One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  There is, as any economist will tell you, a sound economic reason for this. Capitalism has long been subject to what has been called a ‘crisis of overproduction’. An increase in the availability of resources and the efficiency of the technologies needed to transform them into goods has, for over a century, been accompanied by fairly static demand for those goods in the West. It was to increase demand for consumer goods, to create new needs and to transform luxuries into necessities, that everything from the advertising industry to the fashion industry came into being. But markets can only expand so much within any population; to give yourself a serious chance of offloading that surplus production, increasing your profits and market share and outbidding your rivals, you need to expand your markets elsewhere.

  In the late nineteenth century, when Western market expansion was tied up with imperial dominance, arch-Empire builder Cecil Rhodes was at least able to be frank about this process. ‘We must find new lands,’ he said, ‘from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.’12 Today, say activists, the words are couched but the motivation is the same: new markets for Western goods, and hang the consequences.

  All this, say supporters of globalisation, is apocalyptic nonsense. Yes, markets expand; yes, corporations have increasing access to many countries they wouldn’t have done before. Yes, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Starbucks, Disney and all the rest are springing up in remote corners of every country. Yes, the world is homogenising, but that’s because people want it that way. ‘McDonald’s does not march people into its outlets at the point of a gun,’ protests The Economist. ‘Nike does not require people to wear its trainers on pain of imprisonment. If people buy those things, it is because they choose to, not because globalisation is forcing them to.’13

  There are many answers to this. Answers that point out the stranglehold that Western multinationals have on the global economy. Answers that explain how international trade rules prevent countries from building up and supporting their own cultural industries against those from outside. Answers that point to the virtually unchallengeable dominance of Hollywood (which makes 85 per cent of the films watched in the world),14 MTV and all the rest over the world’s cultural landscape. Answers that question just how ‘free’ a choice is when it is made on the back of a multi-million-dollar advertising onslaught in countries where people are barely educated enough to read.

  This battle will go on, because the global movement has its own answers; answers that come not just from America, the belly of the consumer beast, but increasingly from people elsewhere, who resent the dominance of Western culture and the dissolving of their own. Against the endgame of a bleached, smoothed-out, branded planet, the same in essence from Brisbane to Bombay, the movement offers up an alternative of diversity. Only real people, in real places, say activists, can create real culture. It doesn’t come from branding consultants huddled in halogen-lit dens halfway up office blocks that look the same from Singapore to Cincinnati. It comes from the ground up, not the top down, and however hard the corporations try, it can’t be bought.

  What Kalle Lasn calls ‘the second American revolution’ – a struggle to decommodify The People – appears to have begun.

  If you conduct a search on the Internet for the California Department of Corrections, you will come across two websites. The first, an official site of the state government, will tell you everything you could want to know about the state’s ‘correctional facilities’, list the ten most wanted escaped fugitives and show you some charming photos from Death Row. If this is the sort of thing that cranks your chain, you can even apply for a job with them online.

  If it isn’t, the other site might interest you more. The other California Department of Corrections is an underground coalition of culture jammers dedicated to ‘correcting’ advertising billboards. This they do with spraycans, paper, Letraset, creativity and the cover of the night. Like the almost venerable Billboard Liberation Front (which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary), also based in San Francisco, they are engaged in what is probably the longest-running form of culture jamming there is.

  ‘Reworking’ billboards so that their message is ‘subvertised’ is becoming common in the cities of the West. The Billboard Liberation Front, who, like the California Department of Corrections, stubbornly refuse to reveal themselves to the outside world, say they do what they do because ‘old-fashioned notions about art, science and spirituality being the peak achievements and the noblest goals of the spirit of man have been dashed on the crystalline shores of acquisition’.15 They, too, say they are engaged in ‘cultural warfare’. They, too, are not alone.

  Residents from San Francisco to New York to Bristol to Toronto to Cape Town to Bangkok to my home town of Oxford regularly wake up of a morning to discover that what was a billboard ad for Marlboro is now a plug for Marlbore, that Gap Athletic has become ap Ath etic, that Charles Manson is the new face of Levi’s, that L’Oréal is now essential not ‘because you’re worth it’, but ‘because you’re stupid’. Such ‘fauxvertising’ can range from the strikingly funny to the embarrassingly humourless, but it always works best when it is so professionally done that the result is indistinguishable in style and execution from the original. British versions of the BLF and the CDC include the Bristol-based ABBA (Anti-Billboard Brainwashing Action) and the Londoners NASA (New Advertising Standards Authority), but much billboard liberation is done by small groups of cultural guerrillas with no names or pack drill, just a spontaneous desire to make mischief and reclaim public space.16

  While billboard liberation spreads with consumerism itself, the cultural guerrillas of the global movement are adopting more and varied ways of jamming the medium to insert their own message. Adbusters, as well as producing its own ‘subverts’ and TV spots, which corporate-owned US TV channels regularly refuse to air, has instituted an annual celebration of anti-consumerism, ‘Buy Nothing Day’, which is celebrated in over thirty countries every November. In Sweden, anti-consumerist Santa Clauses visit shopping malls and shout about the joys of not shopping. In Ireland, a ‘conga against capitalism’ occupies a Dublin shopping centre. Sheep take to the streets of San Francisco, bleating ‘buy moooooore stuff’, and ‘sweeeeeaaaatshops’. Zombies shuffle through Cairns, Australia, with barcodes on their torsos, wielding shopping bags. Culture jammers outside a mall in Seattle offer shoppers a ‘credit card cut-up service’.17

  Meanwhile, a global network calling itself the Fanclubbers is doing its best to annoy the chainstore retailers of the world. Their favourite tactic is buying something – often, if there are enough people involved, buying a lot of things – and then immediately returning them, with a message attached. In London, a group of Fanclubbers went en masse to NikeTown, bought a batch of sweatshirts, and then immediately returned them on the grounds that they all had ‘dirty marks’ on them – the marks being the Nike logo.18

  Elsewhere, ‘Whirl-Mart’ are wandering into Wal-Mart stores wearing white jump-suits, and processing up and down the aisles for an hour pushing empty trolleys and informing curious customers and riled staff that they are participating in a ‘consumption awareness ritual’. In New York, the Surveillance Camera Players are performing pointed, silent street theatre into some of the 3,000 CCTV cameras that dot Manhattan, in a show of protest against the watched society and the enclosure of public space. SCP branches from Sweden to Lithuania do the same. In London, activists hand out spoof newspapers – the Evading Standards, the Hate Mail, the Financial Crimes – to commuters. American activists did the same during the IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington in 2000, with the Washington Lost, which contains such headlines as ‘In Moving Ceremony, New US Consumers Are Sworn In’, and ‘Fat America Starves Africa to Keep Humanity’s Total Body Weight Unchanged’.19 In Thailand, photo-activists restage Vietnam war photo
s in shopping centres to make a piquant point about a new American invasion – commercial this time, not military.

  Then there is RTMark, a kind of web-based clearing centre for subversive ideas. RTMark, which has set itself up as a limited liability corporation, is a centre for people to come together on projects designed to upset the corporate and political world. People post ideas on their website for culture-jamming projects they want to carry out, and list how much, if any, money they need to do it. Others can then join in or fund them, anonymously if necessary.

  Their first success came in 1993, when a military veterans’ organisation donated $8,000, via RTMark, to the ‘Barbie Liberation Front’, who used the money to switch the voice boxes of 300 Barbie dolls with 300 GI Joe dolls in the shops. Another corker came during the 2000 presidential elections, when RTMark set up a fake George Bush supporters’ website which the president’s men scrambled to close down. The battle became a major news story in the US, especially when Bush, asked what he thought about the fake site, opined that ‘there ought to be limits to freedom’ – a quote he has yet to live down.

  At the time of writing, ideas looking for support and/or funding on RTMark’s site include a project to ‘build or use an existing pirate radio transmitter and use it to broadcast home-made and seemingly sincere advertisements for the major corporation of your choice on to existing radio signals’. Another, noting that Wal-Mart had started allowing people with motor homes to camp in its car parks overnight, seeks to ‘recruit thousands of hippies and homeless to camp in Wal-Mart parking lots nationwide on the same night . . . Design special cardboard boxes to sleep in highlighting the destruction corporations are doing to our communities. Get nationwide media coverage.’ There are plenty more ideas.20

  The corporate response to the growth of such activities has been, in many cases, to try to grab them for themselves. In recent years, a number of examples of the consumer culture trying to co-opt the very act of dissent against it have appeared. Thus we have seen the Gap, a favourite target of activists for its use of sweatshops, running a window display which includes red banners and fake graffiti sprayed across the outside of its windows. Nike has spoofed anti-sweatshop protesters in its own adverts for football boots (‘The most offensive boots we’ve ever made’) and set up a fake grass-roots protest group, supposedly to complain that their boots were so well made that they put non-wearers at a disadvantage (hold your sides in!). Diesel has used staged protest photos to sell jeans. Black Bloc-inspired catwalk costumes, complete with ski masks, have appeared in the Sunday supplements. What all of this tells us is that in a consumer society, everything is for sale: even resistance to consumer society. It can play havoc with your head. Is even culture jamming being jammed?

  Sometimes, it seems. But the point about culture jamming is that however hard the corporations try, it keeps coming back, evolving, being reborn in ways which no one expected. It keeps competing for that cultural hegemony.

  The hard question is how effective any of it is. Culture jamming is certainly fun, but can it really succeed in doing more than pricking the skin of an increasingly global consumer culture? Is it not, on occasion, a bit, well, sanctimonious? And is playing what are, at root, basically old-fashioned pranks really the best way to challenge the hegemony of consumer capitalism?

  I am sitting in a hot spring somewhere in the Arizona desert. The February sun is high and determined, the smell of sulphur is in the air and the bare trees are stark against the thin blue sky. On the horizon, across brown miles of scrub and dust, are snow-capped mountains. This natural spring is one of a complex in a remote and dilapidated ranch that used to be owned by the Rolling Stones. It sits in the centre of Apache territory, where one of the world’s most effective guerrilla wars was fought by one of the last free tribes of North America against the European invaders. Anyone from Geronimo to Mick Jagger could have been in this pool before. Right now, though, there is just me and, six feet away, buck naked, with only a green rubber ring to cover his modesty, Special Agent Apple of the Biotic Baking Brigade. He is lying on his back and smiling vaguely into the sky.

  ‘Isn’t this great?’ he says.

  I have to agree. It is great. I’ve been here two days, sleeping in the back of a car I hired and stupidly drove all the way from San Francisco to get here. This is the annual gathering of the radical American environmental group Earth First!, which turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be a million miles away from the British version – a lot of workshops, dreadlocks, wind chimes, skunk and the exchanging of tips on the best ways to disable road-building machinery and chain yourself to digger axles. Earth First! (the exclamation mark is obligatory), almost two decades ago now, provided today’s movement with one of its prototypes for unyielding radicalism and determined direct action. Since then it has lost some of its own momentum, but it still seems to be good at holding get-togethers in wild and beautiful places. Agent Apple is someone in both Earth First! and the Biotic Baking Brigade. He is a culture jammer par excellence, and before he gets out of the pool, I’m hoping he’s going to tell me more about it.

  The Biotic Baking Brigade has become a legend in its own lunchtime. Its pioneering combination of slapstick, politics, wordplay and gastronomy has inspired imitators around the world, and a veritable mass of cells across the US. The BBB began life in California, where Apple then lived, in 1998. Inspired by the visit of Milton Friedman, the godfather of neoliberal economics, to a conference in San Francisco, Apple and a few friends baked an organic coconut cream pie in celebration. Apple then put on a suit, slid the pie into a briefcase, wangled his way into the conference and gently pressed the pie into Friedman’s face. ‘These neoliberal economists offer us pie in the sky,’ he told the press afterwards. ‘I brought that pie and gave it back to him.’

  Thus was the BBB born, its avowed purpose: ‘Speaking pie to power.’ In the months and years to come, the original California cell perfected its tactics: locally made pies, organic if possible, to be thrown full in the face of the intended victim, the pieing to be followed by a press release stating, in the unique language of the BBB, a combination of politics and brilliantly awful pastry-based puns, the reason for the attack. And it worked. The BBB’s tactics were aimed at getting political messages across in a way that the press would pick up on and people would empathise with, and even enjoy.

  In the months and years that followed, Apple and the BBB hit Robert Shapiro, then head of the biotech company Monsanto; Charles Hurwitz of the Pacific Lumber company, which was busily deforesting ancient woods near the BBB’s California home; and even Carl Pope, head of the US environmental group the Sierra Club, who the BBB accused of co-operating with loggers. Then, in 1999, the BBB’s reputation went global when three of them pied San Francisco mayor Willie Brown in a protest against his policies on homelessness in the city. Brown took them all the way to court, a process which ended in the ‘Cherry Pie Three’ being sentenced to six months in prison.

  Since then, what Agent Apple calls the ‘global pastry uprising’ has spread from Burma to South Africa, from Britain to Germany and from Canada to Chile. It has landed flans in the face of Bill Gates, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Clare Short, Ann Widdecombe, Sylvester Stallone, Keith Campbell (‘inventor’ of Dolly, the cloned sheep), the former heads of both the IMF and the WTO, Helmut Kohl, Jacques Delors . . . The list is still growing.

  According to ‘Subcomandante Tofutti’ of the BBB, the Global Pastry Uprising – described by Apple as ‘an underground network of militant bakers who deliver just desserts to those in power’ – is inspired by the Zapatistas. They pie people who use power without responsibility, and they like their victims to be pompous, powerful, often obscure and devoid of a sense of humour. They are a grass-roots gastronomic retort to a faceless economic process and they have, says Apple, with an almost straight face, the ‘moral pie ground’.

  ‘Pieing is definitely a critical element in culture jamming,’ Apple tells me, lazily pushing himself off the side of the
pool with his big toe. ‘It’s a form of direct action that is not violent and yet delivers a powerful message. It’s a form of visual Esperanto, a universal language. Everyone can understand it. To see politicians dripping with cream – who could resist it?’ Moreover, he says, splashing his hands duckily at his sides, in a world in which the traditional left, and traditional forms of opposition have become ‘boring, bureaucratic and unproductive’, the entartistes, as they are known in the French-speaking world, have something new to offer.

  ‘In today’s world, when everything is about image and image-management, it’s a way of breaking through that control, and sending our own message, creating our own image. I wouldn’t be surprised if at this stage PR firms are training their clients in what to do if you’re pied.’ I wouldn’t be surprised either. But there must, I say, be a point at which pieing passes its sell-by date. And what about culture jamming as a whole? Can it really make a difference?

  ‘Sure,’ he says, splashing again. ‘Pieing is just one weapon in a whole toolbox of resistance, but the pie is a very effective vehicle to communicate issues that otherwise wouldn’t get a hearing. We have got the issues of homelessness, logging, the global market, corporate control, consumerism – we’ve got it all into the media and into people’s consciousness in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d just held some rally or something. Also, though, you have to think tactically, and this applies to all the culture jamming-type stuff that goes on in America. In American society, the forces arrayed against dissenters are massive. We have the biggest military force in the world, the biggest budget for the security services in the world, the highest prison population, etc. The climate of paranoia among dissidents here is extremely high. It’s been that way for a very long time, and Bush’s “war on terror” has just made it a lot worse. Culture jamming, in that context, is a tactic. It’s a guerrilla approach. It’s not about violent confrontation with the state or the system, but it is a really positive way of getting your message across.’