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A partial eToys vs. etoy timeline (open)
NSI and www.etoy.com
Jan. 25 press release
eToys wins game
Dec. 29 press release
A press conference in Los Angeles
Dec. 24 press release
A press conference in New York
A threat from someone at eToys
We brought down www.eToys.com!
Dec. 12 press release
Campaigns and resources
Articles about eToys vs. etoy
Corporate aggression and the internet
Autodesk, the legacy of eToys
B.L.O.
The SimCopter hack
The World Trade Organization
Deconstructing Beck
The Secret Writer's Society hack
The Presidential Exploratory Committee
Popotla vs. Titanic
Phone in Sick Day (Mayday)
The Zapatista Floodnet
The Threat of Millennium
Other past projects
Articles without project focus
Selected archive of recent press
A few ongoing projects
Our company
A Well Balanced Meal
For too long, many reporters have ascribed the responsibility for saving etoy.com either to ®TMark or, more recently, to Toywar.com. Such increasingly wild misreporting cheapens this important victory, and makes it much less useful as a lesson to others.

We hope that the revised timeline below--showing some new information, and with ®TMark's participation in italics and Toywar.com's participation in bold--will show the unimportance of ®TMark's and Toywar.com's roles, and instead give thanks where thanks are due.

Indeed, the only important role in the fight against eToys was played by the countless activists who, with little or no coordination, flooded eToys investment boards until many dropped their stock, bombarded eToys.com until CNN reported it down, wrote countless e-mails to reporters, eToys employees, and anyone else who would listen, and finally achieved, for etoy and for everyone, the most significant victory of art over commerce in Internet history.

The role of ®TMark, which stepped into the fray a full two weeks after the protests began, was only that of publicist and sometime facilitator. And Toywar.com, brilliant as it is, only became functional after the battle against eToys had already been fully won, with only one formality missing.

What brought victory was not ®TMark or Toywar.com, but rather (1) the widespread recognition that eToys was waging a war not just against etoy.com but against free expression, (2) the cleverness of half a dozen key figures in hatching plan after plan after plan, and (3) a tool already at everyone's disposal: the Internet.

To write that etoy was saved by an activist website like ®TMark, or by a sophisticated piece of computer code and graphics like Toywar.com, not only slights the countless people who actually did the saving, but leaves a much less empowering tale for those who will fight in the future.

®TMark participation is shown in italics; Toywar.com participation is shown in bold; most text items are linked to the relevant articles. This chart was inspired by etoy and RT Thompson, and is intended for illustrational purposes only, not to imply a simple causality. There are many factors in the decline of eToys stock, of which the etoy protests were only some. See Dec. 3 posting to Rhizome Dec. 21 article (exaggerates RTMark involvement) Virtual Sit-In pages The etoy Fund www.thing.net "NSI and www.etoy.com" Jan. 17 article Jan. 25 article Dec. 30 article Dec. 29 article Quit eToys! page Dec. 12 press release Dec. 1 article

      
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