Week Poster Design: Chris Dixon 58 Consumption Void Photo: Jennifer Van Evra design: Ken Paul 62 Buy Nothing Poster Design: Chris Dixon sixty four American Soldier Illustration: Michael Maslin, courtesy of The Trends Journal 72 Corporate Tattoos Photo: Shannon Mendes 77 Obsession for Women Concept: Nicholas Racz image: Rick Etkin 98 Paris, May 1968 Photo: Bruno Barbey, Magnum Photos, New York 110 Obsession for Men Photo: Nancy Bleck design: Cayvan Econmi a hundred and twenty Joy Photo: Thomas Antel 122 Life, Spirit, Joy Photo: Lydia Eccles and Wendy Hamer 236 Graphic Credits 126 Autosaurus Tv Uncommercial: Director/animator: Bill Maylone 138 Weasel Tail Jan Prither 142 The Product Is You Tv Uncommercial: Director: Geoff Rogers 144 Organized Crime Collage: Lu Mannseichner 151 Why Are You Buying Your Food from a Tobacco Company? Thus we develop into eager people of Ken- tucky Fried Chicken, Doritos, Pizza Hut and Pepsi (all the identical com- pany) later on in everyday living.» Eventually, we obtain ourselves participating in the best act of distancing: feeding on a genetically altered tomato whose mother plant does not even exist. The typical pound of meals in America travels 1,300 miles before it reaches a kitchen desk. That’s inefficient and unsustainable. Demarket- ing foodstuff consists of closing the gap between the resource and the plate. It signifies turning absent from quick meals and superstores and embracing farmers’ markets and the household kitchen area absent from hothouse tomatoes and toward your individual local supplier, and finally, most likely, your individual backyard plot. These conclusions will modify your everyday living, if you have the hunger for the journey. The commitment will involve reducing, bit by bit, the food items megacorpo- rations out of your lifetime. This is not so diverse from weaning yourself off a destructive however magnetic relationship with an additional human becoming. Every time you adjust your head and do not slip into McDonald’s for a quickie, every single time you squirt some lemon into a glass of drinking water as an alternative of popping open up a Coke, each time you choose to set that jar of Maxwell House coffee back on the shelf, you strike the gong of liberty. When a groundswell of men and women prepare themselves to do all of these issues, to demarket on a each day, individual degree, we are making use of the bot- tom jaw of the Strategic Pincer. The top jaw of the pincer is a series of radio and Tv strategies that ridicule the rapidly/junk-meals marketplace. Working from the two ends — bottom up and best down — the pincer will remodel the way America, and the globe, eats. Junk meals is a person of the most regularly advertised items on Tv that helps make it a large focus on. Today, food jammers just take on the junk-food stuff companies the way antismoking activists locked horns with the tobacco business in the ’70s. They try out to «contaminate» junk foodstuff in the Demarketing Loops a hundred seventy five general public thoughts. Every time an antijunk-foodstuff ad («Fact: Over fifty p.c of the calories in this Big Mac come from body fat») airs, a replicating meme is planted. Every time an uncommercial seems on Tv attacking individuals businesses, their brands are a tiny little bit uncooled. Suppose 1 working day a auto whole of teenage youngsters drives by the Golden Arches and anyone would like to stop for a chunk. But one particular child, inspired by a Tv subvert he saw the night prior to, would make a crack about the McDon- ald’s employee standing above the 900-degree french-fry cooker, sporting the funny hat, generating minimum wage and saying, «Somebody remind me yet again why I’m not promoting medications?
I explained to him. «I’m not trying to sanitize Amer- ica. The world I’m proposing is just not some watered-down, politically cor- 168 Culture Jam rect put. It’s wilder and a lot more intriguing than your world in just about every way. It’s open Tv airwaves where by meme wars, not rankings wars, are fought each day. It’s radical democracy — persons telling governments and cor- porations what to do as an alternative of the other way around. It’s empowered citizens selecting for them selves what is ‘cool’ — not a culture of con- sumer drones suckling at the company teat. It’s living a daily life that’s con- nected to the earth, realizing something about it, caring for it and handing it down to our little ones in some variety of good shape. «What I’m expressing is that the American desire is just not working any- far more, so let’s encounter that truth and la-love-The-boss-nude commence developing a new 1.» I discovered my good friend roll his eyes a few of periods as I spoke. In several methods he is the standard North American — bold, competitive, profitable. If he could persuade me that he genuinely is satisfied and alive, I’d have to concede that his way, nevertheless it really is not my way, is correctly valid. But I just do not see it. The supersize American life style generates at the very least a very little guilt in every marginally considerate person who pursues it. There’s a good deal of filthy laundry in my friend’s existence that he can not disregard, no make any difference how much under the mattress he shoves it. He sees me as a disgruntled Lefty pissing on the American parade I see him as a guy in upper- revenue-bracket denial, receiving what he can although the likely is good even as his entire world is collapsing all-around him. Of just one factor I am absolutely sure: His hyperconsumptive life-style isn’t really awesome any longer. The aged American desire is dying. Change is coming. One of the fantastic techniques of demarketing the American desire is detourning it, in the community creativeness, with a desire which is even a lot more seductive. What’s improved than getting abundant? Being spontaneous, genuine, alive. The new American aspiration is just to method everyday living comprehensive-on, with- out undue dread or crippling self-censorship, pursuing joy and novelty as if tomorrow you’ll be in the ground. The Situationists named this impulse «the will to playful generation,» and they believed it must be prolonged «to all recognized forms of human relationships.» There’s no 1 far more alive than the man or woman who is brazenly, freely improvising — which is why the ideal stand-up comics love hecklers, and why the most effective hosts adore Demarketing Loops 169 wild-card dinner guests, and why the most electric powered political figures really like deviating from their well prepared scripts on reside Tv. There’s no other way to uncover what is at your main. This is what the new American aspiration is all about, and this is the form of person the lifestyle jammer aspires to be: a person who, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury, «jumps off cliffs and builds his wings on the way down.» Uncooling Consumption On the most essential level, demarketing is basically about not acquiring. An anticonsumerist way of living flat-out repudiates the complete concept of marketplace- ing. When you you should not obtain, you really don’t buy in to shopper society. When you will not invest in in, firms lose their keep on you. One ever more obvious group of folks have embraced this thought as a faith. They have looked difficult at the way we do items in this region and decided it’s no extended their way. Somewhere in between the time Faith Popcorn coined the time period «cashing out» and the time actor Sherry Stringfield walked absent from the Tv exhibit E.R. (to rediscover the correct this means of life, a.k.a. leisure time and her companion), the downshifting motion took off. Thousands of Americans now simply call their way of life «voluntary simplicity» (following Duane Elgin’s 1981 book of the similar identify). Some of these downshifters left large-driven work opportunities and took drastic shell out cuts in purchase to make additional time for spouse and children, buddies, commu- nity, meaningful perform. Others were being wage slaves who only decided to improve what Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, in Your Money or Your Life, get in touch with their «joy-to-stuff ratio.» Away with frantic dwelling, they have declared. Away with the acquisitive, secular lifestyle that brings about even the most wise souls to drift out of plumb. Too a great deal operate, way too a lot litter, as well much length among expectation and end result, involving investment decision and payoff, among head and heart will spell the end of us. The downshifters concluded that a greater objective than to amass wealth is to focus on culture as Alexander Solzhenitsyn described it: «the progress, enrichment and enhancement of non-product life.» They recognize intuitively what data bear out: The aggregate amount of Buy Nothing Day 30-Second Tv Spot Voice: «The common North American consumes 5 moments much more than a Mexican .
G7-Ecocide» radio and Tv places from Adbusters Media Foundation. Raise resources. Air the «G7-Ecocide» information on campus radio in the weeks guide- ing up to the summit. Try to get a few sixty-second Tv spots on your area night information on the day the G-7 leaders satisfy. Issue news releases asserting your campaign. If a Tv station refuses to offer you airtime, publicize that truth. Fax nearby newspapers. Phone the Tv newsrooms. On the day the leaders meet, get reporters and Tv crews out to go over your instruct-in. A specifically productive economics teach-in was held at the Univer- sity of Victoria, British Columbia, in May 1996. Stark white posters, just about every with a quote challenging the legitimacy of neoclassical economies’ underlying assumptions, lined the walls to greet students and professors alike 1 Monday early morning. MEME WAHFAHE TON IGKT1 -8Q0-663- T2S3 208 Culture Jam Some pupils were not amused. «It feels like someone’s telling you, ‘You’re silly, you might be stupid’ with each signal,» 1 complained. But the Alternative Economics Committee was geared up to bruise a number of egos. Deciding to deconstruct their professors’ lesson programs for just one day, this group of dedicated students confronted what they termed «lethal abstractions in economics» — the flaws of the neoclassical paradigm taught as gospel in just about all North American schools. Teach-ins perform. In the sixties, college student radicals produced a forum to deal with a burning concern that was being glossed more than or completely disregarded all through their lessons: Just what was the U.S. performing in Vietnam? The instruct- ins that adopted associated the brightest minds and the bravest professors and served to equally legitimize dissident assumed and inspire motion. At UVic, relatively than focusing on a one political difficulty, the stu- dents took on the entire paradigm, analyzing the true-life conse- quences of neoclassical economics. The instruct-in was a collection of hourlong panels that ran all day. Orga- nizers figured they’d have difficulty discovering school eager to challenge the section, but they didn’t. Disillusioned academics ended up burning to air their grievances. Almost all speakers had extra to say than their fifteen minutes allowed. The rancor spilled around into a concern period of time. The economics department despatched a lone defender, a professor named Peter Kennedy, who gamely tried to hold up the facet. At a person issue he refuted an opponent’s assertion by referring the viewers to a sure webpage on a certain syllabus, as if to chastise the speaker for errant examine practices. But Professor Kennedy was condescending and could not demonstrate his posture in basic language, which spoke volumes about the elementary troubles in the division. From speaker following speaker, memes flew. «There’s no social safety in a entire world that consumes the biosphere in which we dwell.» «Nuclear power is touted as a ‘cheap gasoline.’ But is the squander disposal of put in nuclear gasoline factored into the price tag?
Remind me to appear about to your position sometime and we are going to catch what’s on the tube: First we are going to view the puppet exhibit and then we are going to check out the fifty percent-hour docu- mentary on mulch.» «Congratulations,» I replied. «You’ve managed to entirely miss out on the stage. You do have your legal rights, but you are not able to diminish their rights in purchase to enforce yours.» I told him I thought my right to communicate out on Tv was pretty simple, presented that these are community airwaves that legally belong to everybody. «I feel that’s a fiction,» he explained. «The air might belong to you, but not the studios and broadcasting facilities of ABC.» I positioned a simply call to another attorney, this time a large-profile Los Angeles media legal professional and previous president of the Beverly Hills Bar Association, who turned out to be similarly circumspect. «Networks have the ideal to top quality command,» he reported. «They have a right to say, ‘We would not carry a information that would be offen- sive to the other sponsors, for the reason that we don’t want to get rid of those people sponsors.'» That’s the way it all boils down: The broadcaster’s suitable to run a professional organization stands in immediate opposition to my right to freedom of speech. I was searching for an advocate who believed that my trigger — the cause of the folks — experienced at least equal advantage. The Beverly Hills attorney gave me the quantity of a different attorney to check out, and he cordially hung up. The hunt for the First Amendment grail proceeds. Only the vigilant can keep their liberties, and only all those who are regularly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern on their own correctly by democratic methods. A soci- ety, most of whose customers invest a excellent offer of their time not on the place, not right here and now in the calculable upcoming, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and cleaning soap 198 Culture Jam opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it tricky to resist the encroachments of people who would manipulate and handle it. Aldous Huxley was on the mark in the foreword of his revised 1946 version of Brave New World, which perhaps extra than any other get the job done of twentieth-century fiction predicted the psychological weather of our wired age. One can attract an quick parallel amongst «soma» — the enjoyment drug issued to citizens of Brave New World — and the mass media as we know them today. Both preserve the masses tranquilized and pacified, and preserve the social purchase. Both chase out explanation in favor of entertain- ments and disjointed considered. Both really encourage uniformity of behavior. Both devalue the past in favor of sensory pleasures now. Unlike the individuals in Orwell’s 1984, who resent remaining controlled by Big Brother but truly feel powerless to resist, citizens of Huxley’s realm will- ingly take part in their manipulation. They happily consider soma. They’re in the loop, and, by God, they love it. The pursuit of happiness results in being its personal end — you can find unlimited usage, free of charge intercourse and fantastic mood administration. The men and women are enraptured. They think they are living in Utopia. Only you, the reader (and a pair of «imperfect» figures in the ebook who by some means finished up with real personalities) know it is Dystopia. It’s a hell that can only be identified by all those outdoors the sys- tem. Our have dystopia, much too, can only be detected from the outside — by «outsiders» who for some odd explanation did not enjoy way too substantially Tv when they ended up younger who browse a handful of very good publications, fulfilled a couple of fantastic individuals, expended some time dwelling in other cultures, and by some fortunate twist of fate have been not seduced by The Dream and recruited into the con- sumer cult of the insatiables. Although most of us are even now caught in the cult, our taste for soma is souring. Through the haze of created happiness, we are noticing that we need to stop the display, that our only escape is to halt the stream of soma, to split the conversation cartel’s monopoly on the produc- tion of that means. Media Carta 199 Media Carta is the excellent human-rights battle of our data age — a terrific particular, mental, social, cultural and authorized exam. The infrastructure for this fight is currently in spot. Culture jammers around the environment are planning for the showdown. In the early years of the new millennium, we will spearhead a media reform movement to enshrine the suitable to converse as a fundamental human right in the constitutions of all free of charge nations and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We will preserve the most precious of all our all-natural sources: the peace and clarity of our own minds. REDEFINING Progress Fifteen hundred eminent scientists, like the bulk of all residing Nobel Prizewinners, signed a Warning to Humanity in 1992, and fifty- 8 earth academies of science produced a comparable doc in 1994, warning that the human experiment on Planet Earth is veering out of command. Population advancement, overconsumption, inappropriate techno- reasonable purposes and relentless financial growth are destroying the daily life-help systems on which our future relies upon. Meanwhile, strangely, our politicians, economists and organization leaders are putting on banana grins. «We’re growing,» they beam. «We’re putting up extra factories, marketing more goods, building extra wealth than ever right before in the history of mankind.» Never-ending content growth is the cornerstone of our latest economic method. There’s no these detail as a zero-development design in its framework. In truth, practically nothing considerably but substance progress really mat- ters, economists have decreed. And still, regular progress inside of finite terrain is the ideology of the most cancers mobile. It’s madness. It’s a madness propagated 20-4 hours a working day by the company-managed mass media, which are structurally 202 Culture Jam incapable of offering us the root-result in analyses of our recent predica- ment. So we’re trapped attempting to reconcile strong blended messages. For most of us the financial system continues to be a mysterious abstract procedure. As with our microwave oven, we you should not know how it operates and we really don’t truly want to know. We just retain pushing buttons and hot dinners hold com- ing out. We think of markets acquiring their individual rules that we crack at our peril. And we imagine that economists are figured out experts who, with their arcane but irrefutable logic, are somehow managing the complete affair. The reality is that we have handed our ecological and financial perfectly-being above to an elite group of experienced policymakers who have, at very best, only a obscure thought of what they are accomplishing. Their «scientifi- cally» managed cycles of «expansion» and consumption are wiping out the organic world, although if you set it to them that way, they would deny it. Their strategy of «progress» is to offer off the planet’s irreplaceable normal capital and get in touch with it cash flow — nevertheless they would deny that also. Is there a way out of this social entice — this crisis of meaning? The economics career is not going to acknowledge its versions are flawed. First World customers keep on being blissfully unaware of the havoc wrought by their life. The business broadcast media would not promote airtime for citizen-generated wake-up phone calls. Governments refuse to accept the astronomical ecological financial debt we have currently accrued to upcoming gen- erations. Most everyone is in denial. Deep down, we all «know» the planet is dying, but no one would like to chat about it. Of system there are strategies to get the dialogue going — procedures for jamming the world wide economic system again on to a sustainable path. First, we eliminate all the economists (figuratively talking). We establish that inspite of the pretty much spiritual deference culture extends to them, they aren’t untouchable. We obstacle their authority, concern their creden- tials. We launch a international media campaign to discredit them. We exhibit how their financial types are basically flawed. We reveal their «science» as a dangerous pseudoscience. We ridicule them on Tv. We enlist our personal, similarly adorned ecological economists to discussion them Redefining Progress 203 point for level. We pop up in unpredicted destinations like on the neighborhood busi- ness information, on business breaks in the course of the midnight motion picture and ran- domly on nationwide primary time. At the same time, we lay a trap for the G-7 leaders. Our campaign paints them as Lear-like figures, deluded kings unaware of the injury their deepening madness is performing. We demand from customers to know why the difficulty of overconsumption in the First World is not even on their agenda. In the months top up to their yearly summit conference, we buy radio and Tv spots on stations about the earth that dare our leaders to solution the Big Question: «Is Economic ‘Progress’ Killing the Planet?