It must be said that many of Microsoft's high-tech freelancers are hardly defenseless victims of Bill Gates's payroll concoctions, but are freelancers by choice. Like many contractors, the "software gypsies," as high-tech freelancers are sometimes called, have made a conscious decision to put independence and mobility before institutional loyalty and security. Some of them are even what Tom Peters likes to call a "Brand Called You."
Tom Peters's latest management-guru idea is that just as companies must reach branding nirvana by learning to let go of manufacturing and employment, so must individual workers empower themselves by abandoning the idea of being employees. According to this logic, if we are to be successful in the new economy, all of us must self-incorporate into our very own brand-a Brand Called You. Success in the job market will only come when we retrofit ourselves as consultants and service providers, identify our own Brand You equities and lease ourselves out to targeted projects that will in turn increase our individual portfolio of "braggables." "I call the approach Me Inc.," Peters writes. "You're Chairperson/CEO/Entrepreneur-in-Chief of your own professional service firm."56 Faith Popcorn, the management guru who came to prominence with her 1991 best-seller, Faith Popcorn, the management guru who came to prominence with her 1991 best-seller, The Popcorn Report The Popcorn Report, goes so far as to recommend that we change our names to better "click" with our carefully designed and marketed brand image. She She did-her name used to be Faith Plotkin. did-her name used to be Faith Plotkin.
Even more than Popcorn or Peters, however, it is a man named Daniel H. Pink who is the dean at Brand You U. Pink has seen the growth in temporary and contract work, as well as the rise in self-employment, and has declared the arrival of "Free Agent Nation." Not only is he writing a book by that title, but Pink himself is a proud patriot of the nation. After quitting a prestigious White House job as Al Gore's chief speechwriter, Pink went on a journey in search of fellow "free agents": people who had chosen a life of contracts and freelance gigs over bosses and benefits. What he found, as he relayed in a cover article in Fast Company Fast Company, was the sixties. The citizens of Pink's nation are marketing consultants, headhunters, copywriters and software designers who are all striving to achieve a Zen-like balance of work and personal life. They practice their yoga positions and play with their dogs in their wired home offices, while earning more money-by jumping from one contract to the next-than they did when they were tied to one company and paid a fixed salary. "This is the summer of love revisited, man!" we hear from Bo Rinald, an agent representing a thousand freelance software developers in Silicon Valley.57 For Pink's free agents, the end of jobs is the baby-boomer dream come true: free-market capitalism without neckties; dropped out of the corporate world in body but plugged-in in spirit. Everyone knows that you can't be a cog in the machine if you work from your living room.... For Pink's free agents, the end of jobs is the baby-boomer dream come true: free-market capitalism without neckties; dropped out of the corporate world in body but plugged-in in spirit. Everyone knows that you can't be a cog in the machine if you work from your living room....
A younger-and, of course, hipper-version of Free Agent Nation was articulated in a special work issue of Details Details magazine. For Gen-Xers with MBAs, the future of work is apparently filled with stunningly profitable snowboarding businesses, video-game companies and cool-hunting firms. "Opportunity Rocks!" crowed the headline of an article that laid out the future of work as a nonstop party of extreme self-employment: "Life without jobs, work without bosses, money without salaries, lives without limits." magazine. For Gen-Xers with MBAs, the future of work is apparently filled with stunningly profitable snowboarding businesses, video-game companies and cool-hunting firms. "Opportunity Rocks!" crowed the headline of an article that laid out the future of work as a nonstop party of extreme self-employment: "Life without jobs, work without bosses, money without salaries, lives without limits."58 According to the writer, Rob Lieber, "The time of considering yourself an 'employee' has passed. Now it's time to start thinking of yourself as a service provider, hiring out your skills and services to the highest, or most interesting, bidder." According to the writer, Rob Lieber, "The time of considering yourself an 'employee' has passed. Now it's time to start thinking of yourself as a service provider, hiring out your skills and services to the highest, or most interesting, bidder."59 I admit to being lured by the sirens of free agency myself. About four years ago, I quit my job as a magazine editor to go freelance, and like Pink I've never looked back. Of course I love the fact that no one boss controls my every working hour (that privilege is now spread around to dozens of people), that I'm not subject to the arbitrary edicts of petty managers and, most important, that I can work in my pajamas if I feel like it. I know from firsthand experience that freelance life can indeed mean freedom, just as part time, for others, can live up to its promise of genuine flexibility. Pink has a point when he says of free agency, "This is a legitimate way to work-it isn't some poor laid-off slob struggling to find his way back to the corporate bosom."60 However, there's a problem when it's people like Pink-or other freelance writers overly euphoric about working in their pajamas-who hold themselves up as living proof that divestment from corporate employment is a win-win formula. And it does seem as if most of the major articles about the joys of freelancing have been written by successful freelance writers under the impression that they themselves represent the millions of contractors, temps, freelancers, part-timers and the self-employed. But writing, because of its solitary nature and low overhead, is one of the very few professions that are genuinely compatible with homework, and study after study shows that it is absurd to equate the experience of being a freelance journalist, or having your own advertising company, with that of being a temp secretary at Microsoft or a contract factory worker in Cavite. On the whole, casualization pans out as the worst of both worlds: monotonous work at lower wages, with no benefits or security, and even less control over scheduling. However, there's a problem when it's people like Pink-or other freelance writers overly euphoric about working in their pajamas-who hold themselves up as living proof that divestment from corporate employment is a win-win formula. And it does seem as if most of the major articles about the joys of freelancing have been written by successful freelance writers under the impression that they themselves represent the millions of contractors, temps, freelancers, part-timers and the self-employed. But writing, because of its solitary nature and low overhead, is one of the very few professions that are genuinely compatible with homework, and study after study shows that it is absurd to equate the experience of being a freelance journalist, or having your own advertising company, with that of being a temp secretary at Microsoft or a contract factory worker in Cavite. On the whole, casualization pans out as the worst of both worlds: monotonous work at lower wages, with no benefits or security, and even less control over scheduling.
The bottom line is that the advantages and drawbacks of contract and contingency work have a simple correlation to the class of the individuals doing the work: the higher up they are on the income scale, the more chance they have to leverage their comings and goings. The further down they are, the more vulnerable they are to being yanked around and bargained even lower. The top 20 percent of wage earners tend to more or less maintain their high wages whether they are in full-time jobs or on freelance contracts. But according to a 1997 U.S. study, 52 percent of women in nonstandard work arrangements are being paid "poverty-level wages"-compared with only 27.6 percent in the full-time female worker population being paid those low wages. In other words, most nonstandard workers aren't members of Free Agent Nation. According to the study, "58.2 percent are in the lowest quality work arrangements-jobs with substantial pay penalties and few benefits relative to full-time standard workers." (see Table 10.7 Table 10.7)61 Furthermore, the real wages of temp workers in the U.S. actually went down, on average, by 14.7 percent between 1989 and 1994. Furthermore, the real wages of temp workers in the U.S. actually went down, on average, by 14.7 percent between 1989 and 1994.62 In Canada, nonpermanent jobs pay one-third less than permanent jobs, and 30 percent of nonpermanent employees work irregular hours. In Canada, nonpermanent jobs pay one-third less than permanent jobs, and 30 percent of nonpermanent employees work irregular hours.63 Clearly, temping puts the most vulnerable workforce further at risk, and no matter what Clearly, temping puts the most vulnerable workforce further at risk, and no matter what Details Details says, it doesn't rock. says, it doesn't rock.
Moreover, there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the free agents skipping and hopping on the top rungs of the corporate ladder, and the agents hanging off the bottom who have been "freed" of such pesky burdens as security and benefits. Nobody is more liberated, after all, than the CEOs themselves, who, like Nike's cabal of uber-athletes, have formed their own Dream Team to be traded back and forth between companies whenever some star power is needed to boost Wall Street morale. Temp CEOs, as writer Clive Thompson calls them, now shuttle from multinational to multinational, staying for an average term of only five years, collecting multimillion-dollar incentive packages on the way in, and multimillion-dollar golden handshakes on the way out.64 "Companies are changing executives like baseball managers," says John Challenger, executive vice president of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "The replacement will typically arrive like a SWAT team and sweep out the old and restaff with his or her own people." "Companies are changing executives like baseball managers," says John Challenger, executive vice president of the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "The replacement will typically arrive like a SWAT team and sweep out the old and restaff with his or her own people."65 When "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap was appointed CEO of Sunbeam in July 1996, Scott Graham, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., commented, "This is like the Lakers signing Shaquille O'Neal." When "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap was appointed CEO of Sunbeam in July 1996, Scott Graham, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., commented, "This is like the Lakers signing Shaquille O'Neal."66 The two extreme poles of workplace transience-represented by the contractor in Cavite afraid of flying factories, and the temp CEO unveiling restructuring plans in New York-work together like a global seesaw. Since the CEO superstars earn their reputation on Wall Street through such kamikaze missions as auctioning off their company's entire manufacturing base or initiating a grandiose merger that will save millions of dollars in job duplication, the more mobile the CEOs become, the more unstable the position of the broader workforce will be. As Daniel Pink points out, the word "freelance" is derived from the age when mercenary soldiers rented themselves-and their lances-out for battle. "The free lancers roamed from assignment to assignment-killing people for money."67 Granted it's a little dramatic, but it's not a half-bad job description for today's free-agent executives. In fact, it is the precise reason CEO salaries skyrocketed during the years that layoffs were at their most ruthless. Ira T. Kay, author of Granted it's a little dramatic, but it's not a half-bad job description for today's free-agent executives. In fact, it is the precise reason CEO salaries skyrocketed during the years that layoffs were at their most ruthless. Ira T. Kay, author of CEO Pay and Shareholder Value CEO Pay and Shareholder Value, knows why. Writing in The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal, Kay points out that the exorbitant salaries American companies have taken to paying their CEOs is a "crucial factor making the U.S. economy the most competitive in the world" because without juicy bonuses company heads would have "no economic incentive to face up to difficult management decisions, such as layoffs." In other words, as satirist Wayne Grytting retorted, we are "supporting those executive bonuses so we can get...fired."68 It's a fair enough equation, particularly in the U.S. According to the AFL-CIO, "the CEOs of the 30 companies with the largest announced layoffs saw their salaries, bonuses, and long-term compensation increase by 67.3 percent."69 The man responsible for the most layoffs in 1997-Eastman Kodak CEO George Fisher, who cut 20,100 jobs-received an options grant that same year estimated to be worth $60 million. The man responsible for the most layoffs in 1997-Eastman Kodak CEO George Fisher, who cut 20,100 jobs-received an options grant that same year estimated to be worth $60 million.70 And the highest-paid man in the world in 1997 was Sanford Wiell, who earned $230 million as head of the Travelers Group. The first thing Wiell did in 1998 was announce that Travelers would merge with Citicorp, a move that, while sending stock prices soaring, is expected to throw thousands out of work. In the same spirit, John Smith, the General Motors chairman implementing those 82,000 job cuts discussed in the last chapter, received a $2.54 million bonus in 1997 that was tied to the company's record earnings. And the highest-paid man in the world in 1997 was Sanford Wiell, who earned $230 million as head of the Travelers Group. The first thing Wiell did in 1998 was announce that Travelers would merge with Citicorp, a move that, while sending stock prices soaring, is expected to throw thousands out of work. In the same spirit, John Smith, the General Motors chairman implementing those 82,000 job cuts discussed in the last chapter, received a $2.54 million bonus in 1997 that was tied to the company's record earnings.71 There are many others in the business community who, unlike Ira T. Kay, are appalled by the amounts executives have been paying themselves in recent years. In Business Week Business Week, Jennifer Reingold writes with some disgust, "Good, bad, or indifferent, virtually anyone who spent time in the corner office of a large public company in 1997 saw his or her net worth rise by at least several million."72 For Reingold, the injustice lies in the fact that CEOs are able to collect raises and bonuses even when their company's stock price drops and shareholders take a hit. For instance, Ray Irani, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, collected $101 million in compensation in 1997, the same year that the company lost $390 million. For Reingold, the injustice lies in the fact that CEOs are able to collect raises and bonuses even when their company's stock price drops and shareholders take a hit. For instance, Ray Irani, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, collected $101 million in compensation in 1997, the same year that the company lost $390 million.
This camp of market watchers has been pushing for CEO remuneration to be directly linked to stock performance; in other words, "You make us rich, you get a healthy cut. But if we take a hit, then you take one too." Though this system protects stockholders from the greed of ineffective executives, it actually puts ordinary workers at even greater risk, by creating direct incentives for the quick and dirty layoffs that are always sure to rally stock prices and bring on the bonuses. For instance, at Caterpillar-the model of the incentive-driven corporation-executives get paid in stocks that have consistently been inflated by massive plant closures and worker wage rollbacks. What is emerging out of this growing trend of tying executive pay to stock performance is a corporate culture so damaged that workers must often be fired or shortchanged for the boss to get paid.
This last point raises the most interesting question of all, I think, about the long-term effect of the brand-name multinationals' divestment of the jobs business. From Starbucks to Microsoft, from Caterpillar to Citibank, the correlation between profit and job growth is in the process of being severed. As Buzz Hargrove, president of the Canadian Auto Workers, says, "Workers can work harder, their employers can be more successful, but-and downsizing and outsourcing are only one example-the link between overall economic success and the guaranteed sharing in that success is weaker than ever before."73 We know what this means in the short term: record profits, giddy shareholders and no seats left in business class. But what does it mean in the slightly longer term? What of the workers who fell off the payroll, whose bosses are voices on the phone at employment agencies, who lost their reason to take pride in their company's good fortune? Is it possible that the corporate sector, by fleeing from jobs, is unwittingly pouring fuel on the fire of its own opposition movement? We know what this means in the short term: record profits, giddy shareholders and no seats left in business class. But what does it mean in the slightly longer term? What of the workers who fell off the payroll, whose bosses are voices on the phone at employment agencies, who lost their reason to take pride in their company's good fortune? Is it possible that the corporate sector, by fleeing from jobs, is unwittingly pouring fuel on the fire of its own opposition movement?
Bill Gates, Microsoft President and CEO, gets pied. Biotic Baking Brigade strikes again. Economist Milton Friedman, architect of the global corporate takeover, gets his just deserts.
Chapter Eleven.
Breeding Disloyalty What Goes Around, Comes Around In our manufacturing, administrative, and distribution facilities, we have a specific philosophy-cameras keep honest people honest.
-Leo Myers, safety and security systems engineer for Mattel, explains the company's enthusiastic use of video surveillance on its global workforce, 1990 When I dropped out of university in 1993, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of my friends who had jobs. "The Recession," we repeated to one another over and over again, through years of jobless summers, through listless decisions to slog it out in grad school, through periods of cutbacks to our universities, through miserable stretches when parents were out of work. Just as we would later blame El Nino for everything from droughts to floods, the Recession was an economic bad weather system that had sucked up all the jobs as if they were Missouri trailer parks.
When the jobs disappeared, we understood that it was a result of the tough economic times that seemed to be affecting everyone (though perhaps not everyone equally) from company presidents facing bankruptcy to ax-wielding politicians-everybody, men and women, old and young, in all walks of life and work, right on down to me and my middle-class friends and our halfhearted job searches. The shift from the Recession to the cutthroat global economy happened so suddenly I feel as if I was sick that day and missed the whole thing-as with Grade 10 algebra, I will forever be playing catch-up. All I know is that one minute we were all in the Recession together. The next, a new strain of business leader was rising like a phoenix from the ashes-suit freshly pressed, enthusiasm pumped-announcing the arrival of a new golden age. But as we have seen in the last two chapters, when the jobs came back (if the jobs came back), they came back changed. For the workers in the contract factories of the export processing zones, and for the legions of temps, part-timers, contract and service-sector workers in industrialized countries, the modern employer has begun to look like a one-night stand who has the audacity to expect monogamy after a meaningless encounter. And many of them even got it for a while. Running scared from years of layoffs and gloomy economic projections, most of us did swallow the rhetoric that we should be happy picking up whatever pay stubs were scattered our way. There is mounting evidence, however, that workplace transience is finally eroding our collective faith, not only in individual corporations but in the very principle of trickle-down economics. the jobs came back), they came back changed. For the workers in the contract factories of the export processing zones, and for the legions of temps, part-timers, contract and service-sector workers in industrialized countries, the modern employer has begun to look like a one-night stand who has the audacity to expect monogamy after a meaningless encounter. And many of them even got it for a while. Running scared from years of layoffs and gloomy economic projections, most of us did swallow the rhetoric that we should be happy picking up whatever pay stubs were scattered our way. There is mounting evidence, however, that workplace transience is finally eroding our collective faith, not only in individual corporations but in the very principle of trickle-down economics.
Soaring profits and growth rates, as well as the mind-boggling salaries and bonuses that CEOs of large corporations pay themselves, have radically changed the conditions under which workers originally came to accept lower wages and diminished security, leaving many feeling that they've been had. Nowhere was this shift in attitude more apparent than in the public's sympathy for the striking United Parcel Service workers in 1997. Though Americans are notorious for their lack of sympathy for labor strikes, the plight of UPS part-timers struck a chord. Polls found that 55 percent of Americans supported the UPS workers, and only 27 percent sided with the company. Keffo, the editor of a bitter zine for temporary workers, summed up the public sentiment: "Day after day, [people] read and heard how great the economy is and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize well, duh, if UPS is doing so well, why can't they pay their workers more, or hire part timers as full timers, or keep their grubby fingers out of their workers' pension fund. So in a hilarious twist of fate, all the 'good' economic news works against UPS in favour of the Teamsters."1 Realizing that it had become a lightning rod for a broader malaise, UPS agreed to convert 10,000 part-time jobs to full-time jobs at twice the hourly pay, and increased pay for part-timers by 35 percent over five years. In explaining the concessions, UPS vice chairman John W. Alden said the company never foresaw its workers becoming symbols of the rage against the New Economy. "If I had known that it was going to go from negotiating for UPS to negotiating for part-time America, we would've approached it differently."2 From Job Creators to Wealth Creators As we have seen, it has only been in the past three or four years that corporations have stopped hiding layoffs and restructuring behind the rhetoric of necessity and begun to speak openly and unapologetically about their aversion to hiring people and, in extreme cases, their total exodus from the employment business. Multinationals that once boasted of their role as "engines of job growth"-and used it as leverage to extract all kinds of government support-now prefer to identify themselves as engines of "economic growth." It's a subtle difference, but not if you happen to be looking for work. Corporations are indeed "growing" the economy, but they are doing it, as we have seen, through layoffs, mergers, consolidation and outsourcing-in other words, through job debasement and job loss. And as the economy grows, the percentage of people directly employed by the world's largest corporations is actually decreasing. Transnational corporations, which control more than 33 percent of the world's productive assets, account for only 5 percent of the world's direct employment.3 And although the total assets of the world's one hundred largest corporations increased by 288 percent between 1990 and 1997, the number of people those corporations employed grew by less than 9 percent during that same period of tremendous growth. And although the total assets of the world's one hundred largest corporations increased by 288 percent between 1990 and 1997, the number of people those corporations employed grew by less than 9 percent during that same period of tremendous growth.4 The most striking figure is the most recent: in 1998, despite the stellar performance of the U.S. economy and despite the record low unemployment rate, U.S. corporations eliminated 677,000 permanent jobs-more job cuts than in any other year this decade. One in nine of those cuts came in the aftermath of mergers; many others came from the manufacturing sector. As the low U.S unemployment rate suggests, two-thirds of the companies that eliminated jobs created new ones and laid-off workers found alternative employment relatively quickly.5 But what those dramatic job cuts demonstrate is that a stable, reliable relationship between workers and their corporate employers has little or nothing to do with either the unemployment rate or the relative health of the economy. People are experiencing less stability even in the very best of economic times-in fact, these good economic times may be flowing, at least in part, from that loss of stability. But what those dramatic job cuts demonstrate is that a stable, reliable relationship between workers and their corporate employers has little or nothing to do with either the unemployment rate or the relative health of the economy. People are experiencing less stability even in the very best of economic times-in fact, these good economic times may be flowing, at least in part, from that loss of stability.
Job creation as part of the corporate mission, particularly the creation of full-time, decently paid, stable jobs, appears to have taken a back seat in many major corporations, regardless of company profits. (See related tables related tables.) Rather than being one component of a healthy operation, labor is increasingly treated by the corporate sector as an unavoidable burden, like paying income tax; or an expensive nuisance, like not being allowed to dump toxic waste into lakes. Politicians may say that jobs are their priority, but the stock market responds cheerfully every time mass layoffs are announced, and sinks gloomily whenever it looks as if workers might get a raise. Whatever bizarre route we took to get here, an unmistakable message now emanates from our free markets: good jobs are bad for business, bad for "the economy" and should be avoided at all cost. Although this equation has undeniably reaped record profits in the short term, it may well prove to be a strategic miscalculation on the part of our captains of industry. By discarding their self-identification as job creators, companies leave themselves open to a kind of backlash that can come only from a population that knows that the smooth sailing of the economy is of little demonstrable benefit to them. (See Tables 11.111.4 Tables 11.111.4.) According to the 1997 report of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), "Rising inequalities pose a serious threat of a political backlash against globalization, one that is as likely to come from the North as well as from the South.... The 1920s and 1930s provide a stark, and disturbing, reminder of just how quickly faith in markets and economic openness can be overwhelmed by political events."6 With the effects of the Asian and Russian economic crises in full swing, a UN report on "human development" issued the following year was even more severe: noting the growing disparities between rich and poor, James Gustave Speth, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said, "The numbers are shockingly high, amid the affluence. Progress must be more evenly distributed." With the effects of the Asian and Russian economic crises in full swing, a UN report on "human development" issued the following year was even more severe: noting the growing disparities between rich and poor, James Gustave Speth, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, said, "The numbers are shockingly high, amid the affluence. Progress must be more evenly distributed."7 You hear this kind of talk more and more these days. Ominous warnings about a simmering antiglobalization backlash cast a shadow over the usual euphoria of the annual gathering of corporate and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland. The business press is littered with more uneasy forecasts, such as the one in Business Week Business Week that noted, "The sight of bulging corporate coffers co-existing with a continuous stagnation in Americans' living standards could become politically untenable." that noted, "The sight of bulging corporate coffers co-existing with a continuous stagnation in Americans' living standards could become politically untenable."8 And that's America, which has a record low unemployment rate. The situation becomes even less comfortable in Canada, where unemployment is at 8.3 percent, and in European Union countries that are stuck with an average unemployment rate of 11.5 percent. (see And that's America, which has a record low unemployment rate. The situation becomes even less comfortable in Canada, where unemployment is at 8.3 percent, and in European Union countries that are stuck with an average unemployment rate of 11.5 percent. (see Table 11.5 Table 11.5.) At a speech delivered to the Business Council on National Issues, Ted Newall, chief executive officer of Nova Corp. in Calgary, Alberta, called the fact that more than 20 percent of Canadians live below the poverty line a "time bomb that is just waiting to go off." Indeed, a little side industry has developed of CEOs falling over each other to proclaim themselves ethical clairvoyants: they write books about the new "stockholder society," publicly berate their peers at luncheon addresses for their lack of scruples and announce that the time has come for corporate leaders to address the growing economic disparities. Trouble is, they can't agree on who is going to go first.
The fear that the poor will storm the barricades is as old as the castle moat, particularly during periods of great economic prosperity accompanied by inequitable distribution of wealth. Bertrand Russell writes that the Victorian elite in England were so consumed by paranoia that the working class would revolt against their "appalling poverty" that "at the time of Peterloo many large country houses kept artillery in readiness, lest they should be attacked by the mob. My maternal grandfather, who died in 1869, while wandering in his mind during his last illness, heard a loud noise in the street and thought it was the revolution breaking out, showing that at least unconsciously, the thought of revolution had remained with him throughout long prosperous years."9 A friend of mine whose family lives in India says her Punjabi aunt is so afraid of an insurrection of her own household staff that she keeps the kitchen knives locked up, leaving the servants to chop vegetables with sharpened sticks. It's not so different from the growing numbers of Americans moving into gated communities because the suburbs no longer provide adequate protection from the perceived urban threat.
Despite the widening gulf between rich and poor consistently reported by the UN and despite the much-discussed disappearance of the middle class in the West, the attack on jobs and income levels is probably not the most serious corporate offense we face as global citizens: it is, in theory, not irreversible. Far worse, in the long term, are the crimes committed by corporations against the natural environment, the food supply and indigenous peoples and cultures. Nevertheless, the erosion of a commitment to steady employment is the single most significant factor contributing to a climate of anti-corporate militancy and it is this that has made the markets most vulnerable to widespread "social unrest," to quote The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal.10 Table 11.1 Total Assets of Top 100 Transnational Corporations, 1980 and 1995 Source: Transnational Corporations in World Development: Third Survey (UN: 1983); Transnational Corporations in World Development: Trends and Prospects (UN: 1988); World Investment Reports (UN: 1993, 1994, 1997).
Table 11.2 Direct Employment in Top 100 Transnational Corporations, 1980 and 1995 Source: Transnational Corporations in World Development: Third Survey (UN: 1983); Transnational Corporations in World Development: Trends and Prospects (UN: 1988); World Investment Reports (UN: 1993, 1994, 1997).
Table 11.3 Growth of Employment through Temp Agencies in Europe and U.S., 1988 and 1996 Source: International Confederation of Temporary Work Businesses (CIETT); Countries included: U.K., France, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Denmark and the U.S.
Table 11.4 Average Number of People Employed Daily through U.S. Temp Agencies, 1970 and 1998 Source: Bruce Steinberg, "Temporary Help Annual Update for 1997," Contemporary Times Contemporary Times, Spring 1998; Timothy W. Brogan, "Staffing Services Annual Update" (1999), National Association of Temporary and Staffing Services.
When corporations are perceived as functioning vehicles of wealth distribution-effectively trickling down jobs and tax revenue-they at least provide the bedrock for the often Faustian bargains by which citizens offer loyalty to corporate priorities in exchange for a reliable paycheck. In the past, job creation served as a kind of corporate suit of armor, shielding companies from the wrath that might otherwise have been directed their way as a result of environmental or human-rights abuses.
Nowhere was this armor more protective than in the "jobs vs. the environment" debates of the late eighties and early nineties, when progressive movements were sharply divided, for example, between those who supported the rights of loggers and those who wanted to protect old-growth forests. In British Columbia, activists were people who came in by bus from the city while loggers loyally stood by the multinational corporations that had anchored their communities for generations. This kind of division is becoming less clear for many participants, as corporations begin to lose their natural allies among blue-collar workers who have been disenfranchised by callously executed layoffs, sudden mill closures and constant company threats to move offshore.
Today, it's hard to find a contented company town, where citizens do not feel they have in some way been betrayed by the local corporate sector. And rather than dividing communities into factions, corporations are increasingly serving as the common thread by which labor, environmental and human-rights violations can be stitched together into a single political ideology. After a while it becomes apparent that the unsustainable search for profits that, for example, leads to the clear-cutting of old-growth forests is the same philosophy that devastates logging towns by moving the mills to Indonesia. John Jordan, a British anarchist environmentalist, puts it this way: "Transnationals are affecting democracy, work, communities, culture and the biosphere. Inadvertently, they have helped us see the whole problem as one system, to connect every issue to every other issue, to not look at one problem in isolation."
This simmering backlash is about more than personal grievances. Even if you happen to be one of the lucky ones who has landed a good job and has never been laid off, everyone has heard the warnings-if not for themselves, then for their children or their parents or their friends. We live in a culture of job insecurity, and the messages of self-sufficiency have reached every one of us. In North America, the back end of an eighteen-wheeler heading for Mexico, workers weeping at the factory gate, the boarded-up windows of a hollowed-out factory town and people sleeping in doorways and on sidewalks have been among the most powerful economic images of our time: metaphors, seared into the collective consciousness, for an economy that consistently and unapologetically puts profits before people.
That message has perhaps been received most vividly by the generation that came of age since the recession hit in the early nineties. Almost without exception, they mapped out their life plan while listening to a chorus of voices telling them to lower their expectations, to rely on no one for their success. If they wanted a job with General Motors, Nike or General Electric, or indeed anywhere in the corporate sector, the message was the same: count on no one. Just in case they weren't paying attention, it was reinforced by high-school guidance counselors holding seminars on how to become "Me Inc.," by nightly newscasts filled with stories about how pension funds will soon be empty and by companies like Prudential Insurance urging us all to "Be your own rock." At university campuses across North America, orientation-week events-the time when students are first introduced to campus life-are now sponsored by mutual-fund companies, which use the opportunity to prod incoming students to start saving for their retirement before they've even picked a major.
All this has had its effects. According to the bible of demographic marketing, The Yankelovich Report The Yankelovich Report, the belief in the need to be self-reliant has increased by one-third with every generation-from the "Matures" (born 19091945), to "Boomers" (born 19461964) to "Xers" (defined loosely and somewhat inaccurately as everyone born between 1965 and the present). "Over two-thirds of Xers agree that, 'I have to take whatever I can get in this world because no one is going to give me anything.' Far fewer Boomers and Matures agree-only half and one-third, respectively," the report states.11 The New York advertising firm DMB&B found similar attitudes in its study of global teens. "From a lengthy battery of attitudinal items, the one that teens most agree with worldwide is: 'It's up to me to get what I want out of life.'" Nine out of ten young Americans polled agreed with this sentiment of total self-reliance. The New York advertising firm DMB&B found similar attitudes in its study of global teens. "From a lengthy battery of attitudinal items, the one that teens most agree with worldwide is: 'It's up to me to get what I want out of life.'" Nine out of ten young Americans polled agreed with this sentiment of total self-reliance.12 This shift in attitude has translated into a serious boom for the mutual-fund industry. Young people, it seems, are buying more RSPs than ever before. "Why is Generation X more focused on the need to save?" wonders a reporter in Business Week Business Week. "Much of it has to do with self-reliance. They believe they'll succeed only on their own initiative and have little confidence that either Social Security or traditional employer pensions will be around to support them in retirement."13 In fact, if you believe the business press, the only impact this spirit of self-reliance will have is the spearheading of a new wave of cutthroat entrepreneurial initiatives as the kids who can't count on anyone look out for Number One. In fact, if you believe the business press, the only impact this spirit of self-reliance will have is the spearheading of a new wave of cutthroat entrepreneurial initiatives as the kids who can't count on anyone look out for Number One.
There is no question that many young people have compensated for the fact that they don't trust politicians or corporations by adopting the social-Darwinist values of the system that engendered their insecurity: they will be greedier, tougher, more focused. They will Just Do It. But what of those who didn't go the MBA route, who don't want to be the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson? Why should they stay invested in the economic goals of corporations that have so actively divested them? What is the incentive to be loyal to a sector that has bombarded them, for their entire adult life, with a single message: Don't count on us?
This issue is not only about unemployment per se. It would be a grave mistake to assume that any old paycheck will buy the level of loyalty and protection to which many corporations-sometimes rightly-were once accustomed. Casual, part-time and low-wage work does not bring about the same identification with one's employer as the lifelong contracts of yesterday. Go to any mall fifteen minutes after the stores close and you'll see the new employment relationship in action: all the minimum-wage clerks are lined up, their purses and backpacks open for "bag check." It's standard practice, retail workers will tell you, for managers to search them daily for stolen goods. And according to an annual industry survey conducted by the University of Florida's Security Research Project, there is reason for suspicion: the study shows that employee theft accounted for 42.7 percent of the total amount of goods stolen from U.S. retailers in 1998, the highest rate ever recorded by the survey. Starbucks clerk Steve Emery likes to quote a line he got from a sympathetic customer: "You pay peanuts, so you get monkeys." When he told me that, it reminded me of something I had heard only two months earlier from a group of Nike workers in Indonesia. Sitting cross-legged in a circle at one of the dorms, they told me that, deep down, they hoped their factory would burn to the ground. Understandably, the factory workers' sentiments were much more extreme than the resentments expressed by McWorkers in the West-then again, the guards doing "bag check" at the gated entrance to the Nike factory in Indonesia were armed with revolvers.
But it is in the ranks of the millions of temp workers that the true breeding grounds of the anticorporate backlash will most likely be found. Since most temps don't stay at one post long enough for anyone to keep track of the value of their labor, the merit principle-once a sacred capitalist tenet-is becoming moot. And the situation can be intensely demoralizing. "Pretty soon, I'll run out of places to work in this city," writes Debbie Goad, a temp with twenty years of secretarial experience. "I'm registered at fifteen temporary agencies. It's like playing the slots in Vegas. They constantly call me, sounding like used-car salesmen. 'I know I'll get you the perfect job soon.'"14 She wrote those words in Temp Slave Temp Slave, a little publication out of Madison, Wisconsin, devoted to tapping a seemingly bottomless well of worker resentment. In it, workers who have been branded as disposable vent their anger at the corporations that rent them like pieces of equipment, then return them, used, to the agency. Temps traditionally have had no one to talk to about these issues-the nature of the work keeps them isolated from each other and also, inside their temporary workplaces, from their salaried co-workers. So it's no surprise that Temp Slave Temp Slave, and Web sites like Temp 247, boil with repressed hostility, offering helpful tips on how to sabotage your employer's computer system, as well as essays with titles such as "Everybody hates temps. The feeling is mutual!" and "The boredom, the sheer boredom of office life for temps."
Just as temp workforces mess with the merit principle, so does the growing practice of swapping CEOs like pro ballplayers. Temp CEOs are a major assault on the capitalist folklore of the mail-room boy who works his way up to becoming president of the company. Today's executives, since they just seem to trade the top spot with one another, appear to be born into their self-enclosed stratospheres like kings. In such a context, there is less room for the dream of making it up from the mail room-especially since the mail room has probably been outsourced to Pitney Bowes and staffed with permatemps.
That is the situation at Microsoft, and it is part of the reason why temp rage seethes there like nowhere else. Another is that Microsoft openly admits that its reserve of temps exists to protect the core of permanent workers from the ravages of the free market. When a product line is discontinued, or costs are cut in ingenious new ways, it's the temps that absorb the blows. If you ask the agencies, they say that their clients don't mind being treated like outdated software-after all, Bill Gates never promised them a thing. "When people know it's a temporary arrangement, some day, when the assignment ends, there's not a sense of a broken trust," explains Peg Cheirett, president of Wasser Group, one of the agencies that supplies Microsoft with temps.15 There's no doubt Gates has devised a means of downsizing that avoids those high-pitched wails of betrayal that IBM bosses faced in the late eighties when they eliminated 37,000 jobs, shocking employees who were under the impression they had secured jobs for life. Microsoft's temps have no basis to expect anything of Bill Gates-that much is true-but while that fact may keep pickets from blocking the entrance to the Microsoft Campus, it does little to protect the company from getting hacked from inside its own computer system. (As it did throughout 1998, when the hacker cabal Cult of the Dead Cow released a made-for-Microsoft hacking program called Back Orifice. It was downloaded from the Internet 300,000 times.) Microsoft's permatemps brush up against the hyperactive capitalist dream of Silicon Gold every day, and yet they-more than anyone else-know that it's an invitation-only affair. So while Microsoft's permanent employees are renowned for their corporate cultishness, Microsoft permatemps are almost unparalleled in their rancor. Asked by journalists what they think of their employer, they offer up such choice comments as: "They treat you like pond scum"16 or "It's a system of having two classes of people, and instilling fear and inferiority and loathing." or "It's a system of having two classes of people, and instilling fear and inferiority and loathing."17 Divestment: A Two-Way Transaction Commenting on this shift, Charles Handy, author of The Hungry Spirit The Hungry Spirit, writes that "it is clear that the psychological contract between employers and employed has changed. The smart jargon now talks of guaranteeing 'employability' not 'employment,' which, being interpreted, means don't count on us, count on yourself, but we'll try to help if we can."18 But for some-particularly younger workers-there is a silver lining. Because young people tend not to see the place where they work as an extension of their souls, they have, in some cases, found freedom in knowing they will never suffer the kind of heart-wrenching betrayals their parents did. For almost everyone who has entered the job market in the past decade, unemployment is a known quantity, as is self-generated and erratic work. In addition, losing one's job is much less frightening when getting it seemed an accident in the first place. Such familiarity with unemployment creates its own kind of worker divestment-divestment of the very notion of total dependency on stable work. We may begin to wonder whether we should even want the same job for our whole lives, and, more important, why we should depend on the twists and turns of large institutions for our sense of self.
This slow divestment by corporate culture has implications that reach far beyond the psychology of the individual: a population of skilled workers who don't see themselves as corporate lifers could lead to a renaissance in creativity and a revitalization of civic life, two very hopeful prospects. One thing is certain: it is already leading to a new kind of anticorporate politics.
Table 11.6 Labor-Force Profiles in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., 1997 Source: Bureau of Labor Slatistics; Statistics Canada; Office for National Statistics (Labor Force Survey); International Confederation of Temporary Work Businesses (CIETT). For Canadian and U.S. statistics, overlap of temp and part-time workers is accounted for. In the U.K., overlap between part-time and self-employed is accounted for.
[Taking the U.S. statistics as an example: the unemployed, part-time, temporary and replacement workers make up close to 40 percent of people actively working or looking for work. However, if you factor in the 67 million working-age Americans who are not included in the unemployment figures because they are not actively looking for work, the percentage of adults holding down full-time permanent jobs slips into the minority.]
You can see it in the political computer hackers who go after Microsoft and, as the next chapter will show, in the guerrilla "adbusters" who target urban billboards. It is there as well in anarchic pranks like "Phone in Sick to Work Day," the "Steal from Work! Because Work Is Stealing from You!" manifesto and on Web sites with names like Corporate America Sucks, just as it underlies international anticorporate campaigns like the one against McDonald's spurred by the McLibel Trial, and the one against Nike, focusing on Asian factory conditions.
In his essay "Stupid Jobs Are Good to Relax With," Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki contrasts the detachment he feels from the steady stream of "joke jobs" that junk up his resume with his father's profound dislocation at being forced into early retirement after a career of steady upward mobility. Hal helped his father pack up his desk on his last day at the office, watching as he nicked Post-it Notes and other office supplies from the company that had employed him for twelve years. "Despite his decades of labour and my years of being barely employed (and the five degrees we have between us), we have both ended up in the same place. He feels cheated. I don't."19 Members of the sixties youth culture vowed to be the first generation not to "sell out": they just wouldn't buy a ticket for the express train with the sign reading "lifelong employment." But in the ranks of young part-timers, temps and contract workers, we are witnessing something potentially far more powerful. We are seeing the first wave of workers who never bought in-some of them by choice, but most because that lifelong-employment train has spent most of the past decade standing in the station.
The extent of this shift cannot be overstated. Among the total number of working-age adults in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., those with full-time, permanent jobs working for someone other than themselves are in the minority. Temps, part-timers, the unemployed and those who have opted out of the labor force entirely-some because they don't want to work but many more because they have given up looking for jobs-now make up more than half of the working-age population. (see Table 11.6 Table 11.6) In other words, the people who don't have access to a corporation to which they can offer lifelong loyalty are the majority. And for young workers, consistently overrepresented among the unemployed, part-time and temporary sectors, the relationship to the work world is even more tenuous. (see Table 11.7 Table 11.7) From No Jobs to No Logo...
It should come as no surprise that the companies that increasingly find themselves at the wrong end of a bottle of spray paint, a computer hack or an international anticorporate campaign are the ones with the most cutting-edge ads, the most intuitive market researchers and the most aggressive in-school outreach programs. With the dictates of branding forcing companies to sever their traditional ties to steady job creation, it is no exaggeration to say that the "strongest" brands are the ones generating the worst jobs, whether in the export processing zones, in Silicon Valley or at the mall. Furthermore, the companies that advertise aggressively on MTV, Channel One and in Details Details, selling sneakers, jeans, fast food and Walkmans, are the very ones that pioneered the McJob sector and led the production exodus to cheap labor enclaves like Cavite. After pumping young people up with go-get-'em messages-the "Just Do It" sneakers, "No Fear" T-shirts and "No Excuses" jeans-these companies have responded to job requests with a resounding "Who, me?" The workers in Cavite may be unswooshworthy, but Nike's and Levi's core consumers have received another message from the brands' global shuffle: they are unjobworthy.
To add insult to injury, as we saw in Part I, "No Space," this abandonment by brand-name corporations is occurring at the very moment when youth culture is being sought out for more aggressive branding than ever before. Youth style and attitude are among the most effective wealth generators in our entertainment economy, but real live youth are being used around the world to pioneer a new kind of disposable workforce. It is in this volatile context, as the final section will show, that the branding economy is becoming the political equivalent of a sign hanging on the back of the body corporate that says "Kick Me."
No Logo
A call to Depression-era ad jammers from The Ballyhoo. The Ballyhoo. Two tobacco ad parodies by Ron English. Two tobacco ad parodies by Ron English.
Chapter Twelve.
Culture Jamming Ads Under Attack Advertising men are indeed very unhappy these days, very nervous, with a kind of apocalyptic expectancy. Often when I have lunched with an agency friend, a half dozen worried copy writers and art directors have accompanied us. Invariably they want to know when the revolution is coming, and where will they get off if it does come.
-Ex-adman James Forty, Our Master's Voice Our Master's Voice, 1934 It's Sunday morning on the edge of New York's Alphabet City and Jorge Rodriguez de Gerada is perched at the top of a high ladder, ripping the paper off a cigarette billboard. Moments before, the billboard at the corner of Houston and Attorney sported a fun-loving Newport couple jostling over a pretzel. Now it showcases the haunting face of a child, which Rodriguez de Gerada has painted in rust. To finish it off, he pastes up a few hand-torn strips of the old Newport ad, which form a fluorescent green frame around the child's face.
When it's done, the installation looks as the thirty-one-year-old artist had intended: as if years of cigarette, beer and car ads had been scraped away to reveal the rusted backing of the billboard. Burned into the metal is the real commodity of the advertising transaction. "After the ads are taken down," he says, "what is left is the impact on the children in the area, staring at these images."1 Unlike some of the growing legion of New York guerrilla artists, Rodriguez de Gerada refuses to slink around at night like a vandal, choosing instead to make his statements in broad daylight. For that matter, he doesn't much like the phrase "guerrilla art," preferring "citizen art" instead. He wants the dialogue he has been having with the city's billboards for more than ten years to be seen as a normal mode of discourse in a democratic society-not as some edgy vanguard act. While he paints and pastes, he wants kids to stop and watch-as they do on this sunny day, just as an old man offers to help support the ladder.
Rodriguez de Gerada even claims to have talked cops out of arresting him on three different occasions. "I say, 'Look, look what's around here, look what's happening. Let me explain to you why I do it.'" He tells the police officer about how poor neighborhoods have a disproportionately high number of billboards selling tobacco and hard liquor products. He talks about how these ads always feature models sailing, skiing or playing golf, making the addictive products they promote particularly glamorous to kids stuck in the ghetto, longing for escape. Unlike the advertisers who pitch and run, he wants his work to be part of a community discussion about the politics of public space.
Rodriguez de Gerada is widely recognized as one of the most skilled and creative founders of culture jamming, the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages. Streets are public spaces, adbusters argue, and since most residents can't afford to counter corporate messages by purchasing their own ads, they should have the right to talk back to images they never asked to see. In recent years, this argument has been bolstered by advertising's mounting aggressiveness in the public domain-the ads discussed in "No Space," painted and projected onto sidewalks; reaching around entire buildings and buses; into schools; onto basketball courts and on the Internet. At the same time, as discussed in "No Choice," the proliferation of the quasi-public "town squares" of malls and superstores has created more and more spaces where commercial messages are the only ones permitted. Adding even greater urgency to their cause is the belief among many jammers that concentration of media ownership has successfully devalued the right to free speech by severing it from the right to be heard.
All at once, these forces are coalescing to create a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism. A growing number of activists believe the time has come for the public to stop asking that some space be left unsponsored, and to begin seizing it back. Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing-because it buys its way into our public spaces-must be passively accepted as a one-way information flow.
The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions-counter-messages that hack into a corporation's own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that paid for the billboard, or figuratively, because anytime people mess with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful. Kalle Lasn, editor of Vancouver-based Adbusters Adbusters magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a precise metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam. "In one simple deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy." It's an image borrowed from Saul Alinsky who, in his activist bible, magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a precise metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam. "In one simple deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy." It's an image borrowed from Saul Alinsky who, in his activist bible, Rules for Radicals Rules for Radicals, defines "mass political jujitsu" as "utilizing the power of one part of the power structure against another part...the superior strength of the Haves become their own undoing."2 So, by rappelling off the side of a thirty-by-ninety-foot Levi's billboard (the largest in San Francisco) and pasting the face of serial killer Charles Manson over the image, a group of jammers attempts to leave a disruptive message about the labor practices employed to make Levi's jeans. In the statement it left on the scene, the Billboard Liberation Front said they chose Manson's face because the jeans were "Assembled by prisoners in China, sold to penal institutions in the Americas." So, by rappelling off the side of a thirty-by-ninety-foot Levi's billboard (the largest in San Francisco) and pasting the face of serial killer Charles Manson over the image, a group of jammers attempts to leave a disruptive message about the labor practices employed to make Levi's jeans. In the statement it left on the scene, the Billboard Liberation Front said they chose Manson's face because the jeans were "Assembled by prisoners in China, sold to penal institutions in the Americas."
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 Jamcon '84. The jujitsu metaphor isn't as apt for jammers who insist that they aren't inverting ad messages but are rather improving, editing, augmenting or unmasking them. "This is extreme truth in advertising," one billboard artist tells me.3 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? Or Joe is shown about fifteen years younger than his usual swinger self (see 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? Or Joe is shown about fifteen years younger than his usual swinger self (see image image). Like Baby Smurf, the "Cancer Kid" is cute and cuddly and playing with building blocks instead of sports cars and pool cues. And why not? Before R.J. Reynolds reached a $206 billion settlement with forty-six states, the American government accused the tobacco company of using the cartoon camel to entice children to start smoking-why not go further, the culture jammers ask, and reach out to even younger would-be smokers? Apple computers' "Think Different" campaign of famous figures both living and dead has been the subject of numerous simple hacks: a photograph of Stalin appears with the altered slogan "Think Really Different" the caption for the ad featuring the Dalai Lama is changed to "Think Disillusioned" and the rainbow Apple logo is morphed into a skull (see image image). My favorite truth-in-advertising campaign is a simple jam on Exxon that appeared just after the 1989 Valdez spill: "Shit Happens. New Exxon," two towering billboards announced to millions of San Francisco commuters.
Attempting to pinpoint the roots of culture jamming is next to impossible, largely because the practice is itself a cutting and pasting of graffiti, modern art, do-it-yourself punk philosophy and age-old pranksterism. And using billboards as an activist canvas isn't a new revolutionary tactic either. San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front (responsible for the Exxon and Levi's jams) has been altering ads for twenty years, while Australia's Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUG-UP) reached its peak in 1983, causing an unprecedented $1 million worth of damage to tobacco billboards in and around Sydney.
It was Guy Debord and the Situationists, the muses and theorists of the theatrical student uprising of Paris, May 1968, who first articulated the power of a simple detournement detournement, defined as an image, message or artifact lifted out of its context to create a new meaning. But though culture jammers borrow liberally from the avant-garde art movements of the past-from Dada and Surrealism to Conceptualism and Situationism-the canvas these art revolutionaries were attacking tended to be the art world and its passive culture of spectatorship, as well as the anti-pleasure ethos of mainstream capitalist society. For many French students in the late sixties, the enemy was the rigidity and conformity of the Company Man; the company itself proved markedly less engaging. So where Situationist Asger Jorn hurled paint at pastoral paintings bought at flea markets, today's culture jammers prefer to hack into corporate advertising and other avenues of corporate speech. And if the culture jammers' messages are more pointedly political than their predecessors', that may be because what were indeed subversive messages in the sixties-"Never Work," "It Is Forbidden to Forbid," "Take Your Desires for Reality"-now sound more like Sprite or Nike slogans: Just Feel It. And the "situations" or "happenings" staged by the political pranksters in 1968, though genuinely shocking and disruptive at the time, are the Absolut Vodka ad of 1998-the one featuring purple-clad art school students storming bars and restaurants banging on bottles.
In 1993, Mark Dery wrote "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs," a booklet published by the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series. For Dery, jamming incorporates such eclectic combinations of theater and activism as the Guerrilla Girls, who highlighted the art world's exclusion of female artists by holding demonstrations outside the Whitney Museum in gorilla masks; Joey Skagg, who has pulled off countless successful media hoaxes; and Artfux's execution-in-effigy of arch-Republican Jesse Helms on Capitol Hill. For Dery, culture jamming is anything, essentially, that mixes art, media, parody and the outsider stance. But within these subcultures, there has always been a tension between the forces of the merry prankster and the hard-core revolutionary. Nagging questions re-emerge: are play and pleasure themselves revolutionary acts, as the Situationists might argue? Is screwing up the culture's information flows inherently subversive, as Skagg would hold? Or is the mix of art and politics just a matter of making sure, to paraphrase Emma Goldman, that somebody has hooked up a good sound system at the revolution?
Though culture jamming is an undercurrent that never dries up entirely, there is no doubt that for the last five years it has been in the midst of a revival, and one focused more on politics than on pranksterism. For a growing number of young activists, adbusting has presented itself as the perfect tool with which to register disapproval of the multinational corporations that have so aggressively stalked them as shoppers, and so unceremoniously dumped them as workers. Influenced by media theorists such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Mark Crispin Miller, Robert McChesney and Ben Bagdikian, all of whom have explored ideas about corporate control over information flows, the adbusters are writing theory on the streets, literally deconstructing corporate culture with a waterproof magic marker and a bucket of wheatpaste.
Jammers span a significant range of backgrounds, from purer-than-thou Marxist-anarchists who refuse interviews with "the corporate press" to those like Rodriguez de Gerada who work in the advertising industry by day (his paying job, ironically, is putting up commercial signs and superstore window displays) and long to use their skills to send messages they consider constructive. Besides a fair bit of animosity between these camps, the only ideology bridging the spectrum of culture jamming is the belief that free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point that no one can hear you. "I think everyone should have their own billboard, but they don't," says Jack Napier (a pseudonym) of the Billboard Liberation Front.4 On the more radical end of the spectrum, a network of "media collectives" has emerged, decentralized and anarchic, that combine adbusting with zine publishing, pirate radio, activist video, Internet development and community activism. Chapters of the collective have popped up in Tallahassee, Boston, Seattle, Montreal and Winnipeg-often splintering off into other organizations. In London, where adbusting is called "subvertising," a new group has been formed, called the UK Subs after the seventies punk group of the same name. And in the past two years, the real-world jammers have been joined by a global network of on-line "hacktivists" who carry out their raids on the Internet, mostly by breaking into corporate Web sites and leaving their own messages behind.
More mainstream groups have also been getting in on the action. The U.S. Teamsters have taken quite a shine to the ad jam, using it to build up support for striking workers in several recent labor disputes. For instance, Miller Brewing found itself on the receiving end of a similar jam when it laid off workers at a St. Louis plant. The Teamsters purchased a billboard that parodied a then current Miller campaign; as Business Week Business Week reported, "Instead of two bottles of beer in a snowbank with the tagline 'Two Cold,' the ad showed two frozen workers in a snowbank labeled 'Two Cold: Miller canned 88 St. Louis workers.'" reported, "Instead of two bottles of beer in a snowbank with the tagline 'Two Cold,' the ad showed two frozen workers in a snowbank labeled 'Two Cold: Miller canned 88 St. Louis workers.'"5 As organizer Ron Carver says, "When you're doing this, you're threatening multimillion-dollar ad campaigns." As organizer Ron Carver says, "When you're doing this, you're threatening multimillion-dollar ad campaigns."6 One high-profile culture jam arrived in the fall of 1997 when the New York antitobacco lobby purchased hundreds of rooftop taxi ads to hawk "Virginia Slime" and "Cancer Country" brand cigarettes. All over Manhattan, as yellow cabs got stuck in gridlock, the jammed ads jostled with the real ones.
"Mutiny on the Corporate Sponsor Ship"-Paper Tiger, 1997 slogan The rebirth of culture jamming has much to do with newly accessible technologies that have made both the creation and the 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."
This is a crucial distinction. Where graffiti traditionally seek to leave dissonant tags on the slick face of advertising (or the "pimple on the face of the retouched cover photo of America," to use a Negativland image), Rodriguez de Gerada's messages are designed to mesh with their targets, borrowing visual legitimacy from advertising itself. Many of his "edits" have been so successfully integrated that the altered billboards look like originals, though with a message that takes viewers by surprise. Even the child's face he put up in Alphabet City-not a traditional parody jam-was digitally output on the same kind of adhesive vinyl that advertisers use to seamlessly cover buses and buildings with corporate logos. "The technology allows us to use Madison Avenue's aesthetics against itself," he says. "That is the most important aspect of this new wave of people using this guerrilla tactic, because that's what the MTV generation has become accustomed to-everything's flashy, everything's bright and clean. If you spend time to make it cleaner it will not be dismissed."
But others hold that jamming need not be so high tech. The Toronto performance artist Jubal Brown spread the visual virus for Canada's largest billboard-busting blitz with nothing more than a magic marker. He taught his friends how to distort the already hollowed out faces of fashion models by using a marker to black out their eyes and draw a zipper over their mouths-presto! Instant skull. For the women jammers in particular, "skulling" fitted in neatly with the "truth in advertising" theory: if emaciation is the beauty ideal, why not go all the way with zombie chic-give the advertisers a few supermodels from beyond the grave? For Brown, more nihilist than feminist, skulling was simply a detournement to highlight the cultural poverty of the sponsored life. ("Buy Buy Buy! Die Die Die!" reads Brown's statement displayed in a local Toronto art gallery.) On April Fool's Day, 1997, dozens of people went out on skulling missions, hitting hundreds of billboards on busy Toronto streets (see image image). Their handiwork was reprinted in Adbusters Adbusters, helping to spread skulling to cities across North America.
And nobody is riding the culture-jamming wave as high as Adbusters Adbusters, the self-described "house-organ" of the culture-jamming scene. Editor Kalle Lasn, who speaks exclusively in the magazine's enviro-pop lingo, likes to say that we are a culture "addicted to toxins" that are poisoning our bodies, our "mental environment" and our planet. He believes that adbusting will eventually spark a "paradigm shift" in public consciousness. Published by the Vancouver-based Media Foundation, the magazine started in 1989 with 5,000 copies. It now has a circulation of 35,000-at least 20,000 copies of which go to the United States. The foundation also produces "uncommercials" for television that accuse the beauty industry of causing eating disorders, attack North American overconsumption, and urge everyone to trade their cars in for bikes. Most television stations in Canada and the U.S. have refused to air the spots, which gives the Media Foundation the perfect excuse to take them to court and use the trials to attract press attention to their vision of more democratic, publicly accessible media.
Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements, but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surface of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged as the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular. "States have fallen back and corporations have become the new institutions," says Jaggi Singh, a Montreal-based anticorporate activist.7 "People are just reacting to the iconography of our time." American labor rights activist Trim Bissell goes further, explaining that the thirsty expansion of chains like Starbucks and the aggressive branding of companies like Nike have created a climate ripe for anticorporate attacks. "There are certain corporations which market themselves so aggressively, which are so intent on stamping their image on everybody and every street, that they build up a reservoir of resentment among thinking people," he says. "People resent the destruction of culture and its replacement with these mass-produced corporate logos and slogans. It represents a kind of cultural fascism." "People are just reacting to the iconography of our time." American labor rights activist Trim Bissell goes further, explaining that the thirsty expansion of chains like Starbucks and the aggressive branding of companies like Nike have created a climate ripe for anticorporate attacks. "There are certain corporations which market themselves so aggressively, which are so intent on stamping their image on everybody and every street, that they build up a reservoir of resentment among thinking people," he says. "People resent the destruction of culture and its replacement with these mass-produced corporate logos and slogans. It represents a kind of cultural fascism."8 Most of the superbrands are of course well aware that the very imagery that has generated billions for them in sales is likely to create other, unintended, waves within the culture. Well before the anti-Nike campaign began in earnest, CEO Phil Knight presciently observed that "there's a flip side to the emotions we generate and the tremendous well of emotions we live off of. Somehow, emotions imply their opposites and at the level we operate, the reaction is much more than a passing thought."9 The reaction is also more than the fickle flight of fashion that makes a particular style of hip sneaker suddenly look absurd, or a played-to-death pop song become, overnight, intolerable. At its best, culture jamming homes in on the flip side of those branded emotions, and refocuses them, so that they aren't replaced with a craving for the next fashion or pop sensation but turn, slowly, on the process of branding itself. The reaction is also more than the fickle flight of fashion that makes a particular style of hip sneaker suddenly look absurd, or a played-to-death pop song become, overnight, intolerable. At its best, culture jamming homes in on the flip side of those branded emotions, and refocuses them, so that they aren't replaced with a craving for the next fashion or pop sensation but turn, slowly, on the process of branding itself.
It's hard to say how spooked the advertisers are about getting busted. Although the U.S. Association of National Advertisers has no qualms about lobbying police on behalf of its members to crack down on adbusters, they are generally loath to let the charges go to trial. This is probably wise. Even though ad companies try to paint jammers as "vigilante censors" in the media,10 they know it wouldn't take much for the public to decide that the advertisers are the ones censoring the jammers' creative expressions. they know it wouldn't take much for the public to decide that the advertisers are the ones censoring the jammers' creative expressions.
So while most big brand names rush to sue for alleged trademark violations and readily take each other to court for parodying slogans or products (as Nike did when Candies shoes adopted the slogan "Just Screw It"), multinationals are proving markedly less eager to enter into legal battles that will clearly be fought less on legal than on political grounds. "No one wants to be in the limelight because they are the target of community protests or boycotts," one advertising executive told Advertising Age Advertising Age.11 Furthermore, corporations rightly see jammers as rabid attention seekers and have learned to avoid anything that could garner media coverage for their stunts. A case in point came in 1992 when Absolut Vodka threatened to sue Furthermore, corporations rightly see jammers as rabid attention seekers and have learned to avoid anything that could garner media coverage for their stunts. A case in point came in 1992 when Absolut Vodka threatened to sue Adbusters Adbusters over its "Absolut Nonsense" parody. The company immediately backed down when the magazine went to the press and challenged the distiller to a public debate on the harmful effects of alcohol. over its "Absolut Nonsense" parody. The company immediately backed down when the magazine went to the press and challenged the distiller to a public debate on the harmful effects of alcohol.
And much to Negativland's surprise, Pepsi's lawyers even refrained from responding to the band's 1997 release, Dispepsi Dispepsi-an anti-pop album consisting of hacked, jammed, distorted and disfigured Pepsi jingles. One song mimics the ads by juxtaposing the product's name with a laundry list of random unpleasant images: "I got fired by my boss. Pepsi/I nailed Jesus to the cross. Pepsi/...The ghastly stench of puppy mills. Pepsi" and so on.12 When asked by When asked by Entertainment Weekly Entertainment Weekly magazine for its response to the album, the soft-drink giant claimed to think it was "a pretty good listen." magazine for its response to the album, the soft-drink giant claimed to think it was "a pretty good listen."13 Identity Politics Goes Interactive There is a connection between the ad fatigue expressed by the jammers and the fierce salvos against media sexism, racism and homophobia that were so much in vogue when I was an undergraduate in the late eighties and early nineties. This connection is perhaps best traced through the evolving relationships that feminists have had with the ad world, particularly since the movement deserves credit for laying the groundwork for many of the current ad critiques. As Susan Douglas notes in Where the Girls Are 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."14 Furthermore, when Furthermore, when Ms 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. Maybe they started by scrawling "feed me" on Calvin Klein ads in bus shelters, as the skateboarding members of the all-high-school Bitch Brigade did. Or maybe they got their hands on a copy of Nomy Lamm's zine, I'm So Fucking Beautiful I'm So Fucking Beautiful, or they stumbled onto the "Feed the Super Model" interactive game on the official RiotGrrrl Web site. Or maybe, like Toronto's Carly Stasko, they got started through grrrly self-publishing. Twenty-one-year-old Stasko is a one-woman alternative-image factory: her pocket and backpack overflow with ad-jammed stickers, copies of her latest zine and handwritten flyers on the virtues of "guerrilla gardening." And when Stasko is not studying semiotics at the University of Toronto, planting sunflower seeds in abandoned urban lots or making her own media, she's teaching courses at local alternative schools where she shows classes of fourteen-year-olds how they too can cut and paste their own culture jams.
Stasko's interest in marketing began when she realized the degree to which contemporary definitions of female beauty-articulated largely through the media and advertisements-were making her and her peers feel insecure and inadequate. But unlike my generation of young feminists who had dealt with similar revelations largely by calling for censorship and re-education programs, she caught the mid-nineties self-publishing craze. Still in her teens, Stasko began publishing Uncool Uncool, a photocopied zine crammed with collages of sliced-and-diced quizzes from women's magazines, jammed ads for tampons, manifestos on culture jamming and, in one issue, a full-page ad for Philosophy Barbie. "What came first?" Stasko's Barbie wonders. "The beauty or the myth?" and "If I break a nail, but I'm asleep, is it still a crisis?"
She says that the process of making her own media, adopting the voice of the promoter and hacking into the surface of the ad culture began to weaken advertising's effect on her. "I realized that I can use the same tools the media does to promote my ideas. It took the sting out of the media for me because I saw how easy it was."15
Although he is more than ten years older than Stasko, the road that led Rodriguez de Gerada to culture jamming shares some of the same twists. A founding member of the political art troop Artfux, he began adbusting coincident with a wave of black and Latino community organizing against cigarette and alcohol advertising. In 1990, thirty years after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People first lobbied cigarette companies to use more black models in their ads, a church-based movement began in several American cities that accused these same companies of exploiting black poverty by target-marketing inner cities for their lethal product. In a clear sign of the times, attention had shifted from who was in the ads to the products they sold. Reverend Calvin O. Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem took his parishioners on billboard-busting blitzes during which they would paint over the cigarette and alcohol advertisements around their church. Other preachers took up the fight in Chicago, Detroit and Dallas.16 Reverend Butts's adbusting consisted of reaching up to offending billboards with long-handled paint rollers and whitewashing the ads. It was functional, but Rodriguez de Gerada decided to be more creative: to replace the companies' consumption messages with more persuasive political messages of his own. As a skilled artist, he carefully morphed the faces of cigarette models so they looked rancid and diseased. He replaced the standard Surgeon General's Warning with his own messages: "Struggle General's Warning: Blacks and Latinos are the prime scapegoats for illegal drugs, and the prime targets for legal ones."
Like many other early culture jammers, Rodriguez de Gerada soon extended his critiques beyond tobacco and alcohol ads to include rampant ad bombardment and commercialism in general, and, in many ways, he has the ambitiousness of branding itself to thank for this political evolution. As inner-city kids began stabbing each other for their Nike, Polo, Hilfiger and Nautica gear, it became clear that tobacco and alcohol companies are not the only marketers that prey on poor children's longing for escape. As we have seen, these fashion labels sold disadvantaged kids so successfully on their exaggerated representations of the good life-the country club, the yacht, the superstar celebrity-that logowear has become, in some parts of the Global City, both talisman and weapon. Meanwhile, the young feminists of Carly Stasko's generation whose sense of injustice had been awakened by Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth Beauty Myth, and Jean Kilbourne's documentary Killing Us Softly Killing Us Softly, also lived through the feeding frenzies around "alternative," Gen-X, hip-hop and rave culture. In the process, many became vividly aware that marketing affects communities not only by stereotyping them, but also-and equally powerfully-by hyping and chasing after them. This was a tangible shift from one generation of feminists to the next. When Ms Ms. went ad-free in 1990, for instance, there was a belief that the corrosive advertising interference from which Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan were determined to free their publication was a specifically female problem.17 But as the politics of identity mesh with the burgeoning critique of corporate power, the demand has shifted from reforming problematic ad campaigns to questioning whether advertisers have any legitimate right to invade every nook and cranny of our mental and physical environment: it has become about the disappearance of space and the lack of meaningful choice. Ad culture has demonstrated its remarkable ability to absorb, accommodate and even profit from content critiques. In this context, it has become abundantly clear that the only attack that will actually shake this resilient industry is one leveled not at the pretty people in the pictures, but against the corporations that paid for them. But as the politics of identity mesh with the burgeoning critique of corporate power, the demand has shifted from reforming problematic ad campaigns to questioning whether advertisers have any legitimate right to invade every nook and cranny of our mental and physical environment: it has become about the disappearance of space and the lack of meaningful choice. Ad culture has demonstrated its remarkable ability to absorb, accommodate and even profit from content critiques. In this context, it has become abundantly clear that the only attack that will actually shake this resilient industry is one leveled not at the pretty people in the pictures, but against the corporations that paid for them.
So for Carly Stasko, marketing has become more an environmental than a gender or self-esteem issue, and her environment is the streets, the university campus and the mass-media culture in which she, as an urbanite, lives her life. "I mean, this is my environment," she says, "and these ads are really directed at me. If these images can affect me, then I can affect them back."
The Washroom Ad as Political Catalyst For many students coming of age in the late nineties, the turning point from focusing on the content of advertising to a preoccupation with the form itself occurred in the most private of places: in their university washrooms, staring at a car ad. The washroom ads first began appearing on North American campuses in 1997 and have been proliferating ever since. As we have already seen in Chapter 5, the administrators who allowed ads to creep onto their campuses told themselves that young people were already so bombarded with commercial messages that a few more wouldn't kill them, and the revenues would help fund valuable programs. But it seems there is such a thing as an ad that breaks the camel's back-and for many students, that was it.
The irony, of course, is that from the advertiser's perspective, niche nirvana had been attained. Short of eyelid implants, ads in college washrooms represent as captive a youth market as there is on earth. But from the students' perspective, there could have been no more literal metaphor for space closing in than an ad for Pizza Pizza or Chrysler Neon staring at them from over a urinal or from the door of a W.C. cubicle. Which is precisely why this misguided branding scheme created the opportunity for hundreds of North American students to take their first tentative steps toward direct anticorporate activism.
Looking back, school officials must see that there is something hilariously misguided about putting ads in private cubicles where students have been known to pull out their pens or eyeliners and scrawl desperate declarations of love, circulate unsubstantiated rumors, carry on the abortion debate and share deep philosophical insights. When the mini-billboards arrived, the bathroom became the first truly safe space in which to talk back to ads. In an instant, the direction of the scrutiny through the one-way glass of the focus group was reversed, and the target market took aim at the people behind the glass. The most creative response came from students at the University of Toronto. A handful of undergraduates landed part-time jobs with the washroom billboard company and kept conveniently losing the custom-made screwdrivers that opened the four hundred plastic frames. Pretty soon, a group calling themselves the Escher Appreciation Society were breaking into the "student-proof" frames and systematically replacing the bathroom ads with prints by Maurits Cornelis Escher. Rather than brushing up on the latest from Chrysler or Molson, students could learn to appreciate the Dutch graphic artist-chosen, the Escherites conceded, because his geometric work photocopies well.
The bathroom ads made it unmistakably clear to a generation of student activists that they don't need cooler, more progressive or more diverse ads-first and foremost, they need ads to shut up once in a while. Debate on campuses began to shift away from an evaluation of the content of ads to the fact that it was becoming impossible to escape from advertising's intrusive gaze.
Of course there are those among the culture jammers whose interest in advertising is less tapped into the new ethos of anti-branding rage and instead has much in common with the morality squads of the political correctness years. At times, Adbusters Adbusters magazine feels like an only slightly hipper version of a Public Service Announcement about saying no to peer pressure or remembering to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The magazine is capable of lacerating wit, but its attacks on nicotine, alcohol and fast-food joints can be repetitive and obvious. Jams that change Absolut Vodka to "Absolut Hangover" or Ultra Kool cigarettes to "Utter Fool" cigarettes are enough to turn off would-be supporters who see the magazine crossing a fine line between information-age civil disobedience and puritanical finger-waving. Mark Dery, author of the original culture-jammers' manifesto and a former contributor to the magazine, says the anti-booze, -smoking and -fast-food emphasis reads as just plain patronizing-as if "the masses" cannot be trusted to "police their own desires." magazine feels like an only slightly hipper version of a Public Service Announcement about saying no to peer pressure or remembering to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The magazine is capable of lacerating wit, but its attacks on nicotine, alcohol and fast-food joints can be repetitive and obvious. Jams that change Absolut Vodka to "Absolut Hangover" or Ultra Kool cigarettes to "Utter Fool" cigarettes are enough to turn off would-be supporters who see the magazine crossing a fine line between information-age civil disobedience and puritanical finger-waving. Mark Dery, author of the original culture-jammers' manifesto and a former contributor to the magazine, says the anti-booze, -smoking and -fast-food emphasis reads as just plain patronizing-as if "the masses" cannot be trusted to "police their own desires."18 Listening to the Marketer Within In a New Yorker New Yorker article entitled "The Big Sellout," author John Seabrook discusses the phenomenon of "the marketer within." He argues persuasively that an emerging generation of artists will not concern themselves with old ethical dilemmas like "selling out" since they are a walking sales pitch for themselves already, intuitively understanding how to produce prepackaged art, to be their own brand. "The artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration." article entitled "The Big Sellout," author John Seabrook discusses the phenomenon of "the marketer within." He argues persuasively that an emerging generation of artists will not concern themselves with old ethical dilemmas like "selling out" since they are a walking sales pitch for themselves already, intuitively understanding how to produce prepackaged art, to be their own brand. "The artists of the next generation will make their art with an internal marketing barometer already in place. The auteur as marketer, the artist in a suit of his own: the ultimate in vertical integration."19 Seabrook is right in his observation that the rhythm of the pitch is hard-wired into the synapses of many young artists, but he is mistaken in assuming that the built-in marketing barometer will only be used to seek fame and fortune in the culture industries. As Carly Stasko points out, many people who grew up sold are so attuned to the tempo of marketing that as soon as they read or hear a new slogan, they begin to flip it and play with it in their minds, as she herself does. For Stasko, it is the adbuster that is within, and every ad campaign is a riddle just waiting for the right jam. So the skill Seabrook identifies, which allows artists to write the press bumpf for their own gallery openings and musicians to churn out metaphor-filled bios for their liner notes, is the same quality that makes for a deadly clever culture jammer. The culture jammer is the activist artist as anti antimarketer, using a childhood filled with Trix commercials, and an adolescence spent spotting the product placement on Seinfeld Seinfeld, to mess with a system that once saw itself as a specialized science. Jamie Batsy, a Toronto-area "hacktivist," puts it like this: "Advertisers and other opinion makers are now in a position where they are up against a generation of activists that were watching television before they could walk. This generation wants their brains back and mass media is their home turf."20 Culture jammers are drawn to the world of marketing like moths to a flame, and the high-gloss sheen on their work is achieved precisely because they still feel an affection-however deeply ambivalent-for media spectacle and the mechanics of persuasion. "I think a lot of people who are really interested in subverting advertising or studying advertising probably, at one time, wanted to be ad people themselves," says Carrie McLaren, editor of the New York zine Stay Free! Stay Free!21 You can see it in her own ad busts, which are painstakingly seamless in their design and savage in their content. In one issue, a full-page anti-ad shows a beat-up kid face down on the concrete with no shoes on. In the corner of the frame is a hand making away with his Nike sneakers. "Just do it," the slogan says. You can see it in her own ad busts, which are painstakingly seamless in their design and savage in their content. In one issue, a full-page anti-ad shows a beat-up kid face down on the concrete with no shoes on. In the corner of the frame is a hand making away with his Nike sneakers. "Just do it," the slogan says.