Nowhere is the adbuster's ear for the pitch used to fuller effect than in the promotion of adbusting itself, a fact that might explain why culture jamming's truest believers often sound like an odd cross between used-car salesmen and tenured semiotics professors. Second only to Internet hucksters and rappers, adbusters are susceptible to a spiraling bravado and to a level of self-promotion that can be just plain silly. There is much fondness for claiming to be Marshall McLuhan's son, daughter, grandchild or bastard progeny. There is a strong tendency to exaggerate the power of wheatpaste and a damn good joke. And to overstate their own power: one culture-jamming manifesto, for instance, explains that "the billboard artist's goal is to throw a well aimed spanner into the media's gears, bringing the image factory to a shuddering halt."22 Adbusters has taken this hard-sell approach to such an extreme that it has raised hackles among rival culture jammers. Particularly galling to its critics is the magazine's line of anticonsumer products that they say has made the magazine less a culture-jamming clearinghouse than a home-shopping network for adbusting accessories. Culture-jammer "tool boxes" are listed for sale: posters, videos, stickers and postcards; most ironically, it used to sell calendars and T-shirts to coincide with Buy Nothing Day, though better sense eventually prevailed. "What comes out is no real alternative to our culture of consumption," Carrie McLaren writes. "Just a different brand." Fellow Vancouver jammers Guerrilla Media (GM) take a more vicious shot at has taken this hard-sell approach to such an extreme that it has raised hackles among rival culture jammers. Particularly galling to its critics is the magazine's line of anticonsumer products that they say has made the magazine less a culture-jamming clearinghouse than a home-shopping network for adbusting accessories. Culture-jammer "tool boxes" are listed for sale: posters, videos, stickers and postcards; most ironically, it used to sell calendars and T-shirts to coincide with Buy Nothing Day, though better sense eventually prevailed. "What comes out is no real alternative to our culture of consumption," Carrie McLaren writes. "Just a different brand." Fellow Vancouver jammers Guerrilla Media (GM) take a more vicious shot at Adbusters Adbusters in the GM inaugural newsletter. "We promise there are no GM calendars, key chains or coffee mugs in the offing. We are, however, still working on those T-shirts that some of you ordered-we're just looking for that perfect sweatshop to produce them." in the GM inaugural newsletter. "We promise there are no GM calendars, key chains or coffee mugs in the offing. We are, however, still working on those T-shirts that some of you ordered-we're just looking for that perfect sweatshop to produce them."23 Marketing the Antimarketers The attacks are much the same as those lobbed at every punk band that signs a record deal and every zine that goes glossy: Adbusters Adbusters has simply become too popular to have much cachet for the radicals who once dusted it off in their local secondhand bookstore like a precious stone. But beyond the standard-issue purism, the question of how best to "market" an antimarketing movement is a uniquely thorny dilemma. There is a sense among some adbusters that culture jamming, like punk itself, must remain something of a porcupine; that to defy its own inevitable commodification, it must keep its protective quills sharp. After the great Alternative and Girl Power" cashins, the very process of naming a trend, or coining a catchphrase, is regarded by some with deep suspicion. " has simply become too popular to have much cachet for the radicals who once dusted it off in their local secondhand bookstore like a precious stone. But beyond the standard-issue purism, the question of how best to "market" an antimarketing movement is a uniquely thorny dilemma. There is a sense among some adbusters that culture jamming, like punk itself, must remain something of a porcupine; that to defy its own inevitable commodification, it must keep its protective quills sharp. After the great Alternative and Girl Power" cashins, the very process of naming a trend, or coining a catchphrase, is regarded by some with deep suspicion. "Adbusters jumped on it and were ready to claim this movement before it ever really existed," says McLaren, who complains bitterly in her own writing about the "USA Today/MTV-ization" of jumped on it and were ready to claim this movement before it ever really existed," says McLaren, who complains bitterly in her own writing about the "USA Today/MTV-ization" of Adbusters Adbusters. "It's become an advertisement for anti-advertising."24 There is another fear underlying this debate, one more confusing for its proponents than the prospect of culture jamming "selling out" to the dictates of marketing. What if, despite all the rhetorical flair its adherents can muster, culture jamming doesn't actually matter? What if there is no jujitsu, only semiotic shadowboxing? Kalle Lasn insists that his magazine has the power to "jolt postmodern society out of its media trance" and that his uncommercials threaten to shake network television to its core. "The television mindscape has been homogenized over the last 30 to 40 years. It's a space that is very safe for commercial messages. So, if you suddenly introduce a note of cognitive dissonance with a spot that says 'Don't buy a car,' or in the middle of a fashion show somebody suddenly says 'What about anorexia?' there's a powerful moment of truth."25 But the real truth is that, as a culture, we seem to be capable of absorbing limitless amounts of cognitive dissonance on our TV sets. We culture jam manually every time we channel surf-catapulting from the desperate fundraising pleas of the Foster Parent Plan to infomercials for Buns of Steel; from Jerry Springer to Jerry Falwell; from New Country to Marilyn Manson. In these information-numb times, we are beyond being abruptly awakened by a startling image, a sharp juxtaposition or even a fabulously clever detournement. But the real truth is that, as a culture, we seem to be capable of absorbing limitless amounts of cognitive dissonance on our TV sets. We culture jam manually every time we channel surf-catapulting from the desperate fundraising pleas of the Foster Parent Plan to infomercials for Buns of Steel; from Jerry Springer to Jerry Falwell; from New Country to Marilyn Manson. In these information-numb times, we are beyond being abruptly awakened by a startling image, a sharp juxtaposition or even a fabulously clever detournement.
Jaggi Singh is one activist who has become disillusioned with the jujitsu theory. "When you're jamming, you're sort of playing their game, and I think ultimately that playing field is stacked against us because they can saturate...we don't have the resources to do all those billboards, we don't have the resources to buy up all that time, and in a sense, it almost becomes pretty scientific-who can afford these feeds?"
Logo Overload To add further evidence that culture jamming is more drop in the bucket than spanner in the works, marketers are increasingly deciding to join in the fun. When Kalle Lasn says culture jamming has the feeling of "a bit of a fad," he's not exaggerating.26 It turns out that culture jamming-with its combination of hip-hop attitude, punk anti-authoritarianism and a well of visual gimmicks-has great sales potential. It turns out that culture jamming-with its combination of hip-hop attitude, punk anti-authoritarianism and a well of visual gimmicks-has great sales potential.
Yahoo! already has an official culture-jamming site on the Internet, filed under "alternative." At Soho Down & Under on West Broadway in New York, Camden Market in London or any other high street where alterno gear is for sale, you can load up on logo-jammed T-shirts, stickers and badges. Recurring detournements-to use a word that seems suddenly misplaced-include Kraft changed to "Krap," Tide changed to "Jive," Ford changed to "Fucked" and Goodyear changed to "Goodbeer." It's not exactly trenchant social commentary, particularly since the jammed logos appear to be interchangeable with the corporate kitsch of unaltered Dubble Bubble and Tide T-shirts. In the rave scene, logo play is all the rage-in clothing, temporary tattoos, body paint and even ecstasy pills. Ecstasy dealers have taken to branding their tablets with famous logos: there is Big Mac E, Purple Nike Swirl E, X-Files E, and a mixture of uppers and downers called a "Happy Meal." Musician Jeff Renton explains the drug culture's appropriation of corporate logos as a revolt against invasive marketing. "I think it's a matter of: 'You come into our lives with your million-dollar advertising campaigns putting logos in places that make us feel uncomfortable, so we're going to take your logo back and use it in places that make you feel uncomfortable,'" he says.27 But after a while, what began as a way to talk back to the ads starts to feel more like evidence of our total colonization by them, and especially because the ad industry is proving that it is capable of cutting off the culture jammers at the pass. Examples of pre-jammed ads include a 1997 Nike campaign that used the slogan "I am not/A target market/I am an athlete" and Sprite's "Image Is Nothing" campaign, featuring a young black man saying that all his life he has been bombarded with media lies telling him that soft drinks will make him a better athlete or more attractive, until he realized that "image is nothing." Diesel jeans, however, has gone furthest in incorporating the political content of adbusting's anticorporate attacks. One of the most popular ways for artists and activists to highlight the inequalities of free-market globalization is by juxtaposing First World icons with Third World scenes: Marlboro Country in the war-torn rubble of Beirut (see image image); an obviously malnourished Haitian girl wearing Mickey Mouse glasses; Dynasty Dynasty playing on a TV set in an African hut; Indonesian students rioting in front of McDonald's arches. The power of these visual critiques of happy one-worldism is precisely what the Diesel clothing company's "Brand O" ad campaign attempts to co-opt. The campaign features ads within ads: a series of billboards flogging a fictional Brand O line of products in a nameless North Korean city. In one, a glamorous skinny blonde is pictured on the side of a bus that is overflowing with frail-looking workers. The ad is selling "Brand O Diet-There's no limit to how thin you can get." Another shows an Asian man huddled under a piece of cardboard. Above him towers a Ken and Barbie Brand O billboard. playing on a TV set in an African hut; Indonesian students rioting in front of McDonald's arches. The power of these visual critiques of happy one-worldism is precisely what the Diesel clothing company's "Brand O" ad campaign attempts to co-opt. The campaign features ads within ads: a series of billboards flogging a fictional Brand O line of products in a nameless North Korean city. In one, a glamorous skinny blonde is pictured on the side of a bus that is overflowing with frail-looking workers. The ad is selling "Brand O Diet-There's no limit to how thin you can get." Another shows an Asian man huddled under a piece of cardboard. Above him towers a Ken and Barbie Brand O billboard.
Perhaps the point of no return came in 1997 when Mark Hosler of Negativland received a call from the ultra-hip ad agency Wieden & Kennedy asking if the band that coined the term "culture jamming" would do the soundtrack for a new Miller Genuine Draft commercial. The decision to turn down the request and the money was simple enough, but it still sent him spinning. "They utterly failed to grasp that our entire work is essentially in opposition to everything that they are connected to, and it made me really depressed because I had thought that our esthetic couldn't be absorbed into marketing," Hosler says.28 Another rude awakening came when Hosler first saw Sprite's "Obey Your Thirst" campaign. "That commercial was a hair's breadth away from a song on our [ Another rude awakening came when Hosler first saw Sprite's "Obey Your Thirst" campaign. "That commercial was a hair's breadth away from a song on our [Dispepsi] record. It was surreal. It's not just the fringe that's getting absorbed now-that's always happened. What's getting absorbed now is the idea that there's no opposition left, that any resistance is futile."29
I'm not so sure. Yes, some marketers have found a way to distill culture jamming into a particularly edgy kind of nonlinear advertising, and there is no doubt that Madison Avenue's embrace of the techniques of adbusting has succeeded in moving product off the superstore shelves. Since Diesel began its aggressively ironic "Reasons for Living" and "Brand O" campaigns in the U.S., sales have gone from $2 million to $23 million in four years,30 and the Sprite "Image Is Nothing" campaign is credited with a 35 percent rise in sales in just three years. and the Sprite "Image Is Nothing" campaign is credited with a 35 percent rise in sales in just three years.31 That said, the success of these individual campaigns has done nothing to disarm the antimarketing rage that fueled adbusting in the first place. In fact, it may be having the opposite effect. That said, the success of these individual campaigns has done nothing to disarm the antimarketing rage that fueled adbusting in the first place. In fact, it may be having the opposite effect.
Ground Zero of the Cool Hunt The prospect of young people turning against the hype of advertising and defining themselves against the big brands is a continuous threat coming from cool-hunting agencies like Sputnik, that infamous team of professional diary readers and generational snoops. "Intellectual crews," as Sputnik calls thinking young people, are aware and resentful of how useful they are to the marketers: They understand that mammoth corporations now seek their approval to continually deliver goods that will translate to megasales in the mainstream. Their stance of being intellectual says to each other, and to themselves, and most importantly to marketers-who spend innumerable dollars for in-your-face this-is-what-you-need advertisements-that they cannot be bought or fooled anymore by the hype. Being a head means that you won't sell out and be told what to wear, what to buy, what to eat or how to speak by anyone (or anything) other than yourself.32 But while the Sputnik writers inform their corporate readers about the radical ideas on the street, they appear to think that though these ideas will dramatically influence how young people will party, dress and talk, they will magically have no effect whatsoever on how young people will behave as political beings.
After they sound the alarm, the hunters always reassure their readers that all this anticorporate stuff is actually a meaningless pose that can be worked around with a hipper, edgier campaign. In other words, anticorporate rage is no more meaningful a street trend than a mild preference for the color orange. The happy underlying premise of the cool hunters' reports is that despite all the punk-rock talk, there is no belief that is a true belief and there are no rebels who cannot be tamed with an ad campaign or by a street promoter who really speaks to them really speaks to them. The unquestioned assumption is that there is no end point in this style cycle. There will always be new spaces to colonize-whether physical or mental-and there will always be an ad that will be able to penetrate the latest strain of consumer cynicism. Nothing new is taking place, the hunters tell each other: marketers have always extracted symbols and signs from the resistance movements of their day.
What they don't say is that previous waves of youth resistance were focused primarily on such foes as "the establishment," the government, the patriarchy and the military-industrial complex. Culture jamming is different-its rage encompasses the very type of marketing that the cool hunters and their clients are engaging in as they try to figure out how to use antimarketing rage to sell products. The big brands' new ads must incorporate a youth cynicism not about products as status symbols, or about mass homogenization, but about multinational brands themselves as tireless culture vultures.
The admen and adwomen have met this new challenge without changing their course. They are busily hunting down and reselling the edge, just as they have always done, which is why Wieden & Kennedy thought there was nothing strange about asking Negativland to shill for Miller. After all, it was Wieden & Kennedy, a boutique ad agency based in Portland, Oregon, that made Nike a feminist sneaker. It was W&K who dreamed up the postindustrial alienation marketing plan for Coke's OK Cola; W&K who gave the world the immortal plaid-clad assertion that the Subaru Impreza was "like punk rock" and it was W&K who brought Miller Beer into the age of irony. Masters at pitting the individual against various incarnations of mass-market bogeymen, Wieden & Kennedy sold cars to people who hated car ads, shoes to people who loathed image, soft drinks to the Prozac Nation and, most of all, ads to people who were "not a target market."
The agency was founded by two self-styled "beatnik artists," Dan Wieden and David Kennedy, whose technique, it seems, for quieting their own nagging fears that they were selling out has consistently been to drag the ideas and icons of the counterculture with them into the ad world. A quick tour through the agency's body of work is nothing short of a counterculture reunion-Woodstock meets the Beats meets Warhol's Factory. After putting Lou Reed in a Honda spot in the mid-eighties, W&K used the Beatles anthem "Revolution" in one Nike commercial, then carted out John Lennon's "Instant Karma" for another. They also paid proto-rock-and-roller Bo Diddley to do the "Bo Knows" Nike spots, and filmmaker Spike Lee to do an entire series of Air Jordan ads. W&K even got Jean-Luc Godard to direct a European Nike commercial. There were still more countercultural artifacts lying around: they stuck William Burroughs's face in a mini-TV-set in another Nike commercial and designed a campaign, nixed by Subaru before it made it to air, that used Jack Kerouac's On the Road On the Road as the voice-over text for an SVX commercial. as the voice-over text for an SVX commercial.
After making its name on the willingness of the avant-garde to set its price for the right mix of irony and dollars, W&K can hardly be blamed for thinking that culture jammers would also be thrilled to take part in the postmodern fun of a self-aware ad campaign. But the backlash against the brands, of which culture jamming is only one part, isn't about vague notions of alternativeness battling the mainstream. It has to do with the specific issues that have been the subject of this book so far: the loss of public space, corporate censorship and unethical labor practices, to name but three-issues less easily digested than tasty morsels like Girl Power and grunge.
Which is why Wieden & Kennedy hit a wall when they asked Negativland to mix for Miller, and why that was only the first in a string of defeats for the agency. The British political pop-band Chumbawamba turned down a $1.5 million contract that would have allowed Nike to use its hit song "Tub-thumping" in a World Cup spot. Abstract notions about staying indie were not at issue (the band did allow the song to be used in the soundtrack for Home Alone 3 Home Alone 3); at the center of their rejection was Nike's use of sweatshop labor. "It took everybody in the room under 30 seconds to say no," said band member Alice Nutter.33 The political poet Martin Espada also got a call from one of Nike's smaller agencies, inviting him to take part in the "Nike Poetry Slam." If he accepted, he would be paid $2,500 and his poem would be read in a thirty-second commercial during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. Espada turned the agency down flat, offering up a host of reasons and ending with this one: "Ultimately, however, I am rejecting your offer as a protest against the brutal labor practices of the company. I will not associate myself with a company that engages in the well-documented exploitation of workers in sweatshops." The political poet Martin Espada also got a call from one of Nike's smaller agencies, inviting him to take part in the "Nike Poetry Slam." If he accepted, he would be paid $2,500 and his poem would be read in a thirty-second commercial during the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. Espada turned the agency down flat, offering up a host of reasons and ending with this one: "Ultimately, however, I am rejecting your offer as a protest against the brutal labor practices of the company. I will not associate myself with a company that engages in the well-documented exploitation of workers in sweatshops."34 The rudest awakening came with Wieden & Kennedy's cleverest of schemes: in May 1999, with labor scandals still hanging over the swoosh, the agency approached Ralph Nader-the consumer-rights movement's most powerful leader and a folk hero for his attacks on multinational corporations-and asked him to do a Nike ad. The idea was simple: Nader would get $25,000 for holding up an Air 120 sneaker and saying, "Another shameless attempt by Nike to sell shoes." A letter sent to Nader's office from Nike headquarters explained that "what we are asking is for Ralph, as the country's most prominent consumer advocate, to take a light-hearted jab at us. This is a very Nike-like thing to do in our ads." Nader, never known for being light of heart, would only say, "Look at the gall of these guys." The rudest awakening came with Wieden & Kennedy's cleverest of schemes: in May 1999, with labor scandals still hanging over the swoosh, the agency approached Ralph Nader-the consumer-rights movement's most powerful leader and a folk hero for his attacks on multinational corporations-and asked him to do a Nike ad. The idea was simple: Nader would get $25,000 for holding up an Air 120 sneaker and saying, "Another shameless attempt by Nike to sell shoes." A letter sent to Nader's office from Nike headquarters explained that "what we are asking is for Ralph, as the country's most prominent consumer advocate, to take a light-hearted jab at us. This is a very Nike-like thing to do in our ads." Nader, never known for being light of heart, would only say, "Look at the gall of these guys."35 It was indeed a very Nike-like thing to do. Ads co-opt out of reflex-they do so because consuming is what consumer culture does. Madison Avenue is generally not too picky about what it will swallow, it doesn't avoid poison directed against itself but rather, as Wieden & Kennedy have shown, chomps down on whatever it finds along the path as it looks for the new "edge." The scenario that it appears unwilling to consider is that its admen and adwomen, the perennial teenage followers, may finally be following their target market off a cliff.
Adbusting in the Thirties: "Become a Toucher Upper!"
Of course the ad industry has disarmed backlashes before-from women complaining of sexism, gays claiming invisibility, ethnic minorities tired of gross caricatures. And that's not all. In the 1950s and again in the 1970s, Western consumers became obsessed with the idea that they were being fooled by advertisers through the covert use of subliminal techniques. In 1957, Vance Packard published the runaway best-seller The Hidden Persuaders The Hidden Persuaders, which shocked Americans with allegations that social scientists were packing advertisements with messages invisible to the human eye. The issue re-emerged in 1973, when Wilson Bryan Key published Subliminal Seduction Subliminal Seduction, a study of the lascivious messages tucked away in ice cubes. Key was so transported by his discovery that he made such bold claims as "the subliminal promise to anyone buying Gilbey's gin is simply a good old-fashioned sexual orgy."36 But all these antimarketing spasms had one thing in common: they focused exclusively on the content and techniques of advertising. These critics didn't want to be subliminally manipulated-and they did did want African Americans in their cigarette ads and gays and lesbians selling jeans. Because the concerns were so specific, they were relatively easy for the ad world to address or absorb. For instance, the charge of hidden messages harbored in ice cubes, and other carefully cast shadows, spawned an irony-laden advertising subgenre that design historians Ellen Luton and J. Abbot Miller term "meta-subliminal"-ads that parody the charge that ads send secret messages. In 1990, Absolut Vodka launched the "Absolut Subliminal" campaign which showed a glass of vodka on the rocks with the word "absolut" clearly screened into the ice cubes. Seagram's and Tanqueray gin followed with their own subliminal in-jokes, as did the cast of want African Americans in their cigarette ads and gays and lesbians selling jeans. Because the concerns were so specific, they were relatively easy for the ad world to address or absorb. For instance, the charge of hidden messages harbored in ice cubes, and other carefully cast shadows, spawned an irony-laden advertising subgenre that design historians Ellen Luton and J. Abbot Miller term "meta-subliminal"-ads that parody the charge that ads send secret messages. In 1990, Absolut Vodka launched the "Absolut Subliminal" campaign which showed a glass of vodka on the rocks with the word "absolut" clearly screened into the ice cubes. Seagram's and Tanqueray gin followed with their own subliminal in-jokes, as did the cast of Saturday Night Live Saturday Night Live with the recurring character Subliminal Man. with the recurring character Subliminal Man.
The critiques of advertising that have traditionally come out of academe have been equally unthreatening, though for different reasons. Most such criticism focuses not on the effects of marketing on public space, cultural freedom and democracy, but rather on ads' persuasive powers over seemingly clueless people. For the most part, marketing theory concentrates on the way ads implant false desires in the consuming public-making us buy things that are bad for us, pollute the planet or impoverish our souls. "Advertising," as George Orwell once said, "is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket." When such is the theorist's opinion of the public, it is no wonder that there is little potential for redemption in most media criticism: this sorry populace will never be in possession of the critical tools it needs to formulate a political response to marketing mania and media synergy.
The future is even bleaker for those academics who use advertising criticism for a thinly veiled attack on "consumer culture." As James Twitchell writes in Adcult USA Adcult USA, most advertising criticism reeks of contempt for the people who "want-ugh!-things."37 Such a theory can never hope to form the intellectual foundation of an actual resistance movement against the branded life, since genuine political empowerment cannot be reconciled with a belief system that regards the public as a bunch of ad-fed cattle, held captive under commercial culture's hypnotic spell. What's the point of going through the trouble of trying to knock down the fence? Everyone knows the branded cows will just stand there looking dumb and chewing cud. Such a theory can never hope to form the intellectual foundation of an actual resistance movement against the branded life, since genuine political empowerment cannot be reconciled with a belief system that regards the public as a bunch of ad-fed cattle, held captive under commercial culture's hypnotic spell. What's the point of going through the trouble of trying to knock down the fence? Everyone knows the branded cows will just stand there looking dumb and chewing cud.
Interestingly, the last time that there was a successful attack on the practice of advertising-rather than a disagreement on its content or techniques-was during the Great Depression. In the 1930s the very idea of the happy, stable consumer society portrayed in advertising provoked a wave of resentment from the millions of Americans who found themselves on the outside of the dream of prosperity. An anti-advertising movement emerged that attacked ads not for faulty imagery but as the most public face of a deeply faulty economic system. People weren't incensed by the pictures in the ads, but rather by the cruelty of the obviously false promise that they represented-the lie of the American Dream that the happy consumer lifestyle was accessible to all. In the late twenties, and through the thirties, the frivolous promises of the ad world made for stomach-wrenching juxtapositions with the casualties of economic collapse, setting the stage for an unparalleled wave of consumer activism.
There was a short-lived magazine published in New York called The Ballyhoo The Ballyhoo, a sort of Depression-era Adbusters Adbusters. In the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash, The Ballyhoo The Ballyhoo arrived as a cynical new voice, viciously mocking the "creative psychiatry" of cigarette and mouthwash ads, as well as the outright quackery used to sell all kinds of potions and lotions. arrived as a cynical new voice, viciously mocking the "creative psychiatry" of cigarette and mouthwash ads, as well as the outright quackery used to sell all kinds of potions and lotions.38 The Ballyhoo The Ballyhoo was an instant success, reaching a circulation of more than 1.5 million in 1931. James Rorty, a 1920s Mad Ave adman turned revolutionary socialist, explained the new magazine's appeal: "Whereas the stock in trade of the ordinary mass or class consumer magazine is reader-confidence in advertising, the stock in trade of was an instant success, reaching a circulation of more than 1.5 million in 1931. James Rorty, a 1920s Mad Ave adman turned revolutionary socialist, explained the new magazine's appeal: "Whereas the stock in trade of the ordinary mass or class consumer magazine is reader-confidence in advertising, the stock in trade of Ballyhoo Ballyhoo was reader-disgust with advertising, and with high-pressure salesmanship in general.... was reader-disgust with advertising, and with high-pressure salesmanship in general.... Ballyhoo Ballyhoo, in turn, parasites on the grotesque, bloated body of advertising."39 Ballyhoo's culture jams include "Scramel" cigarettes ("they're so fresh they're insulting"), or the line of "69 different Zilch creams: "What the well greased girls will wear. Absolutely indispensable (Ask any dispensary)." The editors encouraged readers to move beyond their snickers and go out and bust bothersome billboards themselves. A fake ad for the "Twitch Toucher Upper School" shows a drawing of a woman who has just painted a mustache on a glamorous cigarette model. The caption reads, "Become a Toucher Upper!" and goes on to say: "If you long to mess up advertisement: if your heart cries out to paint pipes in the mouths of beautiful ladies, try this 10-second test NOW! Our graduates make their marks all over the world! Good Toucher Uppers are always in demand" (see image image). The magazine also created fake products to skewer the hypocrisy of the Hoover administration, like the "Lady Pipperal Bedsheet De Luxe"-made extra long to snugly fit on park benches when you become homeless. Or the "smilette"-two hooks that clamp on to either side of the mouth and force a happy expression. "Smile away the Depression! Smile us into Prosperity!"
The hard-core culture jammers of the era were not the Ballyhoo Ballyhoo humorists, however, but photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. These political documentarians latched on to the hypocrisies of ad campaigns such as the National Association of Manufacturers' "There's No Way Like the American Way" by highlighting the harsh visual contrasts between the ads and the surrounding landscape. A popular technique was photographing billboards with slogans like "World's Highest Standard of Living" in their actual habitat: hanging surreally over breadlines and tenements. The manic grinning models piled into the family sedan were clearly blind to the tattered masses and squalid conditions below. The photographers of the era also scrupulously documented the fragility of the capitalist system by picturing fallen businessmen holding up "Will Work for Food" signs in the shadow of looming Coke billboards and peeling hoardings. humorists, however, but photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White. These political documentarians latched on to the hypocrisies of ad campaigns such as the National Association of Manufacturers' "There's No Way Like the American Way" by highlighting the harsh visual contrasts between the ads and the surrounding landscape. A popular technique was photographing billboards with slogans like "World's Highest Standard of Living" in their actual habitat: hanging surreally over breadlines and tenements. The manic grinning models piled into the family sedan were clearly blind to the tattered masses and squalid conditions below. The photographers of the era also scrupulously documented the fragility of the capitalist system by picturing fallen businessmen holding up "Will Work for Food" signs in the shadow of looming Coke billboards and peeling hoardings.
In 1934, advertisers began to use self-parody to deal with the mounting criticism they faced, a tactic that some saw as proof of the industry's state of disrepair. "It is contended by the broadcasters, and doubtless also by the movie producers, that this burlesque sales promotion takes the curse out of sales talk, and this is probably true to a degree," writes Rorty of the self-mockery. "But the prevalence of the trend gives rise to certain ominous suspicions...When the burlesque comedian mounts the pulpit of the Church of Advertising, it may be legitimately suspected that the edifice is doomed; that it will shortly be torn down or converted to secular uses."40 Of course the edifice survived, though not unscathed. New Deal politicians, under pressure from a wide range of populist movements, imposed lasting reforms on the industry. The adbusters and social documentary photographers were part of a massive grassroots public revolt against big business that included the farmers' uprising against the proliferation of supermarket chains, the establishing of consumer purchasing cooperatives, the rapid expansion of a network of trade unions and a crackdown on garment industry sweatshops (which had seen the ranks of the two U.S. garment workers' unions swell from 40,000 in 1931 to more than 300,000 in 1933). Most of all, the early ad critics were intimately linked to the burgeoning consumer movement that had been catalyzed by One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics One Hundred Million Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics (1933), by F.J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet, and (1933), by F.J. Schlink and Arthur Kallet, and Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer Dollar Your Money's Worth: A Study in the Waste of the Consumer Dollar (1927), written by Stuart Chase and F.J. Schlink. These books presented exhaustive catalogs of the way regular folks were getting lied to, cheated, poisoned and ripped off by America's captains of industry. The authors founded Consumer Research (later splintered off into the Consumers Union), which served both as an independent product-testing laboratory and a political group that lobbied the government for better grading and labeling of products. The CR believed objective testing and truthful labeling could make marketing so irrelevant it would become obsolete. According to Chase and Schlink's logic, if consumers had access to careful scientific research that compared the relative merits of the products on the market, everyone would simply make measured, rational decisions about what to buy. The advertisers, of course, were beside themselves, and terrified of the following F.J. Schlink had built up on the college campuses and among the New York intelligentsia. As adman C.B. Larrabee noted in 1934, "Some forty or fifty thousand persons won't so much as buy a box of dog biscuits unless F.J. gives his 'O.K.'...obviously they think most advertisers are dishonest, double-dealing shysters." (1927), written by Stuart Chase and F.J. Schlink. These books presented exhaustive catalogs of the way regular folks were getting lied to, cheated, poisoned and ripped off by America's captains of industry. The authors founded Consumer Research (later splintered off into the Consumers Union), which served both as an independent product-testing laboratory and a political group that lobbied the government for better grading and labeling of products. The CR believed objective testing and truthful labeling could make marketing so irrelevant it would become obsolete. According to Chase and Schlink's logic, if consumers had access to careful scientific research that compared the relative merits of the products on the market, everyone would simply make measured, rational decisions about what to buy. The advertisers, of course, were beside themselves, and terrified of the following F.J. Schlink had built up on the college campuses and among the New York intelligentsia. As adman C.B. Larrabee noted in 1934, "Some forty or fifty thousand persons won't so much as buy a box of dog biscuits unless F.J. gives his 'O.K.'...obviously they think most advertisers are dishonest, double-dealing shysters."41 Schlink and Chase's rationalist utopia of Spock-like consumerism never came to fruition, but their lobbying did force governments around the world to move to outlaw blatantly false claims in advertising, to establish quality standards for consumer goods, and to become actively involved in the grading and labeling of them. And the Consumers Union Reports Consumers Union Reports is still the buyer's bible in America, though it long ago severed its ties to other social movements. is still the buyer's bible in America, though it long ago severed its ties to other social movements.
It is worth noting that the modern-day ad world's most extreme attempts to co-opt anticorporate rage have fed directly off images pioneered by the Depression-era documentary photographers. Diesel's Brand O is almost a direct replica of Margaret Bourke-White's "American Way" billboard series, both in style and composition. And when the Bank of Montreal ran an ad campaign in Canada in the late nineties, at the height of a popular backlash against soaring bank profits, it used images that recalled Walker Evans's photographs of 1930s businessmen holding up those "Will Work for Food" signs. The bank's campaign consisted of a series of grainy black-and-white photographs of ragged-looking people holding signs that asked, "Will I ever own my own home?" and "Are we going to be okay?" One sign simply read, "The little guy is on his own." The television spots blasted Depression-era gospel and ragtime over eerie industrial images of abandoned freight trains and dusty towns.
In other words, when the time came to fight fire with fire, the advertisers raced back to an era when they were never more loathed and only a world war could save them. It seems that this kind of psychic shock-a clothing company using the very images that have scarred the clothing industry; a bank trading on anti-bank rage-is the only technique left that will get the attention of us ad-resistant roaches. And this may well be true, from a marketing point of view, but there is also a larger context that reaches beyond imagery: Diesel produces many of its garments in Indonesia and other parts of the Far East, profiting from the very disparities illustrated in its clever Brand O ads. In fact, part of the edginess of the campaign is the clear sense that the company is flirting with a Nike-style public-relations meltdown. So far, the Diesel brand does not have a wide enough market reach to feel the full force of having its images slingshot back at its body corporate, but the bigger the company gets-and it is getting bigger every year-the more vulnerable it becomes.
That was the lesson in the responses to the Bank of Montreal's "Sign of the Times" campaign. The bank's use of powerful images of economic collapse at exactly the same time that it announced record profits of $986 million (up in 1998 to $1.3 billion) inspired a spontaneous wave of adbusting. The simple imagery of the campaign-people holding up angry signs-was easy for the bank's critics to replicate with parodies that skewered the bank's exorbitant service fees, its inaccessible loans officers and the closing of branches in low-income neighborhoods (after all, the bank's technique had been stolen from the activists in the first place). Everyone got in on the action: lone jammers, CBC television's satirical show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine, and independent video collectives.
Clearly, these ad campaigns are tapping into powerful emotions. But by playing on sentiments that are already directed against them-for example, public resentment at profiteering banks or widening economic disparities-the process of co-optation runs the very real risk of amplifying the backlash, not disarming it. Above all, imagery appropriation appears to radicalize culture jammers and other anticorporate activists-a "co-opt this!" stance develops that becomes even harder to diffuse. Eor instance, when Chrysler ran a campaign of pre-jammed Neon ads (the one that added a faux aerosol "p," changing "Hi" to "Hip"), it inspired the Billboard Liberation Front to go on its biggest tear in years. The BLF defaced dozens of Bay Area Meon billboards by further altering "Hip" to "Hype," and adding, for good measure, a skull and crossbones. "We can't sit by while these companies co-opt our means of communication," Jack Napier said. "Besides...they're tacky."
Perhaps the gravest miscalculation on the part of both markets and media is the insistence on seeing culture jamming solely as harmless satire, a game that exists in isolation from a genuine political movement or ideology. Certainly for some jammers, parody is perceived, in rather grandiose fashion, as a powerful end in itself. But for many more, as we will see in the next chapters, it is simply a new tool for packaging anticorporate salvos, one that is more effective than most at breaking through the media barrage. And as we will also see, adbusters are currently at work on many different fronts: the people scaling billboards are frequently the same ones who are organizing against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, staging protests on the streets of Geneva against the World Trade Organization and occupying banks to protest against the profits they are making from student debts. Adbusting is not an end in itself. It is simply a tool-one among many-that is being used, loaned and borrowed in a much broader political movement against the branded life.
Chapter Thirteen.
Reclaim the Streets I picture the reality in which we live in terms of military occupation. We are occupied the way the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Nazis during World War II, but this time by an army of marketeers. We have to reclaim our country from those who occupy it on behalf of their global masters.
-Ursula Franklin, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, 1998 This is not a protest. Repeat. This is not a protest. This is some kind of artistic expression. Over.
-A call that went out on Metro Toronto police radios on May 16, 1998, the date of the first Global Street Party It is one of the ironies of our age that now, when the street has become the hottest commodity in advertising culture, street culture itself is under siege. From New York to Vancouver to London, police crackdowns on graffiti, postering, panhandling, sidewalk art, squeegee kids, community gardening and food vendors are rapidly criminalizing everything that is truly street-level in the life of a city.
This tension between the commodification and criminalization of street culture has unfolded in a particularly dramatic manner in England. In the early to mid-nineties, as the ad world leaped to harness the sounds and imagery of the rave scene to sell cars, airlines, soft drinks and newspapers, the lawmakers in Britain made raves all but illegal, through the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. The act gave police far-reaching powers to seize sound equipment and deal harshly with ravers in any public confrontations.
To fight the Criminal Justice Act, the club scene (previously preoccupied with searching out the next all-night dance site) forged new alliances with more politicized subcultures that were also alarmed by these new police powers. Ravers got together with squatters facing eviction, with the so-called New Age travelers facing crackdowns on their nomadic lifestyle, and with radical "eco-warriors" fighting the paving-over of Britain's woodland areas by building tree houses and digging tunnels in the bulldozers' paths. A common theme began to emerge among these struggling countercultures: the right to uncolonized space-for homes, for trees, for gathering, for dancing. What sprang out of these cultural collisions among deejays, anti-corporate activists, political and New Age artists and radical ecologists may well be the most vibrant and fastest-growing political movement since Paris '68: Reclaim the Streets (RTS).
Since 1995, RTS has been hijacking busy streets, major intersections and even stretches of highway for spontaneous gatherings. In an instant, a crowd of seemingly impromptu partyers transforms a traffic artery into a surrealist playpen. Here's how it works. Like the location of the original raves, the RTS party's venue is kept secret until the day. Thousands gather at the designated meeting place, from which they depart en masse to a destination known only to a handful of organizers. Before the crowds arrive, a van rigged up with a powerful sound system is surreptitiously parked on the soon-to-be-reclaimed street. Next, some theatrical means of blocking traffic is devised-for example, two old cars deliberately crash into each other and a mock fight is staged between the drivers. Another technique is to plant twenty-foot scaffolding tripods in the middle of the roadway with a brave lone activist suspended high up top-the tripod poles prevent cars from passing but people can weave between them freely; and since to knock the tripod over would send the person on top crashing to the ground, the police have no recourse but to stand by and watch the events unfold. With traffic safely blocked, the roadway is declared a "street now open." Signs go up that say "Breathe," "Car Free," and "Reclaim Space." The RTS flag-a bolt of lightning on different colored backdrops-goes up and the sound system begins to blast everything from the latest electronic offerings to Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World."
Then seemingly out of nowhere comes the traveling carnival of RTSers: bikers, stilt walkers, ravers, drummers. At previous parties, jungle gyms have been set up in the middle of intersections, as well as giant sandboxes, swing sets, wading pools, couches, throw rugs and volleyball nets. Hundreds of Frisbees sail through the air, free food is circulated and the dancing begins-on cars, at bus stops, on roofs and near signposts. Organizers describe their road-napings as anything from the realization of "a collective daydream" to "a large-scale coincidence." Like adbusters, RTSers have transposed the language and tactics of radical ecology into the urban jungle, demanding un-commercialized space in the city as well as natural wilderness in the country or on the seas. In this spirit, the most theatrical RTS stunt occurred when 10,000 partyers took over London's M41, a six-lane highway. Two people dressed in elaborate carnival costumes sat thirty feet above the roadway, perched on scaffolding contraptions that were covered by huge hoop skirts (see image image). The police standing by had no idea that underneath the skirts were guerrilla gardeners with jackhammers, drilling holes in the highway and planting saplings in the asphalt. The RTSers...die-hard Situationist fans-had made their point: "Beneath the tarmac...a forest," a reference to the Paris '68 slogan, "Beneath the cobblestones...a beach."
The crowd followed us and the road turned from a traffic jam to a road rave with hundreds of people shouting and demanding clean air, public transport and bicycle lanes.-RTS E-mail report, Tel Aviv, Israel, May 16, 1998 The events take culture jamming's philosophy of reclaiming public space to another level. Rather than filling the space left by commerce with advertising parodies, the RTSers attempt to fill it with an alternative vision of what society might look like in the absence of commercial control.
The seeds of RTS's urban environmentalism were planted in 1993 on Claremont Road, a quiet London street slated to disappear under a new expressway. "The M11 Link Road," explains RTSer John Jordan, "will stretch from Wanstead to Hackney in East London. To build it, the Department of Transport had to knock down 350 houses, displace several thousand people, cut through one of London's last ancient woodlands and devastate a community with a six-lane-wide stretch of tarmac at the cost of 240 million pounds, apparently to save six minutes on a car journey."1 When the city ignored fierce local opposition to the road, a group of activist artists took it upon themselves to try to block the bulldozers by turning Claremont Road into a living sculptural fortress. They pulled sofas into the streets, hung TVs from tree branches, painted a giant chessboard in the middle of the road and put up spoof suburban development billboards in front of the houses slated for demolition: "Welcome to Claremont Road-Ideal Homes." The activists moved into chestnut trees, occupied construction cranes, blasted music and blew kisses at the cops and demolition workers below. The now empty houses were transformed-connected to each other through underground tunnels and filled with art installations. Outside, old cars were painted with slogans and zebra stripes and turned into flower boxes. The cars were not only made beautiful, they also made effective barricades, as did a hundred-foot scaffolding tower built through the roof of one of the homes. The tactic, Jordan explains, was not the use of art to achieve political ends but the transformation of art into a pragmatic political tool "both beautiful and functional." When the city ignored fierce local opposition to the road, a group of activist artists took it upon themselves to try to block the bulldozers by turning Claremont Road into a living sculptural fortress. They pulled sofas into the streets, hung TVs from tree branches, painted a giant chessboard in the middle of the road and put up spoof suburban development billboards in front of the houses slated for demolition: "Welcome to Claremont Road-Ideal Homes." The activists moved into chestnut trees, occupied construction cranes, blasted music and blew kisses at the cops and demolition workers below. The now empty houses were transformed-connected to each other through underground tunnels and filled with art installations. Outside, old cars were painted with slogans and zebra stripes and turned into flower boxes. The cars were not only made beautiful, they also made effective barricades, as did a hundred-foot scaffolding tower built through the roof of one of the homes. The tactic, Jordan explains, was not the use of art to achieve political ends but the transformation of art into a pragmatic political tool "both beautiful and functional."2 When Claremont Road was leveled in November 1994, it had become the most creative, celebratory, vibrantly living street in London. It was "a kind of temporary microcosm of a truly liberated, ecological culture," according to Jordan.3 By the time all the activists had been cherry-picked out of their tree houses and fortresses, the point of the action-that high-speed roads suck the life out of a city-could have had no more graphic or eloquent expression. By the time all the activists had been cherry-picked out of their tree houses and fortresses, the point of the action-that high-speed roads suck the life out of a city-could have had no more graphic or eloquent expression.
Though another group had used the same name some years earlier, the current incarnation of Reclaim the Streets was formed in May 1995, with the express purpose of turning what happened on Claremont Road into an airborne virus that could spread at any time, to any place in the city-a roving "temporary autonomous zone," to use a term coined by the American anarchist guru Hakim Bey. According to Jordan, the thinking was simple: "If we could no longer reclaim Claremont Road, we would reclaim the streets of London."4 Five hundred people showed up to the RTS party on Camden Street in May 1995 to dance to a bicycle-powered sound system, drums and whistles. With the Criminal Justice Act in full effect, the gathering caught the attention of the newly politicized rave scene and a key alliance was formed. At RTS's next event, three thousand people showed up to the party on Upper Street, Islington; this time they danced to electronic music blasting from two trucks equipped with club-quality sound systems.
The combination of rave and rage has proved contagious, spreading across Britain to Manchester, York, Oxford and Brighton, and in the largest single RTS event to date, drawing 20,000 people to Trafalgar Square in April 1997. By then, Reclaim the Street parties had gone international, popping up in cities as far away as Sydney, Helsinki and Tel Aviv. Each party is locally organized, but with the help of E-mail lists and linked Web sites, activists in different cities are able to read reports from events around the world, swap cop-dodging strategies, trade information on building effective roadblocks, and read each other's posters, press releases and flyers. Since video and digital cameras appear to be the accessories of choice at the street parties, RTSers also draw inspiration from watching footage of faraway parties, which is circulated through activist video networks, such as the Oxford-based Undercurrents, and uploaded onto several RTS Web sites.
Anarchists among the crowd took advantage of the opportunity to vent their fury on banks, jewelry shops and local branches of McDonald's. Windows were smashed, paint bombs hurled and anti-globalisation slogans graffitied.-RTS E-mail report, Geneva, Switzerland May 16, 1998 In many cities, the street parties have dovetailed with another explosive new international movement-the Critical Mass bicycle rides. The idea started in San Francisco in 1992 and began spreading to cities across North America, Europe and Australia at roughly the same time as RTS. Critical Mass bicycle riders also favor the rhetoric of large-scale coincidence: in dozens of cities, on the last Friday of every month, anywhere from seventeen to seven thousand cyclists gather at a designated intersection and go for a ride together. By force of their numbers, the bikers form a critical mass and the cars must yield to them. "We're not blocking traffic," the Critical Mass riders say, "we are the traffic." Since there's a fair amount of overlap between RTS partyers and Critical Mass riders, it has become a popular tactic for the sites of street parties to be cleared of traffic by "spontaneous" Critical Mass rides that sweep through the area just moments before the blockades are set up and the partyers arrive.
Perhaps in light of these connections, the mainstream media almost invariably describe RTS events as "anti-car protests." Most RTSers, however, insist that this is a profound oversimplification of their goals.5 The car is a symbol, they say-the most tangible manifestation of the loss of communal space, walkable streets and sites of free expression. Rather than simply opposing the use of automobiles, as Jordan says, "RTS has always tried to take the single issue of transportation and the car into a wider critique of society...to dream of reclaiming space for collective use, as commons." The car is a symbol, they say-the most tangible manifestation of the loss of communal space, walkable streets and sites of free expression. Rather than simply opposing the use of automobiles, as Jordan says, "RTS has always tried to take the single issue of transportation and the car into a wider critique of society...to dream of reclaiming space for collective use, as commons."6 To underline these wider connections, RTS organized one London street party in solidarity with striking London Underground workers. Another was a joint event with those darlings of British rock stars, soccer players and anarchists-the sacked Liverpool dock workers. Other actions have taken on the ecological and human rights records of Shell, BP and Mobil. To underline these wider connections, RTS organized one London street party in solidarity with striking London Underground workers. Another was a joint event with those darlings of British rock stars, soccer players and anarchists-the sacked Liverpool dock workers. Other actions have taken on the ecological and human rights records of Shell, BP and Mobil.
These coalitions make RTS extremely difficult to categorize. "Is a street party a political rally?" asks Jordan rhetorically. "A festival? A rave? Direct action? Or just a bloody good party?" In many ways, the parties have defied easy labeling: they camouflage identifiable leaders, and have no center or even a focal point. RTS parties "swirl," as Jordan says.
Playing Politics Not only is the confusion deliberate, but it is precisely this absence of rigidity that has helped RTS to capture the imagination of thousands of young people around the world. Since the days when Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies infused self-conscious absurdity into their "happenings," political protest had lapsed into a ritualized affair, following a fairly unimaginative grid of repetitive chants and scripted police confrontation. Pop, in the meantime, had become equally formulaic in its refusal to let the perceived earnestness of political conviction enter its ironic play space. Which is where RTS comes in. The deliberate culture clashes of the street parties mix the earnest predictability of politics with the amused irony of pop. For many people in their teens and twenties, this presents the first opportunity to reconcile being creatures of their Saturday-morning-cartoon childhoods with a genuine political concern for their communities and environment. RTS is just playful and ironic enough to finally make earnestness possible.
In many ways, Reclaim the Streets is the urban centerpiece of England's thriving do-it-yourself subculture. Exiled to the economic margins by decades of Tory rule, and given little reason to return by the right-of-center policies of Tony Blair's New Labour Party, a largely self-reliant infrastructure of food co-ops, illegal squats, independent media and free music festivals has emerged across the country. Spontaneous street parties are an extension of the DIY lifestyle, asserting as they do that people can make their own fun without asking any state's permission or relying on any corporation's largesse. At a street party, just showing up makes you both a participant and part of the entertainment.
The street party is also at odds with the way our culture tends to imagine freedom. Whether it's hippies dropping out to live in rural communes, or yuppies escaping the urban jungle in sport utility vehicles, freedom is usually about abandoning the claustrophobia of the city. Ereedom is Route 66, it's "On the Road." It's eco-travel. It's anywhere but here. RTS, on the other hand, doesn't write off the city or the present. It harnesses the urge for entertainment and raves (and its darker side-the desire to freak out and riot) and channels them into an act of civil disobedience that is also a festival. For a day, the longing for free space is not about escape but transformation of the here and now.
We visited the Virgin at the place of the cathedral, who certainly didn't expect us and therefore didn't join the dance. In spite of this we offered a very nice sunny show till later that night, past eleven o'clock, reclaiming the street for about five hours.
Of course, if you want to be really cynical, RTS is also flowery eco-poetry about vandalism. It's high-minded talk about blocking traffic. It's wildly dressed and painted kids screeching at extremely confused and possibly well-meaning cops about the tyranny of "car culture." And when RTS events go wrong-because only a handful of people show up, or the antihierarchy anarchist organizers are unable or unwilling to communicate with the crowd-that's exactly what the party becomes: some jerk demanding the right to sit in the middle of the street for a loony reason known only to him. But at their best, RTS actions have been too joyful and humane to dismiss, cracking the cynicism of many onlookers, from the hip British music press, which declared the party at Trafalgar Square "the best illegal rave or dance music party in history,"7 to one striking Liverpool docker who noted that "the others talk about doing something-this lot actually do it." to one striking Liverpool docker who noted that "the others talk about doing something-this lot actually do it."8 And, as with all successful radical movements, some voice concern that the mass appeal of RTS has made it too fashionable, that the subtle theory of "applying radical poetry to radical politics" is getting drowned out by the pounding beat and the mob mentality. In October 1997, Jordan told me that RTS was going through a process of rigorous re-examination. He claimed that the 20,000-strong Trafalgar Square party was not the sort of climax RTS had been moving toward. When the police tried to impound the van containing the sound system, protestors didn't cheekily blow kisses as hoped, they hurled bottles and rocks and four people were charged with attempted murder (the charges were later dropped). Despite the organizers' best efforts, RTS was spiraling into soccer hooliganism and, as one RTS spokesperson told The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph, when the organizers tried to regain control, some rioters turned against them. "I saw some of our people actually trying to stop yobbos who had got tanked up on beer and were mindlessly throwing bottles and rocks. A few of our contingent actually put themselves into the firing line and one was beaten up..."9 Such shades of gray, however, were lost on most in the British media who covered Trafalgar Square with headlines like "Riot Frenzy-Anarchist Thugs Bring Terror to London." Such shades of gray, however, were lost on most in the British media who covered Trafalgar Square with headlines like "Riot Frenzy-Anarchist Thugs Bring Terror to London."10 "The Resistance Will Be as Transnational as Capital"
After Trafalgar Square, Jordan says, it became clear that "it was too easy for the street party to be seen as just fun, just a party with a hint of political action.... If people think that turning up to a street party once a year, getting out of your head and dancing your heart out on a recaptured piece of public land is enough, then we are failing to reach our potential." The next task, he said, is to imagine a takeover bigger than just one street. "The street party is only a beginning, a taster of future possibilities. To date there have been 30 street parties all over the country. Imagine that growing to 100, imagine each one of those happening on the same day, imagine each one lasting for days on end and growing.... Imagine the street party growing roots...la fete permanente...."11 I admit that at the time I spoke to Jordan I was skeptical that this movement could pull off that level of coordination. At the best of times, Reclaim the Streets walks a delicate line, flirting openly with the urge to riot but attempting to flip it into a more constructive protest. The London RTSers say that one of the goals of the parties is to "visualize industrial collapse"-the challenge, then, is for participants to inspire one another enough to dance and plant trees in the rubble, rather than to douse it with gasoline and drop a Zippo. But shortly after our interview, a notice went out on a couple of activist E-mail lists, floating the idea of a coordinated day of simultaneous street parties around the world. Seven months later, the first-ever Global Street Party was under way. To make absolutely sure that the political underpinning of the event didn't get lost, the date chosen for the Global Street Party was May 16, 1998-the same day the G-8 leaders gathered for a summit in Birmingham, England, and two days before they would proceed to Geneva to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the World Trade Organization. With Indian farmers, landless Brazilian peasants, unemployed French, Italian and German workers and international human-rights groups planning simultaneous actions around the two summits, RTS took its place in a fledgling international grassroots movement against transnational corporations and their agenda of economic globalization. This was definitely not just about cars.
The police attack was so hard and brutal that even the Czech public was shocked...Sixty-four people were detained including 22 of those younger than 18 and 13 women. During the police action, innocent people (who were just walking around) were also beaten. All detainees were beaten, mistreated and humiliated until morning hours.-RTS E-mail report, Prague, Czech Republic, May 16, 1998 Though rarely reported as more than isolated traffic snares, thirty RTS events were successfully mounted around the world, in twenty different countries. On May 16, more than eight hundred people blocked a six-lane highway in Utrecht, the Netherlands, dancing for five hours. In Turku, Finland, two thousand partyers peacefully occupied one of the main bridges in the city. Almost a thousand Berliners held a rave at a downtown intersection and in Berkeley, California, seven hundred people played Twister on Telegraph Avenue. By far the most successful of the Global Street Parties was in Sydney, Australia, where an illegal political rally cum music festival went off without a hitch; between three and four thousand people "kidnaped" a road, setting up three stages for live concerts with bands and half a dozen deejays. There were no Levi's, Borders, Pepsi or Revlon sponsorships (the sort of backing that supposedly makes high-priced festivals like Lilith Fair "possible") but, somehow, Sydney's RTS managed to offer "three chai stalls, a food fund-raiser, a skateboard skate rail, a five terminal sidewalk Internet station, two sandstone sculptors, poets, fire twirlers, street gardeners...and loads of mayhem and frivolity."12 Next time it'll be bigger...-RTS E-mail report, Berlin, Germany, May 16, 1998 Police reaction to the Global Street Party varied wildly from city to city. In Sydney, the officers stood back in awe, asking only for the sound to be turned down as the party stretched into the evening. In Utrecht, the police were so friendly that "at one point," reports a local organizer, "they mingled with the crowd, sat on the pavement waiting for the sound system to arrive. When it finally arrived, they really assisted in getting the generator going." Not surprisingly, these were the exceptions. In Toronto, at the party I attended, the police officers let the event go on for an hour, then went into the crowd of four hundred partyers with open knives and (absurdly) began stabbing brightly colored balloons and energetically slashing streamers. As a result, the party degenerated into a series of incoherent cops-are-pigs skirmishes that led the six o'clock news. But Toronto's crackdown was nothing compared with what happened in other cities. Five thousand people danced on the streets of Geneva, but by midnight the party "had turned into a full scale riot. One car was set alight and thousands of police charged the main encampment, firing tear-gas into the crowd. The demonstrators smashed hundreds of windows, mainly banks and corporate offices, until 5 a.m., causing over half a million pounds in damage." With protestors anticipating the arrival of world leaders and trade officials for the WTO anniversary, the rioting continued for several days.13 In Prague, three thousand people showed up for the Global Street Party in Wenceslaus Square, where four sound systems were rigged up and twenty deejays were ready to play. Before long, however, a police car drove into the crowd at full speed; the vehicle was surrounded and overturned and once again, the rave became a riot. After organizers officially dissolved the event, three hundred people, mostly teens, marched through the streets of Prague, some of them stopping to hurl rocks and bottles through the plate-glass windows of McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets. More bottle throwing took place at the Berkeley, California, RTS, as well as several other inane activities including throwing a foam mattress into a bonfire on Telegraph Avenue (creating toxic fumes at an environmental protest-brilliant!) and smashing the window of a local independent bookstore (way to get those corporate bad guys). The event had been billed as a celebration of "art, love and rebellion" but police called it "a riot"-"the biggest in eight years."14 There were at least twenty-seven arrests in Cambridge, four in Toronto, four in Berkeley, three in Berlin, sixty-four in Prague, dozens in Brisbane and more than two hundred over the days of rioting in Geneva. There were at least twenty-seven arrests in Cambridge, four in Toronto, four in Berkeley, three in Berlin, sixty-four in Prague, dozens in Brisbane and more than two hundred over the days of rioting in Geneva.
Sorry for the screw-up but since only about ten of us turned up, we decided, after a walk around town with placards and a drummer, to bugger off to the beach for the rest of the afternoon.-RTS E-mail report, Darwin, Australia, May 16, 1998 In several key cities, the Global Street Party was most certainly not the "fete permanente" that John Jordan had envisioned. However, the immediate international response provoked by nothing more than a few E-mail notices proved that there is both the potential and the desire for a truly global protest against the loss of public space. If anything, the urge to reclaim that space from branded life speaks so directly to so many young people of different nationalities that its greatest liability is the very force of the emotions it inspires.
That emotion was in full sway on May 16 in Birmingham, headquarters of the Global Street Party. The eight most powerful politicians in the world were busy trading hockey jerseys, signing trade agreements and-one cringes-having their own global sing-along to "All You Need Is Love." Against that backdrop, eight thousand activists who had gathered from all over Britain gained control of a roundabout, hooked up a sound system, played street volleyball and recaptured the RTS spirit of celebration. As in other cities, there were confrontations with the police who surrounded the party with a line three officers deep. This time, however, creative absurdity won out, and instead of rocks and bottles, the weapon of choice was that increasingly popular piece of slapstick ammo: the custard pie. And a new banner-a huge red kite-was hoisted amid the tripods, signs and flags, bearing the names of all the cities where street parties were taking place simultaneously in twenty countries around the world.15 "The resistance," one sign said, "will be as transnational as capital." "The resistance," one sign said, "will be as transnational as capital."
RTS AGITPROP.
The privatization of public space in the form of the car continues the erosion of neighborhood and community that defines the metropolis. Road schemes, business "parks," shopping developments-all add up to the disintegration of community and the flattening of a locality. Everywhere becomes the same as everywhere else. Community becomes commodity-a shopping village, sedated and under constant surveillance. The desire for community is then fulfilled elsewhere, through spectacle, sold to us in simulated form. A TV soap "street" or "square" mimicking the area that concrete and capitalism are destroying. The real street, in this scenario, is sterile. A place to move through not to be in. It exists only as an aid to somewhere else-through a shop window, billboard or petrol tank.
-London RTS What I've noticed is that all of these events and actions had one thing in common: RECLAIMING. Whether we were reclaiming the road from cars, reclaiming buildings for squatters, reclaiming surplus food for the homeless, reclaiming campuses as a place for protest and theatre, reclaiming our voice from the deep dark depths of corporate media, or reclaiming our visual environment from billboards, we were always reclaiming. Taking back what should have been ours all along. Not "ours" as in "our club" or "our group," but ours as in the people. All the people. "Ours" as in "not the governments" and "not the corporations."...We want power given back to the people as a collective. We want to Reclaim the Streets.
-Toronto RTS
Chapter Fourteen.
Bad Mood Rising The New Anti-Corporate Activism The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses.
-Utah Phillips How do we tell Steve that his dad owns a sweatshop?!?
-Tori Spelling, as the character Donna on Beverly Hills 90210 Beverly Hills 90210, after discovering that her own line of designer clothing was being manufactured by immigrant women in an L.A. sweatshop, October 15, 1997 While the latter half of the 1990s has seen enormous growth in the brands' ubiquity, a parallel phenomenon has emerged on the margins: a network of environmental, labor and human-rights activists determined to expose the damage being done behind the slick veneer. Dozens of new organizations and publications have been founded for the sole purpose of "outing" corporations that are benefiting from repressive government policies around the globe. Older groups, previously focused on monitoring governments, have reconfigured their mandates so that their primary role is tracking violations committed by multinational corporations. As John Vidal, environmental editor of The Guardian The Guardian, puts it, "A lot of activists are attaching themselves leech-like onto the sides of the bodies corporate."
This leech-like attachment takes many forms, from the socially respectable to the near-terrorist. Since 1994, the Massachusetts-based Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy, for instance, has been developing policy alternatives designed to "contest the authority of corporations to govern." The Oxford-based Corporate Watch, meanwhile, focuses on researching-and helping others to research-corporate crime. (Not to be confused with the San Francisco-based Corporate Watch, which sprang up at about the same time with a nearly identical mission for the U.S.) JUSTICE. DO IT NIKE! is a group of scrappy Oregon activists devoted to haranguing Nike about its labor practices in its own backyard. The Yellow Pages, on the other hand, is an underground international cabal of hackers who have declared war on the computer networks of those corporations that have successfully lobbied to delink human rights from trade with China. "In effect, businessmen started dictating foreign policy," says Blondie Wong, director of Hong Kong Blondes, a group of Chinese pro-democracy hackers now living in exile. "By taking the side of profit over conscience, business has set our struggle back so far that they have become our oppressors too."1 Taking a distinctly lower-tech (some might say primitive) approach is Belgian Noel Godin and his global band of political pie slingers. Although politicians and movie stars have faced flying pies, the corporate sector has been the primary target: Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro, Chevron CEO Ken Derr, World Trade Organization director Renato Ruggiero have all been hit, as well as that architect of global free trade, Milton Friedman. "To their lies, we respond with pies," says Agent Blueberry, of the Biotic Baking Brigade (see image image).2 The fad got so out of hand that in May 1999, Tesco, one of the largest supermarket chains in England, conducted a series of tests on its pies to see which ones made for the best slinging. "We like to keep abreast of what the customers are doing, and that's why we have to do the testing," said company spokesperson Melodie Schuster. Her recommendation: "The custard tart gives total face coverage."3 Oh, and rest assured that none of the Tesco tarts contain any ingredients that have been genetically modified. The chain banned those from its products a month earlier-a response to a groundswell of anticorporate sentiment directed at Monsanto and the other agribusiness giants. Oh, and rest assured that none of the Tesco tarts contain any ingredients that have been genetically modified. The chain banned those from its products a month earlier-a response to a groundswell of anticorporate sentiment directed at Monsanto and the other agribusiness giants.
As we will see in a later chapter, Tesco made its decision to disassociate itself from genetically modified foods after a series of protests against "Frankenfoods" were held on its doorstep-part of an increasingly popular strategy among activist groups. Political rallies, which once wound their predictable course in front of government buildings and consulates, are now just as likely to take place in front of the stores of the corporate giants: outside Nike Town (see image image), Foot Locker, the Disney Store and Shell gas pumps; on the roof of the corporate headquarters of Monsanto or BP; through malls and around Gap outlets; and even at supermarkets.
In short, the triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track. This powerful form of activism reaches well beyond traditional trade unions. Its members are young and old; they come from elementary schools and college campuses suffering from branding fatigue and from church groups with large investment portfolios worried that corporations are behaving "sinfully." They are parents worried about their children's slavish devotion to "logo tribes," and they are also the political intelligentsia and social marketers who are more concerned with the quality of community life than with increased sales. In fact, by October 1997 there were so many disparate anticorporate protests going on around the world-against Nike, Shell, Disney, McDonald's and Monsanto-that Earth First! printed up an impromptu calendar with all the key dates and declared it the first annual End Corporate Dominance Month. About a month later, The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined "Hurry! There Are Only 27 More Protesting Days Until Christmas." ran a story headlined "Hurry! There Are Only 27 More Protesting Days Until Christmas."
"The Year of the Sweatshop"
In North America, much of this activity can be traced back to 199596, the period that Andrew Ross, director of American Studies at New York University, has called "The Year of the Sweatshop." For a time that year, North Americans couldn't turn on their televisions without hearing shameful stories about the exploitative labor practices behind the most popular, mass-marketed labels on the brandscape. In August 1995, the Gap's freshly scrubbed facade was further exfoliated to reveal a lawless factory in El Salvador where the manager responded to a union drive by firing 150 people and vowing that "blood will flow" if organizing continued.4 In May 1996, U.S. labor activists discovered that chat-show host Kathie Lee Gifford's eponymous line of sportswear (sold exclusively at Wal-Mart) was being stitched by a ghastly combination of child laborers in Honduras and illegal sweatshop workers in New York. At about the same time, Guess jeans, which had built its image with sultry black-and-white photographs of supermodel Claudia Schiffer, was in open warfare with the U.S. Department of Labor over a failure on the part of its California-based contractors to pay the minimum wage. Even Mickey Mouse was letting his sweatshops show after a Disney contractor in Haiti was caught making Pocahontas pajamas under such impoverished conditions that workers had to nourish their babies with sugar water. In May 1996, U.S. labor activists discovered that chat-show host Kathie Lee Gifford's eponymous line of sportswear (sold exclusively at Wal-Mart) was being stitched by a ghastly combination of child laborers in Honduras and illegal sweatshop workers in New York. At about the same time, Guess jeans, which had built its image with sultry black-and-white photographs of supermodel Claudia Schiffer, was in open warfare with the U.S. Department of Labor over a failure on the part of its California-based contractors to pay the minimum wage. Even Mickey Mouse was letting his sweatshops show after a Disney contractor in Haiti was caught making Pocahontas pajamas under such impoverished conditions that workers had to nourish their babies with sugar water.
More outrage flowed after NBC aired an investigation of Mattel and Disney just days before Christmas 1996. With the help of hidden cameras, the reporter showed that children in Indonesia and China were working in virtual slavery "so that children in America can put frilly dresses on America's favorite doll."5 In June 1996, In June 1996, Life Life magazine created more waves with photographs of Pakistani kids-looking shockingly young and paid as little as six cents an hour-hunched over soccer balls that bore the unmistakable Nike swoosh. But it wasn't just Nike. Adidas, Reebok, Umbro, Mitre and Brine were all manufacturing balls in Pakistan where an estimated 10,000 children worked in the industry, many of them sold as indentured slave laborers to their employers and branded like livestock. magazine created more waves with photographs of Pakistani kids-looking shockingly young and paid as little as six cents an hour-hunched over soccer balls that bore the unmistakable Nike swoosh. But it wasn't just Nike. Adidas, Reebok, Umbro, Mitre and Brine were all manufacturing balls in Pakistan where an estimated 10,000 children worked in the industry, many of them sold as indentured slave laborers to their employers and branded like livestock.6 The The Life Life images were so chilling that they galvanized parents, students and educators alike, many of whom made the photographs into placards and held them up in protest outside sporting-goods stores across the United States and Canada. images were so chilling that they galvanized parents, students and educators alike, many of whom made the photographs into placards and held them up in protest outside sporting-goods stores across the United States and Canada.
Running alongside all this was the story of Nike's sneakers. The Nike saga started before the Year of the Sweatshop began and has only grown stronger as other corporate controversies have slipped in and out of the public eye. Scandal has dogged Nike, with new revelations about factory conditions trailing the company's own global flight patterns. First came the reports of union crackdowns in South Korea; when the contractors fled and set up shop in Indonesia, the watchdogs followed, filing stories on starvation wages and military intimidation of workers. In March 1996, The New York Times The New York Times reported that after a wildcat strike at one Javanese factory, twenty-two workers were fired and one man who had been singled out as an organizer was locked in a room inside the factory and interrogated by soldiers for seven days. When Nike began moving production to Vietnam, the accusations moved too, with videotaped testimony of wage cheating and workers being beaten over the head with shoe uppers. When production moved decisively to China, the controversies over wages and the factories' "boot camp" style of management were right behind. reported that after a wildcat strike at one Javanese factory, twenty-two workers were fired and one man who had been singled out as an organizer was locked in a room inside the factory and interrogated by soldiers for seven days. When Nike began moving production to Vietnam, the accusations moved too, with videotaped testimony of wage cheating and workers being beaten over the head with shoe uppers. When production moved decisively to China, the controversies over wages and the factories' "boot camp" style of management were right behind.
It wasn't only the superbrands and their celebrity endorsers who felt the sting of the Year of the Sweatshop-clothing-store chains, big-box retailers and department stores also found themselves being held responsible for the conditions under which the toys and fashions on their racks were produced. The issue came home for America in August 1995, when an apartment complex in El Monte, California, was raided by the U.S. Department of Labor. Seventy-two Thai garment workers were being held in bonded slavery-some had been in the compound for as long as seven years. The factory owner was a minor player in the industry, but the clothes the women were sewing were sold by such retail giants as Target, Sears and Nordstrom.
It is Wal-Mart, however, that has taken it on the chin most frequently since sweatshops made their big nineties comeback. As the world's largest retailer Wal-Mart is the primary distributor of many of the branded goods attracting controversy: Kathie Lee Gifford's clothing line, Disney's Haitian-made pajamas, child-produced clothing from Bangladesh, sweatshop-produced toys and sports gear from Asia. Why, consumers demanded, if Wal-Mart had the power to lower prices, alter CD covers and influence magazine content, did it not also have the power to demand and enforce ethical labor standards from its suppliers?
Though the revelations came out in the press one at a time, the incidents coalesced to give us a rare look under the hood of branded America. Few liked what they saw. The unsettling combination of celebrated brand names and impoverished production conditions have turned Nike, Disney and Wal-Mart, among others, into powerful metaphors for a brutal new way of doing business. In a single image, the brand-name sweatshop tells the story of the obscene disparities of the global economy: corporate executives and celebrities raking in salaries so high they defy comprehension, billions of dollars spent on branding and advertising-all propped up by a system of shantytowns, squalid factories and the misery and trampled expectations of young women like the ones I met in Cavite, struggling to survive.
The Year of the Brand Attack Gradually, the Year of the Sweatshop turned into the Year of the Brand Attack. Having been introduced to the laborers behind their toys and clothing, shoppers met the people who grew their coffee at the local Starbucks; according to the U.S. Guatemalan Labor Education Project, some of the coffee frothed at the chain was cultivated with the use of child labor, unsafe pesticides and sub-subsistence wages. But it was in a courtroom in London, England, that the branded world was most thoroughly turned inside out. The highly publicized McLibel Trial began with McDonald's 1990 attempt to suppress a leaflet that accused the company of a host of abuses-from busting unions to depleting rain forests and littering the city streets. McDonald's denied the allegations and sued two London-based environmental activists for libel. The activists defended themselves by subjecting McDonald's to the corporate equivalent of a colonoscopy: the case lasted for seven years, and no infraction committed by the company was considered too minor to bring up in court or to post on the Internet.
The McLibel defendants' allegations about food safety dovetailed with another anticorporate movement taking off across Europe at the same time: the campaign against Monsanto and its bio-engineered agricultural crops. At the center of this dispute was Monsanto's refusal to inform consumers which of the foods they bought at the supermarket were the product of genetic engineering, setting off a wave of direct action that included the uprooting of Monsanto test crops.
As if that weren't enough, multinationals also found themselves under the microscope for their involvement with some of the world's most violent and repressive regimes: Burma, Indonesia, Colombia, Nigeria and Chinese-occupied Tibet. The issue was by no means new, but like the McDonald's and Monsanto campaigns, it came to a new prominence in the mid- to late nineties, with much of the activity focusing on the host of familiar brand names operating in Burma (now officially known as Myanmar). The bloody coup that brought the current military regime to power in Burma took place in 1988, but international awareness about brutal conditions inside the Asian country skyrocketed in 1995 when opposition leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was released from six years of house arrest. In a videotaped appeal smuggled out of the country, Suu Kyi condemned foreign investors for propping up the junta that had disregarded her party's overwhelming election victory in 1990. Companies operating in Burma, she stated, are directly or indirectly profiting from state-run slave-labor camps. "Foreign investors should realize there could be no economic growth and opportunities in Burma until there is agreement on the country's political future."7 The first response from human-rights activists was to lobby governments in North America, Europe and Scandinavia to impose trade sanctions on the Burmese government. When this failed to halt the flow of trade, they began targeting individual companies based in the activists' own home countries. In Denmark, the protests centered on the national brewer, Carlsberg, which had entered into a large contract to build a brewery in Burma. In Holland, the target was Heineken; in the U.S. and Canada, Liz Claiborne, Unocal, Disney, Pepsi and Ralph Lauren were in the crosshairs.
But the most significant landmark in the growth of anticorporate activism also came in 1995, when the world lost Ken Saro-Wiwa. The revered Nigerian writer and environmental leader was imprisoned by his country's oppressive regime for spearheading the Ogoni people's campaign against the devastating human and ecological effects of Royal Dutch/Shell's oil drilling in the Niger Delta. Human-rights groups rallied their governments to interfere, and some economic sanctions were imposed, but they had little effect. In November 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists were executed by a military government who had enriched themselves with Shell's oil money and through their own people's repression.
The Year of the Brand Attack stretched into two years, then three and now shows no sign of receding. In February 1999, a new report revealed that workers sewing Disney clothes in several Chinese factories were earning as little as 13.5 cents an hour and were forced to put in hours of overtime.8 In May 1999, ABC's In May 1999, ABC's 20/20 20/20 returned to the island of Saipan and brought back footage of young women locked inside sweatshop factories sewing for the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger and Polo Ralph Lauren. New revelations have also come out about violent clashes surrounding Chevron's drilling activities in the Niger Delta, and about Talisman Energy's plans to drill on contested territory in war-torn Sudan. returned to the island of Saipan and brought back footage of young women locked inside sweatshop factories sewing for the Gap, Tommy Hilfiger and Polo Ralph Lauren. New revelations have also come out about violent clashes surrounding Chevron's drilling activities in the Niger Delta, and about Talisman Energy's plans to drill on contested territory in war-torn Sudan.
The volume and the tenacity of public outrage directed against them has blindsided the corporations, in large part because the activities for which they were being condemned were not particularly new. McDonald's has never been a friend of the working poor; oil companies have a long and uninterrupted history of collaborating with repressive governments to extract valuable resources with little concern for the people who live near them; Nike has produced its sneakers in Asian sweatshops since the early seventies, and many of the clothing chains have been doing so for even longer. As The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal's Bob Ortega writes, labor unions had been collecting evidence of child laborers in Bangladesh making clothing sold at Wal-Mart since 1991, "But even though the unions had photos of children on the assembly lines...the accusations didn't get much play, in print or on television."9 Obviously much of the current focus on corporate abuses has to do with the tenacity of activists organizing around these issues. But since so many of the abuses being highlighted have been going on for decades, the current groundswell of resistance raises the question, Why now? Why did 199596 become the Year of the Sweatshop, turning quickly into the Years of the Brand Attack? Why not 1976, 1984, 1988, or, perhaps most relevant of all, why not 1993? It was in May of that year that the Kader toy factory in Bangkok burned to the ground. The building was a textbook firetrap, and when the piles of plush fabric ignited, the flames raced through the locked factory, killing 188 workers and injuring 469 more. Kader was the worst fire in industrial history, taking more lives than the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that killed 146 young workers in New York City in 1911. The parallels between Triangle and Kader-separated from each other by half a world, and eighty-two years of so-called development-are chilling: it was as if time hadn't moved forward, but had simply shifted locations.
At Triangle, as at Kader, the workers were almost all young women-some as young as fourteen, but most about nineteen. A report issued after the Triangle fire found that most of the dead were Italian and Russian immigrants, and almost half had come to America ahead of their families, seeking employment to subsidize the journeys of parents and siblings-so similar to the situation of the migrant peasant girls who perished at Kader. Like the Kader factory, the Triangle building was an accident waiting to happen, complete with fake fire exits, mounds of flammable material and doors that stayed locked all day to keep out the union organizers. Like the young women at Kader, many of the girls at Triangle wrapped themselves in cloth and jumped out the factory windows to their deaths-that way, they reasoned, their families would at least be able to identify their bodies. A New York World New York World reporter described the gruesome Triangle scene. "Suddenly something that looked like a bale of dark dress goods was hurled from an eighth-story window.... Then another seeming bundle of cloth came hurtling through the same window, but this time a breeze tossed open the cloth and from the crowd of five hundred persons came a cry of horror. The breeze disclosed the form of a girl shooting down to instant death." reporter described the gruesome Triangle scene. "Suddenly something that looked like a bale of dark dress goods was hurled from an eighth-story window.... Then another seeming bundle of cloth came hurtling through the same window, but this time a breeze tossed open the cloth and from the crowd of five hundred persons came a cry of horror. The breeze disclosed the form of a girl shooting down to instant death."10 The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire was the defining incident of the first anti-sweatshop movement in the United States. It catalyzed hundreds of thousands of workers into militancy and promoted a government response that eventually led to a fifty-four-hour weekly cap on overtime, no work past 9 p.m. and breakthroughs in health and fire regulations. Perhaps the most significant advance as a result of the fire was the introduction of what today would be called independent monitoring-the founding of the New York Factory Investigation Commission, which was authorized to stage surprise raids on suspected sweatshop operators.
So what did the 188 deaths in the Kader fire accomplish? Sadly, despite the fact that several international labor and development groups stepped in to denounce the unlawful factory operator, Kader didn't become a symbol of the desperate need for reform the way Triangle Shirtwaist had done. In One World, Ready or Not One World, Ready or Not, William Greider describes visiting Thailand and meeting victims and activists who had been fighting hard for retribution. "Some of them were under the impression that a worldwide boycott of Kader products was underway, organized by conscience-stricken Americans and Europeans. I had to inform them that the civilized world had barely noticed their tragedy.... A fire in Bangkok was like a typhoon in Bangladesh, an earthquake in Turkey." Little wonder, then, that only six months after Kader, another devastating sweatshop fire-this one at the Zhili toy factory in Shenzhen, China-took the lives of another 87 young workers.
At the time, it didn't seem to register with the international community that the toys the Kader women had been sewing were destined for the joyful aisles of Toys 'R' Us, to be wrapped and placed under Christmas trees in Europe, the United States and Canada. Many news reports failed even to mention the names of the brands being stitched in the factory. As Greider writes, "The Kader fire might have been more meaningful for Americans if they could have seen the thousands of soot-stained dolls that spilled from the wreckage, macabre litter scattered among the dead. Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson and the Muppets. Big Bird and other Sesame Street Sesame Street dolls. Playskool 'Water Pets.'" dolls. Playskool 'Water Pets.'"11 But in 1993 few people in the West-and certainly not in the Western media-were ready to make the connection between the burned-out building in Bangkok, buried on page six or ten of their newspapers, and the brand-name toys filling North American and European homes. That is no longer the case today. What happened in 1995 was a kind of collective "click" on the part of both the media and the public. The cumulative response to the horror stories of Chinese prison labor, the scenes of teenage girls being paid pennies in the Mexican maquiladoras, and burning in fires in Bangkok, has been a slow but noticeable shift in how people in the West see workers in the developing world. "They're getting our jobs" is giving way to a more humane reaction: "Our corporations are stealing their lives."
Much of this has to do with timing. Concerns expressed about child labor in India and Pakistan had remained at the level of a steady drone for more than a decade. But by 1995, the question of linking trade policies to human rights had been pushed so far off most governments' agendas that when thirteen-year-old Craig Kielburger deliberately disrupted Canadian prime minister Jean Chretien's trade mission to India to talk about the children who were working there in bonded slavery, the issue seemed urgent and exotic. Moreover, in North America, the total usurpation of foreign policy by the free-trade agenda invited disruption-the world was ready to listen.
The same is true of corporate crime in general. It may be nothing new for consumer goods to be produced under oppressive conditions, but what clearly is is new is the tremendously expanded role consumer-goods companies are playing in our culture. Anticorporate activism is on the rise because many of us feel the international brand-name connections that crisscross the globe more keenly than we ever have before-and we feel them precisely because we have never been as "branded" as we are today. new is the tremendously expanded role consumer-goods companies are playing in our culture. Anticorporate activism is on the rise because many of us feel the international brand-name connections that crisscross the globe more keenly than we ever have before-and we feel them precisely because we have never been as "branded" as we are today.
Branding, as we have seen, has taken a fairly straightforward relationship between buyer and seller and-through the quest to turn brands into media providers, arts producers, town squares and social philosophers-transformed it into something much more invasive and profound. For the past decade, multinationals like Nike, Microsoft and Starbucks have sought to become the chief communicators of all that is good and cherished in our culture: art, sports, community, connection, equality. But the more successful this project is, the more vulnerable these companies become: if brands are indeed intimately entangled with our culture and our identities, when they do wrong, their crimes are not dismissed as merely the misdemeanors of another corporation trying to make a buck. Instead, many of the people who inhabit their branded worlds feel complicit in their wrongs, both guilty and connected. But this connection is a volatile one: it is not the old-style loyalty between lifelong employee and corporate boss; rather, this is a connection more akin to the relationship of fan and celebrity: emotionally intense but shallow enough to turn on a dime.
This volatility is the unintended consequence of brand managers striving for unprecedented intimacy with the consumer while forging a more casual role with the workforce. In reaching brand-not-products nirvana, these companies have lost two things that may prove more precious in the long run: consumer detachment from their global activities and citizen investment in their economic success.