Absurd look, serious message: Why a man wearing a head bubble spoofed his way onto local TV
Concerned about climate change? How about ethical consumption under capitalism? Hoping to build your retirement plan investments but also feeling guilty for funneling your money into companies with questionable motives?
This (entirely fake) product has got you covered.
The new (not real) TerraDome portable ecosystem, part of the (completely made up) Many Happy Returns Climate Adaptation Toolkit, is a cutting-edge technology that allows you to invest in fossil fuels while also enjoying a guilt-free view of a world not impacted by agents of climate change.
The (non-existent) bubble helmet is filled with lush greenery, allowing you to take bits of a once-healthy world around with you for enjoyment, even if the planet is actively burning under your feet!
The pitch for this spoof product was the scene viewers of PA Live, a paid segment on local network WBRE, saw on Wednesday.
In a product promotion segment with the station's host, two men involved with The Yes Men, a culture-jamming activist group created in the early 2000s and associated with other similar stunts, appeared on the program to promote a silly-looking and entirely fake product, with one participant, who goes by Jay Moorehead, appearing on set in a full-on head bubble.
After the segment aired, it was quickly realized to be a hoax. The spoof was pulled off by Moorehead and Keil Troisi, who goes by the stage name Jeff Walburn, and is part of a bigger satirical campaign to put pressure on Vanguard Group, the world’s largest investor in fossil fuels, with $269 billion in investments.
While the satirical appearance may give savvy viewers a chuckle, the absurdist humor is a means to an important end, Walburn told USA TODAY on Friday.
USA TODAY has reached out to WBRE and Vanguard Group for comment.
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The 'Many Happy Returns' satire campaign
The "Many Happy Returns" campaign goes a lot deeper than one television stunt.
Fake flyers, press kits, ads, pitch decks, products, press releases and advertising materials were all created, along with an impressively slick website. The site, clientinvestor.tools, presents itself as a Vanguard product with a tongue-in-cheek tone, promoting a program that offers treatment for cognitive dissonance caused by investing in climate-destroying initiatives as opposed to offering solutions or alternatives to said harmful initiatives.
"All over the globe, extreme weather leads to starvation, migration, and death—which is alarming, and can make investors behave irrationally. That is why we created the Many Happy Returns™ Climate Adaptation Toolkit," the website copy says in part.
"The Many Happy Returns™ suite delivers the first and best climate adaptation counseling services in wealth management, free to all Vanguard customers and employees, allowing even the most empathetic of us to responsibly steward our own self-interest and keep thriving in an increasingly conflicted world," it continues.
The site also offers a hotline number that leads to a pleasant-sounding pre-recorded voice promising to connect callers with a "licensed tranquility counselor" to help investors and employees with a "mental or moral crisis."
The bottom of the website even features an advertisement for a fake medication called Dissonex (as in "cognitive dissonance") meant to soothe anxieties for those who "can’t help being a part of the problem.” The fake medication, which has the tagline "How do you sleep at night," is even linked to a made-up study in a fake medical journal.
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Taking on Vanguard
WBRE wasn't the only platform that was duped, said Walburn. Another local news station filmed a segment but has yet to air it, as it was not broadcast live. More impressively, the team of Yes People made their way into the Wall Street Green Summit where a member going by the stage name "Tara Hart" did an entire presentation on the Happy Returns campaign.
Once they made it to the Wall Street Green Summit, "Hart" got fairly far into her presentation before the audience seemed to realize what they were hearing was satire.
"The hoax phase of these projects is intentionally really short... it’s [usually] mere hours because the whole point is to actually do the reveal and say why we did it," he said.
The entire point of over-the-top stunts like appearing on TV with a bizarre headpiece is to grab attention and make people stop channel surfing.
"It’s a clown-y way to go on and talk about serious things," said Walburn.
Spoofing for a cause
The primary idea behind this campaign, said Walburn, was to draw attention to Vanguard's withdrawal from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative (NZAM) under CEO Mortimer J. Buckley, who is preparing to retire later this year. This gives the company a chance to appoint a more climate-conscious leader, said Walburn.
"So we just have a very reasonable demand for Vanguard which is to simply offer choices to screen out fossil fuels, something competitors are further ahead on. Vanguard is really intentionally lagging."
Walburn argued that Vanguard could make positive changes simply by giving investors more choices to make greener investments and make fossil fuels an opt-in place to steward funds as opposed to the default.
"We do these fun performance things and act silly and mischievous, but the goal is always to get people to go take action on the actual issues we're talking about, in this case just go to the Vanguard S.O.S campaign site," said Walburn. "It's not a boycott kind of thing, the people who do have their retirements or 401ks with Vanguard are the most powerful people in this campaign because they have customer power."
He encouraged people to check what companies their investments are tied up in and, if they discover Vanguard is one of them, to get in touch with an advisor to ask for green products and more options beyond fossil fuels.