The Culture Jammers Network is a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. We believe culture jamming can be to our era what civil rights was to the ’60s, what feminism was to the ’70s, what environmental activism was to the ’80s. It will alter the way we live and think. It will change the way information flows, the way institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way meaning is produced in our society.
The Culture Jammers Network is a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. We believe culture jamming can be to our era what civil rights was to the ’60s, what feminism was to the ’70s, what environmental activism was to the ’80s. It will alter the way we live and think. It will change the way information flows, the way institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way meaning is produced in our society.
Uncooling Your Everyday
Abusters Magazine and Media Foundation has by far and without equivocation been the source and impetus that has brought culture jamming ideas to the international/global front. From the initial inception by the uniquely creative and impressive found sound-collage artists known as Negativland, who first realized the brilliant potential behind culture jamming which has deep roots to the Situationist International, Adbusters has enthusiastically run full on with the idea, bringing with it unprecedented exposure and awareness.
Adbusters offers incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, their annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week have made them an important activist networking group.
Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. They want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. They try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. They want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons. Visit the Adbustes Culture Jamming Headquarters
Let the Games Begin
Shame 2000: The Official Site of Australia’s UnOlympic Performance in Events That Matter.
For the real dirt on Australia’s human rights, cultural and environmental policies, visit Unolympics.com. They may be hosting the games but according to this website, their spirit is downright “unolympic.”
Typo Jam
The Independent Media Centre with the help of a group of anonymous pranksters has taken advantage of Olympic fever and created www.olympisc.com, which redirects typo-prone web surfers to various jammer sites. Thousands of sport enthusiasts have found themselves inadvertently perusing alternative sites including
sydney.indymedia.org and
www.s11.org.
VICTORY:
COKESPOTLIGHT.ORG
In response to the joint Adbusters and Greenpeace campaign against their use of global warming HFCs, Coca-Cola recently announced its decision to phase out the pollutant by the 2004 Olympics. Check out the CokeSpotlight website which thousands of people used to pressure the soft drink giant.
Virtual Empowerment Center
Global Arcade is the family fun center where you can play arcade games and learn about globalization and what is happening to people around the world. Use the GameXpress to go directly to the games, and then explore the site to find out more about globalization.
Debunking the Bank
The Whirled Bank Group
The World Bank’s “world free of poverty” mandate has now been exposed as a plot for a world “full of poverty” according to the new Whirled Bank website. The site offers a vast amount of evidence to support its claim that the World Bank is hard at work undermining the economies, environments and peoples of the developing world.
Sodding Commercial
Vancouver jammers recently “sodded” (placed living grass carpets in) a parking space on their city’s busy Commercial Drive. While most passersby’s either ignored the installation or pushed their children past it, the occassional brave soul took a few minutes out of their busy city life to relax in the lawn chair and enjoy the view, as drivers desperate for parking carefully avoided the grass.
Nike Jam
Where better to place a call for global justice than on Nike’s own website? Recently, an unkown hijacker redirected potential shoe shoppers to www.s11.org – the Australian website organizing the protest at Melbourne’s World Economic Forum in September. The jam lasted for 19 hours and hits jumped from a low of 57 to a high of 66,000 an hour at the peak of the hijacking! Check out what people saw when they went looking for www.nike.com.
MONSANTOS.COM
A group of web jammers known as the Decepticons launched the Monsantos.com site in April to offer “counter information” on biotechnology. Using the Monsanto home page as a template, this site is a clever détournement that has yet to attract the attention of Monsanto’s lawyers.
Billboard
Members of Vancouver’s “Public Works Crew” actively reclaimed their visual environment. Three billboards were hit simultaneously on February 21st by separate crews, one of which had a brief encounter with the law.
Tree Wrap
Guerrilla urban planning in downtown Vancouver brings the chaotic aesthetics of nature closer to our commodified preferences as consumers, through labeling ie. using paper to label a tree a “tree” equates visually that a tree is for consumption which is made into paper which is for further consumption to help us label “TREES” as such in a never ending cycle of meaningless consumption, consumptions intially designed to help give meaning to itself. The installation was set up this spring in different parts of the city bewildering passersby and fouling traffic.
The Cultuer Jammers Headquaters
This site was designed to help you turn the drab number cruncher you’re staring at right now into the most versatile activist tool ever reckoned with. From cyberpetitions to Critical Mass tips, from disseminating corporate propaganda, to downshifting your lifestyle and treading lightly on the planet, we hope this site will inspire you to move — upon your return to the real world — from spectator to participant.
A News Filtration Experiment
TheExperiment Network posts and produces daily, free news briefs, articles, and articlettes, indepth analysis and critiques, special commentary, interviews, and works of research and informative resources, all of which is a badge of our determination in securing a future for the freeflow proliferation of information. Any of our sites users around the world are encouraged and welcome to freely and widely reproduce any and all material in their own languages. Visit this site regularly to stay up-to-date.
Believing strongly in the idea of free informational flow systems!
Publish Often, Publish Widely, Distribute Freely!
BUY NOTHING DAY
OUR CONSUMER CULTURE IS OUT OF CONTROL.
Once, we shopped to buy what we needed, period. Now that we don’t need much, we shop for other reasons: to impress each other, to fill a void, to kill time. A mere 20% of the earth’s population uses 80% of its natural resources. Our overconsumption is killing the planet.
BUY NOTHING DAY is a simple idea with deep implications. It forces us to think about the “shop-till-you-drop” imperative and its effects on the rest of the world. On Buy Nothing Day enjoy a break from the shopping frenzy. Relish your power as a consumer to change the economic environment.
Buy Nothing Day: November 24, 2000
Author: thee_InVection_report
News Service: Adbusters
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