Rose Colored Retrospectacle

The thing about the presidential campaign that interests me the most (beside the obvious question of whether I will live for the next 4 years in a free, democratic republic, or in an ever-tightening net of paranoia and home-grown terror) is that it's being waged at the individual level by some really amazing and inspiring activists.

I can only assume that this is the inevitable outcome of increased access to technology as well as the opening of the American mind to the idea that DIY doesn't just mean bad garage punkrock (or even good garage punkrock). Adbusters showed us how to control or at least affect our "mental environment" and while there are still things out of reach, technology has placed in our hands the ability to make or change almost anything we can imagine. I suppose that, given the current state of planned obsolescence, this is in part because so many manufactured things are rarely much better than home-made. (And this is a large part what's inspiring my addiction to All Things Steam: because the eras leading up until WWI, for all the bad politics and policies, was also the last time we had industrial economy committed to producing lasting and beautiful goods of many uses, some still unknown!)

I'm talking too broadly. Let me specify:


In the 80s, Apple Computers gave us the Macintosh, which gave aspiring printers and publishers the ability to do things on their desktop that previously had required a full print shop to do. At the same time, printing quality has come down to the same level, because almost no publishers or producers of printed material both with real print anymore -- the computer-based print shop is cheaper and easier and takes up less space. So, while amateur techniques are rising in scale from the type-written and photocopied chapbooks of the 1980s, professional techniques are falling, until they meet. Now how do you know if that magazine you're reading is even real? Right now, we can't easily or cheaply make a fake Newsweek, but give it time. The main thing holding us back isn't technology, it's just time and effort and the fact that organizing anarchists is like herding cats. No, like feeding an entire army of cats their medication. One is bad enough!

Today, this revolution has quietly turned your local Office Max into an urban anarchist's warehouse of subversive goods. Give me a decent inkjet printer, some sticker paper, an Exacto knife, and enough time, and I can convert anything with print on it -- advertisements, books, magazines, menus, packaging, most of the items you see on a city block -- into a subversive message. All it takes is the will and the willingness to turn one's entire portion of free time into scouting locations, matching fonts, measuring ads, checking Pantene colors. This is not a job for the meek, it's a pursuit of the geek.

I'm a geek, and I'm proud of my culture-jamming activities. They aren't all about high-ground political statements -- the 2002 Olympics Art Jam was purely for the fun of it. My targets -- from VISA to the GAP and Old Navy to the military to the What Would Jesus Do campaign -- all deserve to be jammed, and they all maintain enough power that my flea-bites are certainly beneath their notice.

However, I must bow and give credit to the pioneers of Election 04 jammers who are heads and shoulders, leaps and bounds, beyond anything I will ever come up with.

Bikes Against Bush -- an emerging-technology artist and activist based in New York City, Joshua Kinberg will be riding around NYC during the Republican National Convention on his modified bike that squirts environmentally safe, non-toxic field-marking spray chalk into anti-Bush sentiments.

The NO RNC Poster Project: Visual Resistance to the Republican National Convention -- a group of graphic artists providing and (with permission) hanging anti-Bush posters around the city throughout the summer.