Call up GWBush.com or
www.gatt.com, and what you actually get is an activists' website.
Johann Hari on how the anti-globalisers are becoming more and
more ingenious
Last year, a shiny new branch of Starbucks was
launched in London's Leicester Square with a glitzy,
no-expenses-spared party. As balloons were handed out, clowns
juggled and the aroma of coffee filled the streets, one lone
anti-globalisation protester wandered into the fray. He began to
shout about Starbucks's failure to guarantee a living wage for its
coffee-growers, and the wave of sexual harassment lawsuits the
company was facing in the US.
As staff attempted to remove
him, one Starbucks employee suddenly snapped. He leapt from behind a
table, threw the protester to the ground and began to beat him. "You
piece of commie s**t! You f***ing anti-globalisation scum! Why don't
you go back to f***ing Soviet Russia! Don't you see that Starbucks
sets you free?" he screamed, as he whacked his victim's head against
the floor.
But the angry "Starbucks employee" with a taste
for protester-bashing was not what he seemed. In fact, the men were
both members of an anti-globalisation protest group called Space
Hijackers ( [
http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk/]),
which was formed in 1999 and acts out rather unusual protests of
this sort. The group is trying to make ordinary people look at the
corporations that we increasingly take for granted in a different
light.
The Space Architects describe themselves as
"anarchitects", and their mission is to "battle the constant
oppressive encroachment on to our public spaces by institutions,
corporations and urban planners. We oppose the way that public space
is being eroded and replaced by corporate profit."
Anti-globalisation protesters only make headlines when they riot,
but their energies are increasingly deployed between the Genoas and
Seattles. A large slice of the movement concentrates not on the big
street clashes, but on more subtly subverting the corporate
occupation of our public spaces, particularly the
internet.
The "eToys
v etoy" clash illustrates
perfectly the nature of this new battleground. EToys.com was a $6bn
monolith, one of the great success stories of the internet boom -
the Amazon.com of internet toy shopping. However, two years before
eToys bought its domain name in 1997, a small Swiss artists'
collective had set up and registered etoy.com - a website dedicated
to radical (and occasionally pornographic) artworks that often
parodied exactly the kind of corporate culture represented by eToys.
EToys was furious about the "brand confusion", and took etoy to
court, even though the humble artists' circle had got online first.
Etoy responded by stepping up the anti-corporate information on its
site, and became a symbol of the right of individuals on the web to
stand up to the multinationals. The protracted legal battles caused
huge damage to eToys's share price, to such an extent that it proved
unable to withstand the downturn in the US economy and filed for
bankruptcy in March 2001.
Emboldened by the success of etoy,
a number of sites began to undermine the brand images and commercial
interests of irresponsible corporations, individuals and
institutions. They aim to use the techniques of advertising to
promote not corporate interests, but social aims. One of the most
popular websites of the 2000 US presidential race was GWBush.com - a
site run by radical activists - which initially seemed to be Bush's
official campaign site, but quickly began to highlight his hypocrisy
on cocaine use, along with information about his fondness for
ordering the frying of other human beings when he was governor of
Texas.
Similarly, activists bought up [
http://www.gatt.com/] (Gatt was the
precursor of the World Trade Organisation) and created a site that
looked very similar to the WTO's, except that it provided
information about its less admirable actions in the developing
world.
The "hactivists" who hijack websites are only a small
part of the movement; brand images themselves are being hijacked.
T-shirts are printed using the Nestle logo and font, and alleging:
"We kill babies". There are similar T-shirts that use the lettering
and style of the Coca-Cola logo, and proclaim: "We employ Latin
American death squads".
Umberto Eco anticipated this
"semiological guerrilla warfare" in his 1986 book
Travels in
Hyperreality. He wrote: "I am proposing an action [which would]
urge the audience to control the message and its multiple
possibilities of interpretation." When corporate interests go so far
as to employ "viral marketing" - where, for example, two
good-looking, trendy people are employed to walk around public
places talking loudly about how great Stella Artois is - subverting
these acts seems to some activists the only meaningful way to
protest.
Such techniques have become known as
"culture-jamming". Stuart Ewen of Adbusters, the group that has led
the way in this field, explains the rationale behind the campaigns:
"Not only are mass media images intrusive into nearly every second
of people's waking lives but . . . increasingly, these images are
penetrating into the most intimate recesses of people's inner lives,
their fantasy realms of desire and fear. We need to recognise that
media images, increasingly, are sales pitches; that, rather than
merely depicting or entertaining, they are instrumental in the sense
that they are designed to gather audiences, designed to motivate
certain kinds of behaviour . . ."
More and more, corporate
publicity machines are trying to co-opt subvertisement images and
techniques for their own ends, often with preposterous results.
Several trendy clothes firms have sensed that Subcomandante Marcos,
the leader of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, is "cool" - and have
begun to stencil his images on to walls and stick his image on
sweatshop- manufactured clothing.
Naomi Klein was recently
approached by the clothes firm that owned the copyright to the words
"No Logo". "I hear you have some book that is really hip with that
name," it said. "Let's use it and start a new label. Naomi Klein,
Calvin Klein - it's perfect!"
The campaigners who are
fighting this kind of mentality draw on a heritage from the left
that stretches back at least to Guy Debord and the situationists,
who sprang to prominence in 1968. They showed how the power of an
image or logo lifted out of its normal context forced consumers to
confront the way that corporations manipulate them. They were keen
on talking about "the political power of the
prank".
Similarly, the political repercussions of these
tactics are not new: after all, they are just technologically
advanced forms of civil disobedience - of the kind practised by
Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But although we may accept
these tactics when we agree with their motives - for example,
drawing attention to exploitative corporate behaviour - we have no
way of preventing them from being used for causes we loathe. What if
neo-Nazi subvertisers begin hijacking the websites of "Jewish"
corporations? What if some enterprising opponent of the
anti-globalisation movement really
does decide to ridicule
Naomi Klein by manufacturing "No Logo" T-shirts?
What is she
going to do - sue for brand infringement?
