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* * *
_Culture Jamming_: _Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the
Empire of Signs_
I. _The Empire of Signs_
"My fellow Americans," exhorted John F. Kennedy, "haven't you
ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?"
Of course, it wasn't actually Kennedy, but an actor in "Media
Burn," a spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective
Ant Farm. Speaking from a dais, "Kennedy" held forth on America's
addiction to the plug-in drug, declaring, "Mass media monopolies
control people by their control of information." On cue, an
assistant doused a wall of TV sets with kerosene and flicked a
match at the nearest console. An appreciative roar went up from
the crowd as the televisions exploded into snapping flames and
roiling smoke.
Minutes later, a customized 1959 Cadillac hurtled through the
fiery wall with a shuddering crunch and ground to a halt,
surrounded by the smashed, blackened carcasses of televisions.
Here and there, some sets still burned; one by one, their picture
tubes imploded, to the onlookers' delight. A postcard reproduction
of the event's pyrotechnic climax, printed on the occasion of the
its tenth anniversary, bears a droll poem:
Modern alert
plague is here
burn your TV
exterminate fear
Image breakers
smashing TV
American heroes
burn to be free
In "Media Burn," Ant Farm indulged publicly in the guilty
pleasure of kicking a hole in the cathode-ray tube. Now, almost
two decades later, TV's Cyclopean eye peers into every corner of
the cultural arena, and the desire to blind it is as strong as
ever. "Media Burn" materializes the wish-fulfillment dream of a
consumer democracy that yearns, in its hollow heart and empty head,
for a belief system loftier than the "family values" promised by a
Volvo ad campaign, discourse more elevated than that offered by the
shark tank feeding-frenzy of _The McLaughlin Hour_.
It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are intimately
and inextricably bound up in the TV experience. Ninety-eight
percent of all American households---more than have indoor
plumbing---have at least one television, which is on seven hours a
day, on the average. Dwindling funds for public schools and
libraries, counterpointed by the skyrocketing sales of VCRs and
electronic games, have given rise to a culture of "aliteracy,"
defined by Roger Cohen as "the rejection of books by children and
young adults who know how to read but choose not to." The drear
truth that two thirds of Americans get "most of their information"
from television is hardly a revelation.
Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the exchange
value of such information:
We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that
there has been an information 'explosion,' an information
'revolution.' While in a certain narrow sense this is
the case, in many important ways just the opposite is
true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when
vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about
who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An
Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.
The effects of television are most deleterious in the realms
of journalism and politics; in both spheres, TV has reduced
discourse to photo ops and sound bites, asserting the hegemony of
image over language, emotion over intellect. These developments
are bodied forth in Ronald Reagan, a TV conjuration who for eight
years held the news media, and thus the American public,
spellbound. As Mark Hertsgaard points out, the President's media-
savvy handlers were able to reduce the fourth estate, which likes
to think of itself as an unblinking watchdog, to a fawning lapdog:
Deaver, Gergen and their colleagues effectively rewrote
the rules of presidential image-making. On the basis of
a sophisticated analysis of the American news media---how
it worked, which buttons to push when, what techniques
had and had not worked for previous administrations---
they introduced a new model for packaging the nation's
top politician and using the press to sell him to the
American public. Their objective was not simply to tame
the press but to transform it into an unwitting
mouthpiece of the government.
During the Reagan years, America was transformed into a TV
democracy whose prime directive is social control through the
fabrication and manipulation of images. "We [the Reagan campaign
staff] tried to create the most entertaining, visually attractive
scene to fill that box, so that the cameras from the networks would
have to use it," explained former Reagan advisor Michael Deaver.
"It would be so good that they'd say, 'Boy, this is going to make
our show tonight.' [W]e became Hollywood producers."
The conversion of American society into a virtual reality was
lamentably evident in the Persian Gulf War, a made-for-TV
miniseries with piggybacked merchandising (T-shirts, baseball caps,
Saddam toilet paper, Original Desert Shield Condoms) and gushy,
_Entertainment Tonight_-style hype from a cheerleading media. When
filmmaker Jon Alpert, under contract to NBC, brought back stomach-
churning footage of Iraq under U.S. bombardment, the network---
which is owned by one of the world's largest arms manufacturers,
General Electric---fired Alpert and refused to air the film. Not
that Alpert's film would have roused the body politic: throughout
the war, the American people demanded the right not to know. A
poll cited in _The New York Times_ was particularly distressing:
"Given a choice between increasing military control over
information or leaving it to news organizations to make most
decisions about reporting on the war, 57 per cent of those
responding said they would favor greater military control."
During the war's first weeks, as home front news organizations
aided Pentagon spin control by maintaining a near-total blackout on
coverage of protest marches, Deaver was giddy with enthusiasm. "If
you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media
relations for an international event," he bubbled, "it couldn't be
done any better than this is being done." In fact, a P.R. firm,
Hill & Knowlton, was hired; it orchestrated the congressional
testimony of the overwrought young Kuwaiti woman whose horror
stories about babies ripped from incubators and left "on the cold
floor to die" by Iraqi soldiers was highly effective in mobilizing
public support for the war. Her testimony was never substantiated,
and her identity---she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the U.S.---was concealed, but why niggle over details?
"Formulated like a World War II movie, the Gulf War even ended like
a World War II movie," wrote Neal Gabler, "with the troops marching
triumphantly down Broadway or Main Street, bathed in the gratitude
of their fellow Americans while the final credits rolled."
After the yellow ribbons were taken down, however, a creeping
disaffection remained. A slowly-spreading rancor at the televisual
Weltanschauung, it is with us still, exacerbated by the prattle of
talk show hosts, anchorclones, and the Teen Talk Barbie advertised
on Saturday mornings whose "four fun phrases" include "I love
shopping" and "Meet me at the mall." Mark Crispin Miller neatly
sums TV's place in our society:
Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it. This
is the open secret of TV today. Its only champions are
its own executives, the advertisers who exploit it, and
a compromised network of academic boosters. Otherwise,
TV has no spontaneous defenders, because there is almost
nothing in it to defend.
The rage and frustration of the disempowered viewer exorcised
in "Media Burn" bubbles up, unexpectedly, in "57 Channels (And
Nothin' On)", Bruce Springsteen's Scorsese-esque tale of a man
unhinged by the welter of meaningless information that assails him
from every channel. Springsteen sings: "So I bought a .44 magnum
it was solid steel cast/ And in the blessed name of Elvis well I
just let it blast/ 'Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet/ And
they busted me for disturbin' the almighty peace."
Significantly, the video for "57 Channels" incorporates
footage of a white Cadillac on a collision course with a wall of
flaming TV sets in obvious homage to "Media Burn." The ritual
destruction of the TV set, endlessly iterated in American mass
culture, can be seen as a retaliatory gesture by an audience that
has begun to bridle, if only intuitively, at the suggestion that
"power" resides in the remote control unit, that "freedom of
choice" refers to the ever-greater options offered around the dial.
This techno-voodoo rite constitutes the symbolic obliteration
of a one-way information pipeline that only transmits, never
receives. It is an act of sympathetic magic performed in the name
of all who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes owned
by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit margin is the
bottom line. "To the eye of the consumer," notes Ben Bagdikian,
the global media oligopoly is not visible...Newsstands
still display rows of newspapers and magazines, in a
dazzling array of colors and subjects...Throughout the
world, broadcast and cable channels continue to multiply,
as do video cassettes and music recordings. But...if
this bright kaleidoscope suddenly disappeared and was
replaced by the corporate colophons of those who own this
output, the collage would go gray with the names of the
few multinationals that now command the field.
In his watershed work, _The Media Monopoly_, Bagdikian reports
that the number of transnational media giants has dropped to 23
and is rapidly shrinking. Following another vector, Herbert
Schiller considers the interlocked issues of privatized information
and limited access:
The commercialization of information, its private
acquisition and sale, has become a major industry. While
more material than ever before, in formats created for
special use, is available at a price, free public
information supported by general taxation is attacked by
the private sector as an unacceptable form of
subsidy...An individual's ability to know the actual
circumstances of national and international existence has
progressively diminished.
Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon level another, equally
disturbing charge:
In an era of network news cutbacks and staff layoffs,
many reporters are reluctant to pursue stories they know
will upset management. "People are more careful now,"
remarked a former NBC news producer, "because this whole
notion of freedom of the press becomes a contradiction
when the people who own the media are the same people who
need to be reported on."
Corporate ownership of the newsmedia, the subsumption of an
ever-larger number of publishing companies and television networks
into an ever-smaller number of multinationals, and the increased
privatization of truth by an information-rich, technocratic elite
are not newly-risen issues. More recent is the notion that the
public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms---wraithlike
images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the
observations of Neal Gabler and Marshall Blonsky:
Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the
theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the
genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction
between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could
argue that the theatricalization of American life is the
major cultural transformation of this century.
We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it
immediately on video...There is never any longer an event
or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The
direction of events and of people is to be reproduced
into image, to be doubled in the image of television.
[T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are
images. Only images.
The eutopic (literally, "no-place") territory demarcated by
Gabler and Blonsky, lush with fictions yet strangely barren, has
been mapped in detail by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his
landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," Baudrillard put
forth the notion that we inhabit a "hyperreality," a hall of media
mirrors in which reality has been lost in an infinity of
reflections. We "experience" events, first and foremost, as
electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many times removed,
he maintains; originals, invariably compared to their
digitally-enhanced representations, inevitably fall short. In the
"desert of the real," asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases
and are more alluring to the thirsty eye.
Moreover, he argues, signs that once pointed toward distant
realities now refer only to themselves. Disneyland's Main Street,
U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic, turn-of-the-century burg
that exists only in Norman Rockwell paintings and MGM backlots, is
a textbook example of self-referential simulation, a painstaking
replica of something that never was. "These would be the
successive phases of the image," writes Baudrillard, betraying an
almost necrophiliac relish as he contemplates the decomposition of
culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the reflection of a
basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the
absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality
whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum."
Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory
capitalism has been superseded by an information economy
characterized by the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on
computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process.
The engines of industrial production have slowed, yielding to a
phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible commodities---
Hollywood blockbusters, television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles,
buzzwords, images, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions
flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars,
fought with camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and
weaponry in a television that kills. Futurologists predict that
the flagship technology of the coming century will be "virtual
reality," a computer-based system that immerses users wearing
headsets wired for sight and sound in computer-animated worlds. In
virtual reality, the television swallows the viewer, headfirst.
II. _Culture Jamming_
Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with shadows? In
other words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an
empire of signs?
The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla
warfare" imagined by Umberto Eco. "[T]he receiver of the message
seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a
different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to
control the message and its multiple possibilities of
interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne medium can be employed to
communicate a series of opinions on another medium...The universe
of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of
communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension
to passive reception."
Eco assumes, a priori, the radical politics of visual
literacy, an idea eloquently argued by Stuart Ewen, a critic of
consumer culture. "We live at a time when the image has become the
predominant mode of public address, eclipsing all other forms in
the structuring of meaning," asserts Ewen. "Yet little in our
education prepares us to make sense of the rhetoric, historical
development or social implications of the images within our
lives." In a society of heat, light and electronic poltergeists-
--an eerie otherworld of "illimitable vastness, brilliant light,
and the gloss and smoothness of material things"---the desperate
project of reconstructing meaning, or at least reclaiming that
notion from marketing departments and P.R. firms, requires
visually-literate ghostbusters.
Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB slang
for the illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or
conversations between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and
other equally jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is
directed against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture
whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through the
manipulation of symbols.
The term "cultural jamming" was first used by the collage band
Negativland to describe billboard alteration and other forms of
media sabotage. On _Jamcon '84_, a mock-serious bandmember
observes, "As awareness of how the media environment we occupy
affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist...The
skillfully reworked billboard...directs the public viewer to a
consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for
the cultural jammer is the world at large."
Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture
jammers, like Eco's "communications guerrillas," introduce noise
into the signal as it passes from transmitter to receiver,
encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding
on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media
artifacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt
them, rendering their seductions impotent. Jammers offer
irrefutable evidence that the right has no copyright on war waged
with incantations and simulations. And, like Ewen's cultural
cryptographers, they refuse the role of passive shoppers, renewing
the notion of a public discourse.
Finally, and just as importantly, culture jammers are Groucho
Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in the joyful
demolition of oppressive ideologies. As the inveterate prankster
and former Dead Kennedy singer Jello Biafra once observed, "There's
a big difference between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and
'creative crime' as a form of expression...Creative crime
is...uplifting to the soul...What better way to survive our anthill
society than by abusing the very mass media that sedates the
public?...A prank a day keeps the dog leash away!"
Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes
Russian samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official
censorship); the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield;
Situationist detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in _Lipstick
Traces_, as "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts
and their diversion into contexts of one's own devise"); the
underground journalism of '60s radicals such as Paul Krassner,
Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman; Yippie street theater such as the
celebrated attempt to levitate the Pentagon; parody religions such
as the Dallas-based Church of the Subgenius; workplace sabotage of
the sort documented by _Processed World_, a magazine for
disaffected data entry drones; the ecopolitical monkeywrenching of
Earth First!; the random acts of Artaudian cruelty that radical
theorist Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism" ("weird dancing in all-
night computer banking lobbies...bizarre alien artifacts strewn in
State Parks"); the insurgent use of the "cut-up" collage technique
proposed by William Burroughs in "Electronic Revolution" ("The
control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of
association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with
total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning, by
societal "outsiders," of symbols associated with the dominant
culture, as in the appropriation of corporate attire and _Vogue_
model poses by poor, gay, and largely nowhite drag queens).
An elastic category, culture jamming accommodates multitude of
subcultural practices. Outlaw computer hacking with the intent of
exposing institutional or corporate wrongdoing is one example;
"slashing," or textual poaching, is another. (The term "slashing"
derives from the pornographic "K/S"---short for "Kirk/Spock"---
stories written by female _Star Trek_ fans and published in
underground fanzines. Spun from the perceived homoerotic subtext
in _Star Trek_ narratives, K/S, or "slash," tales are often
animated by feminist impulses. I have appropriated the term for
general use, applying it to any form of jamming in which tales told
for mass consumption are perversely reworked.) Transmission
jamming; pirate TV and radio broadcasting; and camcorder
countersurveillance (in which low cost consumer technologies are
used by DIY muckrakers to document police brutality or governmental
corruption) are potential modus operandi for the culture jammer.
So, too, is media activism such as the cheery immolation of a mound
of television sets in front of CBS's Manhattan offices---part of a
protest against media bias staged by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In
Reporting) during the Gulf War---and "media-wrenching" such as ACT
UP's disruption of _The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour_ in protest of
infrequent AIDS coverage. A somewhat more conventional strain of
culture jamming is mediawatch projects such as Paper Tiger
Television, an independent production collective that produces
segments critiquing the information industry; Deep Dish TV, a
grassroots satellite network that distributes free-thinking
programming to public access cable channels nationwide; and Not
Channel Zero, a collective of young African-American "camcorder
activists" whose motto is "The Revolution, Televised." And then
there is academy hacking---cultural studies, conducted outside
university walls, by insurgent intellectuals.
Thus, culture jamming assumes many guises; let us consider, in
greater detail, some of its more typical manifestations.
_Sniping and Subvertising_
"Subvertising," the production and dissemination of anti-ads
that deflect Madison Avenue's attempts to turn the consumer's
attention in a given direction, is an ubiquitous form of jamming.
Often, it takes the form of "sniping"---illegal, late-night sneak
attacks on public space by operatives armed with posters, brushes,
and buckets of wheatpaste.
_Adbusters_, a Vancouver, B.C.-based quarterly that critiques
consumer culture, enlivens its pages with acid satires. "Absolut
Nonsense," a cunningly-executed spoof featuring a suspiciously
familiar-looking bottle, proclaimed: "Any suggestion that our
advertising campaign has contributed to alcoholism, drunk driving
or wife and child beating is absolute nonsense. No one pays any
attention to advertising." Ewen, himself a covert jammer,
excoriates conspicuous consumption in his "Billboards of the
Future"---anonymously-mailed Xerox broadsides like his ad for
"Chutzpah: cologne for women & men, one splash and you'll be
demanding the equal distribution of wealth." Guerrilla Girls, a
cabal of feminist artists that bills itself as "the conscience of
the art world," is known for savagely funny, on-target posters, one
of which depicted a nude odalisque in a gorilla mask, asking, "Do
women have to get naked to get into the Met. Museum?" Los
Angeles's Robbie Conal covers urban walls with the information age
equivalent of Dorian Gray's portrait: grotesque renderings of
Oliver North, Ed Meese, and other scandal-ridden politicos. "I'm
interested in counter-advertising," he says, "using the streamlined
sign language of advertising in a kind of reverse penetration."
For gay activists, subvertising and sniping have proven
formidable weapons. A March, 1991 _Village Voice_ report from the
frontlines of the "outing" wars made mention of "Absolutely Queer"
posters, credited to a phantom organization called OUTPOST,
appearing on Manhattan buildings. One, sparked by the controversy
over the perceived homophobia in _Silence of the Lambs_, featured
a photo of Jodie Foster, with the caption: "Oscar Winner. Yale
Graduate. Ex-Disney Moppet. Dyke." Queer Nation launched a
"Truth in Advertising" postering campaign that sent up New York
Lotto ads calculated to part the poor and their money; in them, the
official tagline, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream" became
"All You Need is a Three-Dollar Bill and a Dream." The graphics
collective Gran Fury, formerly part of ACT UP, has taken its sharp-
tongued message even further: a superslick Benetton parody ran on
buses in San Francisco and New York in 1989. Its headline blared
"Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" over a row of
kissing couples, all of them racially-mixed and two of them gay.
"We are trying to fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights
for attention," says group member Loring Mcalpin. "[I]f anyone is
angry enough and has a Xerox machine and has five or six friends
who feel the same way, you'd be surprised how far you can go."
_Media Hoaxing_
Media hoaxing, the fine art of hoodwinking journalists into
covering exhaustively-researched, elaborately-staged deceptions,
is culture jamming in its purest form. Conceptual con artists like
Joey Skaggs dramatize the dangers inherent in a press that seems to
have forgotten the difference between the public good and the
bottom line, between the responsibility to enlighten and the desire
to entertain.
Skaggs has been flimflamming journalists since 1966, pointing
up the self-replicating, almost viral nature of news stories in a
wired world. The trick, he confides, "is to get someone from an
out-of-state newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen,
and then you Xerox that story and include it in a second mailing.
Journalists see that it has appeared in print and think, therefore,
that there's no need to do any further research. That's how a
snowflake becomes a snowball and finally an avalanche, which is the
scary part. There's a point at which it becomes very difficult to
believe anything the media tells you."
In 1976, Skaggs created the Cathouse For Dogs, a canine
bordello that offered a "savory selection" of doggie Delilahs,
ranging from pedigree (Fifi, the French poodle) to mutt (Lady the
Tramp). The ASPCA was outraged, the _Soho News_ was incensed, and
ABC devoted a segment to it which later received an Emmy
nomination for best news broadcast of the year. In time, Skaggs
reappeared as the leader of Walk Right!, a combat-booted Guardian
Angels-meet-Emily Post outfit determined to improve sidewalk
etiquette, and later as Joe Bones, head of a Fat Squad whose tough
guy enforcers promised, for a fee, to prevent overweight clients
from cheating on diets. As Dr. Joseph Gregor, Skaggs convinced UPI
and New York's WNBC-TV that hormones extracted from mutant
cockroaches could cure arthritis, acne, and nuclear radiation
sickness.
After reeling in the media outlets who have taken his bait,
Skaggs holds a conference at which he reveals his deception. "The
hoax," he insists, "is just the hook. The second phase, in which
I reveal the hoax, is the important part. As Joey Skaggs, I can't
call a press conference to talk about how the media has been turned
into a government propaganda machine, manipulating us into
believing we've got to go to war in the Middle East. But as a
jammer, I can go into these issues in the process of revealing a
hoax."
_Audio Agitprop_
Audio agitprop, much of which utilizes digital samplers to
deconstruct media culture and challenge copyright law, is a
somewhat more innocuous manifestation. Likely suspects include
Sucking Chest Wound, whose _God Family Country_ ponders mobthink
and media bias; The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who take aim
in "Television, the Drug of the Nation" at "happy talk" newscasts
that embrace the values of MTV and _Entertainment Tonight_;
Producers For Bob, whose pert, chittering dance tracks provide an
unlikely backdrop for monologues about "media ecology," a McLuhan-
inspired strategy for survival in a toxic media environment; and
Chris Burke, whose _Oil War_, with its cut-up press conferences,
presidential speeches, and nightly newsbites, is pirate C-Span for
Noam Chomsky readers. Sucking Chest Wound's Wayne Morris speaks
for all when he says, "I get really angry with the biased coverage
that's passed off as objective journalism. By taking scraps of the
news and blatantly manipulating them, we're having our revenge on
manipulative media."
_Billboard Banditry_
Lastly, there is billboard banditry, the phenomenon that
inspired Negativland's coinage. Australia's BUGA UP stages hit-
and-run "demotions," or anti-promotions, scrawling graffiti on
cigarette or liquor ads. The group's name is at once an acronym
for "Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions"
and a pun on "bugger up," Aussie slang for "screw up."
In like fashion, African-American activists have decided to
resist cigarette and liquor ads targeting communities of color by
any means necessary. Describing Reverend Calvin Butts and fellow
Harlem residents attacking a Hennesey billboard with paint and
rollers, _Z_ magazine's Michael Kamber reports, "In less than a
minute there's only a large white blotch where moments before the
woman had smiled coyly down at the street." Chicago's Reverend
Michael Pfleger is a comrade-in-arms; he and his Operation Clean
defaced---some prefer the term "refaced"---approximately 1,000
cigarette and alcohol billboards in 1990 alone. "It started with
the illegal drug problem," says Pfleger. "But you soon realize
that the number-one killer isn't crack or heroin, but tobacco. And
we realized that to stop tobacco and alcohol we [had] to go after
the advertising problem."
San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front, together with
Truth in Advertising, a band of "midnight billboard editors" based
in Santa Cruz, snap motorists out of their rush hour trances with
deconstructed, reconstructed billboards. In the wake of the
_Valdez_ disaster, the BLF reinvented a radio promo---"Hits Happen.
New X-100"---as "Shit Happens---New Exxon"; TIA turned "Tropical
Blend. The Savage Tan" into "Typical Blend. Sex in Ads."
Inspired by a newsflash that plans were underway to begin
producing neutron bombs, a Seattle-based trio known as SSS reworked
a Kent billboard proclaiming "Hollywood Bowled Over By Kent III
Taste!" to read "Hollywood Bowled Over By Neutron Bomb!," replacing
the cigarette pack with a portrait of then-President Ronald Reagan.
Artfux, and the newly-formed breakaway group Cicada Corps of
Artists, are New Jersey-based agitprop collectives who snipe and
stage neo-Situationist happenings. On one occasion, Artfux members
joined painter Ron English for a tutorial of sorts, in which
English instructed the group in the fine art of billboard banditry.
Painting and mounting posters conceptualized by English, Artfux
joined the New York artist on a one-day, all-out attack on
Manhattan. One undercover operation used math symbols to spell out
the corporate equation for animal murder and ecological disaster:
A hapless-looking cow plus a death's-head equalled a McDonald's
polystyrene clamshell. "Food, foam and Fun!," the tagline taunted.
In a similar vein, the group mocked "Smooth Joe," the Camel
cigarettes camel, turning his phallic nose into a flaccid penis and
his sagging lips into bobbing testicles. One altered billboard
adjured, "Drink Coca-Cola---It Makes You Fart," while another
showed a seamed, careworn Uncle Sam opposite the legend,
"Censorship is good because -- --- ----!"
"Corporations and the government have the money and the means
to sell anything they want, good or bad," noted Artfux member
Orlando Cuevas in a _Jersey Journal_ feature on the group.
"We...[are] ringing the alarm for everyone else."
III. _Guerrilla Semiotics_
Culture jammers often make use of what might be called
"guerrilla" semiotics---analytical techniques not unlike those
employed by scholars to decipher the signs and symbols that
constitute a culture's secret language, what literary theorist
Roland Barthes called "systems of signification." These systems,
notes Barthes in the introduction to _Elements of Semiology_,
comprise nonverbal as well as verbal modes of communication,
encompassing "images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the
complex associations of all these."
It is no small irony---or tragedy---that semiotics, which
seeks to make explicit the implicit meanings in the sign language
of society, has become pop culture shorthand for an academic parlor
trick useful in divining the hidden significance in _Casablanca_,
Disneyland, or our never-ending obsession with Marilyn Monroe. In
paranoid pop psych (Vance Packard's _The Hidden Persuaders_, Wilson
Bryan Key's _Subliminal Seduction_), semiotics offers titillating
decryptions of naughty advertising. "This preoccupation with
subliminal advertising," writes Ewen, "is part of the legendary
life of post-World War II American capitalism: the word 'SEX'
written on the surface of Ritz crackers, copulating bodies or death
images concealed in ice cubes, and so forth." Increasingly,
advertising assumes this popular mythology: a recent print ad
depicted a rocks glass filled with icecubes, the words "Absolut
vodka" faintly discernible on the their craggy, shadowed surfaces.
The tagline: "Absolut Subliminal."
All of which makes semiotics seem trivial, effete, although it
is an inherently political project; Barthes "set out..to examine
the normally hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through
which meanings particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in
power) are rendered universal and 'given' for the whole of
society." Marshall Blonsky has called semiotics "a defense
against information sickness, the 'too-muchness' of the world,"
fulfilling Marshall McLuhan's prophecy that "just as we now try to
control atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control media
fallout." As used by culture jammers, it is an essential tool
in the all-important undertaking of making sense of the world, its
networks of power, the encoded messages that flicker ceaselessly
along its communication channels.
This is not to say that all of the jammers mentioned in this
essay knowingly derive their ideas from semiotics or are even
familiar with it, only that their ad hoc approach to cultural
analysis has much in common with the semiotician's attempt to "read
between the lines" of culture considered as a text. Most jammers
have little interest in the deliria that result from long immersion
in the academic vacuum, breathing pure theory. They intuitively
refuse the rejection of engaged politics typical of postmodernists
like Baudrillard, a disempowering stance that too often results in
an overeagerness for ringside seats at the gotterdammerung. The
_L.A. Weekly_'s disquieting observation that Baudrillard "loves to
observe the liquidation of culture, to experience the delivery from
depth" calls to mind Walter Benjamin's pronouncement that mankind's
"self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience
its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first
order." Jammers, in contrast, are attempting to reclaim the
public space ceded to the chimeras of Hollywood and Madison Avenue,
to restore a sense of equilibrium to a society sickened by the
vertiginous whirl of TV culture.
IV. _Postscript From the Edge_
The territory mapped by this essay ends at the edge of the
electronic frontier, the "world space of multinational capital"
(Fredric Jameson) where vast sums are blipped from one computer to
another through phone lines twined around the globe. Many of us
already spend our workdays in an incunabular form of cyberpunk
writer William Gibson's "cyberspace," defined in his novel
_Neuromancer_ as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators...A graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human
system." The experience of computer scientist W. Daniel
Hillis, once novel, is becoming increasingly familiar:
When I first met my wife, she was immersed in trading
options. Her office was in the top of a skyscraper in
Boston, and yet, in a very real sense, when she was at
work she was in a world that could not be identified with
any single physical location. Sitting at a computer
screen, she lived in a world that consisted of offers and
trades, a world in which she knew friends and enemies,
safe and stormy weather. For a large portion of each
day, that world was more real to her than her physical
surroundings.
In the next century, growing numbers of Americans will work
and play in artificial environments that only exist, in the truest
sense, as bytes stored in computer memory. The explosion of
computer-based interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at
least in its familiar form) the decidedly non-interactive medium
that has dominated the latter half of this century: television.
Much of this media may one day be connected to a high-capacity,
high-speed fiber optic network of "information superhighways"
linking as many homes as are currently serviced by the telephone
network. This network, predicts computer journalist John Markoff,
"could do for the flow of information---words, music, movies,
medical images, manufacturing blueprints and much more---what the
transcontinental railroad did for the flow of goods a century ago
and the interstate highway system did in this century."
The culture jammer's question, as always, is: Who will have
access to this cornucopia of information, and on what terms? Will
fiber-optic superhighways make stored knowledge universally
available, in the tradition of the public library, or will they
merely facilitate psychological carpet bombing designed to soften
up consumer defenses? And what of the network news? Will it be
superseded by local broadcasts, with their heartwarming (always
"heartwarming") tales of rescued puppies and shocking (always
"shocking") stories of senseless mayhem, mortared together with
airhead banter? Or will the Big Three give way to innumerable news
channels, each a conduit for information about global, national and
local events germane to a specific demographic? Will cyberpunk
telejournalists equipped with Hi-8 video cameras, digital scanners,
and PC-based editing facilities hack their way into legitimate
broadcasts? Or will they, in a medium of almost infinite bandwidth
and channels beyond count, simply be given their own airtime? In
short, will the electronic frontier be wormholed with "temporary
autonomous zones"---Hakim Bey's term for pirate utopias,
centrifuges in which social gravity is artificially suspended---or
will it be subdivided and overdeveloped by what cultural critic
Andrew Ross calls "the military-industrial-media complex?"
Gibson, who believes that we are "moving toward a world where
all of the consumers under a certain age will...identify
more...with the products they consume than...with any sort of
antiquated notion of nationality," is not sanguine. In the
video documentary _Cyberpunk_, he conjures a minatory vision of
what will happen when virtual reality is married to a device that
stimulates the brain directly. "It's going to be very commercial,"
he says. "We could wind up with something that felt like having a
very, very expensive American television commercial injected
directly into your cortex."
"For Sale" signs already litter the unreal estate of
cyberspace. A _New York Times_ article titled "A Rush to Stake
Claims on the Multimedia Frontier" prophesies "software and
hardware that will connect consumers seamlessly to
services...[allowing them] to shop from home," while a _Newsweek_
cover story on interactive media promises "new technology that will
change the way you shop, play and learn" (the order, here, speaks
volumes about American priorities). Video retailers are betting
that the intersection of interactive media and home shopping will
result in zillions of dollars' worth of impulse buys: zirconium
rings, nonstick frying pans, costumed dolls, spray-on toupees.
What a _New York Times_ author cutely calls Communicopia ("the
convergence of virtually all communications technologies") may end
up looking like the Home Shopping Network on steroids.
But hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers are
heartened by the electronic frontier's promise of a new media
paradigm---interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized
rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than
elitist. To date, this paradigm has assumed two forms: the virtual
community and the desktop-published or on-line 'zine. ("'Zine,"
the preferred term among underground publishers, has subtly
political connotations: grassroots organization, a shoestring
budget, an anti-aesthetic of exuberant sloppiness, a lively give-
and-take between transmitters and receivers, and, more often than
not, a mocking, oppositional stance vis a vis mainstream media.)
Virtual communities are comprised of computer users connected
by modem to the bulletin board systems (BBS's) springing up all
over the Internet, the worldwide meta-network that connects
international computer networks. Funded not by advertisers but by
paid subscribers, the BBS is a first, faltering step toward the
jammer's dream of a truly democratic mass medium. Although virtual
communities fall short of utopia---women and people of color are
grossly underrepresented, and those who cannot afford the price of
admission or who are alienated from technology because of their
cultural status are denied access---they nonetheless represent a
profound improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic medium of
television.
On a BBS, any subscriber may initiate a discussion topic, no
matter how arcane, in which other subscribers may participate. If
the bulletin board in question is plugged into the Internet, their
comments will be read and responded to by computer users scattered
across the Internet. On-line forums retire, at long last, the
Sunday morning punditocracy, the expert elite, the celebrity
anchorclones of network news, even the electronic town hall, with
its carefully-screened audience and over-rehearsed politicians. As
one resident of a San Francisco-based bulletin board called the
WELL noted,
This medium gives us the possibility (illusory
as it may be) that we can build a world
unmediated by authorities and experts. The
roles of reader, writer, and critic are so
quickly interchangeable that they become
increasingly irrelevant in a community of
co-creation.
In like fashion, ever-cheaper, increasingly sophisticated
desktop publishing packages (such as the software and hardware used
to produce this pamphlet) ensure that, in a society where freedom
of the press---as A.J. Leibling so presciently noted---is
guaranteed only to those who own one, multinational monoliths are
not the only publishers. As Gareth Branwyn, 'zine publisher and
longtime resident of virtual communities, points out,
The current saturation of relatively inexpensive
multimedia communication tools holds tremendous potential
for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have lived with
for so long...A personal computer can be configured to
act as a publishing house, a broadcast-quality TV studio,
a professional recording studio, or the node in an
international computer bulletin board system.
Increasingly, 'zines are being published on-line, to be
bounced around the world via the Internet. "I can see a future in
which any person can have a node on the net," says Mitch Kapor,
president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned
with free speech, privacy, and other constitutional issues in
cyberspace. "Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the
media we now have."
The devil's advocate might well argue that _Festering Brain
Sore_, a fanzine for mass murderer aficionados, or the WELL topic
devoted to "armpit sex" are hardly going to crash the corporate
media system. Hakim Bey writes, "The story of computer networks,
BBS's and various other experiments in electro-democracy has so far
been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and
libertarians have deep faith in the PC as a weapon of liberation
and self-liberation---but no real gains to show, no palpable
liberty."
Then again, involvement in virtual communities and the 'zine
scene is rapidly expanding beyond mere hobbyism: as this is
written, approximately 10 million people frequent BBS's, and an
estimated 10,000 'zines are being published (70 alone are given
over to left politics of a more or less radical nature). These
burgeoning subcultures are driven not by the desire for commodities
but by the dream of community---precisely the sort of community now
sought in the nationally-shared experience of watching game shows,
sitcoms, sportscasts, talk shows, and, less and less, the evening
news. It is this yearning for meaning and cohesion that lies at
the heart of the jammer's attempts to reassemble the fragments of
our world into something more profound than the luxury cars, sexy
technology, and overdesigned bodies that flit across our screens.
Hackers who expose governmental wrongdoing, textual slashers,
wheatpaste snipers, billboard bandits, media hoaxers, subvertisers,
and unannounced political protestors who disrupt live newscasts
remind us that numberless stories go untold in the daily papers and
the evening news, that what is not reported speaks louder than what
is. The jammer insists on choice: not the dizzying proliferation
of consumer options, in which a polyphony of brand names conceals
the essential monophony of the advertiser's song, but a true
plurality, in which the univocal world view promulgated by
corporate media yields to a multivocal, polyvalent one.
The electronic frontier is an ever-expanding corner of Eco's
"universe of Technological Communication...patrolled by groups of
communications guerrillas" bent on restoring "a critical dimension
to passive reception." These guerrilla semioticians are in pursuit
of new myths stitched from the material of their own lives, a
fabric of experiences and aspirations where neither the depressive
stories of an apolitical intelligentsia nor the repressive fictions
of corporate media's Magic Kingdom obtain. "The images that
bombard and oppose us must be reorganized," insist Stuart and
Elizabeth Ewen. "If our critique of commodity culture points to
better alternatives, let us explore---in our own billboards of the
future---what they might be." Even now, hackers, slashers, and
snipers---culture jammers all---are rising to that challenge.
* * *
Mark Dery is a cultural critic whose writings have appeared in
_Rolling Stone_, _Elle_, _Interview_, _The New York Times_,
_Wired_, and _Mondo 2000_. His column "Guerrilla Semiotics"
appears in _Adbusters_ and he edited _Flame Wars: The Discourse of
Cyberculture_ (Duke University Press). _Cyberculture_, his survey
of cybernetic subcultures, will be published by Hyperion in Spring
of 1995.
* * *
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Bill Mullen, a professor at Youngstown
University and friend of many years whose close reading and tough-
minded critique of this essay improved it immeasurably, and to
Margot Mifflin, whose slashing red pen saved me, at the last
minute, from my worst excesses.
* * *
Points of Departure
"Billboard Liberation Front Manual," _Processed World #25,
Summer/Fall 1990, pps. 22-6. This and other back issues may be
ordered from 41 Sutter Street, #1829, San Francisco, CA 94104.
The BLF has also published _The Art and Science of Billboard
Improvement (San Francisco: Los Cabrones Press, $1.50). No more
information is available as this is written; writing to _Processed
World, which acts as an intermediary for the BLF, might prove
fruitful.
William Board, "Alter a Billboard," _CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer
1983, pps. 114-116. Do's and don't's for would-be "midnight
billboard editors," written by a pseudonymous member of Truth in
Advertising. $7, Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito,
CA 94965.
Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in _Black Hole, ed. by Carolyn
Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for Publications Design, Yale Gordon
College of Liberal Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992). This
essay, as well as the companion pieces in this underground omnibus,
explore the interstice between cyberpunk and culture jamming.
Contact Gareth Branywn at 4905 Old Dominion Drive, Arlington,
Virginia, 22207.
Robbie Conal, _Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla
Artist (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). At last: the ideal gift
for insurrectionists---a coffee table art book about a wheatpaste
warrior.
_Ecodefense: _A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Dave Foreman and
Bill Haywood, eds. (Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987). Chapter 8,
"Propaganda," includes sections on "Billboard Revision" and
"Correcting Forest Service Signs." The jury is still out on Earth
First!, which often veers disconcertingly close to neo-Luddite
knee-jerking (hence the name of the publishing company). That
said, the authors' folksy pragmatism, anarcho-libertarian humor,
and iron-spined resolve in the face of bulldozers and chainsaws is
truly inspiring.
Abbie Hoffman, _The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls
Eight Windows, 1989). Chapter 43, "Guerrilla Broadcasting,"
includes nuts-and-bolts "how to" sections on pirate radio and
outlaw TV.
Loompanics Unlimited, a distributor of fringe publications, is an
invaluable source for titles on hacking; psychological warfare;
Zeke Teflon's _Complete Manual of Pirate Radio; _Muzzled Media: How
to Get the News You've Been Missing!, by Gerry L. Dexter; and more.
Loompanics' 1988 catalogue includes Erwin R. Strauss's "Pirate
Broadcasting," a historical and philosophical inquiry into the
titular phenomenon. Write P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368
for a catalogue.
_Roar! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism, The
Paper Tiger Television Collective, eds. (New York: The Paper Tiger
Television Collective, 1991). This thoroughgoing, irreplaceable
guide to culture jamming proves, to mutilate Mao, that "power
springs from the barrel of a camcorder." An essay by Schiller,
together with a lengthy "how to" section, make this a must. Write
to 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012.
* * *
Endnotes (available only in hardcopy version).
