Intervention 3- The Shell Game

 The issue I felt compelled to capture in my third intervention was this interesting scandal regarding TurboTax hiding it’s free tax filing program from internet search engines. Unlike the vast majority of other first world countries, the United States does not offer a simple way to file taxes due to lobbying from tax preparation companies. Since money runs our politics we are forced to use unnecessary tax prep websites. Most of these websites have to be paid for in order to use these services. Although congress has made it so that these companies have to offer a free service to lower income Americans, TurboTax has gone out of it’s way to make access to the free service as hard as possible. “The code in question, which can be found in a file called robots.txt or in an HTML tag, has to be actively added to a site, as Intuit has done. It is typically used on pages that designers want to hide from the open internet, such as those that are for internal use only. Without that code, Google and other search engines default to adding a site to their search results.” writes Justin Elliot, a reporter for ProPublica about the TurboTax scandal. These tactics of making people jump through hoops to get basic and necessary services is excruciatingly important to cover due to the fact that these establishments want to deliberately keep these things out of focus. In a Medium article written by human rights activist Svelta Baeva, she interviews an anonymous member that goes under the pseudonym Frida Kahlo. “It was about twisting an issue around, presenting it as maybe a riddle or a conundrum or some unanswered question. And then hitting back with some statistics that would change someone’s mind.” answered Kahlo explaining the power that creative activism can have to highlight systemic issues.

    In my Intervention I wanted to go into a much more lighthearted direction. I was enamoured by The Yes Men’s tactics of pranks to convey an important message. I wanted to bait and switch random people in the student building by making a shell game in which whoever guessed the right cup would be able to win 5 dollars. The switch is that they have to file an immense amount of paperwork and do challenges in order to win the money. The engagement also serves as performance for onlookers that take interest, not too dissimilar to the The Surveillance Camera Players.  “The SCP manifests this opposition by performing specially adapted plays directly in front of these cameras. They use their visibility – through public appearances, interviews with the media, and the website – to explode the myth that only those who are “guilty of something” are opposed to being surveilled by unknown eyes. (Thompson, Shollete 58)”.   

   

Elliott, J. (2019, April 26). Turbotax deliberately hid its free file page from search engines. ProPublica. Retrieved November 17, 2021, from https://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-deliberately-hides-its-free-file-page-from-search-engines. 

Baeva, S. (2018, February 22). Guerrilla girls on the art of creative complaining. Medium. Retrieved November 17, 2021, from https://medium.com/@svetla.baeva/guerrilla-girls-on-the-art-of-creative-complaining-3279fbe22838. 

Thompson, N. (2004). The interventionists: Users' manual for the creative disruption of Everyday Life. MIT.