The price of justice is eternal publicity.
~~ Arnold Bennett

Meet the (Conformist) Company Ad Man

Mark Dery's pamphlet Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs (Westfield, NJ: Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993) defined the post-Cold War period's first wave of media activists: the theatrical Guerilla Girls; the sardonic Artfux effigies; media prankster Joey Skaggs's diverse projects; Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's liberal rap soundbites; and Negativland's clever sound collages. However by the late 1990s, the conformist Company Ad Man had assimilated these disruptive acts and revolutionary events into issues marketing's arsenal. Radical aesthetics became just another psychographics signifier.

Calvin Klein's campaigns used lo-fi and home-movie porn aesthetics to target the "Millennials" (the post—1982 generation); Nike outmanoeuvred its competitor Converse by using Michael Jordan to sell the 'idea' rather than the athletics shoe itself; Apple marketed 'Think Different' computer loyalty campaigns; and Seth Godin unleashed his 'idea viruses' to the entrepreneurial community. Culture jamming tactics were the solution for embattled corporations facing merger mania, synergy bottlenecks, flattened organizational hierarchies, and product line extension failures. Postmodern irony and parody techniques, therefore, momentarily penetrated the defenses of never satisfied consumers. As upscale advertising consultancy Rapp Collins claims, when you know what behavioral "hot-buttons" to press, you can offer "one-to-one marketing on a mass scale."

Even the consultants, writers, and disgruntled scholars who chronicled this secret cultural warfare were being exposed, in turn, by a generation of cynical and wary activists.

Douglas Rushkoff's countercultural credentials were questioned by Wired and other publications, after New York Times journalist Trip Gabriel claimed in an article (November 25, 1996) that Rushkoff earned $7500/hour and upwards to sell "Gen-X youth culture secrets" to multinational conglomerates. What Rushkoff was simultaneously discovering, was that advertising managers had no loyalty to the deeper countercultural ideals, which had moulded the surface imagery. Design staff had not always cultivated the mature moral development levels required for deploying these tools.

Commercial Terrorists?

Enter ®™ark, the corporate consulting firm of the 21st century. ®™ark have co-opted the "limited liability" provision used by transnational corporations, preferring to subvert the system from within, instead of "revolution from below" (the A16 and N30 protests). An article in the prestigious Harvard Review on Legislation journal (Winter 2000) labelled them "commercial terrorists," but ®™ark are closer to the Situationist Internationale than the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Why would ®™ark attract this attention and such a stacked deck against them? Why are the legal eagles using heavy-handed language to jockey for pole-position? One reason is the formative effect of sociopolitical flashpoints: just as Guy Debord was influenced by the May 1968 protests, ®™ark have gone against the grain, tapping the uncertain aftermath of the Cold War and disenchantment with economic rationalist models.

Stalking the Wild Shibboleths

®™ark have "stolen" the Situationist's tactic of detournement, short-circuiting the MTV hypnotized group-mind, by lifting images, messages, and cultural detritus out of their agreed-upon social context, to create new meanings and interpretations. They have adapted Andy Warhol's Pop Art, future-oriented Dadaist> and Surrealist techniques, and any "-ism" that you care to name.

By using dialectical reasoning, ®™ark have undermined corporate shibboleths such as the "Vision thing", the "Brand Called URL", and the "Work Matters" movement.

As a brokerage firm, ®™ark takes a distinctly Social Constructionist view of the corporation as a metaphysical entity. Their consultants use the language of publications like Business 2.0 and Fast Company magazines, and the 'virtual' façade of the professional service firm, to expose how the betrayal of ethics can occur in a mercantilist environment.

Use The Enemy

They might not be Accenture or McKinsey and Company, but ®™ark have shown, through the case studies on their site, why activists must bypass ideological barriers, and scavenge tools from everywhere for their own goals. Like a learning organization, ®™ark have codified the lessons they have learned from each skirmish, building up a repertoire of scenarios, and a skills database. This "institutional memory" will educate future activists. It establishes a process of action, instead of simply reacting to others.

This strategy may bring ®™ark into conflict with other activists, as well as the corporations themselves. Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn wants to dismantle the corporate system altogether (as the Graal knight battling The Dragon Formerly Known As Philip Morris Inc), whereas ®™ark are happy to feed the system's dissociative effects back on itself. Lasn's emphasis on "Lifestyle Activism" risks being assimilated by corporations and non-government organizations that use "Cause-Related Marketing".

The dangers that ®™ark faces are more insidious. Luckily, the 21st century consulting firm not "brain-locked" into 1960s Berkeley nostalgia or a cultural milieu that no longer exists. But if they don't spar with Lasn in the near future, ®™ark's self-deprecating irony will be rejected by "True Believer" activists. The brokerage's tactics may also be absorbed by analysts as "flak PR" tactics. Lastly, corporations may "steal" ®™ark's tactics, then hyper-evolve their own mercantilist structure into different mutations, thereby retaining control of the strategic landscape.Aleister Crowley wasn't thinking of fast cycle times when he wrote about the psychological effect of aeons, but he foresaw the dangerous endgame that ®™ark may face: