by Naomi Klein
Stasko’s interest in marketing began when she realized the degree to which contemporary definitions of female beauty —articulated largely through the media and advertisements —were making her and her peers feel insecure and inadequate. But unlike my generation of young feminists who had dealt with similar revelations largely by calling for censorship and re-education programs, she caught the mid-nineties self-publishing craze. Still in her teens, Stasko began publishing Uncool, a photocopied zine crammed with collages of sliced-and-diced quizzes from women’s magazines, jammed ads for tampons, manifestos on culture jamming and, in one issue, a full-page ad for Philosophy Barbie. “What came first?” Stasko’s Barbie wonders. “The beauty or the myth?” and “If I break a nail, but I’m asleep, is it still a crisis?”
She says that the process of making her own media, adopting the voice of the promoter and hacking into the surface of the ad culture began to weaken advertising’s effect on her. “I realized that I can use the same tools the media does to promote my ideas. It took the sting out of the media for me because I saw how easy it was.”15
Although he is more than ten years older than Stasko, the road that led Rodriguez de Gerada to culture jamming shares some of the same twists. A founding member of the political art troop Artfux, he began adbusting coincident with a wave of black and Latino community organizing against cigarette and alcohol advertising. In 1990, thirty years after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People first lobbied cigarette companies to use more black models in their ads, a church-based movement began in several American cities that accused these same companies of exploiting black poverty by target-marketing inner cities for their lethal product. In a clear sign of the times, attention had shifted from who was in the ads to the products they sold. Reverend Calvin O. Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem took his parishioners on billboard-busting blitzes during which they would paint over the cigarette and alcohol advertisements around their church. Other preachers took up the fight in Chicago, Detroit and Dallas.16
Reverend Butts’s adbusting consisted of reaching up to offending billboards with long-handled paint rollers and whitewashing the ads. It was functional, but Rodriguez de Gerada decided to be more creative: to replace the companies’ consumption messages with more persuasive political messages of his own. As a skilled artist, he carefully morphed the faces of cigarette models so they looked rancid and diseased. He replaced the standard Surgeon General’s Warning with his own messages: “Struggle General’s Warning: Blacks and Latinos are the prime scapegoats for illegal drugs, and the prime targets for legal ones.”
Like many other early culture jammers, Rodriguez de Gerada soon extended his critiques beyond tobacco and alcohol ads to include rampant ad bombardment and commercialism in general, and, in many ways, he has the ambitiousness of branding itself to thank for this political evolution. As inner-city kids began stabbing each other for their Nike, Polo, Hilfiger and Nautica gear, it became clear that tobacco and alcohol companies are not the only marketers that prey on poor children’s longing for escape. As we have seen, these fashion labels sold disadvantaged kids so successfully on their exaggerated representations of the good life —the country club, the yacht, the superstar celebrity —that logowear has become, in some parts of the Global City, both talisman and weapon. Meanwhile, the young feminists of Carly Stasko’s generation whose sense of injustice had been awakened by Naomi Wolf’s Beauty Myth, and Jean Kilbourne’s documentary Killing Us Softly, also lived through the feeding frenzies around “alternative,” Gen-X, hip-hop and rave culture. In the process, many became vividly aware that marketing affects communities not only by stereotyping them, but also —and equally powerfully —by hyping and chasing after them. This was a tangible shift from one generation of feminists to the next. When Ms. went ad-free in 1990, for instance, there was a belief that the corrosive advertising interference from which Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan were determined to free their publication was a specifically female problem.17 But as the politics of identity mesh with the burgeoning critique of corporate power, the demand has shifted from reforming problematic ad campaigns to questioning whether advertisers have any legitimate right to invade every nook and cranny of our mental and physical environment: it has become about the disappearance of space and the lack of meaningful choice. Ad culture has demonstrated its remarkable ability to absorb, accommodate and even profit from content critiques. In this context, it has become abundantly clear that the only attack that will actually shake this resilient industry is one leveled not at the pretty people in the pictures, but against the corporations that paid for them.
So for Carly Stasko, marketing has become more an environmental than a gender or self-esteem issue, and her environment is the streets, the university campus and the mass-media culture in which she, as an urbanite, lives her life. “I mean, this is my environment,” she says, “and these ads are really directed at me. If these images can affect me, then I can affect them back.”
The Washroom Ad as Political Catalyst
For many students coming of age in the late nineties, the turning point from focusing on the content of advertising to a preoccupation with the form itself occurred in the most private of places: in their university washrooms, staring at a car ad. The washroom ads first began appearing on North American campuses in 1997 and have been proliferating ever since. As we have already seen in Chapter 5, the administrators who allowed ads to creep onto their campuses told themselves that young people were already so bombarded with commercial messages that a few more wouldn’t kill them, and the revenues would help fund valuable programs. But it seems there is such a thing as an ad that breaks the camel’s back —and for many students, that was it.
The irony, of course, is that from the advertiser’s perspective, niche nirvana had been attained. Short of eyelid implants, ads in college washrooms represent as captive a youth market as there is on earth. But from the students’ perspective, there could have been no more literal metaphor for space closing in than an ad for Pizza Pizza or Chrysler Neon staring at them from over a urinal or from the door of a W.C. cubicle. Which is precisely why this misguided branding scheme created the opportunity for hundreds of North American students to take their first tentative steps toward direct anticorporate activism.
Looking back, school officials must see that there is something hilariously misguided about putting ads in private cubicles where students have been known to pull out their pens or eyeliners and scrawl desperate declarations of love, circulate unsubstantiated rumors, carry on the abortion debate and share deep philosophical insights. When the mini-billboards arrived, the bathroom became the first truly safe space in which to talk back to ads. In an instant, the direction of the scrutiny through the one-way glass of the focus group was reversed, and the target market took aim at the people behind the glass. The most creative response came from students at the University of Toronto. A handful of undergraduates landed part-time jobs with the washroom billboard company and kept conveniently losing the custom-made screwdrivers that opened the four hundred plastic frames. Pretty soon, a group calling themselves the Escher Appreciation Society were breaking into the “student-proof” frames and systematically replacing the bathroom ads with prints by Maurits Cornelis Escher. Rather than brushing up on the latest from Chrysler or Molson, students could learn to appreciate the Dutch graphic artist —chosen, the Escherites conceded, because his geometric work photocopies well.
The bathroom ads made it unmistakably clear to a generation of student activists that they don’t need cooler, more progressive or more diverse ads —first and foremost, they need ads to shut up once in a while. Debate on campuses began to shift away from an evaluation of the content of ads to the fact that it was becoming impossible to escape from advertising’s intrusive gaze.
Of course there are those among the culture jammers whose interest in advertising is less tapped into the new ethos of anti-branding rage and instead has much in common with th
e morality squads of the political correctness years. At times, Adbusters magazine feels like an only slightly hipper version of a Public Service Announcement about saying no to peer pres sure or remembering to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The magazine is capable of lacerating wit, but its attacks on nicotine, alcohol and fast-food joints can be repetitive and obvious. Jams that change Absolut Vodka to “Absolut Hangover” or Ultra Kool cigarettes to “Utter Fool” cigarettes are enough to turn off would-be supporters who see the magazine crossing a fine line between information-age civil disobedience and puritanical finger-waving. Mark Dery, author of the original culture-jammers’ manifesto and a former contributor to the magazine, says the anti-booze, -smoking and-fast-food emphasis reads as just plain patronizing —as if “the masses” cannot be trusted to “police their own desires.”18
Listening to the Marketer Within
In a New Yorker article entitled “The Big Sellout,” author John Seabrook discusses the phenomenon of “the marketer within.” He argues persuasively that an emerging generation of artists will not concern themselves with old ethical dilemmas like “selling out” since they are a walking sales pitch for themselves already, intuitively understanding how to produce prepackaged art, to be their own brand. “The artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration.”19
Seabrook is right in his observation that the rhythm of the pitch is hardwired into the synapses of many young artists, but he is mistaken in assuming that the built-in marketing barometer will only be used to seek fame and fortune in the culture industries. As Carly Stasko points out, many people who grew up sold are so attuned to the tempo of marketing that as soon as they read or hear a new slogan, they begin to flip it and play with it in their minds, as she herself does. For Stasko, it is the adbuster that is within, and every ad campaign is a riddle just waiting for the right jam. So the skill Seabrook identifies, which allows artists to write the press bumpf for their own gallery openings and musicians to churn out metaphor-filled bios for their liner notes, is the same quality that makes for a deadly clever culture jammer. The culture jammer is the activist artist as anti marketer, using a childhood filled with Trix commercials, and an adolescence spent spotting the product placement on Seinfeld, to mess with a system that once saw itself as a specialized science. Jamie Batsy, a Toronto-area “hacktivist,” puts it like this: “Advertisers and other opinion makers are now in a position where they are up against a generation of activists that were watching television before they could walk. This generation wants their brains back and mass media is their home turf.”20
Culture jammers are drawn to the world of marketing like moths to a flame, and the high-gloss sheen on their work is achieved precisely because they still feel an affection — however deeply ambivalent — for media spectacle and the mechanics of persuasion. “I think a lot of people who are really interested in subverting advertising or studying advertising probably, at one time, wanted to be ad people themselves,” says Carrie McLaren, editor of the New York zine Stay Free! 21 You can see it in her own ad busts, which are painstakingly seamless in their design and savage in their content. In one issue, a full-page anti-ad shows a beat-up kid face down on the concrete with no shoes on. In the corner of the frame is a hand making away with his Nike sneakers. “Just do it,” the slogan says.
Nowhere is the adbuster’s ear for the pitch used to fuller effect than in the promotion of adbusting itself, a fact that might explain why culture jamming’s truest believers often sound like an odd cross between used-car salesmen and tenured semiotics professors. Second only to Internet hucksters and rappers, adbusters are susceptible to a spiraling bravado and to a level of self-promotion that can be just plain silly. There is much fondness for claiming to be Marshall McLuhan’s son, daughter, grandchild or bastard progeny. There is a strong tendency to exaggerate the power of wheatpaste and a damn good joke. And to overstate their own power: one culture-jamming manifesto, for instance, explains that “the billboard artist’s goal is to throw a well aimed spanner into the media’s gears, bringing the image factory to a shuddering halt.”22
Adbusters has taken this hard-sell approach to such an extreme that it has raised hackles among rival culture jammers. Particularly galling to its critics is the magazine’s line of anticonsumer products that they say has made the magazine less a culture-jamming clearinghouse than a home-shopping network for adbusting accessories. Culture-jammer “tool boxes” are listed for sale: posters, videos, stickers and postcards; most ironically, it used to sell calendars and T-shirts to coincide with Buy Nothing Day, though better sense eventually prevailed. “What comes out is no real alternative to our culture of consumption,” Carrie McLaren writes. “Just a different brand.” Fellow Vancouver jammers Guerrilla Media (GM) take a more vicious shot at Adbusters in the GM inaugural newsletter. “We promise there are no GM calendars, key chains or coffee mugs in the offing. We are, however, still working on those T-shirts that some of you ordered —we’re just looking for that perfect sweatshop to produce them.”23
Marketing the Antimarketers
The attacks are much the same as those lobbed at every punk band that signs a record deal and every zine that goes glossy: Adbusters has simply become too popular to have much cachet for the radicals who once dusted it off in their local secondhand bookstore like a precious stone. But beyond the standard-issue purism, the question of how best to “market” an antimarketing movement is a uniquely thorny dilemma. There is a sense among some adbusters that culture jamming, like punk itself, must remain something of a porcupine; that to defy its own inevitable commodification, it must keep its protective quills sharp. After the great Alternative and Girl Power(tm) cash-ins, the very process of naming a trend, or coining a catchphrase, is regarded by some with deep suspicion. “Adbusters jumped on it and were ready to claim this movement before it ever really existed,” says McLaren, who complains bitterly in her own writing about the “USA Today/MTV-ization” of Adbusters. “It’s become an advertisement for anti-advertising.”24
There is another fear underlying this debate, one more confusing for its proponents than the prospect of culture jamming “selling out” to the dictates of marketing. What if, despite all the rhetorical flair its adherents can muster, culture jamming doesn’t actually matter? What if there is no jujitsu, only semiotic shadowboxing? Kalle Lasn insists that his magazine has the power to “jolt postmodern society out of its media trance” and that his uncommercials threaten to shake network television to its core. “The television mindscape has been homogenized over the last 30 to 40 years. It’s a space that is very safe for commercial messages. So, if you suddenly introduce a note of cognitive dissonance with a spot that says ‘Don’t buy a car,’ or in the middle of a fashion show somebody suddenly says ‘What about anorexia?’ there’s a powerful moment of truth.”25 But the real truth is that, as a culture, we seem to be capable of absorbing limitless amounts of cognitive dissonance on our TV sets. We culture jam manually every time we channel surf — catapulting from the desperate fundraising pleas of the Foster Parent Plan to infomercials for Buns of Steel; from Jerry Springer to Jerry Falwell; from New Country to Marilyn Manson. In these information-numb times, we are beyond being abruptly awakened by a startling image, a sharp juxtaposition or even a fabulously clever détournement.
Jaggi Singh is one activist who has become disillusioned with the jujitsu theory. “When you’re jamming, you’re sort of playing their game, and I think ultimately that playing field is stacked against us because they can saturate … we don’t have the resources to do all those billboards, we don’t have the resources to buy up all that time, and in a sense, it almost becomes pretty scientific —who can afford these feeds?”
Logo Overload
To add further evidence that culture jamming is more drop in the bucket than spanner in the works, marketers are increasingly deciding to
join in the fun. When Kalle Lasn says culture jamming has the feeling of “a bit of a fad,” he’s not exaggerating.26 It turns out that culture jamming —with its combination of hip-hop attitude, punk anti-authoritarianism and a well of visual gimmicks — has great sales potential.
Yahoo! already has an official culture-jamming site on the Internet, filed under “alternative.” At Soho Down & Under on West Broadway in New York, Camden Market in London or any other high street where alterno gear is for sale, you can load up on logo-jammed T-shirts, stickers and badges. Recurring détournements —to use a word that seems suddenly misplaced —include Kraft changed to “Krap,” Tide changed to “Jive,” Ford changed to “Fucked” and Goodyear changed to “Goodbeer.” It’s not exactly trenchant social commentary, particularly since the jammed logos appear to be interchangeable with the corporate kitsch of unaltered Dubble Bubble and Tide T-shirts. In the rave scene, logo play is all the rage —in clothing, temporary tattoos, body paint and even ecstasy pills. Ecstasy dealers have taken to branding their tablets with famous logos: there is Big Mac E, Purple Nike Swirl E, X-Files E, and a mixture of uppers and downers called a “Happy Meal.” Musician Jeff Renton explains the drug culture’s appropriation of corporate logos as a revolt against invasive marketing. “I think it’s a matter of: ‘You come into our lives with your million-dollar advertising campaigns putting logos in places that make us feel uncomfortable, so we’re going to take your logo back and use it in places that make you feel uncomfortable,’” he says.27