Part 7 (2/2)

This issue is not only about unemployment per se. It would be a grave mistake to a.s.sume that any old paycheck will buy the level of loyalty and protection to which many corporations-sometimes rightly-were once accustomed. Casual, part-time and low-wage work does not bring about the same identification with one's employer as the lifelong contracts of yesterday. Go to any mall fifteen minutes after the stores close and you'll see the new employment relations.h.i.+p in action: all the minimum-wage clerks are lined up, their purses and backpacks open for ”bag check.” It's standard practice, retail workers will tell you, for managers to search them daily for stolen goods. And according to an annual industry survey conducted by the University of Florida's Security Research Project, there is reason for suspicion: the study shows that employee theft accounted for 42.7 percent of the total amount of goods stolen from U.S. retailers in 1998, the highest rate ever recorded by the survey. Starbucks clerk Steve Emery likes to quote a line he got from a sympathetic customer: ”You pay peanuts, so you get monkeys.” When he told me that, it reminded me of something I had heard only two months earlier from a group of Nike workers in Indonesia. Sitting cross-legged in a circle at one of the dorms, they told me that, deep down, they hoped their factory would burn to the ground. Understandably, the factory workers' sentiments were much more extreme than the resentments expressed by McWorkers in the West-then again, the guards doing ”bag check” at the gated entrance to the Nike factory in Indonesia were armed with revolvers.

But it is in the ranks of the millions of temp workers that the true breeding grounds of the anticorporate backlash will most likely be found. Since most temps don't stay at one post long enough for anyone to keep track of the value of their labor, the merit principle-once a sacred capitalist tenet-is becoming moot. And the situation can be intensely demoralizing. ”Pretty soon, I'll run out of places to work in this city,” writes Debbie Goad, a temp with twenty years of secretarial experience. ”I'm registered at fifteen temporary agencies. It's like playing the slots in Vegas. They constantly call me, sounding like used-car salesmen. 'I know I'll get you the perfect job soon.'”14 She wrote those words in Temp Slave Temp Slave, a little publication out of Madison, Wisconsin, devoted to tapping a seemingly bottomless well of worker resentment. In it, workers who have been branded as disposable vent their anger at the corporations that rent them like pieces of equipment, then return them, used, to the agency. Temps traditionally have had no one to talk to about these issues-the nature of the work keeps them isolated from each other and also, inside their temporary workplaces, from their salaried co-workers. So it's no surprise that Temp Slave Temp Slave, and Web sites like Temp 247, boil with repressed hostility, offering helpful tips on how to sabotage your employer's computer system, as well as essays with t.i.tles such as ”Everybody hates temps. The feeling is mutual!” and ”The boredom, the sheer boredom of office life for temps.”

Just as temp workforces mess with the merit principle, so does the growing practice of swapping CEOs like pro ballplayers. Temp CEOs are a major a.s.sault on the capitalist folklore of the mail-room boy who works his way up to becoming president of the company. Today's executives, since they just seem to trade the top spot with one another, appear to be born into their self-enclosed stratospheres like kings. In such a context, there is less room for the dream of making it up from the mail room-especially since the mail room has probably been outsourced to Pitney Bowes and staffed with permatemps.

That is the situation at Microsoft, and it is part of the reason why temp rage seethes there like nowhere else. Another is that Microsoft openly admits that its reserve of temps exists to protect the core of permanent workers from the ravages of the free market. When a product line is discontinued, or costs are cut in ingenious new ways, it's the temps that absorb the blows. If you ask the agencies, they say that their clients don't mind being treated like outdated software-after all, Bill Gates never promised them a thing. ”When people know it's a temporary arrangement, some day, when the a.s.signment ends, there's not a sense of a broken trust,” explains Peg Cheirett, president of Wa.s.ser Group, one of the agencies that supplies Microsoft with temps.15 There's no doubt Gates has devised a means of downsizing that avoids those high-pitched wails of betrayal that IBM bosses faced in the late eighties when they eliminated 37,000 jobs, shocking employees who were under the impression they had secured jobs for life. Microsoft's temps have no basis to expect anything of Bill Gates-that much is true-but while that fact may keep pickets from blocking the entrance to the Microsoft Campus, it does little to protect the company from getting hacked from inside its own computer system. (As it did throughout 1998, when the hacker cabal Cult of the Dead Cow released a made-for-Microsoft hacking program called Back Orifice. It was downloaded from the Internet 300,000 times.) Microsoft's permatemps brush up against the hyperactive capitalist dream of Silicon Gold every day, and yet they-more than anyone else-know that it's an invitation-only affair. So while Microsoft's permanent employees are renowned for their corporate cultishness, Microsoft permatemps are almost unparalleled in their rancor. Asked by journalists what they think of their employer, they offer up such choice comments as: ”They treat you like pond sc.u.m”16 or ”It's a system of having two cla.s.ses of people, and instilling fear and inferiority and loathing.” or ”It's a system of having two cla.s.ses of people, and instilling fear and inferiority and loathing.”17 Divestment: A Two-Way Transaction Commenting on this s.h.i.+ft, Charles Handy, author of The Hungry Spirit The Hungry Spirit, writes that ”it is clear that the psychological contract between employers and employed has changed. The smart jargon now talks of guaranteeing 'employability' not 'employment,' which, being interpreted, means don't count on us, count on yourself, but we'll try to help if we can.”18 But for some-particularly younger workers-there is a silver lining. Because young people tend not to see the place where they work as an extension of their souls, they have, in some cases, found freedom in knowing they will never suffer the kind of heart-wrenching betrayals their parents did. For almost everyone who has entered the job market in the past decade, unemployment is a known quant.i.ty, as is self-generated and erratic work. In addition, losing one's job is much less frightening when getting it seemed an accident in the first place. Such familiarity with unemployment creates its own kind of worker divestment-divestment of the very notion of total dependency on stable work. We may begin to wonder whether we should even want the same job for our whole lives, and, more important, why we should depend on the twists and turns of large inst.i.tutions for our sense of self.

This slow divestment by corporate culture has implications that reach far beyond the psychology of the individual: a population of skilled workers who don't see themselves as corporate lifers could lead to a renaissance in creativity and a revitalization of civic life, two very hopeful prospects. One thing is certain: it is already leading to a new kind of anticorporate politics.

Table 11.6 Labor-Force Profiles in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., 1997 Source: Bureau of Labor Slatistics; Statistics Canada; Office for National Statistics (Labor Force Survey); International Confederation of Temporary Work Businesses (CIETT). For Canadian and U.S. statistics, overlap of temp and part-time workers is accounted for. In the U.K., overlap between part-time and self-employed is accounted for.

[Taking the U.S. statistics as an example: the unemployed, part-time, temporary and replacement workers make up close to 40 percent of people actively working or looking for work. However, if you factor in the 67 million working-age Americans who are not included in the unemployment figures because they are not actively looking for work, the percentage of adults holding down full-time permanent jobs slips into the minority.]

You can see it in the political computer hackers who go after Microsoft and, as the next chapter will show, in the guerrilla ”adbusters” who target urban billboards. It is there as well in anarchic pranks like ”Phone in Sick to Work Day,” the ”Steal from Work! Because Work Is Stealing from You!” manifesto and on Web sites with names like Corporate America Sucks, just as it underlies international anticorporate campaigns like the one against McDonald's spurred by the McLibel Trial, and the one against Nike, focusing on Asian factory conditions.

In his essay ”Stupid Jobs Are Good to Relax With,” Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki contrasts the detachment he feels from the steady stream of ”joke jobs” that junk up his resume with his father's profound dislocation at being forced into early retirement after a career of steady upward mobility. Hal helped his father pack up his desk on his last day at the office, watching as he nicked Post-it Notes and other office supplies from the company that had employed him for twelve years. ”Despite his decades of labour and my years of being barely employed (and the five degrees we have between us), we have both ended up in the same place. He feels cheated. I don't.”19 Members of the sixties youth culture vowed to be the first generation not to ”sell out”: they just wouldn't buy a ticket for the express train with the sign reading ”lifelong employment.” But in the ranks of young part-timers, temps and contract workers, we are witnessing something potentially far more powerful. We are seeing the first wave of workers who never bought in-some of them by choice, but most because that lifelong-employment train has spent most of the past decade standing in the station.

The extent of this s.h.i.+ft cannot be overstated. Among the total number of working-age adults in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., those with full-time, permanent jobs working for someone other than themselves are in the minority. Temps, part-timers, the unemployed and those who have opted out of the labor force entirely-some because they don't want to work but many more because they have given up looking for jobs-now make up more than half of the working-age population. (see Table 11.6 Table 11.6) In other words, the people who don't have access to a corporation to which they can offer lifelong loyalty are the majority. And for young workers, consistently overrepresented among the unemployed, part-time and temporary sectors, the relations.h.i.+p to the work world is even more tenuous. (see Table 11.7 Table 11.7) From No Jobs to No Logo...

It should come as no surprise that the companies that increasingly find themselves at the wrong end of a bottle of spray paint, a computer hack or an international anticorporate campaign are the ones with the most cutting-edge ads, the most intuitive market researchers and the most aggressive in-school outreach programs. With the dictates of branding forcing companies to sever their traditional ties to steady job creation, it is no exaggeration to say that the ”strongest” brands are the ones generating the worst jobs, whether in the export processing zones, in Silicon Valley or at the mall. Furthermore, the companies that advertise aggressively on MTV, Channel One and in Details Details, selling sneakers, jeans, fast food and Walkmans, are the very ones that pioneered the McJob sector and led the production exodus to cheap labor enclaves like Cavite. After pumping young people up with go-get-'em messages-the ”Just Do It” sneakers, ”No Fear” T-s.h.i.+rts and ”No Excuses” jeans-these companies have responded to job requests with a resounding ”Who, me?” The workers in Cavite may be unswooshworthy, but Nike's and Levi's core consumers have received another message from the brands' global shuffle: they are unjobworthy.

To add insult to injury, as we saw in Part I, ”No s.p.a.ce,” this abandonment by brand-name corporations is occurring at the very moment when youth culture is being sought out for more aggressive branding than ever before. Youth style and att.i.tude are among the most effective wealth generators in our entertainment economy, but real live youth are being used around the world to pioneer a new kind of disposable workforce. It is in this volatile context, as the final section will show, that the branding economy is becoming the political equivalent of a sign hanging on the back of the body corporate that says ”Kick Me.”

No Logo

A call to Depression-era ad jammers from The Ballyhoo. The Ballyhoo. Two tobacco ad parodies by Ron English. Two tobacco ad parodies by Ron English.

Chapter Twelve.

Culture Jamming Ads Under Attack Advertising men are indeed very unhappy these days, very nervous, with a kind of apocalyptic expectancy. Often when I have lunched with an agency friend, a half dozen worried copy writers and art directors have accompanied us. Invariably they want to know when the revolution is coming, and where will they get off if it does come.

-Ex-adman James Forty, Our Master's Voice Our Master's Voice, 1934 It's Sunday morning on the edge of New York's Alphabet City and Jorge Rodriguez de Gerada is perched at the top of a high ladder, ripping the paper off a cigarette billboard. Moments before, the billboard at the corner of Houston and Attorney sported a fun-loving Newport couple jostling over a pretzel. Now it showcases the haunting face of a child, which Rodriguez de Gerada has painted in rust. To finish it off, he pastes up a few hand-torn strips of the old Newport ad, which form a fluorescent green frame around the child's face.

When it's done, the installation looks as the thirty-one-year-old artist had intended: as if years of cigarette, beer and car ads had been sc.r.a.ped away to reveal the rusted backing of the billboard. Burned into the metal is the real commodity of the advertising transaction. ”After the ads are taken down,” he says, ”what is left is the impact on the children in the area, staring at these images.”1 Unlike some of the growing legion of New York guerrilla artists, Rodriguez de Gerada refuses to slink around at night like a vandal, choosing instead to make his statements in broad daylight. For that matter, he doesn't much like the phrase ”guerrilla art,” preferring ”citizen art” instead. He wants the dialogue he has been having with the city's billboards for more than ten years to be seen as a normal mode of discourse in a democratic society-not as some edgy vanguard act. While he paints and pastes, he wants kids to stop and watch-as they do on this sunny day, just as an old man offers to help support the ladder.

Rodriguez de Gerada even claims to have talked cops out of arresting him on three different occasions. ”I say, 'Look, look what's around here, look what's happening. Let me explain to you why I do it.'” He tells the police officer about how poor neighborhoods have a disproportionately high number of billboards selling tobacco and hard liquor products. He talks about how these ads always feature models sailing, skiing or playing golf, making the addictive products they promote particularly glamorous to kids stuck in the ghetto, longing for escape. Unlike the advertisers who pitch and run, he wants his work to be part of a community discussion about the politics of public s.p.a.ce.

Rodriguez de Gerada is widely recognized as one of the most skilled and creative founders of culture jamming, the practice of parodying advertis.e.m.e.nts and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages. Streets are public s.p.a.ces, adbusters argue, and since most residents can't afford to counter corporate messages by purchasing their own ads, they should have the right to talk back to images they never asked to see. In recent years, this argument has been bolstered by advertising's mounting aggressiveness in the public domain-the ads discussed in ”No s.p.a.ce,” painted and projected onto sidewalks; reaching around entire buildings and buses; into schools; onto basketball courts and on the Internet. At the same time, as discussed in ”No Choice,” the proliferation of the quasi-public ”town squares” of malls and superstores has created more and more s.p.a.ces where commercial messages are the only ones permitted. Adding even greater urgency to their cause is the belief among many jammers that concentration of media owners.h.i.+p has successfully devalued the right to free speech by severing it from the right to be heard.

All at once, these forces are coalescing to create a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism. A growing number of activists believe the time has come for the public to stop asking that some s.p.a.ce be left unsponsored, and to begin seizing it back. Culture jamming baldly rejects the idea that marketing-because it buys its way into our public s.p.a.ces-must be pa.s.sively accepted as a one-way information flow.

The most sophisticated culture jams are not stand-alone ad parodies but interceptions-counter-messages that hack into a corporation's own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended. The process forces the company to foot the bill for its own subversion, either literally, because the company is the one that paid for the billboard, or figuratively, because anytime people mess with a logo, they are tapping into the vast resources spent to make that logo meaningful. Kalle Lasn, editor of Vancouver-based Adbusters Adbusters magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a precise metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam. ”In one simple deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy.” It's an image borrowed from Saul Alinsky who, in his activist bible, magazine, uses the martial art of jujitsu as a precise metaphor to explain the mechanics of the jam. ”In one simple deft move you slap the giant on its back. We use the momentum of the enemy.” It's an image borrowed from Saul Alinsky who, in his activist bible, Rules for Radicals Rules for Radicals, defines ”ma.s.s political jujitsu” as ”utilizing the power of one part of the power structure against another part...the superior strength of the Haves become their own undoing.”2 So, by rappelling off the side of a thirty-by-ninety-foot Levi's billboard (the largest in San Francisco) and pasting the face of serial killer Charles Manson over the image, a group of jammers attempts to leave a disruptive message about the labor practices employed to make Levi's jeans. In the statement it left on the scene, the Billboard Liberation Front said they chose Manson's face because the jeans were ”a.s.sembled by prisoners in China, sold to penal inst.i.tutions in the Americas.” So, by rappelling off the side of a thirty-by-ninety-foot Levi's billboard (the largest in San Francisco) and pasting the face of serial killer Charles Manson over the image, a group of jammers attempts to leave a disruptive message about the labor practices employed to make Levi's jeans. In the statement it left on the scene, the Billboard Liberation Front said they chose Manson's face because the jeans were ”a.s.sembled by prisoners in China, sold to penal inst.i.tutions in the Americas.”

The term ”culture jamming” was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco audio-collage band Negativland. ”The skillfully reworked billboard...directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy,” a band member states on the alb.u.m Jamcon '84 Jamcon '84. The jujitsu metaphor isn't as apt for jammers who insist that they aren't inverting ad messages but are rather improving, editing, augmenting or unmasking them. ”This is extreme truth in advertising,” one billboard artist tells me.3 A good jam, in other words, is an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms. So, according to these principles, with a slight turn of the imagery k.n.o.b, the now-retired Joe Camel turns into Joe Chemo, hooked up to an IV machine. That's what's in his future, isn't it? Or Joe is shown about fifteen years younger than his usual swinger self (see A good jam, in other words, is an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hiding beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms. So, according to these principles, with a slight turn of the imagery k.n.o.b, the now-retired Joe Camel turns into Joe Chemo, hooked up to an IV machine. That's what's in his future, isn't it? Or Joe is shown about fifteen years younger than his usual swinger self (see image image). Like Baby Smurf, the ”Cancer Kid” is cute and cuddly and playing with building blocks instead of sports cars and pool cues. And why not? Before R.J. Reynolds reached a $206 billion settlement with forty-six states, the American government accused the tobacco company of using the cartoon camel to entice children to start smoking-why not go further, the culture jammers ask, and reach out to even younger would-be smokers? Apple computers' ”Think Different” campaign of famous figures both living and dead has been the subject of numerous simple hacks: a photograph of Stalin appears with the altered slogan ”Think Really Different” the caption for the ad featuring the Dalai Lama is changed to ”Think Disillusioned” and the rainbow Apple logo is morphed into a skull (see image image). My favorite truth-in-advertising campaign is a simple jam on Exxon that appeared just after the 1989 Valdez spill: ”s.h.i.+t Happens. New Exxon,” two towering billboards announced to millions of San Francisco commuters.

Attempting to pinpoint the roots of culture jamming is next to impossible, largely because the practice is itself a cutting and pasting of graffiti, modern art, do-it-yourself punk philosophy and age-old pranksterism. And using billboards as an activist canvas isn't a new revolutionary tactic either. San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front (responsible for the Exxon and Levi's jams) has been altering ads for twenty years, while Australia's Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUG-UP) reached its peak in 1983, causing an unprecedented $1 million worth of damage to tobacco billboards in and around Sydney.

It was Guy Debord and the Situationists, the muses and theorists of the theatrical student uprising of Paris, May 1968, who first articulated the power of a simple detournement detournement, defined as an image, message or artifact lifted out of its context to create a new meaning. But though culture jammers borrow liberally from the avant-garde art movements of the past-from Dada and Surrealism to Conceptualism and Situationism-the canvas these art revolutionaries were attacking tended to be the art world and its pa.s.sive culture of spectators.h.i.+p, as well as the anti-pleasure ethos of mainstream capitalist society. For many French students in the late sixties, the enemy was the rigidity and conformity of the Company Man; the company itself proved markedly less engaging. So where Situationist Asger Jorn hurled paint at pastoral paintings bought at flea markets, today's culture jammers prefer to hack into corporate advertising and other avenues of corporate speech. And if the culture jammers' messages are more pointedly political than their predecessors', that may be because what were indeed subversive messages in the sixties-”Never Work,” ”It Is Forbidden to Forbid,” ”Take Your Desires for Reality”-now sound more like Sprite or Nike slogans: Just Feel It. And the ”situations” or ”happenings” staged by the political pranksters in 1968, though genuinely shocking and disruptive at the time, are the Absolut Vodka ad of 1998-the one featuring purple-clad art school students storming bars and restaurants banging on bottles.

In 1993, Mark Dery wrote ”Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slas.h.i.+ng and Sniping in the Empire of Signs,” a booklet published by the Open Magazine Pamphlet Series. For Dery, jamming incorporates such eclectic combinations of theater and activism as the

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