KEY POINTS:
Sometime in 2005, an iPod billboard was culture jammed. The New York advertisement - a hipster in silhouette holding the must-have accessory - was affixed with a speech bubble in which some wag wrote: "I steal music, and I'm not going away."
It is one of many jammed
billboards that form artist Ji Lee's Bubble Project (www.thebubbleproject.com). Lee put blank speech bubbles on signs to give voice to anyone who wanted to add their thoughts.
Culture jamming, according to Matt Mason in his book The Pirate's Dilemma, is the act of subverting any kind of corporate control, especially advertising. "Remix" billboards with graffiti that changes the meaning of their messages are an example of branding's "blowback" - "a way to strike up conversation with the advertising industry by heckling it".
Mason, whose book is subtitled How hackers, punk capitalists and graffiti millionaires are re-mixing our culture and changing the world, is big on blowback. "The blowback from centuries of advertising and the privatisation of common spaces ... has armed corporations with new branding tools as much as it has encouraged people to counteract these intrusions," he writes.
Provocative stuff, but a must-read for our legislators who seem intent on stamping out youth's unruly practices - downloading and graffiti - with ever more draconian laws. As Mason says, these things just don't go away.
New York authorities raised the stakes with harsher vandalism laws, so graffiti artists learned to take up more space in less time - hence the rise of stickers, stamps, stencils, even Scotch tape and gravity-defying ways to tag in hard-to-reach places.
Mason charts graffiti's rise and evolution - as he does with other youth movements - to present a point of view most will find hard to swallow. Graffiti is not the scourge of the landscape, but the "most important art form of the twentieth century".
For some, says Mason, tags are "the voice of the invisible that allowed a generation of city kids to brand themselves and become famous".
He tracks success stories of how tags became clothing labels. And how the advertising industry uses this youthful vandalism in potent, guerrilla marketing campaigns. Mason explores graffiti's other side too - "the establishment's arch nemesis, the scribbling democracy, a tool for bombing the system". His notion - that graffiti is a response to advertising's bombing of public spaces with messages that, if not fake, are certainly not real - has some logic.
There's a spooky prescience, too, when Mason looks at what advertising has in store - ubiquitous radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags on consumer goods and on every street corner and sign, attacking anyone in proximity, via their mobile phones, with messages to buy.
Could graffiti be a harbinger of ubiquitous computing and a world full of messages slapped on surfaces, all clamouring to be heard?
Bring it, says Mason, who argues the best way to tackle an outside force that finds new ways to "share information, intellectual property, and public space" is not to try and quash it with repressive laws, but to compete with it. As, for example, iTunes has done in the face of music downloaders.
The Pirate's Dilemma says what's really going on in the cut'n'paste, do-it-yourself, borrow-mix-and-recreate world we now live in, is a move to a less blinkered, "post autistic" economics, infused with an altruistic bent leading to a more engaged, authentic corporate mentality. Piracy, says Mason, is not bad, it's a new business model - punk capitalism.
Mason is possibly deluded by the idealism of youth - hip-hop can apparently lead to world peace. But the idea of capitalism reclaimed and remixed, infused with an altruistic bent leading to a more engaged corporate mentality has appeal.
