The attempt to “jam” the transmissions of our corporate-controlled, media consumer-industrial complex is part of the information war. In the American popular consumer culture today, truth and untruth, morality and immorality are all mixed together. Dissent is never forbidden unless it poses a danger to the capitalist economy which cannot be tolerated.
Dissenters to commercial culture are “culture jammers” who try and describe things as they really are and not as the entertainment-consumption complex wants us to believe things to be. Culture jamming sabotages commercialism and, in turn, the corporate “captains” move to silence the culture jammer-traitors by using laws, like business libel laws, to suppress the dissenters.
The two-faced major media commercial outlets, like newspaper, radio and TV conglomerates and others, may refuse to air what culture jammers would really like to say. However, these same media outlets turn around and hide behind the banner of free speech. This is the conflict between the commercial marketplace, ideas and observations. The right to dissent becomes marginalized if there is little or no access to the commercial airwaves to reach large masses of people all at once instead of little by little like the internet offers.
The bottom line is there are numerous public service ads created by activists that the public will never see even though the activists have the money to pay for the airtime to air their ads on radio and TV.
The origins of culture jamming probably lie in medieval ceremonies, like the Feast of Fools, where authorities are paraded around in fools’ costume. In the early part of the 20th Century what is now the older generation grew up espousing values like trust and civility. Today, however, if you tend to trust others or be civil then
you may be more likely to be taken advantage of. Perceived weakness invites aggression. When you are at your weakest and most vulnerable this is when you can expect challenges from aggressors.
Today, most anything goes. Everything that used to be a sin has now been twisted around to try and convince you that it is a temporary affliction or disease. Today, we are living in a “society of the spectacle” where real leisure and real living has been replaced by pre-packaged experiences and media-created events.
Real experiences and things have also been replaced with copies without an original. Due to the power of mass media advertising, when people are given a better imitation than the original people choose the imitation over the real thing, like choosing Disney World over the real world, and people come to think the imitation or copy IS the real McCoy and they tend to forget about the original.
Originally, advertising connected the product or service being sold with some sort of self-image, like popularity, sexiness, fame, success, power or individuality, or way of life, like pastoral, pleasant or family-oriented. Today, ads are filled with selfishness, mistrust of human behavior and mean-spiritedness.
Today, the product or service offers the consumer a chance to be part of a certain “crowd” or “scene” as consumers are being sold style, image and celebrity getting sold on the images the consumer wants to project on themselves and others and not so much so on the usefulness or satisfaction derived from using the product or service itself.
Is there a way out of hyper-reality and the society of the spectacle? Yes, you can take charge of your mental environment basically jamming the prevailing culture and attitudes. Adbusters Magazine does this all the time as well as critics like Mark Crispin Miller.
As the Western message of consume, consume, consume increasingly spreads to billions of people in India, China and the Third World, slowly, the lines between information and entertainment are being blurred producing “infotainment” as real facts become irrelevant but selling to the largest audience reigns supreme. Conspicuous consumption is slowly eating up the planet. We may not be able to stop consumptive behavior and the ensuing techno-slavery that comes with it but we may be able to jam its reception by awakening people to their media-controlled life and the technology that enslaves them.
Media messages all around us tell us to care less, procreate and consume but do not question. Culture jamming asks people to confront and question that which has become most “natural” to them in the American commercial culture and this is the key weapon in the information war. The outcome could very well determine our collective fate!
SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCE: DR. STEVE MIZRACH AT THE SAMIZDAT PAGE JULY 2011