>But the big C is definitely on target about the superlative class
>consciousness of the US business world. Those guys are extremely
>smart and capable when it comes to running rings around workers.
>Just thinking about it depresses me. OTOH, they may be too smart for
>their britches -- I'm sure they are overlooking a few factors which
>will eventually do them in; I just hope we find out what those
>factors are before they do.
Speaking of which...
http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2004/04/04/1081017033680.html
In this resistance movement, literacy is the weapon
Sydney Morning Herald April 5 2004
The new voices of popular protest are too clever to simply storm the barricades, writes Milissa Deitz.
Casey Neistat, a New York multimedia artist, was the first to draw attention to the fact that the Apple iPod's "unreplaceable" battery had a life far shorter than most users expected. He has since been joined by 11 British MPs and five class actions in California, and his protest is likely to encourage more unhappy iPod owners to take up the cause. Neistat and his brother spray-painted "iPod's unreplaceable battery lasts only 18 months" across iPod billboards in Manhattan and then created http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com, which shows a film of the brothers spray-painting the graffiti.
Neistat's work would, no doubt, be admired by a young man called Mickie Quick. Not long after the Tampa crisis, when many refugees were sent to the island of Nauru to await their fate, the sight of a "pedestrian refuge" street sign stopped Quick in his tracks. The signs depict the simple silhouette of a taller person leading a smaller person by the arm. Quick designed a graphic of an M-16 machine gun and a letter E, and made photocopies of them. He then visited as many of the signs as he could and pasted the gun onto the hands of the taller person, so it looked as if they were forcibly leading the smaller person, and added the letter "e" to the word refuge so the sign read "refugee island". His handiwork was so precise that a few altered signs managed to stay that way for months.
Whether these two recognise their protests as such, their desire to challenge the authority of appearances fits into the ethos of a growing social movement sometimes known as culture jamming, or more often by the unfortunate label of anti-globalisation. I say unfortunate because its advocates are part of globalisation, not anti-globalisation. The existence of this group of hackers, graffiti artists, satirists and middle-aged parents, students, concerned citizens and workers demonstrates that capitalism contains the seeds of resistance. And it is the globalisation of information and image-making technology that, in many ways, gives culture jamming such potential for success.
What arguably began as billboard alteration has become a host of activities under the broader term of media activism. This type of protest relies on media, cultural and often technological literacy, and is a product of the Information Age.
As the Australian media studies academic Graham Meikle says, "An event might call for making a documentary, making a website, making an A4 newsletter, or making a phone call".
Baby boomers may bang on about how kids these days don't get out and protest like they used to, but the fact is that many culture jammers are slipping under the radar.
If companies aren't worried by what they can't see, they should be - this generation is much more media savvy than their parents, and their children will probably be more so again.
Today's activists understand that if you have a problem with, say, Nike's use of sweatshop labour, you don't burn down the factory, you go after the heart and soul of the company. And sick of being portrayed as loonies by the mainstream media, many advocates have bypassed traditional media altogether.
For instance, the S11 protesters who took on the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in 2000 used alternative media to publicise an alternative interpretation of the protests, and to gain advance publicity in Australia and overseas. In one example, one group hacked into the official Nike website and managed to redirect browsers to the S11 alliance website, which received 900,000 hits in the following 19 hours.
Culture jamming is not about vague notions of alternativeness battling against the mainstream. It has to do with the issues that Naomi Klein first talked about in No Logo - loss of public space, corporate censorship and unethical labour practices.
When explaining why such a phenomenon exists, Kalle Lasn, the publisher of Adbusters magazine, says that people are waking up to the fact that the fight of the future is not about race, gender, or left or right - it is about culture.
The use of satire, humour, graffiti, street theatre and performance art in politics is, of course, not new, and the US media studies theorist John Dowling has noted culture jamming's interaction with movements of resistance. What is new is the way in which activists have chosen to protest against what they see as self-serving institutions - government, big business and mainstream media.
What is also new is the desire to aggravate rather than overthrow the status quo - if the movement has one strategy, it is for a complementary existence. It's also about helping people realise you are not what you buy.
Milissa Deitz is completing a PhD in media studies at the University of Sydney.