Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

"Culture jamming," a term I have popularized by articles in The New York Times and Adbusters, might best be defined as media hacking, information warfare, terror-art, and guerrilla semiotics, all in one. Billboard bandits, pirate TV and radio broadcasters, media hoaxers, and other vernacular media wrenchers who intrude on the intruders, investing ads, newscasts, and other media artifacts with subversive meanings are all culture jammers.

"An excellent springboard for anyone wishing to explore this fascinating form of art and revolt." --- bOING-bOING

"A how-to manual for duping the media and turning their own lurid game against themselves." --- The Lumpen Times

"The best attempt yet at a Jammers' manifesto." --- Twisted Times

(Note: Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs (Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993) is out of print. Although you can still find the odd copy of the original pamphlet on the Web, they're rare as hen's teeth. Of course, in the Digital Age, the cultural logic of Jurassic Park---namely, that anything that can be sequenced, scanned, or otherwise encoded can be raised from the dead---is as true for dead texts as it is for anything else. Thus, Culture Jamming lives on here, in the purgatory of the virtual.)

In solidarity with the movement, which champions an "open source" approach to ideas at a time when corporations are privatizing more and more intellectual property, I'm making this essay available to anyone who wants to archive it on her site. In return, I ask only that you credit me as the author and, ironically, copyright holder, as in: "Mark Dery 2004; all rights reserved." This is not license to profit from the republication and resale of my work. That's stealware, not shareware.

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