Criticisms of Jamming

Rebels Without a CauseJoseph Heath and Andrew Potter, the authors of Nation of Rebels, on how the myth of a counterculture derailed the political left
By Elizabeth Wasserman


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/rebels-without-a-cause/3865/



Criticisms: Ironically, critics of culture jamming point to the fact that the ability of jammers to jam is “facilitated in part by the desktop publishing hardware and software readily available to consumers at relatively modest prices” (Carducci, 117), meaning that jammers are dependent to a degree upon goods made available to them by the capitalist system they are opposing.

More fundamental criticisms of culture jamming object to the inherent philosophy behind the practice — the idea that “industrial capitalism has turned the masses into mindless cogs in a great corporate machine” who conform unthinkingly (Wasserman, 2005). Canadian philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, authors of the national bestseller The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture can’t be Jammed, argue that the pursuit of non-conformity is both an ineffective and ironic objective. Heath and Potter posit that the “quest to distinguish [oneself] from the masses through . . . enlightened, hip, or just plain rebellious consumer preferences” does not free an individual from the capitalist machine — it merely reshapes their consumer practices, creating a new niche market within the capitalist system (Wasserman, 2005). Of greater concern to Potter and Heath is the “loss of faith among progressives in the very idea of political reform” (Wasserman, 2005). They argue that disillusionment with traditional modes of political activism on the part of jammers such as Klein — and the insistence on abandoning political reform in favour of an ill-defined, “wholesale revolution” — has “turned the American Left into an increasingly impotent political fringe, even as it seems to gain cultural status” (Wasserman, 2005).