Global Culture Jam 1999

THIS YEAR we will try on many fronts to catalyze a millennial moment of truth - a global mindshift, a mass reversal of perspective - from which the corporate/consumerist forces will never fully recover.

YOU HAVE A CHOICE TO MAKE. You can continue to dream the American dream, continue to drive your car to the supermarket each week and idly wander the aisles, continue to blithely throw out your weight in trash every few weeks, continue to assume the additives in your food are harmless shelf-life extenders, continue to play Visa against MasterCard, continue to sit Sphinxlike in front of the tube most nights absorbing another dose of consumer-culture spectacle. You can keep dreaming of wealth, power, fame, sex and exciting recreational opportunities, and when December 31 finally comes around you can do what you have always done - fall down drunk on cheap champagne, another faceless celebrant of the status quo. Or you can decide to opt out of the first-world consumer cult and participate in the great global mindshift - a transformation comparable in scale to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment - that’s happening right under your nose.

This is the itinerary:

CORPORATE RULE - We will stop hanging our heads and politely asking corporations to please stop doing such massive harm. Instead we’ll start questioning their legitimacy, their legal right to continue conducting business in our communities. We’ll start thinking and acting like who we are: free people running our own affairs. And we’ll start treating corporations like what they are: subordinate legal entities that exist to do our bidding. We’ll launch an action that sends a chill down the spine of corporate America. We’ll make an example of one of the world’s biggest corporate criminals - Philip Morris Inc. - in a saturation TV campaign that tells the grim truth about the company’s long criminal record. We’ll organize a worldwide boycott of its food products and collect hundreds of thousands of petition signatures via the internet. We’ll keep applying pressure until the attorney general of the State of New York revokes Philip Morris’ charter

MEDIA CARTA - This year we will launch a First Amendment legal action against the CBS, NBC and ABC networks for refusing to sell us airtime over the last 10 years, and we’ll also take our Canadian case against the CBC network to the World Court in the Hague under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We’ll stop playing the role of the passive lug beaten down by the spectacle of the global entertainment complex, and start producing a new meaning of our own.

NEW ECONOMICS - On campuses around the world we will ridicule the logic of neoclassical economics. We will interrupt lectures, argue with professors after class. We’ll look these dinosaurs in the eye and contest the archaic way they measure economic “progress.” (How can it be called “progress” when most people are becoming worse off?) We’ll make them explain the “logic” of the vast international gambling casino that free-running capital has created. “The Global Economy is a Doomsday Machine,” we’ll proclaim on stickers pasted on our professors’ doors and all over campus. We’ll air 30-second mindbombs on campus radio, local TV and on CNN worldwide.

CONRAD BLACK - In Canada, we will carry out acts of civil disobedience on the newspaper boxes of Conrad Black, a right-wing bully whose ambitions have gone uncontested for too long. We’ll prove that media monopolies like Black’s are vulnerable to well-planned tactical assaults by small groups of dedicated jammers.

BUY NOTHING DAY - As the millennium’s final Christmas shopping binge approaches, we’ll begin tearing down the icons of consumerism, jamming the airwaves with anti-consumption messages and hold a mirror up to the ugly face of First World commercial culture.

Adbusters - Global Culture Jam 1999

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