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24 March 1942—

Culture Jammer

There are many forms of violence, but one of the most recent—and most insidious—is the phenomenon known as consumerism, the mania to buy and consume more and more and more. Americans are particularly prone to consumerism, a malady sometimes referred to as “affluenza,” but most other so-called developed nations suffer from it too. Alarmingly, less developed regions around the world also feel its allure. Many of them suffer from what might be called consumer envy.

But why is consumerism a form of violence? It harms the environment because the frenetic production of goods to meet demand is unsustainable, and so exploits and pollutes earth and atmosphere. It harms people because it siphons off goods and natural resources from poor regions of the world to fuel the feeding frenzy of the richer ones. And it harms consumers themselves because, like all addictions, it increases craving without offering anything that ultimately satisfies it.

The Estonian-born Canadian social critic Kalle Lasn has declared war on consumerism, but it’s a war fought with “memes,” or units of meaning, rather than physical weapons. According to Lasn, “America is no longer a country. It’s a multitrillion-dollar brand.” What he means is that the average citizen is so surrounded by marketing memes—print and electronic ads, jingles, slogans, images, and sounds, all aimed solely at pushing products—that the default position for most of us from infancy to old age is buy. We’re so drugged by the market-memed culture in which we live that we rarely come out of our daze long enough to get a bit of perspective.

What Lasn suggests as a form of resistance to the culture of consumerism is clogging up its works—“culture jamming”—by manipulating marketing memes in ways that make them convey messages contrary to their original intent. Lasn and his fellow culture jammers tweek ads for high-end jeans featuring body-perfect models by insinuating that our cultural fixation with slimness encourages eating disorders. Similarly, they jam full-page glossy ads for hard liquor by juxtaposing photos of drunks bent double spewing in alleyways. The purpose in their ad “rewriting” is to counteract the marketing memes that are such integral parts of our cultural scene that they just seem natural. Culture jamming uses the “element of surprise” to “stop the flow” of conventional memes. It shocks us in the hope that the ensuing moment of clarity will break us free from our addiction to the “consumerist script.”

The point, says Lasn, is to practice an “ecology of the mind.” We’re pretty aware of the importance of cleaning up the environment or city hall, but much less conscious of the “infotoxins” that pollute our inner landscape. But just as physical and moral contamination violates the earth and politics, meme contamination commits violence against clear thinking and wise decisions. Lasn wants to do something about that.