Culture Jams & Meme Warfare - Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and Media Activism

Fascinating stuff - meme warfare! Metamemes! Media trance! Detonating mind bombs!

Excerpt from 2002 paper subtitled 'Tactics in Global Activism for the 21st Century' by Wendi Pickerel, Helena Jorgensen, and Lance Bennett

'Jams are often aimed at exposing questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture, aiming to capture our attention so that, for a moment, we can consider the branded environment we live in. Culture jams refigure logos, fashion statements, and product images to challenge images of “what’s cool,” along with assumptions about the personal freedoms of consumption. Culture jams can help create a sense of transparency about a product’s production impact by presenting images that quickly communicate the realities hidden behind the slick corporate logos. The logic of culture jamming is to convert easily identifiable images into larger questions about corporate responsibility, the “true” environmental and human costs of consumption, or the private corporate uses of the “public” airwaves.

The basic unit of communication in culture jamming is the meme: the core unit of cultural transmission. Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to others (see Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, second edition 1989)...

For Lasn, the best culture jam is one that introduces a meta-meme, a two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image, but does so in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of corporate domination.