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.

Web Addresses
Electronic Civil Disobedience
http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html
etoy http://www.etoy.com/
Rhizome http://www.rhizome.org/fresh/
RTMark http://www.rtmark.com/
Thing.net http://bbs.thing.net/login.thing
Toywar http://www.Toywar.com/