etoy.CORPORATION (collective) — Toywar

1999

Artists: etoy.CORPORATION (collective) · Year: 1999 · Medium: Coordinated digital resistance campaign against corporate lawsuit · Substrate: Email lists, IRC channels, web campaigns, coordinated market actions · Place: Zurich, Switzerland (headquarters); globally distributed participants · Institution: etoy.CORPORATION (founded 1994) On 29 November 1999 the Silicon Valley online-toy retailer eToys Inc. filed a trademark-and-domain lawsuit against etoy.CORPORATION, a Swiss-based artist collective that had registered the etoy.com domain in 1995 — four years before eToys Inc. existed. A U.S. judge granted an injunction requiring the collective to cease use of etoy.com. Over the next three months, etoy.CORPORATION — along with an ad-hoc international coalition of 1,798 participants operating under the name TOYWAR — conducted one of the most coordinated, visible, and effective campaigns of tactical-media warfare in the history of the internet. They lost the domain temporarily. They reclaimed it in January 2000 when eToys Inc. dropped the suit. By February 2001, eToys Inc. had gone bankrupt, partly as a consequence of the stock-price damage that TOYWAR had done. The campaign's methods were operational rather than rhetorical. TOYWAR participants ran distributed attacks on eToys Inc.'s servers during peak Christmas shopping hours (an early coordinated DDoS tactic, pre-dating most of the Anonymous-era conventions). They flooded the company's investor-relations channels with complaints. They organized coordinated stock-sale campaigns designed to visibly depress the share price. They ran press coverage aggressively, framing the suit as a corporate-giant-versus-artists story in a way that made eToys Inc.'s position untenable. When eToys Inc.'s stock dropped from $72 in October 1999 to under $10 by early 2000, mainstream press began to write about it; the collective claimed partial credit, and the claim was widely accepted. This archive tracks TOYWAR as the single most effective piece of coordinated network-native political action of its decade. It is also, specifically, the case study that vindicated the Critical Art Ensemble's 1996 Electronic Civil Disobedience argument: network-native pressure tactics, executed in coordinated form against a specific commercial target, could produce real economic effects at scales that analog protest could not achieve. etoy.CORPORATION had, in 1999, twelve members. eToys Inc. had several thousand employees. The twelve won. etoy.CORPORATION has continued to exist, is based in Zurich and Dresden, and is arguably one of the oldest continuously-operating artist collectives in this archive. It still owns etoy.com. Lore The TOYWAR campaign was run partly out of a rented office in Zurich that the collective maintained as etoy.HEADQUARTERS — a four-person cubicle painted in the collective's orange corporate color with a bright red phone and a full set of branded stationery. The branding was not incidental. etoy had long cultivated a deliberately corporate aesthetic: stock certificates, board meetings, investor relations, annual reports. This was itself the critique. When eToys Inc. sued, the collective was already operating as a better-branded version of the plaintiff, and the asymmetry was exactly what made the campaign legible. Zai (one of the collective's core agents) has said in subsequent interviews that the collective knew, strategically, that eToys Inc.'s investor-relations infrastructure was its most vulnerable surface, and that attacking it during holiday shopping season would magnify the damage. They attacked during holiday shopping season. eToys Inc. never recovered. Sources • Wishart, Adam; Bochsler, Regula — Leaving Reality Behind: Inside the Battle for the Soul of the Internet (Fourth Estate, 2002). • Grether, Reinhold — "How the etoy Campaign Was Won" (Telepolis, 2000). • etoy.CORPORATION — etoy.com archival material (1995–present).