March 14 - March 20, 2001

Gear Jammers By Joab Jackson Dumb-ass Nike just had it coming. The shoe company has this online service where you can have your name or a favorite saying stitched on the side of a pair of sneakers (Nike iD). So it was just a matter of time before some wiseacre came along and choose a word related to the shoe company's spotty international labor record--like, say, "sweatshop." Which is exactly what Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student Jonah Peretti did. In retrospect, it's one of those obvious great ideas you kick yourself for not thinking of first. "Sweatshop" is probably the word most hated by Nike execs. The company has gotten a lot of bad press lately because of its labor practices; according to the watchdog group Corporate Watch, the sneaker giant employs more than 350,000 workers in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam--often in horrid working conditions, in factories lacking proper ventilation and water, and for wages barely over the legal minimum for those countries (Vietnamese workers are paid an average of $45 a month). So a pair of Nikes with sweatshop stitched on the side would be pretty ironic, huh? A little too ironic for Nike, as it turned out. The company, all too predictably, refused Peretti's order. In a hilarious series of e-mail exchanges (reproduced on the Shey Network, among other online outlets), Peretti badgered Nike for a reason as to why his shoes couldn't be made. After sending Peretti a series of form e-mails, a Nike representative finally responded that the company had the right to refuse words that "we consider inappropriate or simply do not want to place on our products." No further explanation was given. And none was needed. This exchange quickly made its way around the Internet and was featured in The Village Voice's sports column. Nike couldn't have garnered more flak than if it erected billboards across the United States reading corporate third-world oppression: just do it. Interviewed last month on NBC's Today Show, Peretti explained why he did what he did. "The whole thrust of the [Nike iD] Web site was that Nike is about personal freedom and freedom to choose. And to me, it seemed like a contradiction with Nike's labor policies. . . . I didn't expect to get my shoes anyway. I . . . chose the word 'sweatshop' as a challenge to Nike." Peretti reminds me of Mike "Pepsi Boy" Cameron, who gained similar notoriety in 1998 for being suspended from his school for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on Coke Day. What, your local school doesn't have a "Coke Day"? Well, Greenbrier High School in Evans, Ga., did. It had invited a Coca-Cola Co. regional president and a few other management types in for a day of educating students about the wonders of The Real Thing. Greenbriar was trying to win a $500 prize, offered by a local Coke bottling plant to the school that, according to an Associated Press report, came up "with the most creative method of distributing promotional discount cards to students." It was only when the students were arranged, marching band-style, to spell out C-O-K-E for a group photo that someone noticed Cameron in his Pepsi shirt. The 19-year-old student was suspended for one day for the day, but after the resulting press deluge the suspension was stricken from his record. In an interview with the e-zine Fade to Black, Cameron said he "didn't do this as a joke or a prank, I just did it to do it." And Greenbriar principal Gloria Hamilton dismissed any satiric intent in explaining her disciplinary action to AP: "It was a student deliberately being disruptive and rude.'' Disruptive though Cameron may have been, it wasn't a mere juvenile prank. This was no simple case of setting off firecrackers in the bathroom. Both Perreti and Cameron were clever to a point. Both guys, consciously or not, cleverly exposed the hypocrisy perpetuated by these corporations. How can Nike espouse the virtues of freedom (or worse yet, let customers buy into these ideals) while exploiting people in impoverished countries? And what the hell is the educational value of getting kids to spell out C-O-K-E? Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns to make us believe their soda water or shoes or whatever are the bee's knees. And while we pretty much know what advertising is and discount it accordingly, the sheer repetition of these placements just wears us down--eventually, on some unconscious level, we accept their messages. What Cameron and Peretti did is consciously reject those messages. This sort of thing is called "culture-jamming"--using techniques of consumerism to critique consumerism itself. There are a growing number of grass-roots groups intent on subverting the best-laid plans of corporate America. The clandestine organization ®™ark funds various culture-jamming projects, and the magazine Adbusters promotes events such as Buy Nothing Day designed to stir awareness. But sometimes the best pranks are the spontaneous ones, those from individuals who, in small but meaningful acts of defiance, remind us how our passivity leads to blind acceptance. To this end, Peretti and Cameron aren't mere jokesters, but modern-day folk heroes. E-mail: sweatshop@joabj.com.