by Naomi Klein
The term “culture jamming” was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland. “The skillfully reworked billboard … directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy,” a band member states on the album Jamcon ’84. The jujitsu metaphor isn’t as apt for jammers who insist that they aren’t inverting ad messages but are rather improving, editing, augmenting or unmasking them. “This is extreme truth in advertising,” one billboard artist tells me.3 A good jam, in other words, is an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms. So, according to these principles, with a slight turn of the imagery knob, the now-retired Joe Camel turns into Joe Chemo, hooked up to an IV machine. That’s what’s in his future, isn’t it? Or Joe is shown about fifteen years younger than his usual swinger self (see image). Like Baby Smurf, the “Cancer Kid” is cute and cuddly and playing with building blocks instead of sports cars and pool cues. And why not? Before R.J. Reynolds reached a $206 billion settlement with forty-six states, the American government accused the tobacco company of using the cartoon camel to entice children to start smoking —why not go further, the culture jammers ask, and reach out to even younger would-be smokers? Apple computers’ “Think Different” campaign of famous figures both living and dead has been the subject of numerous simple hacks: a photograph of Stalin appears with the altered slogan “Think Really Different;” the caption for the ad featuring the Dalai Lama is changed to “Think Disillusioned” and the rainbow Apple logo is morphed into a skull (see image). My favorite truth-in-advertising campaign is a simple jam on Exxon that appeared just after the 1989 Valdez spill: “Shit Happens. New Exxon,” two towering billboards announced to millions of San Francisco commuters.
Attempting to pinpoint the roots of culture jamming is next to impossible, largely because the practice is itself a cutting and pasting of graffiti, modern art, do-it-yourself punk philosophy and age-old pranksterism. And using billboards as an activist canvas isn’t a new revolutionary tactic either. San Francisco’s Billboard Liberation Front (responsible for the Exxon and Levi’s jams) has been altering ads for twenty years, while Australia’s Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUG-UP) reached its peak in 1983, causing an unprecedented $1 million worth of damage to tobacco bill boards in and around Sydney.
It was Guy Debord and the Situationists, the muses and theorists of the theatrical student uprising of Paris, May 1968, who first articulated the power of a simple détournement, defined as an image, message or artifact lifted out of its context to create a new meaning. But though culture jammers borrow liberally from the avant-garde art movements of the past —from Dada and Surrealism to Conceptualism and Situationism —the canvas these art revolutionaries were attacking tended to be the art world and its passive culture of spectatorship, as well as the anti-pleasure ethos of mainstream capitalist society. For many French students in the late sixties, the enemy was the rigidity and conformity of the Company Man; the company itself proved markedly less engaging. So where Situationist Asger Jorn hurled paint at pastoral paintings bought at flea markets, today’s culture jammers prefer to hack into corporate advertising and other avenues of corporate speech. And if the culture jammers’ messages are more pointedly political than their predecessors’, that may be because what were indeed subversive messages in the sixties —“Never Work,” “It Is Forbidden to Forbid,” “Take Your Desires for Reality” — now sound more like Sprite or Nike slogans: Just Feel It. And the “situations” or “happenings” staged by the political pranksters in 1968, though genuinely shocking and disruptive at the time, are the Absolut Vodka ad of 1998 —the one featuring purple-clad art school students storming bars and restaurants banging on bottles.
In 1993, Mark Dery wrote “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs,” a booklet published by the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series. For Dery, jamming incorporates such eclectic combinations of theater and activism as the Guerrilla Girls, who highlighted the art world’s exclusion of female artists by holding demonstrations outside the Whitney Museum in gorilla masks; Joey Skagg, who has pulled off countless successful media hoaxes; and Artfux’s execution-in-effigy of arch-Republican Jesse Helms on Capitol Hill. For Dery, culture jamming is anything, essentially, that mixes art, media, parody and the outsider stance. But within these subcultures, there has always been a tension between the forces of the merry prankster and the hard-core revolutionary. Nagging questions re-emerge: are play and pleasure themselves revolutionary acts, as the Situationists might argue? Is screwing up the culture’s information flows inherently subversive, as Skagg would hold? Or is the mix of art and politics just a matter of making sure, to paraphrase Emma Goldman, that somebody has hooked up a good sound system at the revolution?
Though culture jamming is an undercurrent that never dries up entirely, there is no doubt that for the last five years it has been in the midst of a revival, and one focused more on politics than on pranksterism. For a growing number of young activists, adbusting has presented itself as the perfect tool with which to register disapproval of the multinational corporations that have so aggressively stalked them as shoppers, and so unceremoniously dumped them as workers. Influenced by media theorists such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Mark Crispin Miller, Robert McChesney and Ben Bagdikian, all of whom have explored ideas about corporate control over information flows, the adbusters are writing theory on the streets, literally deconstructing corporate culture with a waterproof magic marker and a bucket of wheatpaste.
Jammers span a significant range of backgrounds, from purer-than-thou Marxist-anarchists who refuse interviews with “the corporate press” to those like Rodriguez de Gerada who work in the advertising industry by day (his paying job, ironically, is putting up commercial signs and superstore window displays) and long to use their skills to send messages they consider constructive. Besides a fair bit of animosity between these camps, the only ideology bridging the spectrum of culture jamming is the belief that free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point that no one can hear you. “I think everyone should have their own billboard, but they don’t,” says Jack Napier (a pseudonym) of the Billboard Liberation Front.4
On the more radical end of the spectrum, a network of “media collectives” has emerged, decentralized and anarchic, that combine adbusting with zine publishing, pirate radio, activist video, Internet development and community activism. Chapters of the collective have popped up in Tallahassee, Boston, Seattle, Montreal and Winnipeg —often splintering off into other organizations. In London, where adbusting is called “subvertising,” a new group has been formed, called the UK Subs after the seventies punk group of the same name. And in the past two years, the real-world jammers have been joined by a global network of on-line “hacktivists” who carry out their raids on the Internet, mostly by breaking into corporate Web sites and leaving their own messages behind.
More mainstream groups have also been getting in on the action. The U.S. Teamsters have taken quite a shine to the ad jam, using it to build up support for striking workers in several recent labor disputes. For instance, Miller Brewing found itself on the receiving end of a similar jam when it laid off workers at a St. Louis plant. The Teamsters purchased a billboard that parodied a then current Miller campaign; as Business Week reported, “Instead of two bottles of beer in a snowbank with the tagline ‘Two Cold,’ the ad showed two frozen workers in a snowbank labeled ‘Too Cold: Miller canned 88 St. Louis workers.’”5 As organizer Ron Carver says, “When you’re doing this, you’re threatening multimillion-dollar ad campaigns.”6
One high-profile culture jam arrived in the fall of 1997 when the New York antitobacco lobby purchased hundreds of rooftop taxi ads to hawk “Virginia Slime” and “Cancer Country” brand cigarettes. All over Manhattan, as yellow cabs got stuck in gridlock, the jammed ads jostled with the real ones.
“Mutiny on the Corporate Sponsor Ship” — Paper Tiger, 1997 slogan
The rebirth of culture jamming has much to do with newly accessible technologies that have made both the creation and the circulation of ad parodies immeasurably easier. The Internet may be bogged down with brave new forms of branding, as we have seen, but it is also crawling with sites that offer links to culture jammers in cities across North America and Europe, ad parodies for instant downloading and digital versions of original ads, which can be imported directly onto personal desktops or jammed on site. For Rodriguez de Gerada, the true revolution has been in the impact desktop publishing has had on the techniques available to ad hackers. Over the course of the last decade, he says, culture jamming has shifted “from low-tech to medium-tech to high-tech,” with scanners and software programs like Photoshop now enabling activists to match colors, fonts and materials precisely. “I know so many different techniques that make it look like the whole ad was reprinted with its new message, as opposed to somebody coming at it with a spray-paint can.”
This is a crucial distinction. Where graffiti traditionally seek to leave dissonant tags on the slick face of advertising (or the “pimple on the face of the retouched cover photo of America,” to use a Negativland image), Rodriguez de Gerada’s messages are designed to mesh with their targets, borrowing visual legitimacy from advertising itself. Many of his “edits” have been so successfully integrated that the altered billboards look like originals, though with a message that takes viewers by surprise. Even the child’s face he put up in Alphabet City —not a traditional parody jam —was digitally output on the same kind of adhesive vinyl that advertisers use to seamlessly cover buses and buildings with corporate logos. “The technology allows us to use Madison Avenue’s aesthetics against itself,” he says. “That is the most important aspect of this new wave of people using this guerrilla tactic, because that’s what the MTV generation has become accustomed to —everything’s flashy, everything’s bright and clean. If you spend time to make it cleaner it will not be dismissed.”
But others hold that jamming need not be so high tech. The Toronto performance artist Jubal Brown spread the visual virus for Canada’s largest billboard-busting blitz with nothing more than a magic marker. He taught his friends how to distort the already hollowed out faces of fashion models by using a marker to black out their eyes and draw a zipper over their mouths —presto! Instant skull. For the women jammers in particular, “skulling” fitted in neatly with the “truth in advertising” theory: if emaciation is the beauty ideal, why not go all the way with zombie chic —give the advertisers a few supermodels from beyond the grave? For Brown, more nihilist than feminist, skulling was simply a détournement to highlight the cultural poverty of the sponsored life. (“Buy Buy Buy! Die Die Die!” reads Brown’s statement displayed in a local Toronto art gallery.) On April Fool’s Day, 1997, dozens of people went out on skulling missions, hitting hundreds of billboards on busy Toronto streets (see image, page 344). Their handiwork was reprinted in Adbusters, helping to spread skulling to cities across North America.
And nobody is riding the culture-jamming wave as high as Adbusters, the self-described “house-organ” of the culture-jamming scene. Editor Kalle Lasn, who speaks exclusively in the magazine’s enviro-pop lingo, likes to say that we are a culture “addicted to toxins” that are poisoning our bodies, our “mental environment” and our planet. He believes that adbusting will eventually spark a “paradigm shift” in public consciousness. Published by the Vancouver-based Media Foundation, the magazine started in 1989 with 5,000 copies. It now has a circulation of 35,000 —at least 20,000 copies of which go to the United States. The foundation also produces “uncommercials” for television that accuse the beauty industry of causing eating disorders, attack North American overconsumption, and urge everyone to trade their cars in for bikes. Most television stations in Canada and the U.S. have refused to air the spots, which gives the Media Foundation the perfect excuse to take them to court and use the trials to attract press attention to their vision of more democratic, publicly accessible media.
Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements, but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surface of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged as the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular. “States have fallen back and corporations have become the new institutions,” says Jaggi Singh, a Montreal-based anticorporate activist.7 “People are just reacting to the iconography of our time.” American labor rights activist Trim Bissell goes further, explaining that the thirsty expansion of chains like Starbucks and the aggressive branding of companies like Nike have created a climate ripe for anticorporate attacks. “There are certain corporations which market themselves so aggressively, which are so intent on stamping their image on everybody and every street, that they build up a reservoir of resentment among thinking people,” he says. “People resent the destruction of culture and its replacement with these mass-produced corporate logos and slogans. It represents a kind of cultural fascism.”8
Most of the superbrands are of course well aware that the very imagery that has generated billions for them in sales is likely to create other, unintended, waves within the culture. Well before the anti-Nike campaign began in earnest, CEO Phil Knight presciently observed that “there’s a flip side to the emotions we generate and the tremendous well of emotions we live off of. Somehow, emotions imply their opposites and at the level we operate, the reaction is much more than a passing thought.”9 The reaction is also more than the fickle flight of fashion that makes a particular style of hip sneaker suddenly look absurd, or a played-to-death pop song become, overnight, intolerable. At its best, culture jamming homes in on the flip side of those branded emotions, and refocuses them, so that they aren’t replaced with a craving for the next fashion or pop sensation but turn, slowly, on the process of branding itself.
It’s hard to say how spooked the advertisers are about getting busted. Although the U.S. Association of National Advertisers has no qualms about lobbying police on behalf of its members to crack down on adbusters, they are generally loath to let the charges go to trial. This is probably wise. Even though ad companies try to paint jammers as “vigilante censors” in the media,10 they know it wouldn’t take much for the public to decide that the advertisers are the ones censoring the jammers’ creative expressions.
So while most big brand names rush to sue for alleged trademark violations and readily take each other to court for parodying slogans or products (as Nike did when Candies shoes adopted the slogan “Just Screw It”), multinationals are proving markedly less eager to enter into legal battles that will clearly be fought less on legal than on political grounds. “No one wants to be in the limelight because they are the target of community protests or boycotts,” one advertising executive told Advertising Age.11 Furthermore, corporations rightly see jammers as rabid attention seekers and have learned to avoid anything that could garner media coverage for their stunts. A case in point came in 1992 when Absolut Vodka threatened to sue Adbusters over its “Absolut Nonsense” parody. The company immediately backed down when the magazine went to the press and challenged the distiller to a public debate on the harmful effects of alcohol.
And much to Negativland’s surprise, Pepsi’s lawyers even refrained from responding to the band’s 1997 release, Dispepsi —an anti-pop album consisting of hacked, jammed, distorted and disfigured Pepsi jingles. One song mimics the ads by juxtaposing the product’s name with a laundry list of random unpleasant images: “I got fired by my boss. Pepsi/ I nailed Jesus to the cross. Pepsi/… The ghastly stench of puppy mills. Pepsi” and so on.12 Wh
en asked by Entertainment Weekly magazine for its response to the album, the soft-drink giant claimed to think it was “a pretty good listen.”13
Identity Politics Goes Interactive
There is a connection between the ad fatigue expressed by the jammers and the fierce salvos against media sexism, racism and homophobia that were so much in vogue when I was an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties. This connection is perhaps best traced through the evolving relationships that feminists have had with the ad world, particularly since the movement deserves credit for laying the groundwork for many of the current ad critiques. As Susan Douglas notes in Where the Girls Are, “Of all the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, none was more explicitly anti-consumerist than the women’s movement. Feminists had attacked the ad campaigns for products like Pristeen and Silva Thins, and by rejecting makeup, fashion and the need for spotless floors, repudiated the very need to buy certain products at all.”14 Furthermore, when Ms. magazine was relaunched in 1990, the editors took advertiser interference so seriously that they made the unprecedented move of banishing lucrative advertisements from their pages entirely. And the “No Comment” section — a back-page gallery of sexist ads reprinted from other publications —remains one of the highest-profile forums for adbusting.
Many female culture jammers say they first became interested in the machinations of marketing via a “Feminism 101” critique of the beauty industry. Maybe they started by scrawling “feed me” on Calvin Klein ads in bus shelters, as the skateboarding members of the all-high-school Bitch Brigade did. Or maybe they got their hands on a copy of Nomy Lamm’s zine, I’m So Fucking Beautiful, or they stumbled onto the “Feed the Super Model” interactive game on the official RiotGrrrl Web site. Or maybe, like Toronto’s Carly Stasko, they got started though grrrly self-publishing. Twenty-one-year-old Stasko is a one-woman alternative-image factory: her pocket and backpack overflow with ad-jammed stickers, copies of her latest zine and handwritten flyers on the virtues of “guerrilla gardening.” And when Stasko is not studying semiotics at the University of Toronto, planting sunflower seeds in abandoned urban lots or making her own media, she’s teaching courses at local alternative schools where she shows classes of fourteen-year-olds how they too can cut and paste their own culture jams.