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Overview :
An eloquent call to arms to end the "branding" of America
and return to authentic culture.
America
is no longer a country but a multimillion-dollar brand,
says Kalle Lasn and his fellow "culture jammers."
The founder of Adbusters magazine, Lasn aims to stop the
branding of America by changing the way information flows;
the way institutions wield power; the way television stations
are run; and the way food, fashion, automobile, sports,
music, and culture industries set agendas. With a courageous
and compelling voice, Lasn deconstructs the advertising
culture and our fixation on icons and brand names. And he
shows how to organize resistance against the power trust
that manages the brands by "uncooling" consumer
items, by "demarketing" fashions and celebrities,
and by breaking the "media trance" of our TV-addicted
age.
A powerful manifesto by a
leading media activist, Culture Jam lays the foundations
for the most significant social movement of the early twenty-first
century -- a movement that can change the world and the way
we think and live.
Excerpts
From The Introduction
The book
you're holding carries a message that your first instinct
will be to distrust. That message is, We can change the
world. It's risky these days to make such a promise because
it sounds like one of those meaningless "awaken the inner giant"-type bromides: "If
you can dream it, you can do it," "the journey
of a thousand miles begins with a single step," and
so on.
But it's true. We're serious.
We call ourselves culture jammers. We're a loose global network
of media activists who see ourselves as the advance shock
troops of the most significant social movement of the next
twenty years. Our aim is to topple existing power structures
and forge major adjustments to the way we will live in the
twenty-first century. We believe culture jamming will become
to our era what civil rights was to the '60s, what feminism
was to the '70s, what environmental activism was to the '80s.
It will alter the way we live and think. It will change the
way information flows, the way institutions wield power,
the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile,
sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above
all, it will change the way we interact with the mass media
and the way in which meaning is produced in our society.
We are a very diverse tribe.
Our people range from born-again Lefties to Green entrepreneurs
to fundamentalist Christians who don't like what television
is doing to their kids; from punk anarchists to communications
professors to advertising executives searching for a new
role in life. Many of us are longtime activists who in the
midst of our best efforts suddenly felt spiritually winded.
For us feminism had run out of steam, the environmental movement
no longer exited, the fire no longer burned in the belly
of the Left, and youth rebellion was looking more and more
like an empty gesture inspired by Nike. We were losing.
We weren't
looking for it necessarily, but each one of us in our own
way has had a political awakening; a series of very personal "moments
of truth" about ourselves and how the world works. For
some, these insights have come on like powerful, secular
epiphanies. Sometimes they have been triggered by things
we overheard or read or stumbled upon. Sometimes they have
involved things we thought we knew but now, suddenly, felt.
These truths have left us shaken; it's no exaggeration to
say they have changed our lives. I'd like to share with you
some of the insights that have occurred to me over the last
decade or so.
America
is no longer a country. It's a multitrillion-dollar brand.
America TM is essentially no different from McDonald's,
Marlboro or General Motors. It's an image "sold"
not only to the citizens of the U.S.A., but to consumers
worldwide. the American brand is associated with catch-words
such as "democracy," "opportunity" and
"freedom." But like cigarettes that are sold as
symbols of vitality and youthful rebellion, the American
reality is very different from its brand image. America
TM has been subverted by corporate agendas. Its elected
officials bow before corporate power as a condition of their
survival in office. A collective sense of powerlessness
and disillusionment has set in. A deeply felt sense of betrayal
is brewing.
American
culture is no longer created by the people. Our stories,
once passed from one generation to the next by parents,
neighbors and teachers, are now told by distant corporations
with "something
to sell as well as to tell." Brands, products, fashions,
celebrities, entertainments -- the spectacles that surround
the production of culture -- are our culture now. Our role
is mostly to listen and watch -- and then, based on what
we have heard and see, to buy.
A free, authentic life is
no longer possible in America TM today. We are being manipulated
in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and
core values are under siege from media and cultural forces
too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven
itself into the very fabric of our existence. Most North
Americans now live designer lives -- sleep, eat, sit in car,
work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there's more than
a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle.
We ourselves have been branded. The human spirit of prideful
contrariness and fierce independence has been oddly tamed.
We have evolved into a smile-button culture. We wear the
trendiest fashions, drive the best cars industry can produce
and project an image of incredible affluence -- cool people
living life to the hilt. But behind that happy mask is a
face so ugly it invariable shocks the hell out of my friends
from developing countries who come to visit, expecting the
giddy Americana depicted on TV and finding instead a horror
show of disconnection and anomie.
Our mass
media dispense a kind of Huxleyan "soma." The
most powerful narcotic in the world is the promise of belonging.
And belonging is best achieved by conforming to the prescriptions
of America TM. In this way a perverted sense of cool takes
hold of the imaginations of our children. And thus a heavily
manipulative corporate ethos drives our culture. Cool is
indispensable -- and readily, endlessly dispensed. You
can get it on every corner (for the right price), though
it's highly addictive and its effects are short-lived.
If you're here for cool today, you'll almost certainly
be back for more tomorrow.
American cool is a global
pandemic. Communities, traditions, cultural heritages, sovereignties,
whole histories are being replaced by a barren American monoculture.
Living in Japan during its
period of sharpest transition to a western way of life, I
was astonished by the speed and force with which the American
brand took hold. I saw a culture with thousands of years
of tradition behind it vanquished in two generations. Suddenly,
high school girls were selling themselves after class for
$150 a trick so they'd have cash to buy American jeans and
handbags.
The Earth
can no longer support the lifestyle of the coolhunting
American-style consumer. We have sought, bought, spewed
and devoured too much, too fast, too brazenly, and now
we're about to pay. Economic "progress" is
killing the planet.
This
did not fully hit home for me until 1989, when a spate
of nightmarish environmental stories suddenly appeared
on the news: acid rain, dying seals in the North Sea, medical
waste washing up on New York beaches, garbage barges turned
away from port after port, a growing hole in the ozone
layer, and the discovery that the milk in American mothers'
breasts had four times the amount of DDT permitted in cow's
milk. In that year a critical mass of people saw the light
and became "environmentalists." We
were witnessing the specter of a whole planet heading for
ruin. To people like me for whom time had always seemed like
a constant, eternally moving train which people got on and,
seventy years later, got off, it was the end of innocence.
The premonition of ecocide -- planetary death -- became real
for the first time, and it terrified me. It still does.
Once
you experience even a few of these "moments of truth," things
can never be the same again. Your life veers off in strange
new directions. It's very exciting and a little scary.
Ideas blossom into obsessions. The imperative to live life
differently keeps building until the day it breaks through
the surface.
When it happened to me I
was in my neighborhood supermarket parking lot. I was plugging
a coin into a shopping cart when it suddenly occurred to
me just what a dope I was. Here I was putting in my quarter
for the privilege of spending money in a store I come to
every week but hate, a sterile chain store that rarely carries
any locally grown produce and always makes me stand in line
to pay. And when I was finished shopping I'd have to take
this cart back to the exact place their efficiency experts
have decreed, and slide it back in with all the other carts,
rehook it and push the red button to get my damn quarter
back.
A little internal fuse blew.
I stopped moving. I glanced around to make sure no one was
watching. Then I reached for that big bent coin I'd been
carrying in my pocket and I rammed it as hard as I could
into the coin slot. And then with the lucky Buddha charm
on my keyring I banged that coin in tight until it jammed.
I didn't stop to analyze whether this was ethical or not
-- I just let my anger flow. And then I walked away from
that supermarket and headed for the little fruit and vegetable
store down the road. I felt more alive than I had in months.
Much later I realized I had
stumbled on one of the great secrets of modern urban existence:
Honor your instincts. Let your anger out. When it wells up
suddenly from deep in your gut, don't suppress it -- channel
it, trust it, use it. Don't be so unthinkingly civil all
the time. When the system in grinding you down, unplug the
grinding wheel.
Once you start thinking and
acting this way, once you realize that consumer capitalism
is by its very nature unethical, and therefore it's not unethical
to jam it; once you understand that civil disobedience has
a long and honorable history that goes back to Gandhi, Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Henry David Thoreau; once you start
trusting yourself and relating to the world as an empowered
human being instead of a hapless consumer drone, something
remarkable happens. Your cynicism dissolves.
If cool
is the Huxleyan "soma" of
our time, then cynicism is its poisonous, paralytic side
effect. It is the dark side of cool. It's part of the reason
we watch too much TV and don't bother to vote. It's why we
get stuck year after year in tedious, meaningless jobs. It's
why we're bored so much of the time and become compulsive
shoppers.
To find a way out of cynicism
is to find a way out of the postmodern malaise. On the far
side of cynicism lies freedom. And the pursuit of freedom
is what revolutions -- and this book -- are all about.
The Situationists
saw this revolution coming long ago. the French philosophical
movement that inspired the 1968 Paris riots predicted what
might happen to a society driven by consumer capitalism.
The Situationists intuited how hard it would be to hang
on to one's core self in a "society of spectacle," a world of manufactured
desires and manipulated emotions. Guy Debord, the leader
of the Situationist movement said: "Revolution is not
showing life to people, but making them live." This
instinct to be free and unfettered is hard-wired into each
one of us. It's a drive as strong as sex or hunger, an irresistible
force that, once harnessed, is almost impossible to stop.
With that irresistible force
on our side, we will strike.
We will strike by smashing
the postmodern hall of mirrors and redefining what it means
to be alive. We will reframe the battle in the grandest terms.
The old political battles that have consumed humankind during
most of the twentieth century -- black versus white, Left
versus Right, male versus female -- will fade into the background.
The only battle still worth fighting and winning, the only
one that can set us free, is The People versus The Corporate
Cool Machine.
We will strike by unswooshing
America TM, by organizing resistance against the power trust
that owns and manages that brand. Like Marlboro and Nike,
America TM has splashed its logo everywhere. And now resistance
to that brand is about to begin on an unprecedented scale.
We will uncool its fashions and celebrities, its icons, signs
and spectacles. We will jam its image factory until the day
it comes to a sudden, shuddering halt. And then on the ruins
of the old consumer culture, we will build a new one with
a noncommercial heart and soul.
It will be an enormous culture
jam, a protracted war of ideas, ideologies and visions of
the future. It may take a generation or even more. But it
will be done. This book is dedicated to explaining how.
Think of Culture Jam: The
Uncooling of America TM as a rebranding strategy -- a social
demarketing campaign unfolding over four seasons.
In Part One, Autumn, we assess
the current damages. We begin with a journey through the
mental environment, which is sending out the same kind of
early warning signals that the physical environment did thirty-five
years ago. What does it mean when our lives and culture are
no longer shaped by nature, but by an electronic mass media
environment of our own creation?
In Part Two, Winter, we rough
out the problem. America, and much of the rest of world now,
is caught in a media-consumer trance. A numbing sense of
commercial artificiality pervades our postmodern era. Can
spontaneity and authenticity be restored?
In Part Three, Spring, we
explore possibilities for renewal. Has the wild American
spirit been tamed? Is an oppositional culture still possible?
Can we launch another revolution?
In Part Four, Summer, we
catch a glimpse of what could happen if the American revolutionary
impulse reignites.
If it
does nothing else, I hope this book gives you pause. Wherever
you are, whatever you're doing, I hope it serves as what
the Situationists called a détournement -- a perspective-jarring
turnabout in your everyday life.
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Reviews
The second American Revolution is under way and Kalle Lasn
is one of its Tom Paines.
Vicki Robin, co-author of Your Money Or Your Life
A brilliant and essential manual for our species.
David C. Korten, author of The Post-Corporate World: Life After
Capitalism
This is the culture jammer's call to reverse
the suicidal consumer binges while there is still
time.
George Gerbner, founder of the Cultural Environment Movement
Kalle Lasn is challenging the mental stranglehold of advertising
culture.
Polly Ghazi, Resurgence magazine
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About The Author
Kalle Lasn is an internationally known, award-winning documentarist.
He is publisher of Adbusters magazine and founder of the Adbusters
Media Foundation and Powershift Advertising Agency. Lasn has
dedicated himself to launching social marketing campaigns such
as Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week and to fighting legal
campaigns for the right to access the public airwaves. He lives
in Vancouver, Canada.
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