- Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs
John Cole
Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the
Empire of Signs
I. The Empire of Signs
"My fellow Americans," exhorted John F. Kennedy,
"haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your
television screen?"
Of course, it wasn't actually Kennedy, but an actor
in "Media Burn," a spectacle staged in 1975 by the
performance art collective Ant Farm. Speaking from a
dais, "Kennedy" held forth on America's addiction to
the plug-in drug, declaring, "Mass media monopolies
control people by their control of information." On
cue, an assistant doused a wall of TV sets with
kerosene and flicked a match at the nearest console.
An appreciative roar went up from the crowd as the
televisions exploded into snapping flames and roiling
smoke.
Minutes later, a customized 1959 Cadillac hurtled
through the fiery wall with a shuddering crunch and
ground to a halt, surrounded by the smashed, blackened
carcasses of televisions. Here and there, some sets
still burned; one by one, their picture tubes
imploded, to the onlookers' delight. A postcard
reproduction of the event's pyrotechnic climax,
printed on the occasion of the its tenth anniversary,
bears a droll poem:
Modern alert
plague is here
burn your TV
exterminate fear
Image breakers
smashing TV
American heroes
burn to be free
In "Media Burn," Ant Farm indulged publicly in the
guilty pleasure of kicking a hole in the cathode-ray
tube. Now, almost two decades later, TV's cyclopean
eye peers into every corner of the cultural arena, and
the desire to blind it is as strong as ever. "Media
Burn" materializes the wish-fulfillment dream of a
consumer democracy that yearns, in its hollow heart
and empty head, for a belief system loftier than the
"family values" promised by a Volvo ad campaign,
discourse more elevated than that offered by the shark
tank feeding-frenzy of The McLaughlin Hour.
It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are
intimately and inextricably bound up in the TV
experience. Ninety-eight percent of all American
households -- more than have indoor plumbing -- have
at least one television, which is on seven hours a
day, on the average. Dwindling funds for public
schools and libraries, counterpointed by the
skyrocketing sales of VCRs and electronic games, have
given rise to a culture of "aliteracy," defined by
Roger Cohen as "the rejection of books by children and
young adults who know how to read but choose not to."
The drear truth that two thirds of Americans get "most
of their information" from television is hardly a
revelation.
Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the
exchange value of such information:
We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that
there has been an information 'explosion,' an
information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow
sense this is the case, in many important ways just
the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep
ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have
always possessed about who we are and where we live
seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of
missing information.
The effects of television are most deleterious in the
realms of journalism and politics; in both spheres, TV
has reduced discourse to photo ops and sound bites,
asserting the hegemony of image over language, emotion
over intellect. These developments are bodied forth in
Ronald Reagan, a TV conjuration who for eight years
held the news media, and thus the American public,
spellbound. As Mark Hertsgaard points out, the
President's media-savvy handlers were able to reduce
the fourth estate, which likes to think of itself as
an unblinking watchdog, to a fawning lapdog: Deaver,
Gergen and their colleagues effectively rewrote the
rules of presidential image-making. On the basis of a
sophisticated analysis of the American news media --
how it worked, which buttons to push when, what
techniques had and had not worked for previous
administrations -- they introduced a new model for
packaging the nation's top politician and using the
press to sell him to the American public. Their
objective was not simply to tame the press but to
transform it into an unwitting mouthpiece of the
government.
During the Reagan years, America was transformed into
a TV democracy whose prime directive is social control
through the fabrication and manipulation of images.
"We [the Reagan campaign staff] tried to create the
most entertaining, visually attractive scene to fill
that box, so that the cameras from the networks would
have to use it," explained former Reagan advisor
Michael Deaver. "It would be so good that they'd say,
'Boy, this is going to make our show tonight.' [W]e
became Hollywood producers."
The conversion of American society into a virtual
reality was lamentably evident in the Persian Gulf
War, a made-for-TV miniseries with piggybacked
merchandising (T-shirts, baseball caps, Saddam toilet
paper, Original Desert Shield Condoms) and gushy,
Entertainment Tonight-style hype from a cheerleading
media. When filmmaker Jon Alpert, under contract to
NBC, brought back stomach-churning footage of Iraq
under U.S. bombardment, the network -- which is owned
by one of the world's largest arms manufacturers,
General Electric -- fired Alpert and refused to air
the film. Not that Alpert's film would have roused the
body politic: Throughout the war, the American people
demanded the right not to know. A poll cited in The
New York Times was particularly distressing: "Given a
choice between increasing military control over
information or leaving it to news organizations to
make most decisions about reporting on the war, 57 per
cent of those responding said they would favor greater
military control."
During the war's first weeks, as home front news
organizations aided Pentagon spin control by
maintaining a near-total blackout on coverage of
protest marches, Deaver was giddy with enthusiasm. "If
you were going to hire a public relations firm to do
the media relations for an international event," he
bubbled, "it couldn't be done any better than this is
being done." In fact, a P.R. firm, Hill & Knowlton,
was hired; it orchestrated the congressional testimony
of the distraught young Kuwaiti woman whose horror
stories about babies ripped from incubators and left
"on the cold floor to die" by Iraqi soldiers was
highly effective in mobilizing public support for the
war. Her testimony was never substantiated, and her
identity -- she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to the U.S. -- was concealed, but why
niggle over details? "Formulated like a World War II
movie, the Gulf War even ended like a World War II
movie," wrote Neal Gabler, "with the troops marching
triumphantly down Broadway or Main Street, bathed in
the gratitude of their fellow Americans while the
final credits rolled."
After the yellow ribbons were taken down, however, a
creeping disaffection remained. A slowly-spreading
rancor at the televisual Weltanschauung, it is with us
still, exacerbated by the prattle of talk show hosts,
anchorclones, and the Teen Talk Barbie advertised on
Saturday mornings whose "four fun phrases" include "I
love shopping" and "Meet me at the mall." Mark Crispin
Miller neatly sums TV's place in our society:
Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it.
This is the open secret of TV today. Its only
champions are its own executives, the advertisers who
exploit it, and a compromised network of academic
boosters. Otherwise, TV has no spontaneous defenders,
because there is almost nothing in it to defend.
The rage and frustration of the disempowered viewer
exorcised in "Media Burn" bubbles up, unexpectedly, in
"57 Channels (And Nothin' On)", Bruce Springsteen's
Scorsese-esque tale of a man unhinged by the welter of
meaningless information that assails him from every
channel. Springsteen sings: "So I bought a .44 magnum
it was solid steel cast/ And in the blessed name of
Elvis well I just let it blast/ 'Til my TV lay in
pieces there at my feet/ And they busted me for
disturbin' the almighty peace."
Significantly, the video for "57 Channels"
incorporates footage of a white Cadillac on a
collision course with a wall of flaming TV sets, in
obvious homage to "Media Burn." The ritual destruction
of the TV set, endlessly iterated in American mass
culture, can be seen as a retaliatory gesture by an
audience that has begun to bridle, if only
intuitively, at the suggestion that "power" resides in
the remote control unit, that "freedom of choice"
refers to the ever-greater options offered around the
dial. This techno-voodoo rite constitutes
the symbolic obliteration of a one-way information
pipeline that only transmits, never receives. It is an
act of sympathetic magic performed in the name of all
who are obliged to peer at the world through peepholes
owned by multinational conglomerates for whom the
profit margin is the bottom line. "To the eye of the
consumer," notes Ben Bagdikian,
the global media oligopoly is not
visible...Newsstands still display rows of newspapers
and magazines, in a dazzling array of colors and
subjects...Throughout the world, broadcast and cable
channels continue to multiply, as do video cassettes
and music recordings. But...if this bright
kaleidoscope suddenly disappeared and was replaced by
the corporate colophons of those who own this output,
the collage would go gray with the names of the few
multinationals that now command the field.
In his watershed work, The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian
reports that the number of transnational media giants
has dropped to 23 and is rapidly shrinking. Following
another vector, Herbert Schiller considers the
interlocked issues of privatized information and
limited access:
The commercialization of information, its private
acquisition and sale, has become a major industry.
While more material than ever before, in formats
created for special use, is available at a price, free
public information supported by general taxation is
attacked by the private sector as an unacceptable form
of subsidy...An individual's ability to know the
actual circumstances of national and international
existence has progressively diminished.
Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon level another,
equally disturbing charge:
In an era of network news cutbacks and staff layoffs,
many reporters are reluctant to pursue stories they
know will upset management. "People are more careful
now," remarked a former NBC news producer, "because
this whole notion of freedom of the press becomes a
contradiction when the people who own the media are
the same people who need to be reported on."
Corporate ownership of the newsmedia, the subsumption
of an ever-larger number of publishing companies and
television networks into an ever-smaller number of
multinationals, and the increased privatization of
truth by an information-rich, technocratic elite are
not newly-risen issues. More recent is the notion that
the public mind is being colonized by corporate
phantasms -- wraithlike images of power and desire
that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of
Neal Gabler:
Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the
theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the
genuine and the spontaneous until there is no
distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact,
one could argue that the theatricalization of American
life is the major cultural transformation of this
century.
And Marshall Blonsky:
We can no longer do anything without wanting to see
it immediately on video...There is never any longer an
event or a person who acts for himself, in himself.
The direction of events and of people is to be
reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of
television. [T]oday the referent disappears. In
circulation are images. Only images.
The territory demarcated by Gabler and Blonsky, lush
with fictions yet strangely barren, has been mapped in
detail by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his
landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra,"
Baudrillard put forth the notion that we inhabit a
"hyperreality," a hall of media mirrors in which
reality has been lost in an infinity of reflections.
We "experience" events, first and foremost, as
electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many
times removed, he maintains; originals, invariably
compared to their digitally-enhanced representations,
inevitably fall short. In the "desert of the real,"
asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases and are
more alluring to the thirsty eye. Moreover, he
argues, signs that once pointed toward distant
realities now refer only to themselves. Disneyland's
Main Street, U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic,
turn-of-the-century burg that exists only in Norman
Rockwell paintings and MGM backlots, is a textbook
example of self-referential simulation, a painstaking
replica of something that never was. "These would be
the successive phases of the image," writes
Baudrillard, betraying an almost necrophiliac relish
as he contemplates the decomposition of
culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the
reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a
basic reality; it masks the absence of a basic
reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatever:
it is its own pure simulacrum."
Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory
capitalism has been superseded by an information
economy characterized by the reduction of labor to the
manipulation, on computers, of symbols that stand in
for the manufacturing process. The engines of
industrial production have slowed, yielding to a
phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible
commodities -- Hollywood blockbusters, television
sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles, buzzwords, images,
one-minute megatrends, financial transactions
flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are
Nintendo wars, fought with camera-equipped smart bombs
that marry cinema and weaponry in a television that
kills. Futurologists predict that the flagship
technology of the coming century will be "virtual
reality," a computer-based system that immerses users
wearing headgear wired for sight and sound in
computer-animated worlds. In virtual reality, the
television swallows the viewer, headfirst.
II. Culture Jamming
Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with
shadows? In other words, what shape does an engaged
politics assume in an empire of signs?
The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological
guerrilla warfare" imagined by Umberto Eco. "[T]he
receiver of the message seems to have a residual
freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I
am proposing an action to urge the audience to control
the message and its multiple possibilities of
interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne medium can be
employed to communicate a series of opinions on
another medium...The universe of Technological
Communication would then be patrolled by groups of
communications guerrillas, who would restore a
critical dimension to passive reception."
Eco assumes, a priori, the radical politics of visual
literacy, an idea eloquently argued by Stuart Ewen, a
critic of consumer culture. "We live at a time when
the image has become the predominant mode of public
address, eclipsing all other forms in the structuring
of meaning," asserts Ewen. "Yet little in our
education prepares us to make sense of the rhetoric,
historical development or social implications of the
images within our lives." In a society of heat, light
and electronic poltergeists -- an eerie otherworld of
"illimitable vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss
and smoothness of material things" -- the desperate
project of reconstructing meaning, or at least
reclaiming that notion from marketing departments and
P.R. firms, requires visually-literate ghostbusters.
Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB
slang for the illegal practice of interrupting radio
broadcasts or conversations between fellow hams with
lip farts, obscenities, and other equally jejune
hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed
against an ever more intrusive, instrumental
technoculture whose operant mode is the manufacture of
consent through the manipulation of symbols.
The term "cultural jamming" was first used by the
collage band Negativland to describe billboard
alteration and other forms of media sabotage. On
Jamcon '84, a mock-serious bandmember observes, "As
awareness of how the media environment we occupy
affects and directs our inner life grows, some
resist...The skillfully reworked billboard...directs
the public viewer to a consideration of the original
corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer
is the world at large."
Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics,
culture jammers, like Eco's "communications
guerrillas," introduce noise into the signal as it
passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging
idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding
on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and
other media artifacts with subversive meanings;
simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their
seductions impotent. Jammers offer irrefutable
evidence that the right has no copyright on war waged
with incantations and simulations. And, like Ewen's
cultural cryptographers, they refuse the role of
passive shoppers, renewing the notion of a public
discourse.
Finally, and just as importantly, culture jammers are
Groucho Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in
the joyful demolition of oppressive ideologies. As the
inveterate prankster and former Dead Kennedy singer
Jello Biafra once observed, "There's a big difference
between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and
'creative crime' as a form of expression...Creative
crime is...uplifting to the soul...What better way to
survive our anthill society than by abusing the very
mass media that sedates the public?...A prank a day
keeps the dog leash away!"
Jamming is part of a historical continuum that
includes Russian samizdat (underground publishing in
defiance of official censorship); the anti-fascist
photomontages of John Heartfield; Situationist
detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in Lipstick
Traces, as "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from
their contexts and their diversion into contexts of
one's own devise"); the underground journalism of '60s
radicals such as Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie
Hoffman; Yippie street theater such as the celebrated
attempt to levitate the Pentagon; parody religions
such as the Dallas-based Church of the Subgenius;
workplace sabotage of the sort documented by Processed
World, a magazine for disaffected data entry drones;
the ecopolitical monkeywrenching of Earth First!; the
random acts of Artaudian cruelty that radical theorist
Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism" ("weird dancing in
all-night computer banking lobbies...bizarre alien
artifacts strewn in State Parks"); the insurgent use
of the "cut-up" collage technique proposed by William
Burroughs in "Electronic Revolution" ("The control of
the mass media depends on laying down lines of
association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass
media with total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage
(the refunctioning, by societal "outsiders," of
symbols associated with the dominant culture, as in
the appropriation of corporate attire and Vogue model
poses by poor, gay, and largely nonwhite drag queens).
An elastic category, culture jamming accommodates a
multitude of subcultural practices. Outlaw computer
hacking with the intent of exposing institutional or
corporate wrongdoing is one example; "slashing," or
textual poaching, is another. (The term "slashing"
derives from the pornographic "K/S" -- short for
"Kirk/Spock" -- stories written by female Star Trek
fans and published in underground fanzines. Spun from
the perceived homoerotic subtext in Star Trek
narratives, K/S, or "slash," tales are often animated
by feminist impulses. I have appropriated the term for
general use, applying it to any form of jamming in
which tales told for mass consumption are perversely
reworked.) Transmission jamming; pirate TV and radio
broadcasting; and camcorder countersurveillance (in
which low-cost consumer technologies are used by DIY
muckrakers to document police brutality or
governmental corruption) are potential modus operandi
for the culture jammer. So, too, is media activism
such as the cheery immolation of a mound of television
sets in front of CBS's Manhattan offices -- part of a
protest against media bias staged by FAIR (Fairness
and Accuracy In Reporting) during the Gulf War -- and
"media-wrenching" such as ACT UP's disruption of The
MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour in protest of infrequent AIDS
coverage. A somewhat more conventional strain of
culture jamming is mediawatch projects such as Paper
Tiger Television, an independent production collective
that produces segments critiquing the information
industry; Deep Dish TV, a grassroots satellite network
that distributes free-thinking programming to public
access cable channels nationwide; and Not Channel
Zero, a collective of young African-American
"camcorder activists" whose motto is "The Revolution,
Televised." And then there is academy hacking --
cultural studies, conducted outside university walls,
by insurgent intellectuals.
Thus, culture jamming assumes many guises; let us
consider, in greater detail, some of its more typical
manifestations.
Sniping and Subvertising
"Subvertising," the production and dissemination of
anti-ads that deflect Madison Avenue's attempts to
turn the consumer's attention in a given direction, is
an ubiquitous form of jamming. Often, it takes the
form of "sniping" -- illegal, late-night sneak attacks
on public space by operatives armed with posters,
brushes, and buckets of wheatpaste.
Adbusters, a Vancouver, B.C.-based quarterly that
critiques consumer culture, enlivens its pages with
acid satires. "Absolut Nonsense," a cunningly-executed
spoof featuring a suspiciously familiar-looking
bottle, proclaimed: "Any suggestion that our
advertising campaign has contributed to alcoholism,
drunk driving or wife and child beating is absolute
nonsense. No one pays any attention to advertising."
Ewen, himself a covert jammer, excoriates conspicuous
consumption in his "Billboards of the Future" --
anonymously-mailed Xerox broadsides like his ad for
"Chutzpah: cologne for women & men, one splash and
you'll be demanding the equal distribution of wealth."
Guerrilla Girls, a cabal of feminist artists that
bills itself as "the conscience of the art world," is
known for savagely funny, on-target posters, one of
which depicted a nude odalisque in a gorilla mask,
asking, "Do women have to get naked to get into the
Met. Museum?" Los Angeles's Robbie Conal covers urban
walls with the information age equivalent of Dorian
Gray's portrait: grotesque renderings of Oliver North,
Ed Meese, and other scandal-ridden politicos. "I'm
interested in counter-advertising," he says, "using
the streamlined sign language of advertising in a kind
of reverse penetration." For gay activists,
subvertising and sniping have proven formidable
weapons. A March, 1991 Village Voice report from the
frontlines of the "outing" wars made mention of
"Absolutely Queer" posters, credited to a phantom
organization called OUTPOST, appearing on Manhattan
buildings. One, sparked by the controversy over the
perceived homophobia in Silence of the Lambs, featured
a photo of Jodie Foster, with the caption: "Oscar
Winner. Yale Graduate. Ex-Disney Moppet. Dyke." Queer
Nation launched a "Truth in Advertising" postering
campaign that sent up New York Lotto ads calculated to
part the poor and their money; in them, the official
tagline, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream" became
"All You Need is a Three-Dollar Bill and a Dream." The
graphics collective Gran Fury, formerly part of ACT
UP, has taken its sharp-tongued message even further:
a superslick Benetton parody ran on buses in San
Francisco and New York in 1989. Its headline blared
"Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" over
a row of kissing couples, all of them racially-mixed
and two of them gay. "We are trying to fight for
attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for attention,"
says group member Loring Mcalpin. "[I]f anyone is
angry enough and has a Xerox machine and has five or
six friends who feel the same way, you'd be surprised
how far you can go."
Media Hoaxing
Media hoaxing, the fine art of hoodwinking
journalists into covering exhaustively researched,
elaborately staged deceptions, is culture jamming in
its purest form. Conceptual con artists like Joey
Skaggs dramatize the dangers inherent in a press that
seems to have forgotten the difference between the
public good and the bottom line, between the
responsibility to enlighten and the desire to
entertain.
Skaggs has been flimflamming journalists since 1966,
pointing up the self-replicating, almost viral nature
of news stories in a wired world. The trick, he
confides, "is to get someone from an out-of-state
newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen,
and then you Xerox that story and include it in a
second mailing. Journalists see that it has appeared
in print and think, therefore, that there's no need to
do any further research. That's how a snowflake
becomes a snowball and finally an avalanche, which is
the scary part. There's a point at which it becomes
very difficult to believe anything the media tells
you."
In 1976, Skaggs created the Cathouse For Dogs, a
canine bordello that offered a "savory selection" of
doggie Delilahs, ranging from pedigree (Fifi, the
French poodle) to mutt (Lady the Tramp). The ASPCA was
outraged, the Soho News was incensed, and ABC devoted
a segment to it which later received an Emmy
nomination for best news broadcast of the year. In
time, Skaggs reappeared as the leader of Walk Right!,
a combat-booted Guardian Angels-meet-Emily Post outfit
determined to improve sidewalk etiquette, and later as
Joe Bones, head of a Fat Squad whose tough guy
enforcers promised, for a fee, to prevent overweight
clients from cheating on diets. As Dr. Joseph Gregor,
Skaggs convinced UPI and New York's WNBC-TV that
hormones extracted from mutant cockroaches could cure
arthritis, acne, and nuclear radiation sickness.
After reeling in the media outlets who have taken his
bait, Skaggs holds a conference at which he reveals
his deception. "The hoax," he insists, "is just the
hook. The second phase, in which I reveal the hoax, is
the important part. As Joey Skaggs, I can't call a
press conference to talk about how the media has been
turned into a government propaganda machine,
manipulating us into believing we've got to go to war
in the Middle East. But as a jammer, I can go into
these issues in the process of revealing a hoax."
Audio Agitprop
Audio agitprop, much of which utilizes digital
samplers to deconstruct media culture and challenge
copyright law, is a somewhat more innocuous
manifestation. Likely suspects include Sucking Chest
Wound, whose God Family Country ponders mobthink and
media bias; The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who
take aim in "Television, the Drug of the Nation" at
"happy talk" newscasts that embrace the values of MTV
and Entertainment Tonight; Producers For Bob, whose
pert, chittering dance tracks provide an unlikely
backdrop for monologues about "media ecology," a
McLuhan-inspired strategy for survival in a toxic
media environment; and Chris Burke, whose Oil War,
with its cut-up press conferences, presidential
speeches, and nightly newsbites, is pirate C-Span for
Noam Chomsky readers. Sucking Chest Wound's Wayne
Morris speaks for all when he says, "I get really
angry with the biased coverage that's passed off as
objective journalism. By taking scraps of the news and
blatantly manipulating them, we're having our revenge
on manipulative media."
Billboard Banditry
Lastly, there is billboard banditry, the phenomenon
that inspired Negativland's coinage. Australia's BUGA
UP stages hit-and-run "demotions," or anti-promotions,
scrawling graffiti on cigarette or liquor ads. The
group's name is at once an acronym for
"Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy
Promotions" and a pun on "bugger up," Aussie slang for
"screw up."
In like fashion, African-American activists have
decided to resist cigarette and liquor ads targeting
communities of color by any means necessary.
Describing Reverend Calvin Butts and fellow Harlem
residents attacking a Hennesey billboard with paint
and rollers, Z magazine's Michael Kamber reports, "In
less than a minute there's only a large white blotch
where moments before the woman had smiled coyly down
at the street." Chicago's Reverend Michael Pfleger is
a comrade-in-arms; he and his Operation Clean defaced
-- some prefer the term "refaced" -- approximately
1,000 cigarette and alcohol billboards in 1990 alone.
"It started with the illegal drug problem," says
Pfleger. "But you soon realize that the number-one
killer isn't crack or heroin, but tobacco. And we
realized that to stop tobacco and alcohol we [had] to
go after the advertising problem."
San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front, together
with Truth in Advertising, a band of "midnight
billboard editors" based in Santa Cruz, snap motorists
out of their rush hour trances with deconstructed,
reconstructed billboards. In the wake of the Valdez
disaster, the BLF reinvented a radio promo -- "Hits
Happen. New X-100" -- as "Shit Happens -- New Exxon";
TIA turned "Tropical Blend. The Savage Tan" into
"Typical Blend. Sex in Ads." Inspired by a
newsflash that plans were underway to begin producing
neutron bombs, a Seattle-based trio known as SSS
reworked a Kent billboard proclaiming "Hollywood
Bowled Over By Kent III Taste!" to read "Hollywood
Bowled Over By Neutron Bomb!," replacing the cigarette
pack with a portrait of then-President Ronald Reagan.
Artfux and the breakaway group Cicada Corps of Artists
are New Jersey-based agitprop collectives who snipe
and stage neo-Situationist happenings. On one
occasion, Artfux members joined painter Ron English
for a tutorial of sorts, in which English instructed
the group in the fine art of billboard banditry.
Painting and mounting posters conceptualized by
English, Artfux accompanied the New York artist on a
one-day, all-out attack on Manhattan. One undercover
operation used math symbols to spell out the corporate
equation for animal murder and ecological disaster: A
hapless-looking cow plus a death's-head equalled a
McDonald's polystyrene clamshell. "Food, foam and
Fun!," the tagline taunted. In a similar vein, the
group mocked "Smooth Joe," the Camel cigarettes camel,
turning his phallic nose into a flaccid penis and his
sagging lips into bobbing testicles. One altered
billboard adjured, "Drink Coca-Cola -- It Makes You
Fart," while another showed a seamed, careworn Uncle
Sam opposite the legend, "Censorship is good because
-- -- -- -!"
"Corporations and the government have the money and
the means to sell anything they want, good or bad,"
noted Artfux member Orlando Cuevas in a Jersey Journal
feature on the group. "We...[are] ringing the alarm
for everyone else."
III. Guerrilla Semiotics
Culture jammers often make use of what might be
called "guerrilla" semiotics -- analytical techniques
not unlike those employed by scholars to decipher the
signs and symbols that constitute a culture's secret
language, what literary theorist Roland Barthes called
"systems of signification." These systems, notes
Barthes in the introduction to Elements of Semiology,
comprise nonverbal as well as verbal modes of
communication, encompassing "images, gestures, musical
sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all
these."
It is no small irony -- or tragedy -- that semiotics,
which seeks to make explicit the implicit meanings in
the sign language of society, has become pop culture
shorthand for an academic parlor trick useful in
divining the hidden significance in Casablanca,
Disneyland, or our never-ending obsession with Marilyn
Monroe. In paranoid pop psych such as Wilson Bryan
Key's Subliminal Seduction, semiotics offers
titillating decryptions of naughty advertising. "This
preoccupation with subliminal advertising," writes
Ewen, "is part of the legendary life of post-World War
II American capitalism: the word 'SEX' written on the
surface of Ritz crackers, copulating bodies or death
images concealed in ice cubes, and so forth."
Increasingly, advertising assumes this popular
mythology: a recent print ad depicted a cocktail glass
filled with icecubes, the words "Absolut vodka"
faintly discernible on their craggy, shadowed
surfaces. The tagline: "Absolut Subliminal."
All of which makes semiotics seem trivial, effete,
although it is an inherently political project;
Barthes "set out..to examine the normally hidden set
of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings
particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in
power) are rendered universal and 'given' for the
whole of society." Marshall Blonsky has called
semiotics "a defense against information sickness, the
'too-muchness' of the world," fulfilling Marshall
McLuhan's prophecy that "just as we now try to control
atom-bomb fallout, so we will one day try to control
media fallout." As used by culture jammers, it is an
essential tool in the all-important undertaking of
making sense of the world, its networks of power, the
encoded messages that flicker ceaselessly along its
communication channels.
This is not to say that all of the jammers mentioned
in this essay knowingly derive their ideas from
semiotics or are even familiar with it, only that
their ad hoc approach to cultural analysis has much in
common with the semiotician's attempt to "read between
the lines" of culture considered as a text. Most
jammers have little interest in the deliria that
result from long immersion in the academic vacuum,
breathing pure theory. They intuitively refuse the
rejection of engaged politics typical of
postmodernists like Baudrillard, a disempowering
stance that too often results in an overeagerness for
ringside seats at the gotterdammerung. The L.A.
Weekly's disquieting observation that Baudrillard
"loves to observe the liquidation of culture, to
experience the delivery from depth" calls to mind
Walter Benjamin's pronouncement that mankind's
"self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order." Jammers, in contrast,
are attempting to reclaim the public space ceded to
the chimeras of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, to
restore a sense of equilibrium to a society sickened
by the vertiginous whirl of TV culture.
IV. Postscript From the Edge
The territory mapped by this essay ends at the edge
of the electronic frontier, the "world space of
multinational capital" (Fredric Jameson) where vast
sums are blipped from one computer to another through
phone lines twined around the globe. Many of us
already spend our workdays in an incunabular form of
cyberpunk writer William Gibson's "cyberspace,"
defined in his novel Neuromancer as "a consensual
hallucination experienced daily by billions of
legitimate operators...A graphic representation of
data abstracted from the banks of every computer in
the human system." The experience of computer
scientist W. Daniel Hillis, once novel, is becoming
increasingly familiar:
When I first met my wife, she was immersed in trading
options. Her office was in the top of a skyscraper in
Boston, and yet, in a very real sense, when she was at
work she was in a world that could not be identified
with any single physical location. Sitting at a
computer screen, she lived in a world that consisted
of offers and trades, a world in which she knew
friends and enemies, safe and stormy weather. For a
large portion of each day, that world was more real to
her than her physical surroundings.
In the next century, growing numbers of Americans
will work and play in artificial environments that
only exist, in the truest sense, as bytes stored in
computer memory. The explosion of computer-based
interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at
least in its familiar form) the decidedly
non-interactive medium that has dominated the latter
half of this century: television. Much of this media
may one day be connected to a high-capacity,
high-speed fiber optic network of "information
superhighways" linking as many homes as are currently
serviced by the telephone network. This network,
predicts computer journalist John Markoff, "could do
for the flow of information -- words, music, movies,
medical images, manufacturing blueprints and much more
-- what the transcontinental railroad did for the flow
of goods a century ago and the interstate highway
system did in this century."
The culture jammer's question, as always, is: Who
will have access to this cornucopia of information,
and on what terms? Will fiber-optic superhighways make
stored knowledge universally available, in the
tradition of the public library, or will they merely
facilitate psychological carpet bombing designed to
soften up consumer defenses? And what of the network
news? Will it be superseded by local broadcasts, with
their heartwarming (always "heartwarming") tales of
rescued puppies and shocking (always "shocking")
stories of senseless mayhem, mortared together with
airhead banter? Or will the Big Three give way to
innumerable news channels, each a conduit for
information about global, national and local events
germane to a specific demographic? Will cyberpunk
telejournalists equipped with Hi-8 video cameras,
digital scanners, and PC-based editing facilities hack
their way into legitimate broadcasts? Or will they, in
a medium of almost infinite bandwidth and channels
beyond count, simply be given their own airtime? In
short, will the electronic frontier be wormholed with
"temporary autonomous zones" -- Hakim Bey's term for
pirate utopias, centrifuges in which social gravity is
artificially suspended -- or will it be subdivided and
overdeveloped by what cultural critic Andrew Ross
calls "the military-industrial-media complex?"
Gibson, who believes that we are "moving toward a
world where all of the consumers under a certain age
will...identify more...with the products they consume
than...with any sort of antiquated notion of
nationality," is not sanguine. In the video
documentary Cyberpunk, he conjures a minatory vision
of what will happen when virtual reality is married to
a device that stimulates the brain directly. "It's
going to be very commercial," he says. "We could wind
up with something that felt like having a very, very
expensive American television commercial injected
directly into your cortex."
"For Sale" signs already litter the unreal estate of
cyberspace. A New York Times article titled "A Rush to
Stake Claims on the Multimedia Frontier" prophesies
"software and hardware that will connect consumers
seamlessly to services...[allowing them] to shop from
home," while a Newsweek cover story on interactive
media promises "new technology that will change the
way you shop, play and learn" (the order, here, speaks
volumes about American priorities). Video retailers
are betting that the intersection of interactive media
and home shopping will result in zillions of dollars'
worth of impulse buys: zirconium rings, nonstick
frying pans, costumed dolls, spray-on toupees. What a
New York Times author cutely calls Communicopia ("the
convergence of virtually all communications
technologies") may end up looking like the Home
Shopping Network on steroids.
But hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers
are heartened by the electronic frontier's promise of
a new media paradigm -- interactive rather than
passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and
centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist. To date,
this paradigm has assumed two forms: the virtual
community and the desktop-published or on-line 'zine.
("'Zine," the preferred term among underground
publishers, has subtly political connotations:
grassroots organization, a shoestring budget, an
anti-aesthetic of exuberant sloppiness, a lively
give-and-take between transmitters and receivers, and,
more often than not, a mocking, oppositional stance
vis a vis mainstream media.) Virtual
communities are comprised of computer users connected
by modem to the bulletin board systems (BBS's)
springing up all over the Internet, the worldwide
meta-network that connects international computer
networks. Funded not by advertisers but by paid
subscribers, the BBS is a first, faltering step toward
the jammer's dream of a truly democratic mass medium.
Although virtual communities fall short of utopia --
women and people of color are grossly
underrepresented, and those who cannot afford the
price of admission or who are alienated from
technology because of their cultural status are denied
access -- they nonetheless represent a profound
improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic medium of
television.
On a BBS, any subscriber may initiate a discussion
topic, no matter how arcane, in which other
subscribers may participate. If the bulletin board in
question is plugged into the Internet, their comments
will be read and responded to by computer users
scattered across the Internet. On-line forums retire,
at long last, the Sunday morning punditocracy, the
expert elite, the celebrity anchorclones of network
news, even the electronic town hall, with its
carefully-screened audience and over-rehearsed
politicians. As one resident of a San Francisco-based
bulletin board called the WELL noted,
This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it
may be) that we can build a world unmediated by
authorities and experts. The roles of reader, writer,
and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they
become increasingly irrelevant in a community of
co-creation.
In like fashion, ever-cheaper, increasingly
sophisticated desktop publishing packages (such as the
software and hardware used to produce this pamphlet)
ensure that, in a society where freedom of the press
-- as A.J. Leibling so presciently noted -- is
guaranteed only to those who own one, multinational
monoliths are not the only publishers. As Gareth
Branwyn, a one-time 'zine publisher and longtime
resident of virtual communities, points out,
The current saturation of relatively inexpensive
multimedia communication tools holds tremendous
potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have
lived with for so long...A personal computer can be
configured to act as a publishing house, a
broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording
studio, or the node in an international computer
bulletin board system.
Increasingly, 'zines are being published on-line, to
be bounced around the world via the Internet. "I can
see a future in which any person can have a node on
the net," says Mitch Kapor, president of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with
free speech, privacy, and other constitutional issues
in cyberspace. "Any person can be a publisher. It's
better than the media we now have."
Devil's advocates might well argue that Festering
Brain Sore, a fanzine for mass murderer aficionados,
or the WELL topic devoted to "armpit sex" are hardly
going to crash the corporate media system. Hakim Bey
writes, "The story of computer networks, BBS's and
various other experiments in electro-democracy has so
far been one of hobbyism for the most part. Many
anarchists and libertarians have deep faith in the PC
as a weapon of liberation and self-liberation -- but
no real gains to show, no palpable liberty."
Then again, involvement in virtual communities and
the 'zine scene is rapidly expanding beyond mere
hobbyism: as this is written, approximately 10 million
people frequent BBS's, and an estimated 10,000 'zines
are being published (70 alone are given over to left
politics of a more or less radical nature). These
burgeoning subcultures are driven not by the desire
for commodities but by the dream of community --
precisely the sort of community now sought in the
nationally-shared experience of watching game shows,
sitcoms, sportscasts, talk shows, and, less and less,
the evening news. It is this yearning for meaning and
cohesion that lies at the heart of the jammer's
attempts to reassemble the fragments of our world into
something more profound than the luxury cars, sexy
technology, and overdesigned bodies that flit across
our screens. Hackers who expose governmental
wrongdoing, textual slashers, wheatpaste snipers,
billboard bandits, media hoaxers, subvertisers, and
unannounced political protestors who disrupt live
newscasts remind us that numberless stories go untold
in the daily papers and the evening news, that what is
not reported speaks louder than what is. The jammer
insists on choice: not the dizzying proliferation of
consumer options, in which a polyphony of brand names
conceals the essential monophony of the advertiser's
song, but a true plurality, in which the univocal
world view promulgated by corporate media yields to a
multivocal, polyvalent one.
The electronic frontier is an ever-expanding corner of
Eco's "universe of Technological
Communication...patrolled by groups of communications
guerrillas" bent on restoring "a critical dimension to
passive reception." These guerrilla semioticians are
in pursuit of new myths stitched together from the
fabric of their own lives, a patchwork of experiences
and aspirations that has little to do with the
depressive stories of an apolitical intelligentsia or
the repressive fictions of corporate media's Magic
Kingdom. "The images that bombard and oppose us must
be reorganized," insist Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen. "If
our critique of commodity culture points to better
alternatives, let us explore -- in our own billboards
of the future -- what they might be." Even now,
hackers, slashers, and snipers -- culture jammers all
-- are rising to that challenge.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Bill Mullen, a professor at
Youngstown University and friend of many years whose
close reading and tough-minded critique of this essay
improved it immeasurably, and to Margot Mifflin, whose
slashing red pen saved me, at the last minute, from my
worst excesses.
* * *
Points of Departure
Craig Baldwin, Sonic Outlaws (c/o Artists Television
Access, 415-824-3890, or by mail from 992 Valencia
Street, San Francisco, CA 94110, VHS, 87 minutes, $30,
make check payable to Craig Baldwin). Baldwin, an
independent filmmaker, is an appropriationist auteur
par excellence, equal parts Eisenstein and
dumpster-diver. His documentary Sonic Outlaws uses the
legal and media brouhaha stirred up by Negativland's
illegal sampling (and howlingly funny parody) of a U-2
song as a springboard for deeper thoughts on copyright
in the age of digital reproduction and private
ownership of the public airwaves. Audio Dadaists and
unrepentant plagiarists Emergency Broadcast Network,
the Tape Beatles, and John Oswald are also featured.
"Billboard Liberation Front Manual," Processed World
#25, Summer/Fall 1990, pps. 22-6. This and other back
issues may be ordered from 41 Sutter Street, #1829,
San Francisco, CA 94104.
The BLF has also published The Art and Science of
Billboard Improvement (San Francisco: Los Cabrones
Press, $1.50). No more information is available as
this is written; writing to Processed World, which
acts as an intermediary for the BLF, might prove
fruitful.
William Board, "Alter a Billboard," CoEvolution
Quarterly, Summer 1983, pps. 114-116. Do's and don't's
for would-be "midnight billboard editors," written by
a pseudonymous member of Truth in Advertising. $7,
Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito, CA
94965.
Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in Black Hole,
ed. by Carolyn Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for
Publications Design, Yale Gordon College of Liberal
Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992). This essay, as
well as the companion pieces in this underground
omnibus, explore the interstice between cyberpunk and
culture jamming. Branywn's later book, Jamming the
Media: A Citizen's Guide to Reclaiming the Tools of
Communication (Chronicle Books), is an exhaustively
researched, high-spirited romp through the DIY
underground, stuffed to bursting with detailed how-to
information on desktop publishing, media pranking,
pirate radio, and "multimedia for the masses." The
refrain to the Ramones song, "We want the airwaves,"
reverberates through these pages. E-mail Gareth at
gar...@well.com.
Robbie Conal, Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a
Guerrilla Artist (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
At last: the ideal gift for insurrectionists -- a
coffee table art book about a wheatpaste warrior.
Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance and
Electronic Civil Disobedience (both available from
Autonomedia, POB 568 Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn,
NY 11211-0568, phone/fax 718-963-2603). Critical Art
Ensemble is a collective of media hackers and
postmodern theorists. In my back cover blurb to
Electronic Civil Disobedience, I write, "An
Anarchist's Cookbook for an age of decentralized,
dematerialized power, ECD shares cultural DNA with
William Burroughs's 'Electronic Revolution,' Guy
Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Hakim Bey's
Temporary Autonomous Zone, and other classics of
'nomadic resistance.' CAE is a flesh-eating virus on
the body politic."
Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Dave
Foreman and Bill Haywood, eds. (Tucson: Ned Ludd
Books, 1987). Chapter 8, "Propaganda," includes
sections on "Billboard Revision" and "Correcting
Forest Service Signs." The jury is still out on Earth
First!, which often crosses the line from righteous
ecopolitical rage to neo-Luddite knee-jerking (hence
the name of the publishing company). That said, the
authors' folksy pragmatism, anarcho-libertarian humor,
and iron-spined resolve in the face of bulldozers and
chainsaws is truly inspiring.
The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher
Primates, ed. Mark Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair,
Gareth Branwyn, Will Kreth (Riverhead Books). Includes
brief profiles of Chris Baldwin, Joey Skaggs, the
Cacophony Society, and the Billboard Liberation Front,
as well as articles on hacking, DIY radio and TV,
shirking work, and hit-and-run ontology-wrenching
(pranks).
Abbie Hoffman, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York:
Four Walls Eight Windows, 1989). Chapter 43,
"Guerrilla Broadcasting," includes nuts-and-bolts "how
to" sections on pirate radio and outlaw TV.
Loompanics Unlimited, a distributor of fringe
publications, is an invaluable source for titles on
hacking; psychological warfare; Zeke Teflon's Complete
Manual of Pirate Radio; Muzzled Media: How to Get the
News You've Been Missing! by Gerry L. Dexter; and
more. Loompanics' 1988 catalogue includes Erwin R.
Strauss's "Pirate Broadcasting," a historical and
philosophical inquiry into the titular phenomenon.
Write P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368 for a
catalogue.
Roar! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media
Activism, The Paper Tiger Television Collective, eds.
(New York: The Paper Tiger Television Collective,
1991). This thoroughgoing, irreplaceable guide to
culture jamming proves, to mutilate Mao, that power
springs from the barrel of a camcorder. An essay by
Schiller, together with a lengthy "how to" section,
make this a must. Write to 339 Lafayette Street, New
York, NY 10012.
Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of
Dissatisfaction, Mischief, and Revenge, ed. Martin
sprouse (Pressure Drop Press and AK Press). Studs
Terkel's Working for the deskilled, downsized, or just
plain disaffected.
Test Card F: Television, Mythinformation, and Social
Control (AK Press, POB 40682, San Francisco, CA
94140-0682). A spleen-filled rant on "the media
machine" as engine of social control, lashed together
with punk and neo-Situationist collages. The back
cover declares, "Using savage image/text
cut-and-paste, Test Card F explodes all previous media
theories and riots through the Global Village, looting
the ideological supermarket of all its products…" A
Molotov cocktail for the mind.
* * *
Endnotes
1. This essay originally appeared in 1993, as
Pamphlet #25 in the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series.
2. Roger Cohen, "The Lost Book Generation," The New
York Times, "Education Life" supplement, January 6,
1991, pg. 34.
3. Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New
York: Random House, 1992), p. 18.
4. Ibid., p. 9.
5. Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the
Reagan Presidency (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1988), p. 5.
6. From a transcript of "Illusions of News," the third
episode in the PBS series, The Public Mind with Bill
Moyers, p. 5.
7. Alex S. Jones, "Poll Backs Control of News," The
New York Times, C24, January 31, 1991.
8. Neal Gabler, "Now Playing: Real Life, the Movie,"
The New York Times, Sunday, October 20, 1991, Section
2, pg. 32.
9. Mark Crispin Miller, "Deride and Conquer," in
Watching Television, ed. by Todd Gitlin (New York:
Pantheon, 1987), p. 228.
10. Ben Bagdikian, "Lords of the Global Village," The
Nation, June 12, 1989, p. 819.
1. Herbert Schiller, The Nation, July 4-11, 1987, p. 6.
2. Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, "Anti-Hero: What
Happens When Network News is Owned and Sponsored By
Big Corporations That Need To Protect Their Own
Interests?," Spin, volume six, number four, July,
1990, p. 75.
3. Gabler, ibid.
4. Marshall Blonsky, American Mythologies (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 231.
5. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in
Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 11.
6. Umberto Eco, "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla
Warfare," in Travels in Hyperreality (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1986), pps. 138, 143, 144.
7. Stuart Ewen, "Living by Design," in Art in America,
June, 1990, p. 76.
8. A line lifted, out of context, from Marguerite
Sechehaye's Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (New
York: Grune & Stratton, 1968), p. 19.
9. Jello Biafra, interviewed in Pranks!: Re/Search #11
(San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1987), p. 64.
20. Quoted by Karrie Jacobs, in Metropolis,
July/August 1990, and reprinted in the Utne Reader,
March/April 1991, p. 91-2.
2. God Family Country is available from
DOVentertainment, 2 Bloor Street West, Suite 100-159,
Toronto, Canada M4W 3E2, as is Bob's Media Ecology, by
Producers For Bob; Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury,
by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, was released
by 4th & Bdwy/Island, and should be stocked by most
major record retailers; the cassette-only Oil War, by
Chris Burke, can be purchased directly from the artist
($5.95 check or money order to Chris Burke, 111 3rd
Avenue, #12-E, New York, NY 10003).
22. Harry Goldstein, "Billboard Liberation: Talking
Back to Marketers By Taking Outdoor Advertising Into
Your Own Hands," in the Utne Reader, November/December
1991, pps. 46-48.
23. David Ferman, "Pastor Leads War on Billboards," in
Adbusters, Fall/Winter 1991, p. 41-2.
24. Stuart Ewen, "Desublimated Advertising," Artforum,
January, 1991, p. 26.
25. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style
(London: Routledge, 1988), p. 9.
26. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964), p. 267.
27. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future
in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990), p. 54.
28. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984),
p. 51.
29. W. Daniel Hillis, "What is Massively Parallel
Computing?," in Daedalus, Winter 1992, p. 13.
30. John Markoff, "Building the Electronic
Superhighway," The New York Times, January 24, 1993,
Section 3, p. 1.
3. William Gibson, in Cyberpunk (VHS, 60 minutes,
available from ATA/Cyberpunk, P.O. Box 12, Massapequa
Park, NY 11762).
32. Loc. cit.
33. William Rolf Knutson, a computer programmer,
fiction writer, and occasional Mondo 2000 contributor,
in a private e-mail letter to the author, March 25,
1993.
34. Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in Black
Hole, ed. by Carolyn Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for
Publications Design, Yale Gordon College of Liberal
Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992), pps. 1-2.
35. Mitch Kapor, quoted by Bruce Sterling, in The
Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic
Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992), p. 298.
36. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. (New York: Autonomedia, 1991),
p. 113.
37. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire:
Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), p. 282. This passage
appears only in the original, unrevised edition of the
book.
Mark Dery [mark...@optonline.net] is a cultural
critic. He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of
Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1995) and wrote
Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the
Century (Grove Press, 1996). His collection of essays,
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the
Brink was published by Grove Press in February, 1999.
He is an occasional writer for The New York Times
Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice Literary
Supplement, Suck, and Feed, and a frequent lecturer in
the U.S. and Europe on new media, fringe thought, and
unpopular culture.
--
"republiKKKans do best what they do on their knees."