Culture Jamming - from the inside

- REMIX Magazine- Australia

World War III will be a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation. - Marshall McLuhan

Yail sits across from me at the table, smiling; his bright eyes are shining in the dark of this apartment. His hands are folded over a satchel, the thing that makes him smile. It's only another half hour before we head out, and Yail is getting a bit nervous. Hell, so am I at this point, but I'm not about to back down now, after all, we have a deadline.

A few weeks ago, I pitched the idea to my editor to do a story on culture jammers, and then, I never suspected how far my research would take me. Culture Jamming is, essentially, what it sounds like. It is throwing a wrench in the workings of popular culture, the corporate reality we are subjected to constantly through advertising and the media. Ads tell us to feel bad about ourselves so they can fill that void with consumer products. Jamming is Prozac™ for the soul. Culture jamming, hacktivism, media hijacking, whatever you call it, these are all tactics to bring the mass media back to the masses. Jammers often work within media, subverting the advertiser's message, or changing it just enough to illuminate the fallacy behind every ad. There is something wrong with the world, they say, and corporate America is at the heart of it. Why do we spend a day's wages on shoes, or a week's wages on a jacket? Why do we believe that we will not lead spontaneous, fulfilling lives unless we shop at the Gap, or eat at McDonald's, or drink Starbuck's? These are the questions jammers are asking, and answering. Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine (www.adbusters.org) and the person credited with creating the Culture Jam movement, believes that culture jamming is the most significant social movement of the next twenty years, and he's probably right.

Culture jamming has come a long way since Lasn gave it a name. These days, jammers aren't necessarily working towards the same goals. Melbourne documentary writer/ director Kim Beamish (Non 'D' Script) released a documentary this year, Communikation Guerrillas, on the Australian jamming scene. He breaks it down into two main schools of thought. There are those who see jamming as a tactic, a means to their own political ends. There is another school that sees jamming almost as an end unto itself. They are hijacking the agitprop infrastructure simply to wake people up to the fact that they are only being exposed to one side of the story. These are the "Another world is possible" soldiers…and this is the camp that we found ourselves in last night, soldiers in the meme war, fighting for mindshare of a generation.

Never confuse movement with action. - Ernest Hemingway

As for last night…Yail and I are sitting at this worn oak table, the two glasses of bourbon sweating as the last slivers of ice melt. He starts to roll one more cigarette, probably more a tactic to delay our departure than a genuine need for nicotine. He's smoked five in the last twenty minutes.
"Alright," I say, "I think its late enough now. Let's get this over with."
"Remember," Yail replies, "if the cops come, we go down the train tracks and damn the equipment. It's going to be dark, so I doubt they will follow us, and the gear won't do them any good…just cost us a ladder."
"We won't get caught," I say, deadpan.
"Yeah, I know, but just in case, man. Do you know what they do to you if they catch you? First they tie us to chairs and stick electric cords up our noses. There will be blood everywhere. After about three hours of that, they have you admitting to being a terrorist and selling crack to underage girls. They'll soak our feet in salt water and let goats lick them to the bone. Can you imagine experiencing something like that on acid?"
"Look, I'm sure the acid would have worn off by then. Anyway, you're not proposing we do this straight, are you? I mean, that would just go against the whole ethos of the thing. This is a war, my friend, and we need to be prepared for anything."
"Well, I'm taking the bourbon with us anyway. At least we can claim we're just drunk, instead of drug-crazed if they do get us. If you get drunk, beat your wife and rape your kids, they'll write it off as a domestic, but you drop LSD and walk down the sidewalk, they'll lock you up for conspiracy to overthrow the government, so we might as well have booze on our breath."

Standing up from the table, I hear Yail mutter something about the revolution not being televised, and I can feel the first far-off tingling of the acid in the tips of my toes, in my spine and sexual organs. I grab the satchel, look at Yail for a minute, thinking, can I trust this guy if things get weird? Then I start towards the door.

A few miles down the road, we find ourselves at one of those all-night diners you only see in the movies nowadays, a conglomeration of fifties coffee machine, forties grill, sixties coca-cola clock on the wall, and continental cabbies from places like Estonia, Latvia and all of the other places you'll never see on the specials board at Flight Centre. Yail is feverish as he orders his coffee, dropping change all over the joint, the cab drivers reaching down to fetch coins from the floor. His eyes have that special animal glow that comes with this drug, and his mind is wandering like the wind. He leans over, muttering, "These goddamn cab drivers…they know something, man. There's like, this whole underground railroad thing they have, a secret organization, like the cab mafia."
"What?" I look up from my mug, one of those heavy-duty restaurant ceramic jobs.
"…they've got this big database somewhere and…"
"You're wasted," I cut him off, then get up and head for the car before things get any weirder.

Yail is craning his neck around the corner, looking for cars coming down the street. It's is a busy city intersection, and there are still plenty of people about. I'm sitting on my stepladder nonchalantly, peeling the back off the double-sided tape on the three panels that make up our billboard improvement. We're waiting for one of those quiet moments when the traffic dies for about thirty seconds, and it doesn't look soon in coming. As we approached the sign, a sleek black cat ran across the sidewalk, making Yail look at me with the fear in his eyes, but we decided to go ahead anyway, it's bad luck to be superstitious.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

After about 15 minutes of sitting suspiciously on the corner, every pedestrian seems like a plainclothes police officer waiting for us to make our move. Paranoia is setting in, and I know I better do this before I freak out. I walk over to the billboard with my stepladder, casually step up and start lining up my graphic. "GR" is followed by the rest of the "R" and one and a half "Es", then half an "E" and the "D".

Stepping back, I'm smiling at how good it looks. The color isn't right, but this is our first billboard, I say, and anyway, it seems to work. My periphery is swimming with imaginary police as we take a few photos for the record, and the far-off sound of a siren wakes us up.

"Yail," I whisper, too loudly, "did you hear that? Is it coming this way?"
"Just because you're paranoid…" he starts before freezing in real terror. Across the street, a police cruiser is sitting at the red light looking at the billboard, and then at me in my sunglasses, and then at the billboard, and then at Yail with his hood up over his head and the stepladder. I decide to wait it out and be cool - surely they'll just keep driving, until I hear the inhalation of the big engine and the screech of tires as they turn the car around and flick the siren on for a second.

"Shit!" Yail yells as the ladder hits the pavement and he bounds towards a dark alley. At the end of the alley is a vacant lot, pitch black, with chest-high grass and razor sharp sheet metal poking out here and there. Yail already cut himself bad just checking out our escape options.

I can't see him, but I can hear Yail yelping as he makes his way across the wasteland, and I can also hear the doors slam shut on the cop car, the jangling of keys on belts and their flat-soled shoes sliding in the grit of the alleyway. The acid makes us run fast, but the darkness is impossible to see in, with swimming mandalas filling the black, and the sound of the cops seems to echo off every brick.

At the other side of the clearing, I can see the jagged edge of a chain link fence spring up again, but Yail's maniacal laugh is muffled in the wet grass. Eventually, bruised and bleeding from somewhere, I slump against Yail a block away waiting for sounds from behind…but only hearing the steady urban drone and our giddy laughter between breaths.

Our first attempt at jamming was a success. We made plenty of mistakes along the way, but we didn't get caught. One thing, though: jamming is addictive. As Lasn says in Culture Jam, it lifts the weight of cynicism and boredom from our shoulders instantly. The jammer walks through Western cities like a modern day prophet, converting signs and billboards to disciples, spreading the faith; decorating any flat surface with messages from a future where countries do not prey on each other to feed hungry consumers, where people realize that products do not make us happier, and imagination extends to thoughts other than: What will I buy today?