in thisversion zones anyway. But without the tradition. Has Duchamp already done itclaim on etoy.com, the project of the so- all? Duchamp's readymades retain thecial sculpture would have been out of character of objects for the most part;
reach. It borders on insult and suggests a etoy forces the character of readymades
bad memory when etoy is now accused of onto social processes-in particular, the"selling out." They already passed up making and marketing of virtuality.Whattheir considerable chance to do so.
eToys and Network Solutions do-these
And so, two representations on the are the readymades of the 'OOs.Didn't
Web stood opposed to one another.
Beuys completely and utterly exhaust theeToys, the parasite-like one, organizing theme of the social sculpture? Wrongthe circulation of already existing real Beuys developed social sculptures in themedium of anthropological psychism;
objects, and etoy, the autochthonous
one, using Web-based tools to pressure only the first explorations are now being
virtual as well as real social processes to conducted in the medium of transreveal and change themselves. Two mod- anthropic virtualism, e.g. Luther Blissett
els of participation were also opposed,
and TOYWAR.
one noting the changing valuations of
Warhol drove the recontextualization
stocks, and the other honoring participa- of everydayicons with great style, Koons
tion with shares in the project. In the exposed the pornographyof surfaces,andsame way, it was a conflict between two the Business Art of the '80s recast corpolifestyles, one consumerist-giving abso- rate identity to the hilt, so what's left forlute priority to acquisition, in this case, a etoy? etoy's perversion lies in upping,domain-and the other artistic-declarmeasure by measure, the development of
theexhibitionofsocialthe value of a single icon, their own name,ing
complexpractices, rather than art objects, the virtually cast as <www.etoy.com>,in theobject of art. And not least of all, of spiraling attention of the economic, po-

322

How the etoy Campaign Was Won
Grether,

litical, social and artistic, thus reflecting
the process of the creation of value in thefinancial markets in the excess of self-exaggeration. So it's not enough to merely
simulate an airline, as Ingold Airlines
does; you have to chase the take-off andlanding slots away from Lauda Air withthe "fuckingplugins" from agent.DAVE.

BRINGING IT TO YOU
When, back in November 1999, eToys
management unveiled its coup andJudge Shook pored over the files andetoy developed the concept for the
TOYWARplatform, I hadjust completed
my several-month-long study of the evolution of stock prices on the "Neue
Markt," Germany's vague equivalent of
the U.S. technology index NASDAQ.
The bulk of these stocks for the mostpart rose dramatically after their initialpublic offering and then more or lesszigged 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 newcompanies arejust now creating the markets within which they move, the valuations excuse the most miserable data aslong 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 andgives it back. Those who anticipate achange in the market profit whether itgoes up or down. The sovereign speculator is the one with his hand on thecourse of the story.
As the story turns, so turns the market.
The stock falls because a majority of investors believe they will earn more if it
falls than if it rises. Rather nasty for those
who are 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 andthe 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 thesame 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 ofdesire-for eToys, because they were losing 20,000 of 300,000 hits a day toetoy.com; for etoy, because the domainname was the point of reference of theirartistic existence. And the fight was particularly heated because the opponents
followed different sets of logic; the economic, on the one hand, which has to dowith numbers and payments, and the artistic on the other, where it has to dowith anything but. The art group was inpossession of a double advantage: forone, 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 theirartistic project. While etoy could always
put both sets of logic into play, eToys wasnever 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 athird 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 whatbecame the RTMark
campaign with my "anew toy for you" (all of which is documented at To:list@rhizome.org), thepoint was to set up an undeniable mirror
which would make the moves by
etoy.ARTSand etoy.POLITICSappear as
losses in the market value of eToys. This
mirror was the NASDAQ notation ofeToys, from which I was able to determine that the company had exhausted
the hot air puffing up their story andthat the market was looming on theverge 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 avalue 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 athought-through calculation: the stock

was introduced on May 20, and startingon November 20 the insiders flooded
the market. The valuation reflected theanticipation 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 thecampaign 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.POLITICSfollowed 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 thetrump cards. A respectable batch ofunmoderated mailing lists such as Rhizome, where my "urgently needed"sent 36 minutes after I received the news
to Nettime and four minutes later to Rhizome-had long since met with a wave ofpositive resonance, when Nettime moderator Ted Byfield (who, by the way, dida great job in the background) let meknow that "we (Nettime) don't send out
stuff like this."Even though the point was
to attack eToys immediately, to hit themsenseless with attacksjust when they werealready overworked with their monumental Christmas business. The media
and net.art scene subscribed to Rhizome
understood immediately, and shortly after "a new toy," I found myself hijacked
to the working
by the brokerage RTMark
group furiously toiling away.
When the forms on the Web site andthen the mailboxes of the management
were plastered with protests and, by dintof Richard Zach's estimable Campaign
Links,eToyswaspulled into a press frenzy,
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,
RTMarkon the political, the NASDAQ
valuation on the financial and the virtual
sit-in on the infrastructurallevel.
A virtual sit-in is little more than a collective, simultaneous requesting of a
Web site. If one requests a Web site fasterthan 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 specificallybetween 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 awarning strike during wage negotiations,a means of civil disobedience signalingthat one side has the willingness andcourage to fight. A virtual sit-in risks
bringing symbolic forms of action tobear in a medium of virtuality.
In the case of eToys, great pains weretaken to attack the server for short spansof time only (five 15-minute periods on
10 Christmas shopping days) and to
avoid completely bringing it down at all
costs. There was a "killer bullet script"
which was capable of doingjust that, but
its use was unanimously opposed. One
participant wrote: "I'm not ready to
trade the distributed, swarming community of activistsmodel for a single tacticalnuke." The point was to get across just
how widespread 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'sserver busy performing routine tasks. The cleverest script wasprobably "killertoy.html," a non-linear
script that fills cookies-based shopping
carts to the brim without actually making
a purchase. For every new item, theserver would have to refigure the complete list all over again, a process thatwould take longer and longer as the cart
filled, and some of the mirrors could
generate a hundred thousand or morerequests a day. eToys's server was able toprocess the simple request for pages on
the first day without a hitch, but themore complex scripts introduced on thesecond day gave it a run for its money.
Requests for particular IP addresses werecompletely 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 shutdown of one of The Thing's Web sites bybackbone provider Verio. Here, too, the"hype out the hype" strategywas at work,
further virtualizing eToys's virtual shopping carts with virtual purchases.
Just as important was the constantpresence in all the investors' forums that
had to do with eToys, where breath-taking, whiplash-like discussions were taking place. At first, the tone was set prima-

Grether,How the etoy Campaign Was Won

323

rily by the financial world gloating overthose mourning for the lost domain. But
the vocabularyof investors can be picked
up pretty quickly, and soon, the speculators counting on an upward trend wereconfronted with all sorts of negative financial data. When the market made its
irreversible dip, the catcalls from investors betting on the slump out-yelled eventhose from the activists.
The financial press was as surely ineToys's hands as the cultural press was inetoy's. But the telling difference lay inthe 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"It'shysteripress statement from RTMark.
cal," one of the founders emailed.
No personal meeting, no telephone
contact. Email and Web sites, nothing

324

How the etoy Campaign Was Won
Grether,

else. Mad email trafficearlyin the evening
and, when necessary, early in the morning. Then, time to think it all over.Shortly
after noon, mails to Rhizome so that theearly risers on the East Coast were immediately brought up to speed. Flow, when
10 to 20 people were communicating at
once and sending information aroundthe world. Anyone can do it. You, too.
An email finish with electronic slingshots! Hundreds of TOYWAR.agentsplace the eToys management under
TOYWARfire!! Unconditional surrender!!!
Dayslater,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.
wrote"Unleavened
ReinholdGrether
Breads,"a widelydiscussedarticleabouttheFrankfurt" 5/87). Afterart scene ("Wolkenkratzer,
studyingeconomics,politics, and aesthetics,
in 1994 he wrote "Longingfor WorldCul-

ture: Transgressionand Deletionin the Second EcumenicalAge."He collaboratedwith
ManfredStumpfto edit the "Sketch-BookoftheIcon 'EntryinJerusalem"'(Cantz,1996).
He has also authorednumerouspublications
on the Net, among them "WorldRevolution
AfterFlusser"and "Net.art and the Global
Imaginary."He holdsan assistantprofessorship with ConstanceUniversityto handlethe
project "net.science."

Links
Campaign Links: <http://dmoz.org/Society/Activism/Media_Activism/CultureJamming/etoy/>
Endorsements:<http://www.eviltoy.com/
endorsements.html>
etoy: <http://www.etoy.com/>eToys: <http://www.etoys.com>
RTMarketoy Fund: <http://www.rtmark.com/
etoy.html>
To:list@rhizome.org:
etoyrhiz.html><http://www.hygrid.de/

TOYWAR:<http://www.toywar.com/>
Virtual Sit-In Support: <http://www.duke.edu/~arg2/solidarity_list.html>