The idea of culture jamming, as old as activism itself, has been gaining momentum for a decade, and is now the favorite tactic of anti-corporate campaigners around the world. Its most common form is “ad busting,” the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards. In one well-known bust, New York artist Ron English skewers Joe Camel’s appeal to children. He paints the camel as a younger, cuddly “Cancer Kid,” playing with building blocks instead of sports cars and pool cues.
Ad busters argue that there’s nothing wrong with writing over a billboard they never asked to see and can’t afford to answer with an ad of their own. They’re bolstered in this conviction by the mounting aggressiveness of ads in the public domain–on sidewalks, covering buildings, in schools–and by the proliferation of public spaces like malls and superstores where commercial messages are the only ones permitted. Rage Against the Machine recently jammed the Gap in a video takeoff on the chain’s famous “everybody in vests” campaign. The video begins with figures hunched over sewing machines under the slogan “everybody in denial”–a reference to allegations that some of the Gap’s contractors use sweatshop labor.
The idea of the culture jam is to turn the corporation’s own message against it. Kalle Lasn, editor of Vancouver-based Adbusters magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a pet metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam. “In one simple, deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy.”
Increasingly, culture jammers are going beyond parody into real-world political struggles, as we saw on the streets of Seattle. They’ve tried to turn the Nike swoosh into a symbol for sweatshop labor, Mickey Mouse into a cartoon reflection of everything from sweatshops to animal cruelty to outlandish CEO salaries. At Harvard and Stanford, students demanded that the schools refuse deals with PepsiCo to protest the company’s business in the military dictatorship of Burma. Pepsi decided to pull out of Burma rather than pull its logo out of the campuses, and many other companies soon followed.
There is a clear difference between these campaigns and boycotts of the past, like the one against Nestle for its baby formula in the 1970s. In those cases, activists targeted a specific corporation for a particular transgression. Today’s campaigns commandeer corporate names as public-relations weapons. So the English activists who went after McDonald’s in the so-called McLibel trial were not just going after a fast-food chain for allegedly harming the environment. They were harnessing the brand name to provoke debate on the dominance of multinational corporations. In practice, jammed companies may not even be the worst offenders, but rather the ones who flash their logos in the brightest lights. It may seem unfair, but for such companies, the power of their own brand names is becoming an odd sort of liability.
