by Naomi Klein
In 1934, advertisers began to use self-parody to deal with the mounting criticism they faced, a tactic that some saw as proof of the industry’s state of disrepair. “It is contended by the broadcasters, and doubtless also by the movie producers, that this burlesque sales promotion takes the curse out of sales talk, and this is probably true to a degree,” writes Rorty of the self-mockery. “But the prevalence of the trend gives rise to certain ominous suspicions … When the burlesque comedian mounts the pulpit of the Church of Advertising, it may be legitimately suspected that the edifice is doomed; that it will shortly be torn down or converted to secular uses.”40
Of course the edifice survived, though not unscathed. New Deal politicians, under pressure from a wide range of populist movements, imposed lasting reforms on the industry. The adbusters and social documentary photographers were part of a massive grassroots public revolt against big business that included the farmers’ uprising against the proliferation of super market chains, the establishing of consumer purchasing cooperatives, the rapid expansion of a network of trade unions and a crackdown on garment industry sweatshops (which had seen the ranks of the two U.S. garment workers’ unions swell from 40,000 in 1931 to more than 300,000 in 1933). Most of all, the early ad critics were intimately linked to the burgeoning consumer movement that had been catalyzed by One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics (1933), by F.J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet, and Your Money’s Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer Dollar (1927), written by Stuart Chase and F.J. Schlink. These books presented exhaustive catalogs of the way regular folks were getting lied to, cheated, poisoned and ripped off by America’s captains of industry. The authors founded Consumer Research (later splintered off into the Consumers Union), which served both as an independent product-testing laboratory and a political group that lobbied the government for better grading and labeling of products. The CR believed objective testing and truthful labeling could make marketing so irrelevant it would become obsolete. According to Chase and Schlink’s logic, if consumers had access to careful scientific research that compared the relative merits of the products on the market, everyone would simply make measured, rational decisions about what to buy. The advertisers, of course, were beside themselves, and terrified of the following F.J. Schlink had built up on the college campuses and among the New York intelligentsia. As adman C.B. Larrabee noted in 1934, “Some forty or fifty thousand persons won’t so much as buy a box of dog biscuits unless F.J. gives his ‘O.K.’ … obviously they think most advertisers are dishonest, double-dealing shysters.”41
Schlink and Chase’s rationalist utopia of Spock-like consumerism never came to fruition, but their lobbying did force governments around the world to move to outlaw blatantly false claims in advertising, to establish quality standards for consumer goods, and to become actively involved in the grading and labeling of them. And the Consumers Union Reports is still the buyer’s bible in America, though it long ago severed its ties to other social movements.
It is worth noting that the modern-day ad world’s most extreme attempts to co-opt anticorporate rage have fed directly off images pioneered by the Depression-era documentary photographers. Diesel’s Brand O is almost a direct replica of Margaret Bourke-White’s “American Way” billboard series, both in style and composition. And when the Bank of Montreal ran an ad campaign in Canada in the late nineties, at the height of a popular backlash against soaring bank profits, it used images that recalled Walker Evans’s photographs of 1930s businessmen holding up those “Will Work for Food” signs. The bank’s campaign consisted of a series of grainy black-and-white photographs of ragged-looking people holding signs that asked, “Will I ever own my own home?” and “Are we going to be okay?” One sign simply read, “The little guy is on his own.” The television spots blasted Depression-era gospel and ragtime over eerie industrial images of abandoned freight trains and dusty towns.
In other words, when the time came to fight fire with fire, the advertisers raced back to an era when they were never more loathed and only a world war could save them. It seems that this kind of psychic shock —a clothing company using the very images that have scarred the clothing industry; a bank trading on anti-bank rage —is the only technique left that will get the attention of us ad-resistant roaches. And this may well be true, from a marketing point of view, but there is also a larger context that reaches beyond imagery: Diesel produces many of its garments in Indonesia and other parts of the Far East, profiting from the very disparities illustrated in its clever Brand O ads. In fact, part of the edginess of the campaign is the clear sense that the company is flirting with a Nike-style public-relations meltdown. So far, the Diesel brand does not have a wide enough market reach to feel the full force of having its images slingshot back at its body corporate, but the bigger the company gets —and it is getting bigger every year —the more vulnerable it becomes.
That was the lesson in the responses to the Bank of Montreal’s “Sign of the Times” campaign. The bank’s use of powerful images of economic collapse at exactly the same time that it announced record profits of $986 million (up in 1998 to $1.3 billion) inspired a spontaneous wave of adbusting. The simple imagery of the campaign —people holding up angry signs —was easy for the bank’s critics to replicate with parodies that skewered the bank’s exorbitant service fees, its inaccessible loans officers and the closing of branches in low-income neighborhoods (after all, the bank’s technique had been stolen from the activists in the first place). Everyone got in on the action: lone jammers, CBC television’s satirical show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Magazine, and independent video collectives.
Clearly, these ad campaigns are tapping into powerful emotions. But by playing on sentiments that are already directed against them —for example, public resentment at profiteering banks or widening economic disparities —the process of co-optation runs the very real risk of amplifying the backlash, not disarming it. Above all, imagery appropriation appears to radicalize culture jammers and other anticorporate activists — a “co-opt this!” stance develops that becomes even harder to diffuse. For instance, when Chrysler ran a campaign of pre-jammed Neon ads (the one that added a faux aerosol “p,” changing “Hi” to “Hip”), it inspired the Billboard Liberation Front to go on its biggest tear in years. The BLF defaced dozens of Bay Area Neon billboards by further altering “Hip” to “Hype,” and adding, for good measure, a skull and crossbones. “We can’t sit by while these companies co-opt our means of communication,” Jack Napier said. “Besides … they’re tacky.”
Perhaps the gravest miscalculation on the part of both markets and media
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
RECLAIM THE STREETS
I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military occupation. We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War II, but this time by an army of marketeers. We have to reclaim our country from those who occupy it on behalf of their global masters.
—Ursula Franklin, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, 1998
This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over.
—A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998,
the date of the first Global Street Party
It is one of the ironies of our age that now, when the street has become the hottest commodity in advertising culture, street culture itself is under siege. From New York to Vancouver to London, police crackdowns on graffiti, postering, panhandling, sidewalk art, squeegee kids, community gardening and food vendors are rapidly criminalizing everything that is truly street-level in the life of a city.
This tension between the commodification and criminalization of street culture has unfolded in a particularly dramatic manner in England. In the early to mid-nineties, as the ad world leaped to harness the sounds and imagery of the rave scene to sell cars, airlines, soft drinks an
d newspapers, the lawmakers in Britain made raves all but illegal, through the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. The act gave police far-reaching powers to seize sound equipment and deal harshly with ravers in any public confrontations.
To fight the Criminal Justice Act, the club scene (previously preoccupied with searching out the next all-night dance site) forged new alliances with more politicized subcultures that were also alarmed by these new police powers. Ravers got together with squatters facing eviction, with the so-called New Age travelers facing crackdowns on their nomadic lifestyle, and with radical “eco-warriors” fighting the paving-over of Britain’s woodland areas by building tree houses and digging tunnels in the bulldozers’ paths. A common theme began to emerge among these struggling countercultures: the right to uncolonized space —for homes, for trees, for gathering, for dancing. What sprang out of these cultural collisions among deejays, anti-corporate activists, political and New Age artists and radical ecologists may well be the most vibrant and fastest-growing political movement since Paris ’68: Reclaim the Streets (RTS).
Since 1995, RTS has been hijacking busy streets, major intersections and even stretches of highway for spontaneous gatherings. In an instant, a crowd of seemingly impromptu partyers transforms a traffic artery into a surrealist playpen. Here’s how it works. Like the location of the original raves, the RTS party’s venue is kept secret until the day of. Thousands gather at the designated meeting place, from which they depart en masse to a destination known only to a handful of organizers. Before the crowds arrive, a van rigged up with a powerful sound system is surreptitiously parked on the soon-to-be-reclaimed street. Next, some theatrical means of blocking traffic is devised —for example, two old cars deliberately crash into each other and a mock fight is staged between the drivers. Another technique is to plant twenty-foot scaffolding tripods in the middle of the roadway with a brave lone activist suspended high up top — the tripod poles prevent cars from passing but people can weave between them freely; and since to knock the tripod over would send the person on top crashing to the ground, the police have no recourse but to stand by and watch the events unfold. With traffic safely blocked, the roadway is declared a “street now open.” Signs go up that say “Breathe,” “Car Free,” and “Reclaim Space.” The RTS flag —a bolt of lightning on different colored backdrops —goes up and the sound system begins to blast everything from the latest electronic offerings to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”
The crowd followed us and the road turned from a traffic jam to a road rave with hundreds of people shouting and demanding clean air, public transport and bicycle lanes.
—RTS E-mail report, Tel Aviv, Israel, May 16, 1998
Then seemingly out of nowhere comes the traveling carnival of RTSers: bikers, stilt walkers, ravers, drummers. At previous parties, jungle gyms have been set up in the middle of intersections, as well as giant sandboxes, swing sets, wading pools, couches, throw rugs and volleyball nets. Hundreds of Frisbees sail through the air, free food is circulated and the dancing begins —on cars, at bus stops, on roofs and near signposts. Organizers describe their road-napings as anything from the realization of “a collective daydream” to “a large-scale coincidence.” Like adbusters, RTSers have transposed the language and tactics of radical ecology into the urban jungle, demanding uncommercialized space in the city as well as natural wilderness in the country or on the seas. In this spirit, the most theatrical RTS stunt occurred when 10,000 partyers took over London’s M41, a six-lane highway. Two people dressed in elaborate carnival costumes sat thirty feet above the roadway, perched on scaffolding contraptions that were covered by huge hoop skirts (see image on page 310). The police standing by had no idea that underneath the skirts were guerrilla gardeners with jackhammers, drilling holes in the highway and planting saplings in the asphalt. The RTSers — die-hard Situationist fans — had made their point: “Beneath the tarmac … a forest,” a reference to the Paris ’68 slogan, “Beneath the cobblestones … a beach.”
The events take culture jamming’s philosophy of reclaiming public space to another level. Rather than filling the space left by commerce with advertising parodies, the RTSers attempt to fill it with an alternative vision of what society might look like in the absence of commercial control.
The seeds of RTS’s urban environmentalism were planted in 1993 on Claremont Road, a quiet London street slated to disappear under a new expressway. “The M11 Link Road,” explains RTSer John Jordan, “will stretch from Wanstead to Hackney in East London. To build it, the Department of Transport had to knock down 350 houses, displace several thousand people, cut through one of London’s last ancient woodlands and devastate a community with a six-lane-wide stretch of tarmac at the cost of 240 million pounds, apparently to save six minutes on a car journey.”1 When the city ignored fierce local opposition to the road, a group of activist artists took it upon themselves to try to block the bulldozers by turning Claremont Road into a living sculptural fortress. They pulled sofas into the streets, hung TVs from tree branches, painted a giant chessboard in the middle of the road and put up spoof suburban development billboards in front of the houses slated for demolition: “Welcome to Claremont Road — Ideal Homes.” The activists moved into chestnut trees, occupied construction cranes, blasted music and blew kisses at the cops and demolition workers below. The now empty houses were transformed —connected to each other through underground tunnels and filled with art installations. Outside, old cars were painted with slogans and zebra stripes and turned into flower boxes. The cars were not only made beautiful, they also made effective barricades, as did a hundred-foot scaffolding tower built through the roof of one of the homes. The tactic, Jordan explains, was not the use of art to achieve political ends but the transformation of art into a pragmatic political tool “both beautiful and functional.”2
When Claremont Road was leveled in November 1994, it had become the most creative, celebratory, vibrantly living street in London. It was “a kind of temporary microcosm of a truly liberated, ecological culture,” according to Jordan.3 By the time all the activists had been cherry-picked out of their tree houses and fortresses, the point of the action —that high-speed roads suck the life out of a city —could have had no more graphic or eloquent expression.
Though another group had used the same name some years earlier, the current incarnation of Reclaim the Streets was formed in May 1995, with the express purpose of turning what happened on Claremont Road into an airborne virus that could spread at any time, to any place in the city —a roving “temporary autonomous zone,” to use a term coined by the American anarchist guru Hakim Bey. According to Jordan, the thinking was simple: “If we could no longer reclaim Claremont Road, we would reclaim the streets of London.”4
Five hundred people showed up to the RTS party on Camden Street in May 1995 to dance to a bicycle-powered sound system, drums and whistles. With the Criminal Justice Act in full effect, the gathering caught the attention of the newly politicized rave scene and a key alliance was formed. At RTS’s next event, three thousand people showed up to the party on Upper Street, Islington; this time they danced to electronic music blasting from two trucks equipped with club-quality sound systems.
Anarchists among the crowd took advantage of the opportunity to vent their fury on banks, jewelry shops and local branches of McDonald’s. Windows were smashed, paint bombs hurled and anti-globalisation slogans graffitied.
—RTS E-mail report, Geneva, Switzerland, May 16, 1998
The combination of rave and rage has proved contagious, spreading across Britain to Manchester, York, Oxford and Brighton, and in the largest single RTS event to date, drawing 20,000 people to Trafalgar Square in April 1997. By then, Reclaim the Street parties had gone international, popping up in cities as far away as Sydney, Helsinki and Tel Aviv. Each party is locally organized, but with the help of E-mail lists and linked Web sites, activists in different cities are able to read reports from events around the world, swap cop-dodging strategi
es, trade information on building effective roadblocks, and read each other’s posters, press releases and flyers. Since video and digital cameras appear to be the accessories of choice at the street parties, RTSers also draw inspiration from watching footage of faraway parties, which is circulated through activist video networks, such as the Oxford-based Undercurrents, and uploaded onto several RTS Web sites.
In many cities, the street parties have dovetailed with another explosive new international movement — the Critical Mass bicycle rides. The idea started in San Francisco in 1992 and began spreading to cities across North America, Europe and Australia at roughly the same time as RTS. Critical Mass bicycle riders also favor the rhetoric of large-scale coincidence: in dozens of cities, on the last Friday of every month, anywhere from seventeen to seven thousand cyclists gather at a designated intersection and go for a ride together. By force of their numbers, the bikers form a critical mass and the cars must yield to them. “We’re not blocking traffic,” the Critical Mass riders say, “we are the traffic.” Since there’s a fair amount of overlap between RTS partyers and Critical Mass riders, it has become a popular tactic for the sites of street parties to be cleared of traffic by “spontaneous” Critical Mass rides that sweep through the area just moments before the blockades are set up and the partyers arrive.
Perhaps in light of these connections, the mainstream media almost invariably describe RTS events as “anti-car protests.” Most RTSers, however, insist that this is a profound oversimplification of their goals.5 The car is a symbol, they say —the most tangible manifestation of the loss of communal space, walkable streets and sites of free expression. Rather than simply opposing the use of automobiles, as Jordan says, “RTS has always tried to take the single issue of transportation and the car into a wider critique of society … to dream of reclaiming space for collective use, as commons.”6 To underline these wider connections, RTS organized one London street party in solidarity with striking London Underground workers. Another was a joint event with those darlings of British rock stars, soccer players and anarchists —the sacked Liverpool dock workers. Other actions have taken on the ecological and human rights records of Shell, BP and Mobil.