Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and

Sniping in the Empire of Signs

I. The Empire of Signs

"My fellow Americans," exhorted John F. Kennedy, "haven't you

ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?"

Of course, it wasn't actually Kennedy, but an actor in "Media Burn,"

a spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant

Farm. Speaking from a dais, "Kennedy" held forth on America's

addiction to the plug-in drug, declaring, "Mass media monopolies

control people by their control of information." On cue, an assistant

doused a wall of TV sets with kerosene and flicked a match at the

nearest console. An appreciative roar went up from the crowd as the

televisions exploded into snapping flames and roiling smoke.

Minutes later, a customized 1959 Cadillac hurtled through the fiery

wall with a shuddering crunch and ground to a halt, surrounded by

the smashed, blackened carcasses of televisions. Here and there, some

sets still burned; one by one, their picture tubes imploded, to the

onlookers' delight. A postcard reproduction of the event's

pyrotechnic climax, printed on the occasion of the its tenth

anniversary, bears a droll poem:

Modern alert

plague is here

burn your TV

exterminate fear

Image breakers

smashing TV

American heroes

burn to be free

In "Media Burn," Ant Farm indulged publicly in the guilty pleasure

of kicking a hole in the cathode-ray tube. Now, almost two decades

later, TV's cyclopean eye peers into every corner of the cultural

arena, and the desire to blind it is as strong as ever. "Media Burn"

materializes the wish-fulfillment dream of a consumer democracy

that yearns, in its hollow heart and empty head, for a belief system

loftier than the "family values" promised by a Volvo ad campaign,

discourse more elevated than that offered by the shark tank

feeding-frenzy of The McLaughlin Hour.

It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are intimately and

inextricably bound up in the TV experience. Ninety-eight percent of

all American households -- more than have indoor plumbing -- have

at least one television, which is on seven hours a day, on the average.

Dwindling funds for public schools and libraries, counterpointed by

the skyrocketing sales of VCRs and electronic games, have given rise

to a culture of "aliteracy," defined by Roger Cohen as "the rejection

of books by children and young adults who know how to read but

choose not to." The drear truth that two thirds of Americans get

"most of their information" from television is hardly a revelation.

Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the exchange value

of such information:

We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that

there has been an information 'explosion,' an

information 'revolution.' While in a certain narrow

sense this is the case, in many important ways just the

opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep

ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have

always possessed about who we are and where we live

seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age

of missing information.

The effects of television are most deleterious in the realms of

journalism and politics; in both spheres, TV has reduced discourse to

photo ops and sound bites, asserting the hegemony of image over

language, emotion over intellect. These developments are bodied

forth in Ronald Reagan, a TV conjuration who for eight years held

the news media, and thus the American public, spellbound. As Mark

Hertsgaard points out, the President's media-savvy handlers were able

to reduce the fourth estate, which likes to think of itself as an

unblinking watchdog, to a fawning lapdog: Deaver, Gergen and their

colleagues effectively rewrote the rules of presidential image-making.

On the basis of a sophisticated analysis of the American news media --

how it worked, which buttons to push when, what techniques had and

had not worked for previous administrations -- they introduced a new

model for packaging the nation's top politician and using the press to

sell him to the American public. Their objective was not simply to

tame the press but to transform it into an unwitting mouthpiece of the

government.

During the Reagan years, America was transformed into a TV

democracy whose prime directive is social control through the

fabrication and manipulation of images. "We [the Reagan campaign

staff] tried to create the most entertaining, visually attractive scene to

fill that box, so that the cameras from the networks would have to use

it," explained former Reagan advisor Michael Deaver. "It would be

so good that they'd say, 'Boy, this is going to make our show tonight.'

[W]e became Hollywood producers."

The conversion of American society into a virtual reality was

lamentably evident in the Persian Gulf War, a made-for-TV

miniseries with piggybacked merchandising (T-shirts, baseball caps,

Saddam toilet paper, Original Desert Shield Condoms) and gushy,

Entertainment Tonight-style hype from a cheerleading media. When

filmmaker Jon Alpert, under contract to NBC, brought back

stomach-churning footage of Iraq under U.S. bombardment, the

network -- which is owned by one of the world's largest arms

manufacturers, General Electric -- fired Alpert and refused to air the

film. Not that Alpert's film would have roused the body politic:

Throughout the war, the American people demanded the right not to

know. A poll cited in The New York Times was particularly

distressing: "Given a choice between increasing military control over

information or leaving it to news organizations to make most

decisions about reporting on the war, 57 per cent of those responding

said they would favor greater military control."

During the war's first weeks, as home front news organizations aided

Pentagon spin control by maintaining a near-total blackout on

coverage of protest marches, Deaver was giddy with enthusiasm. "If

you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media

relations for an international event," he bubbled, "it couldn't be done

any better than this is being done." In fact, a P.R. firm, Hill &

Knowlton, was hired; it orchestrated the congressional testimony of

the distraught young Kuwaiti woman whose horror stories about

babies ripped from incubators and left "on the cold floor to die" by

Iraqi soldiers was highly effective in mobilizing public support for

the war. Her testimony was never substantiated, and her identity --

she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. -- was

concealed, but why niggle over details? "Formulated like a World

War II movie, the Gulf War even ended like a World War II movie,"

wrote Neal Gabler, "with the troops marching triumphantly down

Broadway or Main Street, bathed in the gratitude of their fellow

Americans while the final credits rolled."

After the yellow ribbons were taken down, however, a creeping

disaffection remained. A slowly-spreading rancor at the televisual

Weltanschauung, it is with us still, exacerbated by the prattle of talk

show hosts, anchorclones, and the Teen Talk Barbie advertised on

Saturday mornings whose "four fun phrases" include "I love

shopping" and "Meet me at the mall." Mark Crispin Miller neatly

sums TV's place in our society:

Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it. This is

the open secret of TV today. Its only champions are its

own executives, the advertisers who exploit it, and a

compromised network of academic boosters.

Otherwise, TV has no spontaneous defenders, because

there is almost nothing in it to defend.

The rage and frustration of the disempowered viewer exorcised in

"Media Burn" bubbles up, unexpectedly, in "57 Channels (And

Nothin' On)", Bruce Springsteen's Scorsese-esque tale of a man

unhinged by the welter of meaningless information that assails him

from every channel. Springsteen sings: "So I bought a .44 magnum it

was solid steel cast/ And in the blessed name of Elvis well I just let it

blast/ 'Til my TV lay in pieces there at my feet/ And they busted me

for disturbin' the almighty peace."

Significantly, the video for "57 Channels" incorporates footage of a

white Cadillac on a collision course with a wall of flaming TV sets, in

obvious homage to "Media Burn." The ritual destruction of the TV

set, endlessly iterated in American mass culture, can be seen as a

retaliatory gesture by an audience that has begun to bridle, if only

intuitively, at the suggestion that "power" resides in the remote

control unit, that "freedom of choice" refers to the ever-greater

options offered around the dial. This techno-voodoo rite constitutes

the symbolic obliteration of a one-way information pipeline that only

transmits, never receives. It is an act of sympathetic magic performed

in the name of all who are obliged to peer at the world through

peepholes owned by multinational conglomerates for whom the profit

margin is the bottom line. "To the eye of the consumer," notes Ben

Bagdikian,

the global media oligopoly is not visible...Newsstands

still display rows of newspapers and magazines, in a

dazzling array of colors and subjects...Throughout the

world, broadcast and cable channels continue to

multiply, as do video cassettes and music recordings.

But...if this bright kaleidoscope suddenly disappeared

and was replaced by the corporate colophons of those

who own this output, the collage would go gray with

the names of the few multinationals that now command

the field.

In his watershed work, The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian reports that

the number of transnational media giants has dropped to 23 and is

rapidly shrinking. Following another vector, Herbert Schiller

considers the interlocked issues of privatized information and limited

access:

The commercialization of information, its private

acquisition and sale, has become a major industry.

While more material than ever before, in formats

created for special use, is available at a price, free

public information supported by general taxation is

attacked by the private sector as an unacceptable form

of subsidy...An individual's ability to know the actual

circumstances of national and international existence

has progressively diminished.

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon level another, equally disturbing

charge:

In an era of network news cutbacks and staff layoffs,

many reporters are reluctant to pursue stories they

know will upset management. "People are more careful

now," remarked a former NBC news producer,

"because this whole notion of freedom of the press

becomes a contradiction when the people who own the

media are the same people who need to be reported

on."

Corporate ownership of the newsmedia, the subsumption of an

ever-larger number of publishing companies and television networks

into an ever-smaller number of multinationals, and the increased

privatization of truth by an information-rich, technocratic elite are

not newly-risen issues. More recent is the notion that the public mind

is being colonized by corporate phantasms -- wraithlike images of

power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of

Neal Gabler:

Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the

theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the

genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction

between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could

argue that the theatricalization of American life is the

major cultural transformation of this century.

And Marshall Blonsky:

We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it

immediately on video...There is never any longer an

event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The

direction of events and of people is to be reproduced

into image, to be doubled in the image of television.

[T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are

images. Only images.

The territory demarcated by Gabler and Blonsky, lush with fictions

yet strangely barren, has been mapped in detail by the philosopher

Jean Baudrillard. In his landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of

Simulacra," Baudrillard put forth the notion that we inhabit a

"hyperreality," a hall of media mirrors in which reality has been lost

in an infinity of reflections. We "experience" events, first and

foremost, as electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many

times removed, he maintains; originals, invariably compared to their

digitally-enhanced representations, inevitably fall short. In the "desert

of the real," asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases and are

more alluring to the thirsty eye. Moreover, he argues, signs that once

pointed toward distant realities now refer only to themselves.

Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic,

turn-of-the-century burg that exists only in Norman Rockwell

paintings and MGM backlots, is a textbook example of self-referential

simulation, a painstaking replica of something that never was. "These

would be the successive phases of the image," writes Baudrillard,

betraying an almost necrophiliac relish as he contemplates the

decomposition of culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the

reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it

masks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any

reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory capitalism has

been superseded by an information economy characterized by the

reduction of labor to the manipulation, on computers, of symbols that

stand in for the manufacturing process. The engines of industrial

production have slowed, yielding to a phantasmagoric capitalism that

produces intangible commodities -- Hollywood blockbusters,

television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles, buzzwords, images,

one-minute megatrends, financial transactions flickering through

fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars, fought with

camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and weaponry in a

television that kills. Futurologists predict that the flagship technology

of the coming century will be "virtual reality," a computer-based

system that immerses users wearing headgear wired for sight and

sound in computer-animated worlds. In virtual reality, the television

swallows the viewer, headfirst.

II. Culture Jamming

Meanwhile, the question remains: How to box with shadows? In other

words, what shape does an engaged politics assume in an empire of

signs?

The answer lies, perhaps, in the "semiological guerrilla warfare"

imagined by Umberto Eco. "[T]he receiver of the message seems to

have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I

am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message

and its multiple possibilities of interpretation," he writes. "[O]ne

medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on

another medium...The universe of Technological Communication

would then be patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas, who

would restore a critical dimension to passive reception."

Eco assumes, a priori, the radical politics of visual literacy, an idea

eloquently argued by Stuart Ewen, a critic of consumer culture. "We

live at a time when the image has become the predominant mode of

public address, eclipsing all other forms in the structuring of

meaning," asserts Ewen. "Yet little in our education prepares us to

make sense of the rhetoric, historical development or social

implications of the images within our lives." In a society of heat, light

and electronic poltergeists -- an eerie otherworld of "illimitable

vastness, brilliant light, and the gloss and smoothness of material

things" -- the desperate project of reconstructing meaning, or at least

reclaiming that notion from marketing departments and P.R. firms,

requires visually-literate ghostbusters.

Culture jammers answer to that name. "Jamming" is CB slang for the

illegal practice of interrupting radio broadcasts or conversations

between fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and other equally

jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed against an

ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture whose operant mode

is the manufacture of consent through the manipulation of symbols.

The term "cultural jamming" was first used by the collage band

Negativland to describe billboard alteration and other forms of media

sabotage. On Jamcon '84, a mock-serious bandmember observes, "As

awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and

directs our inner life grows, some resist...The skillfully reworked

billboard...directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original

corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at

large."

Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture jammers, like

Eco's "communications guerrillas," introduce noise into the signal as

it passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging idiosyncratic,

unintended interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest

ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings;

simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions

impotent. Jammers offer irrefutable evidence that the right has no

copyright on war waged with incantations and simulations. And, like

Ewen's cultural cryptographers, they refuse the role of passive

shoppers, renewing the notion of a public discourse.

Finally, and just as importantly, culture jammers are Groucho

Marxists, ever mindful of the fun to be had in the joyful demolition

of oppressive ideologies. As the inveterate prankster and former

Dead Kennedy singer Jello Biafra once observed, "There's a big

difference between 'simple crime' like holding up a 7-11, and

'creative crime' as a form of expression...Creative crime is...uplifting

to the soul...What better way to survive our anthill society than by

abusing the very mass media that sedates the public?...A prank a day

keeps the dog leash away!"

Jamming is part of a historical continuum that includes Russian

samizdat (underground publishing in defiance of official censorship);

the anti-fascist photomontages of John Heartfield; Situationist

detournement (defined by Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Traces, as "the

theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into

contexts of one's own devise"); the underground journalism of '60s

radicals such as Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman;

Yippie street theater such as the celebrated attempt to levitate the

Pentagon; parody religions such as the Dallas-based Church of the

Subgenius; workplace sabotage of the sort documented by Processed

World, a magazine for disaffected data entry drones; the ecopolitical

monkeywrenching of Earth First!; the random acts of Artaudian

cruelty that radical theorist Hakim Bey calls "poetic terrorism"

("weird dancing in all-night computer banking lobbies...bizarre alien

artifacts strewn in State Parks"); the insurgent use of the "cut-up"

collage technique proposed by William Burroughs in "Electronic

Revolution" ("The control of the mass media depends on laying down

lines of association...Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media

with total illusion"); and subcultural bricolage (the refunctioning, by

societal "outsiders," of symbols associated with the dominant culture,

as in the appropriation of corporate attire and Vogue model poses by

poor, gay, and largely nonwhite drag queens).

An elastic category, culture jamming accommodates a multitude of

subcultural practices. Outlaw computer hacking with the intent of

exposing institutional or corporate wrongdoing is one example;

"slashing," or textual poaching, is another. (The term "slashing"

derives from the pornographic "K/S" -- short for "Kirk/Spock" --

stories written by female Star Trek fans and published in

underground fanzines. Spun from the perceived homoerotic subtext

in Star Trek narratives, K/S, or "slash," tales are often animated by

feminist impulses. I have appropriated the term for general use,

applying it to any form of jamming in which tales told for mass

consumption are perversely reworked.) Transmission jamming;

pirate TV and radio broadcasting; and camcorder countersurveillance

(in which low-cost consumer technologies are used by DIY

muckrakers to document police brutality or governmental

corruption) are potential modus operandi for the culture jammer. So,

too, is media activism such as the cheery immolation of a mound of

television sets in front of CBS's Manhattan offices -- part of a protest

against media bias staged by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In

Reporting) during the Gulf War -- and "media-wrenching" such as

ACT UP's disruption of The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour in protest of

infrequent AIDS coverage. A somewhat more conventional strain of

culture jamming is mediawatch projects such as Paper Tiger

Television, an independent production collective that produces

segments critiquing the information industry; Deep Dish TV, a

grassroots satellite network that distributes free-thinking

programming to public access cable channels nationwide; and Not

Channel Zero, a collective of young African-American "camcorder

activists" whose motto is "The Revolution, Televised." And then there

is academy hacking -- cultural studies, conducted outside university

walls, by insurgent intellectuals.

Thus, culture jamming assumes many guises; let us consider, in

greater detail, some of its more typical manifestations.

Sniping and Subvertising

"Subvertising," the production and dissemination of anti-ads that

deflect Madison Avenue's attempts to turn the consumer's attention in

a given direction, is an ubiquitous form of jamming. Often, it takes

the form of "sniping" -- illegal, late-night sneak attacks on public

space by operatives armed with posters, brushes, and buckets of

wheatpaste.

Adbusters, a Vancouver, B.C.-based quarterly that critiques

consumer culture, enlivens its pages with acid satires. "Absolut

Nonsense," a cunningly-executed spoof featuring a suspiciously

familiar-looking bottle, proclaimed: "Any suggestion that our

advertising campaign has contributed to alcoholism, drunk driving or

wife and child beating is absolute nonsense. No one pays any attention

to advertising." Ewen, himself a covert jammer, excoriates

conspicuous consumption in his "Billboards of the Future" --

anonymously-mailed Xerox broadsides like his ad for "Chutzpah:

cologne for women & men, one splash and you'll be demanding the

equal distribution of wealth." Guerrilla Girls, a cabal of feminist

artists that bills itself as "the conscience of the art world," is known

for savagely funny, on-target posters, one of which depicted a nude

odalisque in a gorilla mask, asking, "Do women have to get naked to

get into the Met. Museum?" Los Angeles's Robbie Conal covers urban

walls with the information age equivalent of Dorian Gray's portrait:

grotesque renderings of Oliver North, Ed Meese, and other

scandal-ridden politicos. "I'm interested in counter-advertising," he

says, "using the streamlined sign language of advertising in a kind of

reverse penetration." For gay activists, subvertising and sniping have

proven formidable weapons. A March, 1991 Village Voice report

from the frontlines of the "outing" wars made mention of "Absolutely

Queer" posters, credited to a phantom organization called OUTPOST,

appearing on Manhattan buildings. One, sparked by the controversy

over the perceived homophobia in Silence of the Lambs, featured a

photo of Jodie Foster, with the caption: "Oscar Winner. Yale

Graduate. Ex-Disney Moppet. Dyke." Queer Nation launched a

"Truth in Advertising" postering campaign that sent up New York

Lotto ads calculated to part the poor and their money; in them, the

official tagline, "All You Need is a Dollar and a Dream" became "All

You Need is a Three-Dollar Bill and a Dream." The graphics

collective Gran Fury, formerly part of ACT UP, has taken its

sharp-tongued message even further: a superslick Benetton parody

ran on buses in San Francisco and New York in 1989. Its headline

blared "Kissing Doesn't Kill: Greed and Indifference Do" over a row

of kissing couples, all of them racially-mixed and two of them gay.

"We are trying to fight for attention as hard as Coca-Cola fights for

attention," says group member Loring Mcalpin. "[I]f anyone is angry

enough and has a Xerox machine and has five or six friends who feel

the same way, you'd be surprised how far you can go."

Media Hoaxing

Media hoaxing, the fine art of hoodwinking journalists into covering

exhaustively researched, elaborately staged deceptions, is culture

jamming in its purest form. Conceptual con artists like Joey Skaggs

dramatize the dangers inherent in a press that seems to have forgotten

the difference between the public good and the bottom line, between

the responsibility to enlighten and the desire to entertain.

Skaggs has been flimflamming journalists since 1966, pointing up the

self-replicating, almost viral nature of news stories in a wired world.

The trick, he confides, "is to get someone from an out-of-state

newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen, and then you

Xerox that story and include it in a second mailing. Journalists see

that it has appeared in print and think, therefore, that there's no need

to do any further research. That's how a snowflake becomes a

snowball and finally an avalanche, which is the scary part. There's a

point at which it becomes very difficult to believe anything the media

tells you."

In 1976, Skaggs created the Cathouse For Dogs, a canine bordello

that offered a "savory selection" of doggie Delilahs, ranging from

pedigree (Fifi, the French poodle) to mutt (Lady the Tramp). The

ASPCA was outraged, the Soho News was incensed, and ABC devoted

a segment to it which later received an Emmy nomination for best

news broadcast of the year. In time, Skaggs reappeared as the leader

of Walk Right!, a combat-booted Guardian Angels-meet-Emily Post

outfit determined to improve sidewalk etiquette, and later as Joe

Bones, head of a Fat Squad whose tough guy enforcers promised, for

a fee, to prevent overweight clients from cheating on diets. As Dr.

Joseph Gregor, Skaggs convinced UPI and New York's WNBC-TV

that hormones extracted from mutant cockroaches could cure

arthritis, acne, and nuclear radiation sickness.

After reeling in the media outlets who have taken his bait, Skaggs

holds a conference at which he reveals his deception. "The hoax," he

insists, "is just the hook. The second phase, in which I reveal the

hoax, is the important part. As Joey Skaggs, I can't call a press

conference to talk about how the media has been turned into a

government propaganda machine, manipulating us into believing

we've got to go to war in the Middle East. But as a jammer, I can go

into these issues in the process of revealing a hoax."

Audio Agitprop

Audio agitprop, much of which utilizes digital samplers to

deconstruct media culture and challenge copyright law, is a somewhat

more innocuous manifestation. Likely suspects include Sucking Chest

Wound, whose God Family Country ponders mobthink and media

bias; The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who take aim in

"Television, the Drug of the Nation" at "happy talk" newscasts that

embrace the values of MTV and Entertainment Tonight; Producers

For Bob, whose pert, chittering dance tracks provide an unlikely

backdrop for monologues about "media ecology," a

McLuhan-inspired strategy for survival in a toxic media

environment; and Chris Burke, whose Oil War, with its cut-up press

conferences, presidential speeches, and nightly newsbites, is pirate

C-Span for Noam Chomsky readers. Sucking Chest Wound's Wayne

Morris speaks for all when he says, "I get really angry with the

biased coverage that's passed off as objective journalism. By taking

scraps of the news and blatantly manipulating them, we're having our

revenge on manipulative media."

Billboard Banditry

Lastly, there is billboard banditry, the phenomenon that inspired

Negativland's coinage. Australia's BUGA UP stages hit-and-run

"demotions," or anti-promotions, scrawling graffiti on cigarette or

liquor ads. The group's name is at once an acronym for

"Billboard-Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions" and a

pun on "bugger up," Aussie slang for "screw up."

In like fashion, African-American activists have decided to resist

cigarette and liquor ads targeting communities of color by any means

necessary. Describing Reverend Calvin Butts and fellow Harlem

residents attacking a Hennesey billboard with paint and rollers, Z

magazine's Michael Kamber reports, "In less than a minute there's

only a large white blotch where moments before the woman had

smiled coyly down at the street." Chicago's Reverend Michael Pfleger

is a comrade-in-arms; he and his Operation Clean defaced -- some

prefer the term "refaced" -- approximately 1,000 cigarette and

alcohol billboards in 1990 alone. "It started with the illegal drug

problem," says Pfleger. "But you soon realize that the number-one

killer isn't crack or heroin, but tobacco. And we realized that to stop

tobacco and alcohol we [had] to go after the advertising problem."

San Francisco's Billboard Liberation Front, together with Truth in

Advertising, a band of "midnight billboard editors" based in Santa

Cruz, snap motorists out of their rush hour trances with

deconstructed, reconstructed billboards. In the wake of the Valdez

disaster, the BLF reinvented a radio promo -- "Hits Happen. New

X-100" -- as "Shit Happens -- New Exxon"; TIA turned "Tropical

Blend. The Savage Tan" into "Typical Blend. Sex in Ads." Inspired

by a newsflash that plans were underway to begin producing neutron

bombs, a Seattle-based trio known as SSS reworked a Kent billboard

proclaiming "Hollywood Bowled Over By Kent III Taste!" to read

"Hollywood Bowled Over By Neutron Bomb!," replacing the

cigarette pack with a portrait of then-President Ronald Reagan.

Artfux and the breakaway group Cicada Corps of Artists are New

Jersey-based agitprop collectives who snipe and stage neo-Situationist

happenings. On one occasion, Artfux members joined painter Ron

English for a tutorial of sorts, in which English instructed the group

in the fine art of billboard banditry. Painting and mounting posters

conceptualized by English, Artfux accompanied the New York artist

on a one-day, all-out attack on Manhattan. One undercover operation

used math symbols to spell out the corporate equation for animal

murder and ecological disaster: A hapless-looking cow plus a

death's-head equalled a McDonald's polystyrene clamshell. "Food,

foam and Fun!," the tagline taunted. In a similar vein, the group

mocked "Smooth Joe," the Camel cigarettes camel, turning his phallic

nose into a flaccid penis and his sagging lips into bobbing testicles.

One altered billboard adjured, "Drink Coca-Cola -- It Makes You

Fart," while another showed a seamed, careworn Uncle Sam opposite

the legend, "Censorship is good because -- -- -- -!"

"Corporations and the government have the money and the means to

sell anything they want, good or bad," noted Artfux member Orlando

Cuevas in a Jersey Journal feature on the group. "We...[are] ringing

the alarm for everyone else."

III. Guerrilla Semiotics

Culture jammers often make use of what might be called "guerrilla"

semiotics -- analytical techniques not unlike those employed by

scholars to decipher the signs and symbols that constitute a culture's

secret language, what literary theorist Roland Barthes called "systems

of signification." These systems, notes Barthes in the introduction to

Elements of Semiology, comprise nonverbal as well as verbal modes

of communication, encompassing "images, gestures, musical sounds,

objects, and the complex associations of all these."

It is no small irony -- or tragedy -- that semiotics, which seeks to

make explicit the implicit meanings in the sign language of society,

has become pop culture shorthand for an academic parlor trick useful

in divining the hidden significance in Casablanca, Disneyland, or our

never-ending obsession with Marilyn Monroe. In paranoid pop psych

such as Wilson Bryan Key's Subliminal Seduction, semiotics offers

titillating decryptions of naughty advertising. "This preoccupation

with subliminal advertising," writes Ewen, "is part of the legendary

life of post-World War II American capitalism: the word 'SEX'

written on the surface of Ritz crackers, copulating bodies or death

images concealed in ice cubes, and so forth." Increasingly, advertising

assumes this popular mythology: a recent print ad depicted a cocktail

glass filled with icecubes, the words "Absolut vodka" faintly

discernible on their craggy, shadowed surfaces. The tagline: "Absolut

Subliminal."

All of which makes semiotics seem trivial, effete, although it is an

inherently political project; Barthes "set out..to examine the normally

hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings

particular to specific social groups (i.e. those in power) are rendered

universal and 'given' for the whole of society." Marshall Blonsky has

called semiotics "a defense against information sickness, the

'too-muchness' of the world," fulfilling Marshall McLuhan's

prophecy that "just as we now try to control atom-bomb fallout, so

we will one day try to control media fallout." As used by culture

jammers, it is an essential tool in the all-important undertaking of

making sense of the world, its networks of power, the encoded

messages that flicker ceaselessly along its communication channels.

This is not to say that all of the jammers mentioned in this essay

knowingly derive their ideas from semiotics or are even familiar with

it, only that their ad hoc approach to cultural analysis has much in

common with the semiotician's attempt to "read between the lines" of

culture considered as a text. Most jammers have little interest in the

deliria that result from long immersion in the academic vacuum,

breathing pure theory. They intuitively refuse the rejection of

engaged politics typical of postmodernists like Baudrillard, a

disempowering stance that too often results in an overeagerness for

ringside seats at the gotterdammerung. The L.A. Weekly's disquieting

observation that Baudrillard "loves to observe the liquidation of

culture, to experience the delivery from depth" calls to mind Walter

Benjamin's pronouncement that mankind's "self-alienation has

reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an

aesthetic pleasure of the first order." Jammers, in contrast, are

attempting to reclaim the public space ceded to the chimeras of

Hollywood and Madison Avenue, to restore a sense of equilibrium to

a society sickened by the vertiginous whirl of TV culture.

IV. Postscript From the Edge

The territory mapped by this essay ends at the edge of the electronic

frontier, the "world space of multinational capital" (Fredric Jameson)

where vast sums are blipped from one computer to another through

phone lines twined around the globe. Many of us already spend our

workdays in an incunabular form of cyberpunk writer William

Gibson's "cyberspace," defined in his novel Neuromancer as "a

consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators...A graphic representation of data abstracted from the

banks of every computer in the human system." The experience of

computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis, once novel, is becoming

increasingly familiar:

When I first met my wife, she was immersed in trading

options. Her office was in the top of a skyscraper in

Boston, and yet, in a very real sense, when she was at

work she was in a world that could not be identified

with any single physical location. Sitting at a computer

screen, she lived in a world that consisted of offers and

trades, a world in which she knew friends and enemies,

safe and stormy weather. For a large portion of each

day, that world was more real to her than her physical

surroundings.

In the next century, growing numbers of Americans will work and

play in artificial environments that only exist, in the truest sense, as

bytes stored in computer memory. The explosion of computer-based

interactive media seems destined to sweep away (at least in its

familiar form) the decidedly non-interactive medium that has

dominated the latter half of this century: television. Much of this

media may one day be connected to a high-capacity, high-speed fiber

optic network of "information superhighways" linking as many

homes as are currently serviced by the telephone network. This

network, predicts computer journalist John Markoff, "could do for

the flow of information -- words, music, movies, medical images,

manufacturing blueprints and much more -- what the transcontinental

railroad did for the flow of goods a century ago and the interstate

highway system did in this century."

The culture jammer's question, as always, is: Who will have access to

this cornucopia of information, and on what terms? Will fiber-optic

superhighways make stored knowledge universally available, in the

tradition of the public library, or will they merely facilitate

psychological carpet bombing designed to soften up consumer

defenses? And what of the network news? Will it be superseded by

local broadcasts, with their heartwarming (always "heartwarming")

tales of rescued puppies and shocking (always "shocking") stories of

senseless mayhem, mortared together with airhead banter? Or will

the Big Three give way to innumerable news channels, each a conduit

for information about global, national and local events germane to a

specific demographic? Will cyberpunk telejournalists equipped with

Hi-8 video cameras, digital scanners, and PC-based editing facilities

hack their way into legitimate broadcasts? Or will they, in a medium

of almost infinite bandwidth and channels beyond count, simply be

given their own airtime? In short, will the electronic frontier be

wormholed with "temporary autonomous zones" -- Hakim Bey's term

for pirate utopias, centrifuges in which social gravity is artificially

suspended -- or will it be subdivided and overdeveloped by what

cultural critic Andrew Ross calls "the military-industrial-media

complex?" Gibson, who believes that we are "moving toward a world

where all of the consumers under a certain age will...identify

more...with the products they consume than...with any sort of

antiquated notion of nationality," is not sanguine. In the video

documentary Cyberpunk, he conjures a minatory vision of what will

happen when virtual reality is married to a device that stimulates the

brain directly. "It's going to be very commercial," he says. "We

could wind up with something that felt like having a very, very

expensive American television commercial injected directly into your

cortex."

"For Sale" signs already litter the unreal estate of cyberspace. A New

York Times article titled "A Rush to Stake Claims on the Multimedia

Frontier" prophesies "software and hardware that will connect

consumers seamlessly to services...[allowing them] to shop from

home," while a Newsweek cover story on interactive media promises

"new technology that will change the way you shop, play and learn"

(the order, here, speaks volumes about American priorities). Video

retailers are betting that the intersection of interactive media and

home shopping will result in zillions of dollars' worth of impulse

buys: zirconium rings, nonstick frying pans, costumed dolls, spray-on

toupees. What a New York Times author cutely calls Communicopia

("the convergence of virtually all communications technologies") may

end up looking like the Home Shopping Network on steroids.

But hope springs eternal, even in cyberspace. Jammers are heartened

by the electronic frontier's promise of a new media paradigm --

interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than

resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist. To date, this

paradigm has assumed two forms: the virtual community and the

desktop-published or on-line 'zine. ("'Zine," the preferred term

among underground publishers, has subtly political connotations:

grassroots organization, a shoestring budget, an anti-aesthetic of

exuberant sloppiness, a lively give-and-take between transmitters and

receivers, and, more often than not, a mocking, oppositional stance

vis a vis mainstream media.) Virtual communities are comprised of

computer users connected by modem to the bulletin board systems

(BBS's) springing up all over the Internet, the worldwide

meta-network that connects international computer networks. Funded

not by advertisers but by paid subscribers, the BBS is a first, faltering

step toward the jammer's dream of a truly democratic mass medium.

Although virtual communities fall short of utopia -- women and

people of color are grossly underrepresented, and those who cannot

afford the price of admission or who are alienated from technology

because of their cultural status are denied access -- they nonetheless

represent a profound improvement on the homogenous, hegemonic

medium of television.

On a BBS, any subscriber may initiate a discussion topic, no matter

how arcane, in which other subscribers may participate. If the

bulletin board in question is plugged into the Internet, their comments

will be read and responded to by computer users scattered across the

Internet. On-line forums retire, at long last, the Sunday morning

punditocracy, the expert elite, the celebrity anchorclones of network

news, even the electronic town hall, with its carefully-screened

audience and over-rehearsed politicians. As one resident of a San

Francisco-based bulletin board called the WELL noted,

This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may

be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities

and experts. The roles of reader, writer, and critic are

so quickly interchangeable that they become

increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation.

In like fashion, ever-cheaper, increasingly sophisticated desktop

publishing packages (such as the software and hardware used to

produce this pamphlet) ensure that, in a society where freedom of the

press -- as A.J. Leibling so presciently noted -- is guaranteed only to

those who own one, multinational monoliths are not the only

publishers. As Gareth Branwyn, a one-time 'zine publisher and

longtime resident of virtual communities, points out,

The current saturation of relatively inexpensive

multimedia communication tools holds tremendous

potential for destroying the monopoly of ideas we have

lived with for so long...A personal computer can be

configured to act as a publishing house, a

broadcast-quality TV studio, a professional recording

studio, or the node in an international computer bulletin

board system.

Increasingly, 'zines are being published on-line, to be bounced around

the world via the Internet. "I can see a future in which any person can

have a node on the net," says Mitch Kapor, president of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group concerned with free speech,

privacy, and other constitutional issues in cyberspace. "Any person

can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have."

Devil's advocates might well argue that Festering Brain Sore, a

fanzine for mass murderer aficionados, or the WELL topic devoted

to "armpit sex" are hardly going to crash the corporate media system.

Hakim Bey writes, "The story of computer networks, BBS's and

various other experiments in electro-democracy has so far been one

of hobbyism for the most part. Many anarchists and libertarians have

deep faith in the PC as a weapon of liberation and self-liberation --

but no real gains to show, no palpable liberty."

Then again, involvement in virtual communities and the 'zine scene is

rapidly expanding beyond mere hobbyism: as this is written,

approximately 10 million people frequent BBS's, and an estimated

10,000 'zines are being published (70 alone are given over to left

politics of a more or less radical nature). These burgeoning

subcultures are driven not by the desire for commodities but by the

dream of community -- precisely the sort of community now sought

in the nationally-shared experience of watching game shows, sitcoms,

sportscasts, talk shows, and, less and less, the evening news. It is this

yearning for meaning and cohesion that lies at the heart of the

jammer's attempts to reassemble the fragments of our world into

something more profound than the luxury cars, sexy technology, and

overdesigned bodies that flit across our screens. Hackers who expose

governmental wrongdoing, textual slashers, wheatpaste snipers,

billboard bandits, media hoaxers, subvertisers, and unannounced

political protestors who disrupt live newscasts remind us that

numberless stories go untold in the daily papers and the evening

news, that what is not reported speaks louder than what is. The

jammer insists on choice: not the dizzying proliferation of consumer

options, in which a polyphony of brand names conceals the essential

monophony of the advertiser's song, but a true plurality, in which the

univocal world view promulgated by corporate media yields to a

multivocal, polyvalent one.

The electronic frontier is an ever-expanding corner of Eco's

"universe of Technological Communication...patrolled by groups of

communications guerrillas" bent on restoring "a critical dimension to

passive reception." These guerrilla semioticians are in pursuit of new

myths stitched together from the fabric of their own lives, a

patchwork of experiences and aspirations that has little to do with the

depressive stories of an apolitical intelligentsia or the repressive

fictions of corporate media's Magic Kingdom. "The images that

bombard and oppose us must be reorganized," insist Stuart and

Elizabeth Ewen. "If our critique of commodity culture points to

better alternatives, let us explore -- in our own billboards of the

future -- what they might be." Even now, hackers, slashers, and

snipers -- culture jammers all -- are rising to that challenge.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Bill Mullen, a professor at Youngstown University

and friend of many years whose close reading and tough-minded

critique of this essay improved it immeasurably, and to Margot

Mifflin, whose slashing red pen saved me, at the last minute, from my

worst excesses.

* * *

Points of Departure

Craig Baldwin, Sonic Outlaws (c/o Artists Television Access,

415-824-3890, or by mail from 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco,

CA 94110, VHS, 87 minutes, $30, make check payable to Craig

Baldwin). Baldwin, an independent filmmaker, is an appropriationist

auteur par excellence, equal parts Eisenstein and dumpster-diver. His

documentary Sonic Outlaws uses the legal and media brouhaha stirred

up by Negativland's illegal sampling (and howlingly funny parody) of

a U-2 song as a springboard for deeper thoughts on copyright in the

age of digital reproduction and private ownership of the public

airwaves. Audio Dadaists and unrepentant plagiarists Emergency

Broadcast Network, the Tape Beatles, and John Oswald are also

featured.

"Billboard Liberation Front Manual," Processed World #25,

Summer/Fall 1990, pps. 22-6. This and other back issues may be

ordered from 41 Sutter Street, #1829, San Francisco, CA 94104.

The BLF has also published The Art and Science of Billboard

Improvement (San Francisco: Los Cabrones Press, $1.50). No more

information is available as this is written; writing to Processed

World, which acts as an intermediary for the BLF, might prove

fruitful.

William Board, "Alter a Billboard," CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer

1983, pps. 114-116. Do's and don't's for would-be "midnight

billboard editors," written by a pseudonymous member of Truth in

Advertising. $7, Whole Earth Review, 27 Gate Five Road, Sausalito,

CA 94965.

Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in Black Hole, ed. by

Carolyn Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for Publications Design, Yale

Gordon College of Liberal Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992).

This essay, as well as the companion pieces in this underground

omnibus, explore the interstice between cyberpunk and culture

jamming. Branywn's later book, Jamming the Media: A Citizen's

Guide to Reclaiming the Tools of Communication (Chronicle Books),

is an exhaustively researched, high-spirited romp through the DIY

underground, stuffed to bursting with detailed how-to information on

desktop publishing, media pranking, pirate radio, and "multimedia

for the masses." The refrain to the Ramones song, "We want the

airwaves," reverberates through these pages. E-mail Gareth at

gareth@well.com.

Robbie Conal, Art Attack: The Midnight Politics of a Guerrilla Artist

(New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). At last: the ideal gift for

insurrectionists -- a coffee table art book about a wheatpaste warrior.

Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance and Electronic

Civil Disobedience (both available from Autonomedia, POB 568

Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568, phone/fax

718-963-2603). Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of media

hackers and postmodern theorists. In my back cover blurb to

Electronic Civil Disobedience, I write, "An Anarchist's Cookbook for

an age of decentralized, dematerialized power, ECD shares cultural

DNA with William Burroughs's 'Electronic Revolution,' Guy

Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Hakim Bey's Temporary

Autonomous Zone, and other classics of 'nomadic resistance.' CAE is

a flesh-eating virus on the body politic."

Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, Dave Foreman and

Bill Haywood, eds. (Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987). Chapter 8,

"Propaganda," includes sections on "Billboard Revision" and

"Correcting Forest Service Signs." The jury is still out on Earth

First!, which often crosses the line from righteous ecopolitical rage to

neo-Luddite knee-jerking (hence the name of the publishing

company). That said, the authors' folksy pragmatism,

anarcho-libertarian humor, and iron-spined resolve in the face of

bulldozers and chainsaws is truly inspiring.

The Happy Mutant Handbook: Mischievous Fun for Higher Primates,

ed. Mark Frauenfelder, Carla Sinclair, Gareth Branwyn, Will Kreth

(Riverhead Books). Includes brief profiles of Chris Baldwin, Joey

Skaggs, the Cacophony Society, and the Billboard Liberation Front,

as well as articles on hacking, DIY radio and TV, shirking work, and

hit-and-run ontology-wrenching (pranks).

Abbie Hoffman, The Best of Abbie Hoffman (New York: Four Walls

Eight Windows, 1989). Chapter 43, "Guerrilla Broadcasting,"

includes nuts-and-bolts "how to" sections on pirate radio and outlaw

TV.

Loompanics Unlimited, a distributor of fringe publications, is an

invaluable source for titles on hacking; psychological warfare; Zeke

Teflon's Complete Manual of Pirate Radio; Muzzled Media: How to

Get the News You've Been Missing! by Gerry L. Dexter; and more.

Loompanics' 1988 catalogue includes Erwin R. Strauss's "Pirate

Broadcasting," a historical and philosophical inquiry into the titular

phenomenon. Write P.O. Box 1197, Port Townsend, WA 98368 for a

catalogue.

Roar! The Paper Tiger Television Guide to Media Activism, The

Paper Tiger Television Collective, eds. (New York: The Paper Tiger

Television Collective, 1991). This thoroughgoing, irreplaceable guide

to culture jamming proves, to mutilate Mao, that power springs from

the barrel of a camcorder. An essay by Schiller, together with a

lengthy "how to" section, make this a must. Write to 339 Lafayette

Street, New York, NY 10012.

Sabotage in the American Workplace: Anecdotes of Dissatisfaction,

Mischief, and Revenge, ed. Martin sprouse (Pressure Drop Press and

AK Press). Studs Terkel's Working for the deskilled, downsized, or

just plain disaffected.

Test Card F: Television, Mythinformation, and Social Control (AK

Press, POB 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682). A spleen-filled

rant on "the media machine" as engine of social control, lashed

together with punk and neo-Situationist collages. The back cover

declares, "Using savage image/text cut-and-paste, Test Card F

explodes all previous media theories and riots through the Global

Village, looting the ideological supermarket of all its products…" A

Molotov cocktail for the mind.

* * *

Endnotes

1. This essay originally appeared in 1993, as Pamphlet #25 in the

Open Magazine Pamphlet Series.

2. Roger Cohen, "The Lost Book Generation," The New York Times,

"Education Life" supplement, January 6, 1991, pg. 34.

3. Bill McKibben, The Age of Missing Information (New York:

Random House, 1992), p. 18.

4. Ibid., p. 9.

5. Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan

Presidency (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), p. 5.

6. From a transcript of "Illusions of News," the third episode in the

PBS series, The Public Mind with Bill Moyers, p. 5.

7. Alex S. Jones, "Poll Backs Control of News," The New York

Times, C24, January 31, 1991.

8. Neal Gabler, "Now Playing: Real Life, the Movie," The New York

Times, Sunday, October 20, 1991, Section 2, pg. 32.

9. Mark Crispin Miller, "Deride and Conquer," in Watching

Television, ed. by Todd Gitlin (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 228.

10. Ben Bagdikian, "Lords of the Global Village," The Nation, June

12, 1989, p. 819.

1. Herbert Schiller, The Nation, July 4-11, 1987, p. 6.

2. Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, "Anti-Hero: What Happens

When Network News is Owned and Sponsored By Big Corporations

That Need To Protect Their Own Interests?," Spin, volume six,

number four, July, 1990, p. 75.

3. Gabler, ibid.

4. Marshall Blonsky, American Mythologies (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), p. 231.

5. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in Simulations

(New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 11.

6. Umberto Eco, "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare," in

Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich:

1986), pps. 138, 143, 144.

7. Stuart Ewen, "Living by Design," in Art in America, June, 1990,

p. 76.

8. A line lifted, out of context, from Marguerite Sechehaye's

Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl (New York: Grune &

Stratton, 1968), p. 19.

9. Jello Biafra, interviewed in Pranks!: Re/Search #11 (San

Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1987), p. 64.

20. Quoted by Karrie Jacobs, in Metropolis, July/August 1990, and

reprinted in the Utne Reader, March/April 1991, p. 91-2.

2. God Family Country is available from DOVentertainment, 2 Bloor

Street West, Suite 100-159, Toronto, Canada M4W 3E2, as is Bob's

Media Ecology, by Producers For Bob; Hypocrisy is the Greatest

Luxury, by the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, was released by 4th

& Bdwy/Island, and should be stocked by most major record

retailers; the cassette-only Oil War, by Chris Burke, can be purchased

directly from the artist ($5.95 check or money order to Chris Burke,

111 3rd Avenue, #12-E, New York, NY 10003).

22. Harry Goldstein, "Billboard Liberation: Talking Back to

Marketers By Taking Outdoor Advertising Into Your Own Hands," in

the Utne Reader, November/December 1991, pps. 46-48.

23. David Ferman, "Pastor Leads War on Billboards," in Adbusters,

Fall/Winter 1991, p. 41-2.

24. Stuart Ewen, "Desublimated Advertising," Artforum, January,

1991, p. 26.

25. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London:

Routledge, 1988), p. 9.

26. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

(New York: Signet, 1964), p. 267.

27. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los

Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990), p. 54.

28. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), p. 51.

29. W. Daniel Hillis, "What is Massively Parallel Computing?," in

Daedalus, Winter 1992, p. 13.

30. John Markoff, "Building the Electronic Superhighway," The New

York Times, January 24, 1993, Section 3, p. 1.

3. William Gibson, in Cyberpunk (VHS, 60 minutes, available from

ATA/Cyberpunk, P.O. Box 12, Massapequa Park, NY 11762).

32. Loc. cit.

33. William Rolf Knutson, a computer programmer, fiction writer,

and occasional Mondo 2000 contributor, in a private e-mail letter to

the author, March 25, 1993.

34. Gareth Branwyn, "Jamming the Media," in Black Hole, ed. by

Carolyn Hughes, (Baltimore: Institute for Publications Design, Yale

Gordon College of Liberal Arts, University of Baltimore, 1992), pps.

1-2.

35. Mitch Kapor, quoted by Bruce Sterling, in The Hacker

Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New

York: Bantam, 1992), p. 298.

36. Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. (New York: Autonomedia, 1991), p. 113.

37. Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and

the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill,

1976), p. 282. This passage appears only in the original, unrevised

edition of the book.

Mark Dery [markdery@mindspring.com] is a cultural critic. He

edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University

Press, 1995) and wrote Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of

the Century (Grove Press, 1996). His collection of essays, The

Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink was

published by Grove Press in February, 1999. He is an occasional

writer for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The

Village Voice Literary Supplement, Suck, and Feed, and a frequent

lecturer in the U.S. and Europe on new media, fringe thought, and

unpopular culture.