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on Sunday 18/10/1998 How To Make Trouble And Influence People Summary: "Stay calm and relaxed and comfortable. You are entering a culture jam." It's the new subversion - website spoofs, satire, practical jokes, subtle message changes. Cultural terrorists, they organise "Buy Nothing Days" and disorganise Barbie dolls' voice box. Mix and match disinformation. They send the spin doctors spiralling. Their aim is the media, marketing, consumerism. And their message: "Break your chains"... Transcript: THEME ABC ANNOUNCEMENT: Across Australia, this is Radio National. We apologise for this break in transmission. We'll return you to our normal program as soon as possible. SCHMALTZY 50s MUSIC SEXY WOMAN: Your mission, if you choose to accept it. AD MAN: Unleash the fiend, invoke your dark side, vandalise everything. Stand in the middle of traffic and dance. Return favours twofold, and return malice fivefold. Insert tiny propaganda bombs into publications and news-stands everywhere. Defy TV, denounce everybody, see through everything, place disturbing classified ads in newspapers, toss money at people, paint targets on cars, streak, defy classification, get yourself on TV. Start a church, cross dress, write several conflicting autobiographies, be politically incorrect, make love to anything, make war on everything. Look normal, be insane. Take a deep breath and... jump! IAN WALKER: I'm Ian Walker, and we apologise for this departure from normal programming. For the next 50 minutes you'll hear an emergency broadcast of HOW TO MAKE TROUBLE AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE, a loose A-to-Z of subversion in the late 20th century. We'll meet the pranksters, hoaxers, hackers, massers and artistic terrorists who may well be one click away from a virtual revolution in political activism.or at the very least, making protest fun again. HAKIM BEY: Weird dancing in all night computer banking lobbies; unauthorised pyrotechnic displays; land art; earthworks as bizarre alien artefacts strewn in state parks; burglarise houses, but instead of stealing, move poetic terrorist objects; kidnap someone and make them happy. IAN WALKER: So, fire up your browser as we journey into cyberspace and beyond on a slightly gonzo and roughly alphabetical tour of the world of culture jamming... SEXY WOMAN: A is for anarchy, anti-ads, audio agitprop... MECHANICAL VOICE: Back. IAN WALKER: If anarchism's not dead, then it's been having a very long nap. But with socialism buried and capitalism crumbling before our eyes, it's maybe the only 'ism' left that hasn't been given a proper workout this side of the new millennium. In the past, revolution's been a messy business. But thanks to the Internet, young anarchists have found a place to cause maximum disturbance without a whole lotta bloodshed. DANIEL MARON: I think the Internet came at a really, you know, almost inevitable, but really good time in our culture. And a lot of people clued-in to what was possible in a pretty short period of time. And, you know, continued to learn and explore the possibilities I think. I think the web has provided probably the best opportunity for slipping things in under people's radar, because it is just the sort of sea of information where you can make something that looks very professional, that is not necessarily easily distinguishable from, you know, The New York Times website. IAN WALKER: Daniel Maron is among the new breed of young artists who are doing their bit to confuse and subvert. Most of them are 20 to 40-year-olds, Gen-X-ers weary of baby boomer nostalgia about the glorious 60s. They write ambitious and polemic manifestos. They walk a fine line between petty crime and conceptual art. They make their public statements by working undercover. You generally contact them via email under pseudonyms like The Roaming Irrationalist, The Apocalyptic Cowboy and X-Dubois. They keep odd hours, work mostly from home, own cheap phones and many run their own web pages. MUSIC SEXY WOMAN: ...arm the homeless, abbie hoffman, albert langer, adbusters, abrupt. MECHANICAL VOICE: Open this link. IAN WALKER: A browse through Daniel Maron's website ABRUPT, reveals a nice line in fake flyers, political parody and anti-ads. It may not sound like much, but his most famous creation is a series remodelling the classic Kellogs cereal box graphics.Snap, Crackle and Pop as you've never seen them before. DANIEL MARON: There's a one-way communication with these broadcast media, television ads and printed imagery, and I think as the people who these things are targeted at, it can be very frustrating to be told what you like and what you should aspire to. A good culture hack, it makes you say, like you know, "Screw these people, we can have a lot more fun you know" and all their expensive psychological research into consumer response, and all their high-paid designers they've got to do this, we can take all that they did and just have fun with it... or not, or ignore it. This leads into another issue though, which is that in recent years the people doing advertising are every bit as aware of these kinds of tricks and developments and critical response, as the people doing culture jamming. SPRITE GRUNGE SONG RADIO COMMERCIAL No-one understands me, and I ain't got no job; Sprite helped me grow my goatee, now I'm a total slob; Yes I'm a total slacker, I owe it all to Sprite I got nothing else to do, I drink it day and night. If you want to know the truth this song is just a ploy Sprite won't make you miserable or fill your life with joy 'Cause Sprite is just a soda, remember what comes first So drink whatever tastes good and just obey your thirst. This commercial is so stupid ... DANIEL MARON: When you're dealing with public imagery which is both the advertisement and any parodies or mutations of them, it's public domain and there's really no guarantees. I mean, especially there are those who've passed it off in terms of information war and image war and stuff, and if that's the case, well then, you know, wringing your hands about the other side using dirty tactics certainly doesn't get you anywhere. You know, it just means that the standards are raised, and everyone's going to have to be a little more creative and more resourceful, I don't know. SEXY WOMAN: Those headaches you've been having aren't symptoms of fatigue, they're labour pains. Your dreams and ideas have been boiling for years, just below the surface. And now your mind is ready to give birth. But they are watching. They know how your brain cells are blossoming towards transformation.and they're scared. For now it's OK, they've got you quarantined on a college campus, or wearing yourself out at some crappy job, or following the latest media scandal.. IAN WALKER: This is the text of ABRUPT's favourite piece of silliness: the infamous Tract No. 9, a mock-religious pamphlet which was handed out to intoxicated punters at the Kentucky Derby. SEXY WOMAN: When your neurons start to replicate themselves in your head, or in your actions, then you start to threaten their sterile dream of law and order. You threaten to become unpredictable. That's when they put the red tag by your file... AD MAN: Carcinogenius. You've been marked for observation. Wear your stigma with pride. DANIEL MARON: There's an element to it that's purely fun and humourous. At the same time, I'd like to think that in the right context, if these images that have been re-appropriated or whatever you want to call it, someone looks at them long enough to realise that something's not right. And if things like this are done enough and people are made to see things like this a few times and they start to think, you know, maybe they've been too trusting of the imagery that they receive on a regular basis, and perhaps it will make one or two people even a little more critical of the information that they're sort of swimming in all the time. IAN WALKER: The world headquarters of culture jamming is The Media Foundation in downtown Vancouver in Canada. It was founded in 1989 by some self-proclaimed "mental environmentalists" specialising in what they called "subvertising". They publish a popular monthly magazine called ADBUSTERS, and their annual campaigns such as TV TURNOFF WEEK and BUY NOTHING DAY have now spread to dozens of countries, including Australia. The co-founder of The Media Foundation and editor of ADBUSTERS magazine is KALLE LASN. He's bringing out a book next year on the future of culture jamming called "The Uncooling of America". He has high hopes for what the movement might achieve. KALLE LASN: Culture jamming is the social activist movement of our information age, is the way I see it. I think that there have been three big social movements in my lifetime: the black liberation movement of the 60s, and then the feminist movement of the 70s, followed by the environmental movement of the 80s and 90s. And culture jamming I think is the fourth big movement now that is going to wash over our society and reinvent every nook and cranny of it. ADBUSTERS TV UNCOMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: For years, people have defined the economic health of a country by its gross national product. The trouble is that every time a forest falls, the GNP goes up. Every oil spill, the GNP goes up. Every time a new cancer patient has diagnosed, the GNP goes up. If we are to save ourselves, economists must learn to subtract. KALLE LASN: Some culture jammers are liberating billboards, some culture jammers are having to pilot radio and micro broadcasting. Many culture jammers work on campus radio stations, and I think the most effective jamming that we're doing at the moment is television jamming, where we're producing 30-second and 60-second subvertisements, or as some people call them 'uncommercials'. FACTORY PRODUCTION LINE NOISES ADBUSTERS TV UNCOMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: There's never been a better time to buy. The world we're living in is the factory.the product being manufactured is you. KALLE LASN: Culture jammers are angry because we're not creating our own culture any more, and we don't have access to our own public airwaves any more. And because in some sense we are being brainwashed into a consumer cult, is the way many culture jammers feel. So, this battle to gain access to television and other airwaves is absolutely crucial to our movement. But in each of the areas of our life, like the way we get around, the way we eat, how we dress, how we feel about our sexuality and so on, in each of these areas there's culture jams going on. BURPING SFX ADBUSTERS TV UNCOMMERCIAL VOICEOVER: The average North American consumes five times more than a Mexican; ten times more than a Chinese person; and 30 times more than a person from India. We are the most rabid consumers in the world, a world that could die because of the way we North Americans live. Give it a rest. November 28 is BUY NOTHING DAY. KALLE LASN: To go on a 24-hour consumer fast on BUY NOTHING DAY is one of the most profound experiences that I've had over the last ten years of my life, when I went on this consumer fast seven years ago for the first time, then I found out that not buying anything for 24 hours was almost as difficult as not smoking a cigarette for 24 hours was for me many years ago when I was still a smoker. I discovered that consumption, buying things you know, giving in to this impulse to have a Mars Bar right now, or another coffee, or whatever, that this had become the very essence of my life. In other words, consumer culture had really done a job on me, and BUY NOTHING DAY was the first time when I started realising how personal this addiction to buying really is, and for me really that was the first step in pulling out of mainstream consumer culture. SEXY WOMAN: B is for billboard banditry, and buga up. MECHANICAL VOICE: Refresh. IAN WALKER: The world pioneers of culture jamming were Australia's own BUGA UP, the Billboard Utilising Graffitists against Unhealthy Promotions who for a decade from 1979 were making enemies of tobacco and alcohol companies with their eye-catching creative reworking of public advertising spaces. All you needed was a clever slogan, a steady hand and a spraycan on a long stick. But since the government regulations banning tobacco advertising came into play, BUGA UP have been up to bugger all. SEXY WOMAN: ...back orifice, barbie liberation organisation. MECHANCIAL VOICE: Add bookmark. IAN WALKER: When you're sick of subverting the advert, you can always try sabotaging the product. The best example of this in recent times goes to the gorgeously-named BLO, the Barbie Liberation Organisation. CORPORATE VIDEO VOICEOVER: And what has happened to Barbie? She's the talk of GI Joe. GI JOE VOICE: Sieg Heil! Direct fire at that Goon squad. BARBIE VOICE: Let's make plans for the weekend. CORPORATE VIDEO VOICEOVER: Now BLO stands for the Barbie Liberation Organisation. RTMark effected its first high profile act of worker-based sabotage in 1993 when it channelled $8,000 to a group that switched the voiceboxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. IAN WALKER: The people bankrolling the BLO was a savvy group of cultural terrorists calling themselves RTMark (pronounced "Artmark"). They're a kind of clearing house cum funding body for politically-motivated pranks, and they've cleverly aped the structures and jargons of a financial institution.even down to a smarmingly corporate-sounding promotional video. CORPORATE VIDEO VOICEOVER: RTMark has helped fund the sabotage or subversion of dozens of corporate products. As a privately-held corporation, RTMark allows investors to participate in blacklisted or illegal cultural production with minimum risk... IAN WALKER: Their spokesperson is Ray Thomas. RAY THOMAS: A lot of people are still thinking of power in the old terms, and we have tried, and we're trying to focus thought on what's wrong with corporate power, which is at least the equal of government power. They're so adaptable, and they're so organic that it's hard to speak of any one corporation as the enemy. It's more the system that allows tremendous abuse. CORPORATE VIDEO VOICEOVER: The core of the RTMark system is its database of unfilfilled sabotage projects. IAN WALKER: The RTMark project list reads like a cultural saboteur's wet dream, complete with cash incentives. AD WOMAN: $1,000 for a worker at a film editing house, or video duplication outfit, to insert other scenes of a shockingly educating nature into popular movies or videos. Viewers must see the scenes, and it must be reported in the media. AD MAN: $1,000 for a worker at a major metropolitan newspaper who significantly alters an issue and changes most of the articled text in an interesting way. AD WOMAN: $3,000 to re-name a major chemicals weapons incineration plant after Ronald Reagan. AD MAN: Place leaflets detailing the poor working conditions that exist for those who assemble athletic footwear in major brand athletic shoes, their shoeboxes or the shopping bags containing them before or as they're being sold. RAY THOMAS: Projects can be seen as stocks, and when you support a project you're investing in it. When you contribute, say, $100 to a project that you would like to see accomplished, you are sort of investing in the accomplishment of the project. What you want to see out of that project is cultural dividends; you want to see a beneficial cultural event take place because of your money, as a reward. What you're doing is you're investing in the improvement of the culture; that's why we've modelled it after the financial sector because really these words like "profit", and "investment" and "dividends" and so on, they've really contaminated the language and we want to reclaim those words and use the power in those words. And so we talk about cultural dividends; we talk about for-profit companies are really... RTMark is a for-profit company, we're for cultural profit. CORPORATE VIDEO VOICEOVER: Investors and workers together ensure that RTMark continues to be the industry leader. It brings sabotage and blacklisted cultural production into the public marketplace. EXPLOSION SFX SEXY WOMAN: C is for culture jamming... MECHANICAL VOICE: Frequently asked questions. CROSLEY BENDIX: As awareness of how the media environment we occupy effects and directs our inner life grows, so resist. The possibility of adding pimples to the retouched photo of the face on the cover of America are only now being seen as artistic territory. The cultural jammer works his secret in public. IAN WALKER: The term "culture jamming" was first used on this 1984 track by the weirdo techno-yippie band NEGATIVLAND, whose label-defying output is much closer to Dada and the surrealists than anything you'd hear on America's Top 40. The "jamming" part of the term is CB radio slang for the illegal practice of electronically interrupting radio shows, or the sound on your television, or conversations between fellow ham operators. CROSLEY BENDIX: So, keep your ears up and your eyes open, a jammer could appear on your TV, or a radio show like this one. LAUGHTER HYSTERICAL VOICE: Jamming! Jamming! Jamming! SEXY WOMAN: C is for cultural terrorist agency, cult of the dead cow, critical mass. MECHANICAL VOICE: Open this link. MUFFLED VOICES IN THE STREET IAN WALKER: It's approaching midnight on a Tuesday in the back streets of inner Sydney's Newtown. A handful of bicycle enthusiasts armed with spraycans and a plastic stencil are taking a leisurely wander along roads which have long been gazetted by the local council for bike lanes. The bike riders think they've been waiting long enough. YOUNG WOMAN BIKE ACTIVIST: I think it's quite cool really, because I'm all for taking direct action and doing something yourself to prove a point. Like they were saying, some of these routes here that we're going to paint are bike routes, but they just don't have any official sort of you know, sign that they are. So it's a good idea to paint them on. I mean I don't want to get caught or anything, you know, the authorities or anything. IAN WALKER: The stencillers claim their DIY approach is more than just a slick form of graffiti. They're trying to help create a future where bikes are taken seriously as a legitimate form of city transport. There are now dozens of new, unauthorised bike lanes around Sydney... and the idea seems to be catching on. MALE BIKE ACTIVIST: We're also trying to set an example, that's why we've invited you along to see if other people who are interested in cycling, or think cycling should have a better go, that it's quite easy to make up your own stencil and start putting in your own bike lane where you think you'd like to ride. We've got to keep it pretty quiet for obvious reasons, but why not paint a bike symbol on a road. The bike logos also have the effect of educating drivers into expecting bikes. BELLS AND WHISTLES/CITY TRAFFIC MALE VOICE: Bike lanes for Sydney! IAN WALKER: The Stencil Project is brought to you by the bicycle activist group, CRITICAL MASS. It's built an impressive groundswell of support in cities around the world. The Sydney chapter meets after work on the last Friday of every month, creating mayhem for motorists, jamming city streets with a colourful spectacle of hundreds of two-wheelers powered by lungs and legs. Gabrielle Kuiper turns up on a regular basis... GABRIELLE KUIPER: Basically, CRITICAL MASS is about providing a vision, not only a vision of how our streets could be, you know, filled with people on bicycles, on rollerblades, on skateboards, even walking or running. But also CRITICAL MASS provides a vision of how sustainable transport is at the moment. You know, ordinary people ride bicycles, and some of them even wear suits! BR> SEXY WOMAN: D is for dada, dick tuck, daniel flood, disinformation, deconstructing beck... MECHANICAL VOICE: Forward. SEXY WOMAN: E is for electronic civil disobedience... F is for floodnet... MECHANICAL VOICE: What's new? MEXICAN FOLK GUITAR IAN WALKER: A Mexican revolutionary army leader with his own laptop and webpage is just another cute anomaly whilst reality overtakes imagination as we speed on down the information superhighway. First there was ZAPATISTAS IN CYBERSPACE, a network of grassroots social activist groups from around the world who've been using the Internet to promote the struggle of the indigenous people of the Chiapas. Now they have a new weapon in the form of the DIGITAL ZAPATISMO, a series of Internet-based actions designed to make tactical strikes at the websites of a nominated enemy of the Zapatista. In the past, this has included the Mexican President's site, the Pentagon and the US Defence Department. CHIAPAS FOLK SONG IAN WALKER: Activists are notified by email of a day or week of action. They then fire up their web browsers and hook up to FLOODNET, a software tool which uses an automatic reload function to jam the site of the chosen target. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ is one of the New York-based artists who pioneered what they like to call ELECTRONIC CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ: Basically we call it a "virtual sit-in". It's a lot of people, literally kind of just sitting on a space, and they keep knocking on the door, you know, going "Can we look at that page again?" "Can we look at that page again?" And the more people go to that FLOODNET site, the more it has to send out this new data. MECHANICAL VOICE: Reload. Reload. Reload. Reload. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ: So, in a certain sense, it clogs up the pipeline. In the same way that when you protest on the street, you know, it's difficult for cars to move, it might be difficult for people to get to the office, to read their newspapers, or get to their bank. For a certain period of time, these pipelines will be clogged. What happens is it creates a disturbance. Once the action is over, the site remains the same, it's not hurt. In the same way that a street wouldn't be destroyed by an active action of people laying down on the street, or say, Martin Luther King and the early Civil Rights people would literally just sit in the restaurant, right? And that would literally create a disturbance. What we're trying to promote is that it can be done as a hybrid action. You can hit them on-line and you can literally march out into the street and know that your two elements, your data body and your real body, are both acting in a similar gesture, or in a similar position. MECHANICAL VOICE: Reload. IAN WALKER: Some of the more traditional activist communities have been sceptical about FLOODNET's usefulness. And while RICARDO DOMINGUEZ admits it's not the same thing as tying yourself to a tree, some of the chosen targets have got very cranky indeed. RICARDO DOMINGUEZ: All of a sudden they have to realise, well here is a group of five individuals who can disturb the Pentagon. While perhaps in the 60s it would have taken literally, what, 100,000 marchers surrounding it to disturb it? And here you have a grassroots movement of five individuals, five artists, who are able to create a way for many people around the world to publicly gather in front of the Pentagon and disturb it, so much so that it has to respond. IAN WALKER: How do you gauge that disturbance and level of annoyance that you're creating? RICARDO DOMINGUEZ: They have literally tried to electronically hack in to our server to try to shut down FLOODNET. Also when we did the action against the Pentagon and Mexican President's site, and Frankfurt Stock Exchange, the Pentagon literally came at us with these hostile Java aplets which are a type of system that would spawn code quite quickly and shut down FLOODNET. So, there you had an instance of them kind of counter-attacking, you know, this kind of peaceful protest, let us say. But, that often happens in real life, you know, when you butt down the middle of the street the cops come and they may arrest you and they may hurt you, but you know, they respond obviously to the level of your disturbance. So there has been a kind of technological response. There was an occasion where the Mexican government not only tried to hack in, but we had kind of "browser wars", where they were trying to overcome our browsers and we had to try to overcome theirs. MECHANICAL VOICE: Reload. Reload. MULTIPLE MODEM CREECHING MECHANICAL VOICE: Help. SEXY WOMAN: G is for graffiti, guru adrian, guerilla girls... H is for hakim bey, hackers... MECHANICAL VOICE: Add bookmark. ABC NEWSREADER: The first election dirty tricks turned X-rated yesterday after computer hackers linked the Liberal Party's official website to pornography sites. The hackers have rearranged the Liberals' ministerial page, dubbing Treasurer Peter Costello "The Minister for the Rich, Stomping the Poor and Wrecking the Economy", and naming Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer as "Failed as Leader, but Given a Cushy Job". The hackers gave almost every Minister a new nickname, with Peter "Crush the Unions" Reith now "Minister for Destruction of Workplace Fairness, the Gestapo and Propaganda". IAN WALKER: Despite it being an amusing start to a dull election campaign, the hacking of the Liberal Party website was an amateur job which backfired badly. The two ALP junior staffers who encouraged the prank were sacked amidst a bucketload of negative publicity for their party. Hackers have generally been disappointing when it comes to culture jamming. Rarely have they broken their own mould.the computer geek whose only contact with the world is an all-night Dungeons and Dragons-type existence. They dial into networks, looking for security holes and leave smug notes saying they've called.the digital equivalent of pissing in the corner. They hack because they can. But a new breed's begun appearing in recent times, politicised hackers who choose their targets accordingly. They go by names like Portuguese Hackers Against Indonesia, Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia, and some former Chinese students calling themselves Hong Kong Blondes, who have the Communist government in Beijing firmly in their sites. SEXY WOMAN: I is for information war, imposters, illegal art... J is for jokers, jello biafra, joey skaggs... MECHANICAL VOICE: Forward. SEXY WOMAN: K is for klf... L is for luddites, and larrikins... M is for memetics and media hoaxing. MECHANICAL VOICE: Open this link. AUSTRALIAN WOMAN TV NEWSREADER: Next up, practical jokes: the man who's made an art form out of practical jokes, and some of the media fall for them. But not us, of course. BRITISH MALE TV NEWSREADER: Feeling tired? Maybe a little bit stressed. Well, a visiting American therapist says he has a roaring good way to chase away those blues, and he's trying it out in Poplar in East London. It's based on the behavioural patterns of lions in a pride, and of course they have their very own Lion King, Baba Wa Simba. ROARING IAN WALKER: ...Grown journalists down on their knees roaring like lions! It's all in the cause of a good story of course, but the last laugh, as always, goes to the legendary American media hoaxer, JOEY SKAGGS. BRITISH WOMAN TV NEWSREADER: Hungry for stories, Sky's Live-at-Five presenters Frank Partridge and Anna Walker swallowed the lot... IAN WALKER: The New York-born Skaggs is the undisputed granddaddy of culture jamming. For more than 30 years he's been hoaxing some of the biggest names in the US media.making people laugh, making journalists whimper, and making us all question the nature of the media messages we swallow every day. And when he's not pretending to be the lion-loving therapist, Baba Wa Simba, he might turn up on the telly as a priest on a bicycle towing a portable confession box. Then again, he looks a lot like the bloke in charge of the celebrity sperm bank... or the notorious for-hire diet enforcers, The Fat Squad... or the justice-dispensing computer system, The Solomon Project... Or maybe he's that guy who used to run a brothel for dogs in New York City? JOEY SKAGGS: I ran an ad in a newspaper in New York City advertising a "Cathouse for Dogs", featuring a savoury selection of hot bitches from pedigree Fifi - The French Poodle to Mutt Lady the Tramp Handler, and vet-on-duty, stud and photo service available, no weirdos please, dogs only, and my phone number. I simultaneously sent out a press release saying if your dog graduated in obedience school, or if it was your dog's birthday, or if you're embarrassed to come home and finding your dog humping on a pillow, or if you were fearful of having a party because your dog would mount your company's legs... since there are cemeteries for dogs, restaurants for dogs, clothing stores for dogs, all the amenities in life except the one that a dog would enjoy the most... now for the first time for $50 you can get Fido sexually-gratified. And the phone rang off the hook, and everyone called up to get their dog sexually-gratified. Of course, then the media called and they wanted to come and visit it. So I had to get 25 actors and 15 dogs, and I staged for the news media a night in a Cathouse for Dogs. And they believed it. US NEWSREADER: For $50 your dog can have sex with a female dog while you watch and sip cocktails and take some pictures if you'd like to... JOEY SKAGGS: I did an interview with the ABC and they did what's called a "wraparound". They interviewed a real veterinarian, went to a real dog shelter and everyone said all these horrible things about what I was doing, and that was the news show. And it was nominated for an Emmy, an award, as being the best news broadcast of the year and I was consequently subpoenaed by the Attorney-General for illegally running a whorehouse for dogs. I told them it was a hoax, it was a prank, it was just to illustrate how the media jumps on sexsational stories, and without ever finding out whether it was real or not. IAN WALKER: So how do you gauge what kind of results you get? What gives you the most satisfaction? JOEY SKAGGS: All along the way there are great thrills and chills and spills. You never know if they're going to go for it. It's like surfing, you know. You're swimming out there with a board, you don't know if you're going to get eaten by a shark before you even get out to where the waves are. When you get out to where the waves are you don't know if you're going to catch a wave, and if you catch a wave you don't know what kind of ride you're going to have, if you're going to wipe out or what. So you never really know, and that's what's exciting about it all. And you never know what kind of fish you're going to catch, and just to see how far it goes. And then what you're really hoping for is that the message gets through. All these pieces have in them really serious issues. They're just disguised with humour or with satire or with some ridiculous scenario that I've created. SEXY WOMAN: N is for negativland and news unlimited... O is for organised nonsense, the onion, organarchy, oms not bombs... P is for pranks, positive propaganda, the pieman, pirate radio, poetic terrorism, parody, political satire, pauline pantsdown... MECHANICAL VOICE: Open this link. IAN WALKER: Elections provide a perfect stage for the aspiring culture jammer. CHANNEL 9 TV NEWSREADER: Well, Pauline Hanson won't like it. The One Nation leader's most bizarre political rival, Pauline Pantsdown, has announced she'll be standing for the Senate in New South Wales. And for campaign advertising, Ms Pantsdown is counting on a hit record song. PAULINE PANTSDOWN SONG I don't like it when you turn my voice about. I don't like it when you vote One Nation out. My language has been murdered. My shopping trolley murdered, my groceries just gone. I don't like it when you turn my voice about. I don't like it. IAN WALKER: Pauline Pantsdown is the alter ego of Sydney artschool lecturer Simon Hunt. Using Pauline Hanson's voice, but not exactly her words, Hunt's drag queen persona launched her second single, I Don't Like It, with uncanny timing just three weeks before election day. And while Pantsdown may have received only a few thousand votes on the day, she spent the night dancing triumphantly on the political grave of her rival, gleefully announcing Pauline Hanson's demise to 15,000 revellers during a performance of the song at Sydney's Sleaze Ball. Political satire had scored an important victory... SIMON HUNT: As soon as I heard her speak and heard what she was talking about, I knew immediately I wanted to do something with her. But I guess that just having a real personal disgust for racism, you know, it's something that I find quite, it just causes revulsion in me, basically.that I actually found it quite difficult for a long time. I went into the studio at different times during that year, and I'd just turn her phrases around and give them the opposite meaning, but it wasn't very funny. It's difficult, racism is a difficult thing to joke about. AUDIENCE APPLAUSE SYDNEY UNIVERSITY LUNCHTIME RALLY PAULINE PANTSDOWN: Now you may think I'm a silly drag queen with a list of overused jokes. David Oldfield has called me a fringedweller of dubious value... IAN WALKER: Pantsdown's jokey takeoffs and media stunts became a rallying point for anti-Hanson protesters and a must-attend for foreign journalists covering the election. And although Hunt takes some of the credit for helping turn public opinion against the One Nation leader, in the beginning, working out exactly how to counter her racist rhetoric wasn't so obvious. For inspiration, he turned to the Berlin Cabaret artists of the early 1930s. UTE LEMPER SONG SIMON HUNT: Because what they wrote about at that time, this is all documented in a very good book by Professor Peter Jelavich called "Berlin Cabaret", they wrote about having difficulty satirising Hitler, because his statements on race and nationalism were always at a complete extreme, there was no possible exaggeration for satirical purposes. And so what they would do would be they'd take Hitler's use of the actual German language and his construction of argument and put it into totally unrelated areas, other than race or nationalism, because there was nowhere to go there satirically. And so thus they would satirise his ideas on race and nationalism by having Hitler talking about shopping and how a supermarket is divided, not a supermarket, but how different things in a shop were divided at that stage, things like that. SONG - "I DON'T LIKE IT" SEXY WOMAN: Q is for quadro QRS250G... R is for RTMark, reclaim the streets... MECHANICAL VOICE: Refresh. NOISY STREET PARTY ACTUALITY MAN: It's a street party! IAN WALKER: It's Saturday afternoon, and thousands of people have literally taken over a major Sydney road and declared it "a street now open". The usual roar of traffic has been replaced by music, song and lots of laughter, as road rage becomes road rave. Reclaim the Streets has arrived in Australia. The original idea came out of the anti-roads movement in Britain, but the seed has well and truly sprouted. On an international day of action in May, twenty cities around the world threw spontaneous, unauthorised street parties. There have now been three Reclaim the Streets events in Sydney, and police have so far been hands-off, dazzled and charmed perhaps by the sheer decadence of the spectacle. Carpets and sofas are arranged into lounge spaces; there are chai tents, food stalls, skateboard areas, internet stations, sculptures, poets, fire twirlers and street gardens. But according to two of the people who've helped make it happen, CHRISTOPHER GILL and PAUL ELLIOTT, it's much more than just a hell of a good time. PAUL ELLIOTT: When you block off the road suddenly there's all these really beautiful sunny places where people can lie around and read the papers, and it's a fantastic thing, you know, once people have experienced that I don't think they'll ever.every time they walk down Enmore Road ever again, they'll always think "Remember that time when it was a human space?" And it gets into their subconscious thinking and wanting for it to happen again, you know. So I guess it's just that envisioning thing, is like planting the seeds of a sort-of future reality. IAN WALKER: Is it an experiment in anarchy in action perhaps? CHRISTOPHER GILL: Yes, I guess it's anarchic, you know. And the interesting thing about that is that anarchy takes really a lot of discipline, you know, because people can't sort of take on the responsibility in an anarchistic moment and then not actually follow through because that can actually destroy it for everyone you know. What I've learnt is that if you want to be an anarchist you actually have to do incredibly good, you know, you have to be very responsible and enthusiastic, and stay sober and not take drugs and all that sort of stuff. SEXY WOMAN: S is for situationist internationale, soy bomb nation, san louis obispo cacophony society, stop biopeep... MECHANICAL VOICE: History. IAN WALKER: When media hoaxer Joey Skaggs visited Down Under in 1996, he dropped a hint on national television that he might come back to prank us... MIDDAY SHOW PRESENTER: Are you actually here to hoax us? JOEY SKAGGS: I'm thinking about it, I'll give you a clue: the clue is peep. That's singular. Peeps is plural. MIDDAY SHOW PRESENTER: Peep. P-E-E-P. JOEY SKAGGS: Right, peep. MIDDAY SHOW PRESENTER: So that is the clue on how you're going to hoax us. So you are going to hoax Australia? JOEY SKAGGS: Maybe I will. MIDDAY SHOW PRESENTER: Do you trust this man? Would you trust this man? IAN WALKER: Brisbane student Larry Croft was watching the show, although he should have been at uni where Skaggs was due to give a lecture. Later that night, while propping up the bar in a Brisbane pub, the merry prankster signed up Croft and some of his other uni mates for what was possibly Skaggs' most ludicrous scam to date... an international eugenics conspiracy of staggering proportions. CHOOK SOUNDS MALE NEWSREEL-TYPE VOICEOVER: Attention please. December 1997. Dear concerned citizens, political leaders and members of news media. It is with great urgency that we wish to inform you that we have received important information about a terrifying international conspiracy to release addiction-causing genetic material capable of eradicating DNA-targeted populations. This alarming abuse of genetic engineering by specific governments and multi-national corporations has global implications and significance. The attached press release will provide additional information... IAN WALKER: By the time of its Brisbane launch last December, the hoax would involve over 70 people in four continents and many hundred hours of careful but crazy planning. Hundreds of press releases were faxed to media organisations around the world, alerting them to an elaborate website of fake data, photos from mock demos in Brisbane and New York, the gruesome details of the tests being carried out on chickens at an un-named Queensland poultry facility, plus the names and phone numbers of the alleged scientific bad guys. While the Australian media didn't bite, the hoax hit major paydirt in Slovenia where news of the evil experiment apparently involving the country's top supercomputer sent their media pack into a complete spin for more than a week. SLOVENIAN NEWSREADER IAN WALKER: Despite the low takeup rate, LARRY CROFT maintains STOP BIOPEEP had all the hallmarks of a truly great culture jam. LARRY CROFT: Part of a prank I guess is always making it just on the edge of truthfulness. If it's plausible but you're not quite sure, then it's a good prank, and it shows that things are changing very quickly and people are unsure about exactly what is possible. And I know that the current genetic technology is probably ten years ahead of people's ethical thoughts and arguments. IAN WALKER: But if there's one thing culture jammers are good at, it's how to take the ideas of their enemies and turn them around to use in the pursuit of happiness and in defence of the forces of goodness. LARRY CROFT: This is a very interesting idea. Because culture jamming is about changing a culture, and if we can plant a little seed, we can change like a culture. And I guess from genetics we talk about genes, and an organism is made of genes, while a culture is made out of memes. And memes are like the little sets of bits of information that replicate themselves. They might be an icon or a symbol, they might be "the Australian larrikin", that might be a meme, or a church or a religious group as a meme. And the set of memes is our culture, and by modifying the memes we're memetic engineering, we're changing the organism which is our society. And if we can target the right meme and just modify it slightly, the end effect can be quite dramatic. IAN WALKER: Take time to ponder that deliciously evil thought, as we hurtle through cyberspace towards the end of this emergency broadcast. SEXY WOMAN: T is for tv nation, temporary autonomous zone... V is for veterans of future wars, virtual artists, vandalism... W is for work resisters, william s. burroughs... X is for extropians... Y is for yippies... Z is for zines and zapitismo. MECHANICAL VOICE: Exit. IAN WALKER: We hope your head is swimming with the seemingly endless possible ways to make trouble, have fun and influence people... all at the same time. But be assured it's only the beginning. According to Adbuster KALLE LASN, the cynicism and apathy of our time are about to meet a most timely death. KALLE LASN: We are almost living in what I call a malaise culture, where nobody believes that anything can be done any more. When I go to give talks at universities these days, then I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the lack of a wild spirit among students any more. You know, in many other countries like Indonesia, and in China and in Korea, the university students are still rocking their nations. But in first world universities the students are snoozing in the libraries and there is no wild spirit left whatsoever. So I think that the reason culture jamming is interesting to these kinds of people is because it empowers them. Once you become a culture jammer and start speaking back at mainstream consumer culture, then all of a sudden you lose that cynicism. HAKIM BEY: Don't be sentimental, be ruthless, take risks. Vandalise only what must be defaced. Do something children will remember all their lives, but don't be spontaneous unless the poetic terrorist news has possessed you. Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best poetic terrorism is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime. Crime as art. KALLE LASN: A lot of people don't like our techniques, even though I think the successes of culture jamming in like BUY NOTHING DAY and TV TURNOFF WEEK, they have been some of the great successes of social activism over the last 20 years. Whereas the Left, for example, hasn't won a single significant victory for a couple of decades now, and we believe that we cannot follow in the footsteps of the Left, we cannot follow in the footsteps of the old Feminism, because when you think of unsustainability and consumerism, when you think of re-inventing car culture, then these issues, they've got nothing to do with the Left or the Right, or being male or female, they are I feel totally new issues of our time, and we have to find new tools with which to fight those issues. WHITE NOISE ABC ANNOUNCER: We leave this program now to return to our normal schedule. THEME KIRSTEN GARRETT: Co-ordinating Producer for Background Briefing is Linda McGinness; Research - Vanessa Muir; Technical Production - Tom Hall, Anne-Marie Debbettencore and John Diamond. Readings by Wednesday Kennedy, Robbie McGregor and Fiona Kerr; Executive Producer - Kirsten Garrett. IAN WALKER: ...And I'm Ian Walker. THEME ENDS Further information:
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