Culture Jammer's Hotlist
Ten sites you can use to fight corporate commercialism

By Brooke Shelby Biggs

A few months ago NetEffects debuted its first-ever top 10 list, beginning with a selective list of Web sites the mainstream media doesn't want you to see. This is the second in that occasional series. In this installment, we look at sites that come in handy for recreational culture jamming -- that is, subverting the dominant, consumerist paradigm in your copious free time.

(A good way to get yourself revved up and irony-enriched for a culture jamming escapade online is to search on the term "anti-consumerism" in Yahoo! You'll notice that the first link offered is "Shop online.")

• Adbusters
  The center of the culture jamming universe, this Vancouver, B.C.-based magazine pioneered the famous Buy Nothing Day and TV Turn-Off Week campaigns, and it has been at the forefront of the advertising spoof movement (think: Joe Chemo, Absolut Impotence; Escape from Calvin Klein). Adbusters can be credited with inspiring a number of other anticorporate movements.

• The Billboard Liberation Front
  This 22-year-old San Francisco institution began the tradition of "improving" billboards with radical restatements of commercial sloganeering. The movement inspired copycats in 1996 in the South Park neighborhood: a Microsoft billboard situated at Third and Bryant Streets that read "This way to the Internet" was altered so that the ubiquitous pointing finger icon gave the bird to tens of thousands of passing motorists.

• Negativland
  The ultimate anti-intellectual property, anti-copyright, populist avant garde locus.

• ®^TMark
  Heir apparent to Adbusters, this younger, tougher, more serious group describes itself as "Corporate Consulting for the 21st Century." The group presents itself as a corporation in which individuals can buy a kind of stock, and the money is used for various cultural terrorist activities (franchises), from ad spoofing to outright sabotage of commercial products.

• Overcoming Consumerism
  A great resource for justifying your jamming activities. The stats here on what consumerism does to the environment, in particular, are horrifying.

• Detritus
  From its mission statement: "Our society spends a lot of time telling us that there is some brand new, fresh cultural produce, generated from thin air and sunshine, slick and clean. They package it with pretty plastic & ribbons and then feed it to us. A lot gets thrown away: the ribbons, the wrapping; culture becomes garbage, or it dies, and rots behind the refrigerator. But the new fluffy shiny stuff still gets churned out, and it gets forced between our teeth. And we are told to swallow it.

  We will not swallow. We will chew, and then spit. We will play with our food, and create something new and interesting from it."

• The Idiosyntactix Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia
  A great resource for all things anticommercial, including great spoofs and a guide to concocting a good hoax.

• HappyClown, Inc.
  The folks behind the fictional McDonald's specialty sandwich, the vegetarian Bilder Burger.

• Jamming the Media: A Citizen's Guide
  OK, it's not so much a site as a book, but Wired's Gareth Branwyn is second only to Mark Dery for cogent commercial media deconstruction for fun and profit.

• Abrupt
  A poor person's Adbusters, with perhaps the most original packaging spoof: cereal boxes like "Reason Bran," and "Kellogg's Smack."

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