Abstract: In the spirit of culture jamming, ®TMark is distinguished by its explicit complicity with ‘the system’.. It functions as a corporation, and identifies itself as such, in order to protest and subvert the corporate ethos. Its site goes beyond a savvy understanding of corporatism to a robust engagement in it. In turn, it is a timely response to those that consider the postmodern zeitgeist politically barren or overwhelmingly cynical.

The Politics and Play of ®TMark

In July 2001, New York couple Jason Black and Francis Schroeder opened bidding on the internet for corporate sponsorship of their newborn son. Naming rights started at $US5000 000. For Black, a business editor with the trade publication Internet World, the logic was simple: “We already see sponsorship in so many areas of our lives: professional athletes, stadiums. We’re taking this to a new level. It’s a valid way of working with corporate America.”
Black and Schroeder already had two daughters and lived in a small two-bedroom apartment. In exchange for their son’s financial security, they risked branding him ‘Big Mac’ or ‘Nike’ – literally. Yet where Black and Schroeder saw this as reasonable, perhaps even ingenious, the story was reported with a certain air of incredulity. The idea of raising a child with a brand name and corporate sponsorship seemed somewhat bizarre, as though the excesses of consumer culture had finally corrupted something as simple and natural as parental care.
If nothing else, the case of Black and Schroeder exemplified the amazing reach of brand consciousness. The couple had internalised its values and rationale with such ease and comfort, the notion of forfeiting their child’s name was not abhorrent, but a lucrative marketing opportunity. Then again, the story is not without precedent. In 2000, teenagers Chris Barrett and Luke McCabe, both from New Jersey, became ‘spokesguys’ for First USA, one of America’s top credit-card companies. By sporting the company logo on their surfboards and all their clothes, the pair receives an annual $US40 000 each in tuition, board and books for their four-year university contract. They do not just advertise the brand; they are its living embodiment.
For critics of consumer culture, such stories exemplify the extent to which corporatism has become a complete and closed system, with the panoramic presence of brands and logos and the commodification of life itself.  Black et al demonstrate the alarming readiness of some people to encode and enact the consumerist impulse. At its most malignant, this impulse appears as a crass consumerism that eats up every aspect of a culture, so much so that consumerism becomes the culture. As Jean Baudrillard writes, with characteristic aplomb, “We have reached the point where‘consumption’ has grasped the whole of life; where all activities are sequenced in the same combinatorial mode; where the schedule of gratification is outlined in advance, one hour at a time; and where the ‘environment’ is complete, completely climatized, furnished, and culturalized.”
In a consumer society, this rationale, taken to its logical conclusion, dislodges all else: all meaning is both anchored in and governed by the capitalist creed. And herein lies the crux of so many damning critiques of the consumerist mindset: the idea that mass-produced contemporary culture provides a seemingly empty substitute for genuine experience and emotion. Such consumer societies are seduced by and succumb to what Fredric Jameson termed “a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.”
For its critics, the contemporary consumer has been reduced to a mere imitation of mass-mediated expectations, a functionary cog in the corporatist machine. As Lauren Langman writes, “Everyday life has beentransformed into an extension of consumer capitalism and the person rendered a consumer or spectacle in whom the commodified meanings, the symbolic and affective values embedded in the sign system, have been interiorized as representations of reality. The ideology of consumerism promises the good life, good feelings and good selfhood. Emotional satisfaction and self-worth are dependent on the orderliness of your bathroom.”
As this “sign system” infects and invades more and more space, public and private, a certain cultural literacy is inevitably called for, an intimate knowledge of symbol and significance, logo and logic. However, like all living language, this one is open to some resistance, albeit a somewhat piecemeal one. Part appropriation, partantithesis, it is a resistance that hijacks form in order to subvert content. To explain how this type of activism might work, one could consider the highly effective activist operation, ®TMark
In 1993, ®TMark organized its first high-profile act of sabotage when it channelled $US 8000 to the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO), a group that switched the voice boxes of 300 GI Joe and Barbie dolls. In true ®TMark style, the critical content of this project was an alchemic stroke of humour and commentary: the protest lies within the ‘information alteration’ of commodities that usually rely on their supposed virtues, whereby ®TMark undermines this perception. The BLO offensive, for example, drew attention to the questionable labour practices of companies like Mattel, manufacturers of Barbie.
From the outset, ®TMark’s key feature is its corporate status. As a brokerage, ®TMark benefits from ‘limited liability’, just like any other corporation. It exploits this principle (that is, corporate protection, thereby bypassing legal responsibility) to sabotage other corporate products, referred to as ‘information alteration’ in ®TMark parlance. Unlike other corporations, though, its bottom-line is cultural profit. As spokesperson Ray Thomas explains, the corporate model is both the object of ®TMark’s criticism, and the method by which that criticism is being facilitated:
“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 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.”
A useful guide to the aims and operations of ®TMark is its ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQ) page. As with almost all ®TMark literature and material, the tone is one of clipped civility, similar to the tense restraint characteristic of almost any corporation. For example, it describes its ‘mutual funds’ thus:
“by facilitating investment based on general areas of interest, they allow investors to participate in unpredictable behaviour without fully understanding its nature or consequences. They are also called ‘mutual funds’ in order to call attention to one way in which large numbers of people are led to falsely identify corporate needs as their own.”
Perhaps the closest the site gets to a ‘straightforward’ philosophy is in this piece of advice to dispirited students, fearful that they too will be sucked into the corporate void:
“As you pursue a direction you find vital and interesting, it is possible it will lead you into corporate work. If this happens, it is indeed likely you will at some point in the future be presented with some fairly forceful reasons to trust the corporate version of history, or even the corporate version of you. (It may for example become difficult to keep working while seeing your work environment for what it is.) We believe that performing an ®TMark project can help you, psychologically at least, at such a difficult juncture; but more importantly, we urge you to at all costs remember that laws should defend human people, not corporate people like the one of which you will be a part. If you keep this in mind and work towards making it a reality, you may find your life much more bearable.”
Of course, this too might be read as a ‘mission statement’ of sorts, and therefore another appendage to ®TMark’s corporate veneer. Nonetheless, it does at least point to some of the goals of the site. The depiction of ®TMark projects as morale boosters for disenchanted cynics goes some way in illustrating the ambitions and limits of the site. Rather than prescribe a far-reaching, holistic approach to social change (what might be termed a ‘revolutionary’ vision), ®TMark marshals ideas and initiatives a little more subtly. This is not to belittle or dispute its utility or significance; on the contrary, it is an approach that effectively (in)corporates a diverse range of people and programs.
For example, the very fact that ‘mutual funds’ group together projects that share a theme suggests that, rather than unifying its adherents to a common agenda, ®TMark operates as a coalition of interests. As such, the followings funds collectively serve the ®TMark project: the Labor Fund; the Frontier Fund (which challenges naïve visions of the ‘global village’); the Education Fund; the Health Fund; the Alternative Markets Fund (which considers overlooked demographics, such as poor gays); the Media Fund; the Intellectual Property Fund; the Biological Property Fund; the Corporate Law Fund; and the Environment Fund, among others.
While it is not always immediately clear from the funds’ names alone, the ®TMark spectrum canvasses a plethora of pertinent, interconnected themes. These include: the plight of workers in developing countries; the hypocrisy of conservative politicians; censorship; institutionalised racism; green politics; the nominal triumph of consumer culture; unbridled free-trade; techno-utopianism and the ‘digerati’; police brutality; copyright law; lax standards among journalists; the dubious strategies of the CIA; the increasing opacity of corporate activities; and the war-time activities of companies like IBM. Underlying all these issues is ®TMark’s intention to publicise corporate abuses of democratic processes. There is, then, a humanist current behind its operations. Importantly, this multiplicity of interests is considered a suitable counterpart to the dispersed nature of corporate power.
These funds are often ‘managed’ by public figures whose association with certain causes lend their celebrity well to particular campaigns. For example, Negativeland, the techno-yippie, audio-collage San Francisco band widely credited for coining the term ‘culture jamming’ in 1984, manages the Intellectual Property Fund. This is most appropriate. Their 1991 legal battle with major label Island, on account of their ‘deceptive’ use of U2 material, cemented their place as champions of ‘creative appropriation’ and the right to create ‘with mirrors’ (as Negativeland describe it on their eponymous website).
Similarly, this impulse, the desire to create ‘with mirrors’, propels much of ®TMark’s work. It imbues all ®TMark projects with the same sense of calculated mischief. This suggests a mode of activism that is both opportunistic and ingenious, fashioning criticism from the very resources it is attacking. Financial reward aside (which, in any case, is negligible, at best) the real pay-off for ®TMark saboteurs comes via media coverage of their projects. As such, it straddles an interesting divide, between public infamy and necessary stealth. ®TMark requires media attention to render its projects effective, yet must maintain the critical distance necessary for any activist potency. Indeed, the need to bolster ®TMark’s profile was one of the reasons it went from being a dial-in system to a website in 1997. Within its first eight months the site had received almost 20 000 visits.
In this schema, the activism in question is assigned a somewhat smaller purpose than has been hitherto associated with protest movements generally. Rather than provide a grand panacea for all the world’s ills, ®TMark’s scale is, by its own admission, modest:
“The value of ®TMark is, and has always been, not in any real pressure it can possibly bear, but rather in its ability to quickly and cheaply attract widespread interest to important issues. ®TMark is thus essentially a public relations agency for anti-corporate activism, using sensationalist framing – ‘sabotage’, ‘financial muscle’, etc. – to attract mainstream press interest to projects that, to one degree or another, illustrate the enormous abuses of corporate power against democracy and human life.”
In this way, ®TMark is firmly positioned within that strand of activism often referred to as ‘culture jamming’. It is a form of protest that relies on a distinct degree of cultural literacy, one that isconsonant with, and a product of, the Information Age. As Mark Dery describes it,
“Part artistic terrorists, part vernacular critics, culture jammers, like Eco’s ‘communications guerrillas’, introduce noise into the signal as it passes from transmitter toreceiver, encouraging idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Intruding on the intruders, they invest ads, newscasts, and other media artefacts with subversive meanings; simultaneously, they decrypt them, rendering their seductions impotent.”
Culture jamming draws on (and contributes to) critiques of contemporary consumer capitalism. Its premise is that too much public space has already been ceded to Hollywood, Madison Avenue and such, and that activists must seize whatever opportunities allow this space to be reclaimed, however fleetingly. Trading on publicity and shock value, jammers manipulate those icons, slogans and trademarks that will register immediate recognition, thereby rendering their efforts meaningful. It constitutes a politicised refusal to submit to the cheerful passivity scripted by the corporate class. As jammers resist this role, reclaiming rather than forfeiting public space, they create what Naomi Klein calls “a climate of semiotic Robin Hoodism”. This term aptly captures the spirit of moralistic idealism that is, almost inevitably, a part of the milieu. This is not to dismiss or deride the progressive agenda of most culture jammers; if anything, it is a positive endorsement of their activism, and a response to those that would deem the postmodern zeitgeist politically barren or overwhelmingly cynical.
What it reveals, then, is a somewhat unexpected distribution of power, as expressions of criticism and opposition emerge at seemingly incongruous junctures. They are at once engaged and complicit, finding cracks in ‘the system’ (that is, corporate society) and co-opting them, what Linda Hutcheon calls “subversion from within.”
In the absence of ‘big picture’ solutions, culture jammers prioritise temporary connections and hybrid forms over ideological certainties and operational rigidity. As David Garcia and Geert Lovink put it, these tacticians are “based on a principle of flexible response, of working with different coalitions, being able to move between the different entities in their vast media landscape, without betraying their original motivations”. What is at stake, then, are the patchy, incremental gains made through culture jamming, and the malleability and mobility it relies on.
Tactical thinking clearly informs and animates ®TMark’s work. As Graham Meikle explains in Future Active, “Different actions and campaigns use whichever media are most appropriate at any given time for any given purpose. An event might call for making a documentary, making a website, making an A4 newsletter, or making a phone call.” Defining its boundaries as fluid and porous, ®TMark stops short of overstating its purpose or exaggerating its success. There is no lofty manifesto or ironclad strategy; without departing too far from its anti-corporatist stance, ®TMark encourages an almost playful combination of comedy and critique, with a thick ironic overlay. At its most ambitious, then, ®TMark can hope to alter the everyday behaviour of ordinary citizens, making inroads at the expense of powerful corporations. At the very least, it can prompt bemused surfers to rethink certain things – such as Nike’s labour practices or Shell’s environmental record.
In a sense, though, the degree to which such perceptual jolts can ‘make a difference’ is almost immaterial: the fact that the status quo has been questioned is a minor triumph. Where some commentators bemoan the virtual stupor they deem characteristic of contemporary Western politics, projects like ®TMark prove that there are spaces and opportunities left for meaningful debate and dissent.