Mark Dery
Has culture jamming, that 1990s mash-up of “media hacking, information warfare, terror art, and guerrilla semiotics,” gone the way of all fads? “The old rhetoric of opposition and co-optation assumed a world where consumers had little direct power to shape media content,” Henry Jenkins contended in 2006, in his book Convergence Culture, “whereas the new digital environment expands the scope and reach of consumer activities” (215).
Is jamming a quaint anachronism in a networked world where Facebook and Twitter pass the mike to anyone with a Net connection, giving her access to a global PA system, free of charge? Where smartphone videos of the beat downs and murders of black people by white cops are driving the national conversation about race? Is jamming just more of the same crankypants elitism and gloomy declinism familiar from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), the foundational text of the shoot-your-TV school of media criticism? Were the culture jammers of the 1990s heirs apparent to Marxist killjoys like the Adorno and Horkheimer of “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)? Were they vanguardist snobs whose disdain for the masses, so easily gulled by the hidden persuaders and subliminal seducers of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, was equaled only by their obliviousness to the conundrum at the heart of their argument: namely, if the media pull the wool over our eyes, how had they managed to spy out the truth? Is jamming’s tactical irony—its attempt to regard the Society of the Spectacle from a critical distance—mere comic relief in the eyes of millennials born into a world where subcultural resistance is almost instantly appropriated by corporate coolhunters? Was jamming always an ornament to power (the irony!) in its paranoid insistence on the mind-controlling powers of the newsmedia, advertisers, and mass entertainment? In the twenty-first century, has culture jamming become irrelevant to the struggles of our moment because “the old rhetoric of opposition and co-optation” is laughably outdated, rendered obsolete by the digital disruption that has flattened media hierarchies, expanding “the scope and reach of consumer activities”?
Of course, no one would deny that we live in a media galaxy far, far away from the one jammers inhabited in the 1990s. The web—specifically, the many-to-many video-sharing sites like YouTube; social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; and alternative sources of news and commentary such as the Drudge Report and Breitbart on the Right and Truthout and the Daily Kos on the Left—have (at least in theory) broken the chokehold that TV and “papers of record” such as the New York Times had on public discourse and popular opinion. Jamming in the 1990s was a subcultural backlash, given intellectual momentum by critics such as myself, against a society in which a powerful few spoke while millions listened. Broadcast news shaped the national conversation about current events, mobilizing mass consent for elite agendas and marginalizing dissenters who challenged the status quo consensus of pols, pundits, and think-tank hacks. Commercials ginned up consumer desire for fetishized commodities, drawing on mass psychology and Freudian analysis to bathe those commodities in an aura of powerful emotional associations.
By contrast, those who’ve grown up in the Digital Age are wise to the ways of the persuasion industry, immunized by their visual literacy, not to mention all those semiotics courses at Brown. Or so we’re told. And anyone with wi-fi access can speak truth to power. Anyone in the right place at the right time, smartphone in hand or dashboard cam rolling, can commit an act of journalism, the story goes.
It could also be argued that many of the tactics devised for semiotic guerrilla warfare in a pre-web world—when access to opposing viewpoints and platforms for public address was far more limited—are irrelevant in our networked age. And if not irrelevant, ineffectual: billboard banditry, détourned ads, media hoaxes, street theater, and guerrilla interventions seem absurdly analog ways of hacking the matrix, circa 2016.
But since this is, after all, a foreword to an anthology of essays on culture jamming, it seems only fitting that I monkeywrench some of these received truths. To begin, the presumption that if, as A. J. Liebling observed, “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” then the claim that the web has radically democratized journalism conveniently ignores the fact that the social media where most of us swap memes and post links (to brand-name websites, more often than not) is private property masquerading as the town square. Whether we’re Like-ing LOLcat photos or lifting our voices in righteous rage about the social injustice of the day, we’re working as unpaid content providers for Lords of the New Economy like Mark Zuckerberg, who are only too happy to mine our personal data and sell it to advertisers. And while we’re on the subject of LOLcats, the web isn’t exactly bringing up a bumper crop of I. F. Stones and George Seldeses, though it has proven fertile ground for sites like Buzzfeed, Gawker, and Thought Catalog, which attract advertisers by providing platforms for user-generated content, much of it listicles by overshare-y Millennials, most of it unpaid, and precious little of it fact-checked.
Meanwhile, back in the Desert of the Real, the consolidation of big-media outlets into fewer and fewer multinational brands continues apace, thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which eviscerated the regulation of cross-media ownership. Major print and TV news outlets are chain-sawing staff and shuttering foreign bureaus at a moment when geopolitical literacy is more important than ever. Ad copy crafted to look like news coverage is blurring the boundary between reported fact and “sponsored content.” Simultaneously, the proliferation of niche media markets on the web and around the cable dial—unquestionably a good thing when it comes to a diversity of opinion—turns out to have a downside: from Fox News and its legions on the Right to Democracy Now! and The Rachel Maddow Show on the Left to Vibe out on the gonzo-dude fringe, it’s easier than ever before to seal yourself in an ideological hyperbaric chamber and breathe the heady atmosphere of 100 percent pure confirmation bias. Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser at the White House, lays part of the blame for the ideological polarization that has led to congressional gridlock at the feet of the news media, which “has changed so that people select only sources that will confirm their preexisting beliefs.” Pfeiffer told New York magazine, “We don’t have the ability to communicate with [the Republicans]—we can’t even break into the tight communication circles to convince them that climate change is real. They are talking to people who agree with them, they are listening to news outlets that reinforce that point of view, and the president is probably the person with the least ability to break into that because of the partisan bias there.”
The question I asked in 1993, “How to box with shadows? What shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of signs?” is as relevant as ever. TV’s influence may be waning, and the web may have popularized the idea of culture as a conversation, not a monologue, but news, entertainment, and advertising media continue to exert a powerful influence on our mental lives—more so than ever before, arguably, given the amount of our lives we spend on the other side of the screen. “TV,” for 1990s jammers, was only ever shorthand for broadcast news and advertising as delivery systems for state propaganda, fables of the Good Life (as defined by consumption and careerism), paeans to capitalism, panegyrics to washboard abs, and all the other narratives that bound our sense of possibility as individuals and as a society.
The Society of the Spectacle, as the Situationist Guy Debord called it, is still very much with us—a matrix world where what was once “directly lived” is experienced, increasingly, in virtual form; where our social interactions are “mediated by images” and “the commodity completes its colonization of social life.” Debord commits the Rousseauvian sin of harking back to an Edenic “authenticity,” when the word and the thing, representation and reality were one, but he’s dead on when he decries the Spectacle as the commodification of lived experience and the privatization of community. (How many Facebook “friends” do you have? How many Twitter “followers”? Quantify your social status; tally up your net worth in emotional capital.)
Following Debord, culture jamming reminds us that what Marshall McLuhan called the “folklore of industrial man”—the shared mythology of brands and pop songs and TV shows and movie franchises and online communities that is our common culture—is, more often than not, wholly owned by multinational corporations. The web’s, and social media’s, empowerment of citizen activism lags notably behind the dizzying proliferation of opportunities to consume, and to engage with the culture brought to us by corporations—a cultural dynamic that harmonizes sweetly with growing corporate subversion of democracy in the wake of the Supreme Court’s rollback of campaign-spending regulation in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010).
If culture jamming is anything, it’s the dream of reclaiming our sense of ourselves as citizens in a culture that insists on reducing us to consumers—wallets with mouths, in advertising parlance. Inspired by jamming’s first wave, the political activists, consumer-culture refuseniks, tactical-media insurgents, and practitioners of “semiological guerrilla warfare” (Umberto Eco) who are chronicled and critiqued in these pages have updated the theory and practice of 1990s jamming for a more virtual world. Contemporary jammers give the lie, as the Occupy movement did, and as recent protests against law enforcement’s open season on black men have, to the postmodernist canard that the streets are dead capital. They inspire us to loop our virtual lives back into things directly lived, harnessing our online social networks to activist ends, circulating images and information that rouse us to action. They urge us to disseminate the stories the corporate newsmedia won’t cover, forcing them onto front pages and nightly newscasts through sheer viral ubiquity. And, yes, they inspire us to update the Situationist tactic of “using spectacular images and language to disrupt the flow of the spectacle” (Debord), dreaming up ways to punch through the seamless surface of the matrix to expose the emptiness of its promise.
As I’ve written elsewhere, “culture jamming’s startling vision of a better world, where we are citizens actively engaged in civic life and public discourse rather than passive consumers of media myths, is not easily forgotten. Haunting the commodified images of the good life in our magazines or on our TV screens, jamming troubles our collective sleep, darkening the dreams that money can buy.” Jamming—whose philosophical roots are, after all, in the carnivals of the Middle Ages, in which pigs were baptized, clerics mocked, and the god‑given rights of religious power and royal privilege challenged, however briefly—reminds us that culture really is a contest of narratives, a war of stories, and that for every orthodoxy there is an equal and opposite blasphemy.