- guardian.co.uk, Monday April 10 2000 16.11 BST
Part one: Culture jamming
Part two: The Manchurian consumer: are you authentic?
Part three: Posthuman: life in cyberspace
You may already be a culture jammer. Maybe you're a student who does not want a career working for corporate America. A graphic artist tired of selling your soul to ad agency clients. A vegan. A biker. A maverick professor. An Earth Firster who liberated a billboard last night.
We jammers are a loose global network of artists, activists, environmentalists, Green entrepreneurs, media-literacy teachers, downshifters, reborn Lefties, high-school shit disturbers, campus rabble-rousers, drop-outs, incorrigibles, poets, philosophers, ecofeminists. We cover the spectrum from the cool intellectual middle to the violent lunatic fringe, from Raging Grannies who chant doggerel at protests to urban guerrillas who stage wild street parties. We are ecological economists, TV jammers, ethical investors. We paint our own bike lanes, reclaim streets, "skull" Calvin Klein ads, and paste GREASE stickers on tables and trays at McDonald's restaurants. We organize swap meets, rearrange items on supermarket shelves, make our software available free on the Net, and generally apply ourselves to the daily business of getting consumer culture to bite its own tail. We're idealists, anarchists, guerrilla tacticians, hoaxers, pranksters, neo-Luddites, malcontents and punks. We are the ragtig remnants of oppositional culture - what's left of the revolutionary impulse in the jaded "fin de millenium atmosphere of postmodernity" in which revolution is said to be no longer possible. What we share is an overwhelming rage against consumer capitalism, and a vague sense that our time has come to act as a collective force.
On the simplest level, we are a growing band of people who have given up on the American dream. Here are a few samples of the way we think:
• Instead of treating vegetative, corporate-driven TV culture as something to be gently, ironically mocked, it's time to face the whole ugly spectre of our TV-addicted nation, the savage anomie of a society entranced and entrapped and living a lie. It's time to admit that chronic TV watching is North America's number one mental health problem, and that a society in which citizens spend a quarter of their waking lives (more than four hours a day) in front of their sets is in serious need of shock therapy.
• We recycle our beer cans, newspapers and vodka bottles; we join car pools and food co-ops; we turn our thermostats down at night. We do all the right things. So why do our environmental problems just keep getting worse? Maybe it's time we stopped expending our energies on small do-goody gestures and faced the fact that many of the paradigms within which we live cultural, social, economic - are outdated and dysfunctional. Most of our environmental "solutions" are red herrings. They deflect energy from the essential work at hand. What we need is not just fewer cars on the roads but new cities designed chiefly with pedestrians, bicycles and public transport in mind. Not just new ecofriendly products, but new consumption patterns and new lifestyles. Not just a carbon tax, but a global across-the-board pricing system that tells the ecological truth. Not just new measures of economic progress more accurate than the GDP, but a radical rethinking of the neoclassical paradigm we've been teaching in Economics 101 for the past few generations.
• Ours is a society filled with exceptional individuals, affluent communities, efficient businesses, top notch universities and exciting cities. But that is no longer enough. The concept of excellence must now be applied to the whole culture. We have never been afraid of getting tough with the other broken systems in our lives; we retrain workers, dump governments, and eagerly, completely revamp entire corporate cultures such as IBM's when they lose their sense of mission. Now let's apply that sane sense of focused urgency to the repair of our culture.
Let's rethink our vital components - our information delivery systems, our basic ideas about nutrition, transportation and economics. Let's commit, totally, passionately, to reducing our ecological footprint, to learning how to measure progress accurately, to countering the information viruses spreading in our midst. Instead of resisting this kind of fundamental change, let's embrace it. Let's cheer on our cultural rebels even as we fear them. Let's revel in (or at least not shy away from) the life and death of our paradigms.
Excerpted from Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn, Copyright © 1999 by Kalle Lasn. Excerpted by permission of Eagle Brook, an imprint of William Morrow and Company, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Part one: Culture jamming
Part two: The Manchurian consumer: are you authentic?
Part three: Posthuman: life in cyberspace
