Joseph Heath - Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can’t Be Jammed

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S eptember 2003 marked a turning point in the development of Western civilization. It was the month that Adbusters magazine started accepting orders for the Black Spot Sneaker, its own signature brand of subversive running shoes. After that day, no rational person could possibly believe that there is any tension between mainstream and alternative culture. After that day, it became obvious to everyone that cultural rebellion, of the type epitomized by Adbusters magazine, is not a threat to the systemit is the system.

Founded in 1989, Adbusters is the flagship publication of the culture-jamming movement. In their view, society has become so thoroughly permeated with propaganda and lies, largely as a consequence of advertising, that the culture as a whole has become an enormous system of ideologyall designed to reproduce faith in the system. The goal of the culture jammers is quite literally to jam the culture, by subverting the messages used to reproduce this faith and blocking the channels through which it is propagated. This in turn is thought to have radical political consequences. Kalle Lasn argued that culture jamming will become to our era what civil rights was to the 60s, what feminism was to the 70s, what environmental activism was to the 80s.

Five years later, hes using the Adbusters brand to flog his own trademark line of running shoes. What happened? Did Adbusters sell out?

Absolutely not. It is essential that we all see and understand this. Adbusters did not sell out, because there was nothing to sell out in the first place. Adbusters never had a revolutionary doctrine. What they had was simply a warmed-over version of the countercultural thinking that has dominated leftist politics since the 60s. And this type of countercultural politics, far from being a revolutionary doctrine, has been one of the primary forces driving consumer capitalism for the past forty years.

In other words, what we see on display in Adbusters magazine is, and always has been, the true spirit of capitalism. The episode with the running shoes just serves to prove the point.

as a ground-breaking marketing scheme to uncool Nike. If it succeeds, it will set a precedent that will revolutionize capitalism. Yet how exactly is it supposed to revolutionize capitalism? Reebok, Adidas, Puma, Vans and a half-dozen other companies have been trying to uncool Nike for decades. Thats called marketplace competition. It is, in fact, the whole point of capitalism.

Lasn defends the sneaker project against critics, pointing out that his shoes, unlike those of his rivals, will not be manufactured in sweatshopsalthough they will still be imported from Asia. This is nice. But fair trade and ethical marketing are hardly revolutionary ideas, and they certainly represent no threat to the capitalist system. If consumers are willing to pay more for shoes made by happy workersor for eggs laid by happy chickensthen there is money to be made in bringing these goods to market. Its a business model that has already been successfully exploited to great effect by The Body Shop and Starbucks, among others.

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Culture jammers are not the first to try to break the system through consumer revolt. Countercultural rebels have been playing the same game for over forty years, and it obviously doesnt work. With . So how does one get from a VW Beetle to a Ford Explorer? It turns out to be not so difficult.

The crucial point is that (contrary to rumor) the hippies did not sell out. Hippie ideology and yuppie ideology are one and the same. There simply never was any tension between the countercultural ideas that informed the 60s rebellion and the ideological requirements of the capitalist system. While there is no doubt that a cultural conflict developed between the members of the counterculture and the defenders of the older American Protestant establishment, there never was any tension between the values of the counterculture and the functional requirements of the capitalist economic system. The counterculture was, from its very inception, intensely entrepreneurial. It reflected, as does Adbusters, the most authentic spirit of capitalism.

Hippies bought VW Beetles for one primary reasonto show that they rejected mass society. The big three Detroit automakers had been the target of withering social criticism for well over a decade, accused of promoting planned obsolescence in their vehicles. They were chastised above all for changing their models and designs so that consumers would be forced to buy a new car every few years in order to keep up with the Joneses. by many as an object of special scornas both embodiment and symbol of the wastefulness of American consumer culture. Against this backdrop, Volkswagen entered the U.S. consumer market with a very simple pitch: Wanna show people that youre not just a cog in the machine? Buy our car!

When the boomers started having children, the old VW obviously was no longer sufficient. Yet there was no question of buying a wood-paneled station wagon, the kind that their parents used to drive. They may have had kids, but they were still rebels at heart. And no vehicle appealed to this desire for rebel chic more perfectly than the SUV. Off-road capability was the major selling pointeven the Grateful Dead sang the praises of four-wheel drive. The system tells you that you have to drive in a straight line, down some road that The Man has built for you. The rebel cant be tied down like that; he yearns for freedom. He needs to be able to veer off at any time and start following his own road.

What a perfect vehicle! To anyone who passes by, it says, Im not one of those losers with kids, living in the suburbs. My life is an adventure. It tells them that youre not a square, not a cog in the machine.

If the boomers were obsessed with cars, Generation Xers seem to have had a special preoccupation with shoes. Shoes were an essential element of the punk aesthetic from the beginning, from army boots and Converse sneakers to Doc Martens and Blundstones. And instead of the big three automakers to play the villain, there were the shoe companies: first and foremost, Nike. For antiglobalization demonstrators, Nike came to symbolize everything that was wrong with the emerging capitalist world order.

Yet this animus toward Nike did create occasional moments of embarrassment. During the famous Seattle riots of 1999, the downtown Niketown was trashed by protestors, but videotape recorded at the scene showed several protestors kicking in the front window wearing Nike shoes. It occurred to many people that if you think Nike is the root of all evil, you really shouldnt be wearing their shoes. Yet if thousands of young people refuse to wear Nike, that creates an obvious market for alternative footwear. Vans and Airwalk were both able to leverage some of the rebel chic associated with skateboarding into millions of dollars of sneaker sales. Its the same story all over again, and Adbusters is just trying to get a piece of the action.

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The question is, why would anyone think that selling running shoes could be subversive? To understand the answer, it is useful to take a closer look at the first film in the Matrix trilogy. Lots has been written about the philosophy of the Matrix, most of it wrong. To understand the first film, one must look very carefully at the scene in which Neo sees the white rabbit. He hands a book to his friend, and on the spine of that book we can see the title: Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.

Many commentators on the film saw the core idea of The Matrixthat the world we live in might be an elaborate illusion, that our brains are simply being fed sensory input by machines, input that tricks us into thinking that we live and interact with a world of physical objectsas simply an updated version of Ren Descartess skeptical How do you know that youre not dreaming? thought experiment. This is a misinterpretation.