Here I’ll be reviewing the last division of No Logo, which is her thoughts on strategy, starting with “culture jamming.”
The term “culture jamming” was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland. “The skillfully reworked billboard…directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy,” a band member states on the album Jamcon ’84…A good jam, in other words, is an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms. So, according to these principles, with a slight turn of the imagery knob, the now-retired Joe Camel turns into Joe Chemo, hooked up to an IV machine. That’s what’s in his future, isn’t it?
There’s soooo much pretentious justification for defacing ads. It’s cool and everything, but I can just look at memes on /r/latestagecapitalism and it’s probably not going to change the world.
“I think everyone should have their own billboard, but they don’t,” says Jack Napier (a pseudonym) of the Billboard Liberation Front.
Well, they do now, and it didn’t actually defeat the media.
Besides, everyone just uses ad blockers now. The faith in technology was still corporate hype, not recognized as such.
The rebirth of culture jamming has much to do with newly accessible technologies that have made both the creation and circulation of ad parodies immeasurably easier. The internet may be bogged down with brave new forms of branding, as we have seen, but it is also crawling with sites that offer links to culture jammers in cities across North America and Europe, ad parodies for instant downloading and digital versions of original ads, which can be imported directly onto personal desktops or jammed on site. For Rodriguez de Gerada, the true revolution has been in the impact desktop publishing has had on the techniques available to ad hackers. Over the course of the last decade, he says, culture jamming has shifted “from low-tech to medium-tech to high-tech,” with scanners and software programs like Photoshop now enabling activists to match colors, fonts, and materials precisely. “I know so many different techniques that make it look like the whole ad was reprinted with its new message, as opposed to somebody coming at it with a spray-paint can.”
Much wow.
As Susan Douglas notes in Where the Girls Are, “Of all the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, none was more explicitly anti-consumerist than the women’s movement. Feminists had attacked the ad campaigns for products like Pristeen and Silva Thins, and by rejecting makeup, fashion, and the need for spotless floors, repudiated the very need to buy certain products at all.” Furthermore, when Ms. magazine was relaunched in 1990, the editors took advertiser interference so seriously that they made the unprecedented move of banishing lucrative advertisements from their pages entirely. And the “No Comment” section–a back-page gallery of sexist ads reprinted from other publications–remains one of the highest-profile forums for adbusting.
Many female culture jammers say they first became interested in the machinations of marketing via a “Feminism 101” critique of the beauty industry.
Crucially, Ellen Willis was pro-consumerism.
There’s a section on Carly Stasko, who you can see in this YouTube video:
Where are they now? Carly Stasko is doing TikTok dances with her kids, of course.
It was already obvious this wasn’t working in the 1990s:
But after a while, what began as a way to talk back to ads starts to feel more like evidence of our total colonization by them, and especially because the ad industry is proving that it is capable of cutting off the culture jammers at the pass. Examples of pre-jammed ads include a 1997 Nike campaign that used the slogan “I am not/A target market/I am an athlete” and Sprite’s “Image is Nothing” campaign, featuring a young black man saying that all his life he has been bombarded with media lies telling him that soft drinks will make him a better athlete or more attractive, until he realized that “image is nothing.”
…Perhaps the point of no return came in 1997 when Mark Hosler of Negativland received a call from the ultra-hip ad agency Wieden & Kenedy asking if the band that coined the term “culture jamming” would do the soundtrack for a new Miller Genuine Draft commercial…”They utterly failed to grasp that our entire work is essentially in opposition to everything that they are connected to, and it made me really depressed because I had thought that our aesthetic couldn’t be absorbed into marketing,” Hosler says. Another rude awakening came when Hosler first saw Sprite’s “Obey Your Thirst” campaign. “That commercial was a hair’s breadth away from a song on our record. It was surreal. It’s not just the fringe that’s getting absorbed now–that’s always happened. What’s getting absorbed now is the idea that there’s no opposition left, that any resistance is futile.”
Indeed, now we can watch Mr. Robot on the USA Channel.
Nowadays I’m deeply skeptical of art people as revolutionares. I mean…an avant-garde band is trying to be cool. Hosler was missing the insight’s from Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool, about how marketing has been like that from day 1.
This history is interesting, but she doesn’t draw the conclusion that it didn’t work then, so why would it be different now?
There was a short-lived magazine published in New York called The Ballyhoo, a sort of Depression-era Adbusters. In the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash, The Ballyhoo arrived as a cynical new voice, viciously mocking the “creative psychiatry” of cigarette and mouthwash ads, as well as the outright quackery used to sell all kinds of potions and lotions. The Ballyhoo was an instant success, reaching a circulation of more than 1.5 million in 1931. James Rorty, a 1920s Mad Ave adman turned revolutionary socialist, explained the new magazine’s appeal: “Whereas the stock in trade of the ordinary mass or class consumer magazine is reader-confidence in advertising, the stock in trade of Ballyhoo was reader-disgust with advertising, and with high-pressure salesmanship in general…Ballyhoo, in turn, parasites on the grotesque, bloated body of advertising.”
Propaganda is necessary but not sufficient.
After culture jamming, the whole next chapter is about the Reclaim the Streets movement, which she says “may be the most vibrant and fastest-growing political movement since Paris ’68.” I mean…at the time I thought raves were gonna enlighten everyone through psychedelics and MDMA. PLUR! Burning Man is now…tech bros using psychedelics to creep on women at their exclusive camps or whatever. At age 20, I was like, “Wow, buying and selling aren’t allowed!” Temporary Autonomous Zones!
They did a “Global Street Party” back then and…I guess police in different places reacted differently, but nobody even remembers this shit anymore. I guess CHOP was cool, but I almost forgot that even happened too.
It’s funny how nowadays the most progressive thing happening is…support for socialism and people unionizing at Amazon and Starbucks.
In short, the triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track. This powerful form of activism reaches well beyond traditional trade unions. Its members are young and old; they come from elementary schools and college campuses suffering from branding fatigue and from church groups with large investment portfolios worried that corporations are behaving “sinfully.”
LOL churches as a brake on conservative policy.
1996 was the “year of the sweatshop.” I remember that. The clothes are still made in sweatshops, except I guess some of them are in America now. There was American Apparel in the meantime.
This next passage was written in bad faith. The idea is that brands are so intertwined with identity that people feel complicit when they hear about brand wrongdoing. So far so good. But Klein thinks that’ll reliably translate into some kind of Consumer Power. Really, what happens when people’s identities are threatened is that they double down and try to destroy the messenger. Since people know they can’t control Nike, and if they’re wearing Nikes, they’ll defend Nike.
Branding…has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and–through the quest to turn brands into media providers, arts producers, town squares and social philosophers–transformed it into something much more invasive and profound. For the past decade, multinationals like Nike, Microsoft, and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sports, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become: if brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and our identities, when they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as merely the misdemeanors of another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit their branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. But this connection is a volatile one: it is no the old-style loyalty between lifelong employee and corporate boss; rather, this is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime.
This volatility is the unintended consequence of brand managers striving for unprecedented intimacy with the consumer while forging a more casual role with the workforce. In reaching brand-not-products nirvana, these companies have lost two things that may prove more precious in the long run: consumer detachment from their global activities and citizen investment in their economic success.
She contradicts herself on this point 35 pages later, talking about kids’ attachment to Air Jordans:
It’s easy to blame the parents for giving in, but that “deep inner need” for designer gear has grown so intense that it has confounded everyone from community leaders to the police. Everyone pretty much agrees that brands like Nike are playing a powerful surrogate role in the ghetto, subbing for everything from self-esteem to African-American cultural history to political power. What they are far less sure about is how to fill that need with empowerment and a sense of self-worth that does not necessarily come with a logo attached. Even broaching the subject of brand fetishism to these kids is risky. With so much emotion invested in celebrity consumer goods, many kids take criticism of Nike or Tommy as a personal attack, as grave a transgression as insulting someone’s mother to his face.
She makes a big deal of the anti-Nike campaign:
No story illustrates the growing distrust of the culture of corporate branding more than the international anti-Nike movement–the most publicized and tenacious of the brand-based campaigns.
In the meantime, the story of how Nike infiltrated skateboarding is actually a case study. Kaepernick is in the news like, my protests made Nike bank. So much for the “durability” of the Nike backlash. They had a few bad quarters in the 1990s or something.
People were mad at Shell oil back then. Not for global warming making the planet uninhabitable. There was a big Greenpeace victory where they were gonna sink an old oil rig and instead they had to tug it into shore and take it apart.
The concept of protecting the unknowable–for no empirical reason in the short term except that it comforts us that it is there–was indeed amorphous, but it was also powerful. As Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore wrote, Brent Spar had at least as much to do with mysticism as with science: “In the depths strange species lurk, and though we may never ever see them, we feel in our hearts that they should be left alone. Why must they share the great dark deep with bits and bobs from a dismembered oil platform?”
Well, now we know they’re already sharing it with plastic. Suzanne Moore has been excommunicated as a TERF.
She also had a lot to say about the McLibel trial. Now we know that the pamphlet was written by an undercover cop who was sleeping with activists under false pretenses and even fathered a child. McDonald’s is still around.
There’s a story where she gives a speech at a high school. The kids start cheering at the first mention of Nike, when she’s being introduced.
The first question (as at all Sweatshop 101 events) was “What brands are sweatshop-free?”–Adidas? they asked? Reebook? The Gap? I told St. Mary’s students that shopping for an exploitation-free wardrobe at the mall is next to impossible, given the way all the large brands produce. The best way to make a difference, I told them, is to stay informed by surfing the Net, and by letting companies know what you think by writing letters and asking lots of questions at the store. The St. Mary’s kids were deeply skeptical of this non-answer. “Look, I don’t have time to be some kind of major political activist every time I go to the mall,” one girl said, right hand planted firmly on right hip. “Just tell me what kind of shoes are okay to buy, okay?”
Another girl, who looked about 16, sashayed to the microphone, “I’d just like to say that this is capitalism, okay, and people are allowed to make money and if you don’t like it maybe you’re just jealous.”
The hands shot up in response. “No, I’d just like to say that you are totally screwed up and just because everyone is doing something doesn’t mean it’s right–you’ve got to stand up for what you believe in instead of just standing in front of the mirror trying to look good!”
Even children understand that she had no alternative.
Her last suggestion is “local foreign policy”, basically making companies lose contracts because they do business with Burma or whatever cause. In the meantime, the Powers That Be know about the BDS movement and Anti-BDS laws are a thing now. She called it the “most effective tool,” which I guess is why they’re doing something about it.
The rest of the book is her own reflections on the limitations of the movement, and my next post will be about that.