Culture Jam/The Corporation

Culture Jam 72-136

1. I really liked The New Activism (Fire in the Belly) chapter because it gave a nice contrast to old revolutionary movements and how culture jammers stand apart from them. I especially liked the feminist and leftist sections, where I found a refreshingly new viewpoint that Lasn expresses in this quote: “The Liberal Left has a way of co-opting every worthwhile cause. In the past few decades, it has hung its flag on the black movement, the women’s movement and the environmental movement… if we’re going to build an effective new social movement, we’re going to have to work not with them but around them.” (119-120) I thought this was powerful because it showed how important a role inspired creativity plays in revolutions with ideas that have never been tried before. This is mostly because of the numerous connotations that are attached to certain pre-stereotyped groups and ideas.
2. In the list of metamemes for culture jammers, I think adjusting the global marketplace with ecologically true costs is by far the most fundamentally impossible. There is no way any industry or nation of individuals; moreover a world of billions, can afford to pay the price of ecological sanctity. Whatever utopia we might’ve once had was long gone before human civilization became its irreversible corrupter. This dilemma appears in my everyday life whenever I eat tropical fruits, ride a plane, use Styrofoam… all irreversibly damaging, yet capitalistically de-valued, therefore undervalued in my consumer-dependent mind, and killing our planet.
3. In the “We’re Not Slackers” Lasn describes the typical North American undergrad conundrum; “There’s no real rush to finish a degree because what lies on the other side but debt, pavement pounding and the potential shame of boomeranging back home?” (155) If this is the kind of fear that is keeping us in school and from flourishing through creativity and independence, what am I doing? Why should I put myself in all this debt? Is this crazy?

4. “Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.” (177)

5. In “The Meme Warrior” I found the tactics of a culture jammer very interesting in that it challenges the persuasive skills of corporate media directly, because it must overpower it in order to succeed. “An effective TV subvertisement (or uncommercial) is so unlike what surrounds it on the commercial-TV mindscape that it immediately grabs the attention of viewers. It breaks their media-consumer trance and momentarily challenges their whole world outlook.”(133)

In all of Lasn’s refrences to promote ad busters and their ideas, I feel he is being hypocritical and basically advertising throughout the whole book.

My question is how can we trust Lasn’s huge solutions when it seems there is a bias and other intentions any author has in capitalizing off their work, and what adbusters as an organization does with its profit. As a media foundation their very motive is to sell their product, and although its supportive of revolutionary ideas and eye-opening literature, their campaigns seem less effective than the price of their zine would imply. I would say stop filtering money into the systems, Lasn has a huge obsession with television, the people who are watching however, are the corrupted. I think more exposure in community centers and on a more human level is where it is most important to get the message out to the appropriate and most effective audience. Why pay thousands to millions for airtime on a corporate news channel when you can channel those funds into worthy causes like charity or promotion of these ideas within the community or at educational seminars/ lectures. People who are going to attend and participate at these levels are the individuals who will make a difference.

The Corporation:

What really made an impact on me was the simplicity of the corporation. After all everything that is human-engineered, human-geared, and human-centered must have similar characteristics to that of a human. I really liked the psychological breakdown of corporate psychopathic tendencies, and thought it was very intuitively effective. All of a corporations connotations and ecological effects are in actuality just a reflection of humans as consumers, and it boils down to the savvy techniques of wealthy owners and their busy bee workers that are happening behind the scenes. I thought the most important part was in exemplifying the externalities of a corporate civilization, and that’s what most consumers fail to understand, or have concern for, ultimately being the destroyer of the natural world. The spy interview was pretty cool and I liked the optimistic quote: “In devastation there is opportunity”, although it can produce good or bad outcomes dependent upon who takes action first.