Culture Jam : How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge--any Why We Must by Lasn Kalle

Author:Lasn, Kalle [Lasn, Kalle]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

What would happen if even 10 percent of North Americans came to believe in and support even one of these ideas? Life would change. The ready-for-prime-time metameme—the big paradigm-busting idea that suddenly captures the public imagination and becomes a super-spectacle in itself—is the meme-warfare equivalent of a nuclear bomb. It causes cognitive dissonance of the highest order. It jolts people out of their habitual patterns and nudges society in brave new directions.

The last time social activists ventured wholesale into TV, they won a magnificent victory. I’m talking about the tobacco war, which history will record as having begun in the 1960s and having ended around the turn of the millennium, with the tobacco giants finally rolling over. The tobacco war marked the first (and so far the last) time anti-ads beat product ads in open meme combat in a free marketplace of ideas.

Here was a multibillion-dollar industry butting heads with the fledgling antitobacco lobby. In 1969, the antitobacco crusaders, through persistent efforts and relentless pressure, managed to secure airtime for their antismoking ads, which ran against the cigarette ads that were then still legal on TV.

I remember those ads vividly—the superclose-ups of the glowing tips of cigarettes, the X rays of cruddy lungs. I remember Yul Brynner, whose last creative act in the world, after a slow disintegration from lung cancer, was to come on TV just months from death, look the world squarely in the eye and say, “Whatever you do, don’t smoke.” That meme forged the link between cigarettes and death. Everybody watching knew it was the truth. Those anti-ads helped me and millions of others to quit smoking. More significantly, they demonstrated that even a multibillion-dollar cartel can be beaten in a free marketplace of ideas.

The antismoking meme crushed the smoking meme. Even with all its financial might, the tobacco industry was simply unable to compete because it lost its psychological stranglehold on the public mind. It lost its magic. Smoking was uncooled, and no amount of PR money could buy the cool back. In 1971, the tobacco companies “voluntarily” accepted a federal ban on TV and radio cigarette advertising, and their ads have not appeared in those media since.

For the antismoking lobby—early culture jammers—beating the enemy on TV was the key. The victory initiated the great social turn-around of the next twenty years, with smokers in increasing numbers being driven out of the temple.

Today a new generation of jammers is inspired by that victory. If the mighty tobacco industry was vulnerable to calculated, well-researched, tactical assaults by TV activists, then surely such subversive efforts can be repeated with success on other dysfunctional industries.

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