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Culture Jamming and the Web
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of November 7, 2002.
Culture jamming

Culture jamming is a way to engage people in social change by turning a familiar cultural object on its head in a sly, subversive way. It's usually funny as well, and if it's done well it's attractive to public media and appealing to even a fairly hostile public. Adbusters Magazine is the best-known Canadian practitioner of culture jamming and its close relative, subvertising (as in these uncommercials).

Andrew Boyd is an organizer and grass-roots publicist from New York who has been designing media stunts and leading culture jamming workshops for several years. He's increasingly using the web to extend the reach of social action. In fact, it's such a wonderful use of the web that I and some others (Mark Surman of Commons Group among them) are bringing Andrew to Toronto for a public event and some private workshops.

Here's how Andrew describes the Billionaires for Bush (or Gore) campaign, launched in the spring of 2000, excerpted from an article entitled Truth is a Virus. Please check out the Billionaires web site and particularly the radio spots and posters.

The Billionaires campaign was devised to educate the public about the twin evils of campaign finance corruption and economic inequality. With the pay gap between CEOs and workers at 475 to 1, both Democrats and Republicans renting themselves out to big money donors, and 97% of incumbents running for re-election being returned to Congress, these problems had reached crisis proportions by the 2000 presidential election. Our idea was to create a humorous, ironic media campaign that would spread like a virus via grassroots activists and the mainstream media.

In early May, in New York City I pulled together a team of talented volunteer designers, media producers, and veteran street theater activists. We created a stylish logo by splicing together a donkey and elephant, and a "candidate" by digitally morphing photos of presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore into a single eerie image. Riffing off of slogans like "Free the Forbes 400" "Corporations are people too" "We're paying for America's free elections so you don't have to" and "We don't care who you vote for, we've already bought them" we created bumper stickers, buttons, a series of posters, and a kick-ass website that eventually won more than a few awards (http://www.billionairesforbushorgore.com/).

We also created a set of more content-rich materials, including a political platform, a full campaign speech, a candidate product comparison chart, as well as a campaign-contribution-return-on-your-investment-analysis. We even made mock radio ads, pressed them onto CD and sent 100 out to stations across the country. The satire was compact, funny and politically on target. The look was slick and the message was unified across a whole range of media. It was quite a package. And we launched it all with a "Million Billionaire March" at the Republican and Democratic national conventions.

We designed the campaign to be participatory: a simple concept that was easy to execute yet allowed for rich elaboration. Through the website, activists could download all the materials they needed to do actions in their own communities. By June, wildcat chapters were springing up. In Denver a Billionaires squad barged into the Green Party convention and tried to buy off Ralph Nader, much to the delight of delegates and the media.

By the time we arrived in Philadelphia for the Republican convention in late July, we were already a minor sensation. Advance articles in Time magazine and major dailies, radio coverage, and internet buzz had put us on the map. Our website was getting 100,000 hits a day (20,000 unique page views). Everybody was asking for our buttons and stickers and posters. Nearly a hundred Billionaires in full dress joined us in the streets, chanting, singing, burning money, smoking cigars. We also staged a "Vigil for Corporate Welfare" and auctioned off merchandising rights to the Liberty Bell (would it become the Taco Bell Liberty Bell or the Ma Bell Liberty Bell...?)

The media were all over us. FOX, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, BBC, radio, print, corporate, independent - it was a feeding-frenzy. An informal poll of photo-journalists voted us 'favorite protest'. We were certainly one of the more focused and cohesive. The Democratic convention in Los Angeles was more of the same. Folks there formed a very strong chapter, which included a marching band and a choir. My Billionaire character, Phil T. Rich, and Co-Chair Jenny Levison's Millie O'Naire, became hits on the radio interview circuit and web site traffic shot up to 200,000 hits per day.

As the campaign picked up, a hub-node structure arose. UFE became the organizational hub of an ad hoc network of Do-It-Yourself movement grouplets. In the weeks after the conventions, we'd get email and calls every day from people across the country, raving about the project and eager to start local Billionaires chapters. "Cheney is flying into town next week." A young student in Ashland, OR told me in a typical call. "I've gotten a bunch of folks together and we're going to meet him at the airport. The local thrift store has already donated ten tuxedos." This student had first seen the Billionaires on a late-night mainstream news program. He then went to the "Be a Billionaire" section of our website, downloaded the slogans, posters, and sample press releases. The group chose satirical names for themselves, called to give us a heads-up, and went into action. While other participants first heard about the campaign through activist email networks or via word of mouth, penetration of corporate mass media was key to the Billionaires' success.

It took ingenious "viral design" to get our message through the corporate media's editorial filters and out into the datasphere at large. We built our virus by embedding a threatening idea inside a non-threatening form. The "protein shell" of our virus: "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)." Our meme, or hidden ideological code: Big Money owns both candidates/parties; both candidates/parties are roughly the same. Elegantly encapsulating the core ideas of the campaign into a funny five-word concept made for a sleek and potent virus.

This concision also served as an "inoculation" against distortion. Even the most fragmented and de-contextualized mention in the media tended to carry our name, and thus our message. If they also got our tag line, "Because Inequality is not Growing Fast Enough," then the message deepened. If they picked up modular parts of our shtick, then it deepened further. When they invited us on the air for lengthy radio interviews, we could eventually drop character and proceed with a straight up critique. The campaign had layers of codežconcentric rings of more and more elaborate messaging. Each component was modular, compact, and self-contained. It could survive in a hostile, unpredictable media environment and like a fractal, still represent the campaign as a whole. [cited by permission from Andrew Gore.]

Web of Change

I met Andrew Boyd at a conference of Internet professionals and community organizers called Web of Change, held at Hollyhock, a retreat centre in the coastal islands of British Columbia. The conference was held in conjunction with a rather ferocious group of anti-globalization activists, and Leif Utne (of the Utne Reader family business) was one of the participants. The official topic of conversation was how to use the Web to change the world, and unofficial conversations happened in hot tubs looking out over the water - it was that kind of place. Very west coast.

If you're interested in attending next year's invitational Web of Change conference, email Jason Mogus of Communicopia with your background and interests. The Hollyhock conference is limited to about 40 people to encourage the formation of professional relationships but there may be local spin-offs.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.

President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net