Man, so it looks like corporate America is finally ready to appropriate “culture-jamming” techniques into mainstream advertising. It had to happen sooner or later. Adbusters must be spinning in its grave… Actually, this campaign for Napster is pretty smart. They have a bunch of fake but real looking posters for just random shit, and then, randomly pasted over the heads in those posters is that dumb Napster cat wearing headphones logo. But the whole thing is designed to look like Napster is engaging in what they are calling “sniping” or stealing/messing up other people’s billboards for their own purposes. But the whole thing is actually the campaign, so that it looks like Napster is all “underground” and has like street-crews going out and “fucking with the man” to support it. The sad part is that it’s probably gonna work. It probably will build them a certain weird street-cred. I mean, the idea is cool, but at the same time also horrendously irritating.

The whole advertising culture vs. counter-culture war that will inevitably spring up around this reminds me of a fantastic article by Philip K. Dick, that I think should be like required reading in every 12th grade high-school English class (or something… I’m just saying: “Read it, asshole!”). In it, he talks about reality, and the idea of authenticity, and how fake realities create fake people, and fake people create fake realities, and something that’s totally relevant to ‘culture-jamming,’ as much as I cringe to have to use that term: the idea of replacing fakes with fake fakes, that is, real things which are meant to impersonate fakes, and introduce uncontrolled elements into the system. The example he gives is like, if you snuck into Disneyworld and replaced their mechanical birds with real birds. Or replaced the robot pirates with real pirates. Shit like that. I think that’s the next level in all this, and is a model for the kind of next-generational counter-cultural work that I would like to see.

PS. If I haven’t yet convinced you to read that article, what can I do that would make you read it? Just let me know, Ill do it. I swear.

Oh, another thing I liked from that article is the stuff on the Wooster Collective’s site. Nice pictures.