The uncooling of America: a new global boycott targets corporate chic - The Popular Condition

I missed the Fourth of July this year. I don't mean to say that I missed the fireworks. Or that I missed a cacophony of baton twirlers and an American Legion band. I didn't miss an event or a celebration. I missed the day itself.

I wasn't aware that the fourth had passed until some time on the fifth when I made an earnest effort to study a calendar, figure out the date, and make plans to eventually snake my way up to Belize City, Belize, in time to return to Buffalo, New York, during the following week. Once I hammered down the precise date, I muttered, "Oh, yesterday must have been the Fourth of July," a trivial fact that had little significance to me in Belize.

Meanwhile back in Buffalo on the Fourth of July, a friend stopped into an Elmwood Avenue shop to buy a bagel, picking up an abandoned copy the New York Times while he was there. In it he found a full-page ad, a normal looking page of stock quotes--with a large black spot sloppily scrawled over the top of the page. Below the blemish, appearing to be written by a felt tip pen, the ad read:

  July 4th--Because my country has sold
   its soul to corporate power. Because consumerism
   has become our national religion.
   Because we've forgotten the true
   meaning of freedom. And because patriotism
   now means agreeing with the president.
   I pledge to do my duty ... and to
   take my country back.

The black spot had made its way to the heart of the U.S. corporate media and I missed it. I knew it was coming. It crept its way over here last spring, immediately after President George W. Bush's administration launched its illegal war on Iraq. Americans now know that the so-called evidence presented by the Bush crew to justify the attack was fictitious. The rest of the world knew it the day the war began. While we were watching flag-draped Fox "News" anchors bellowing in Orwellian style about "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the rest of the world was learning of civilian casualties.

While the U.S. corporate media--often with myriad connections to the arms industry, the oil industry, and the Republican Party--extolled the supposed virtues of Bush's attack, most of the world's citizens looked on in horror. To them, the globe's sole superpower was acting out as a rogue state.

That's when it began. Spontaneously, people the world over started rethinking their relationship with corporate America. Coca-Cola, uncontested for half a century, was suddenly on the line. Saying no to the United States was saying no to war. And saying no to war was suddenly as easy (and healthy) as not walking into a McDonalds or not drinking a Coke or a Pepsi. The boycott was on. And since it was never organized in any formal way, there was no stopping it.

The London-based Boycott America website (www.boycottamerica.org), launched in the wake of the Iraq invasion, takes the issue beyond Iraq and the Bush administration's military adventurism. It touts corporate America's threat to the environment--the result of its successful lobbying against protocols to curb climate change--and its threat to the world's food chain with the proliferation of genetically modified organisms as additional pressing reasons for the boycott. The site terms these actions commercial disobedience, claiming that they aren't targeting U.S. citizens, but are instead targeting U.S. corporations tied to the Bush administration. Activists are organizing similar efforts in nations around the world.

Kono Matsu, writing for the Canadian-based Adbusters magazine, cites Mohandas Gandhi's successful call to the people of India to boycott British cloth and salt, which eventually led to India's freedom and, debatably, contributed to the fall of the British Empire. Matsu hopes that a similar boycott could check the power of the world's sole superpower. But, he admits, it won't be easy:

  We would have to adjust our lifestyle in
   sometimes painful ways; learn to live
   without foods and drinks we've loved
   since we were kids; find local alternative to brands
   we consume every day without thought; shut out
   corporations that we've dealt with for years. We
   have to politicize every purchase we make, constantly
   look for opportunities and take them,
   because our target is a power that surrounds us all
   the time. They call it American cool.

Matsu calls the boycott "a daunting project" which would need to develop it's own logo, or "anti-logo, as well known around the world as the golden arches or the Nike swoosh." That icon, developed by Adbusters, is the painfully simple black spot, which with the twist of the wrist threatens to turn any corporate logo against itself as an emblem of resistance.

Multinational corporations no longer produce products. They are now solely in the image business. Nike produces nothing. Their primary goal now is to maintain the swoosh as an archetypical symbol of cool--in essence branding the entire concept of sports. It contracts production out to sweatshops in developing nations, dancing across the globe in search of the worst working conditions, which translates into the lowest wages and costs. Its products pop forth out of the same hellhole factories as its competitors' products--except the Nike goods are swooshed with the coolest of logos.

Modern corporations have shed the precarious weight of factories and the liabilities associated with maintaining labor forces. Instead they've invested their energy in brand image development. They no longer build factories. Today they build advertising campaigns. Their capital isn't tied up in rusting machinery or weathered buildings. It is tied up in images. They fire employees while cultivating consumers. This is clearly unsustainable, but right now it is the only model out there--and it is driving down living conditions around the world. And it is supported by consumers who have allowed their very bodies to be branded, with names like "GAP" and "Abercrombie" ostentatiously printed across their chests and butts. The brand label, once a small mark to indicate who made the product, is now the product itself. Garments are mere vessels to carry the value-enhancing marks.

Coke and Pepsi typify the most successful of all the branders. Their assets rest on the sacred World Trade Organization-protected synthesis of image and license. The formula is simple. Coke and Pepsi own an image--one that ultimately represents American cool. In nations around the world people manufacture their own Coke and Pepsi under license, using their own water and bottles, often using their own sugar. They then sell it to themselves, using their own distribution networks, sending the profits off to the United States. These two companies, which in essence dominate the world's beverage market, produce nothing tangible. They sell cool while vacuuming money up from around the world. In doing so they are spreading a toxic culture of obesity--the same culture that is killing citizens here in the U.S. homeland, where soda pop consumption has doubled since the mid 1980s, contributing to a 50 percent rise in the obesity and diabetes rates during the same time span. The most sophisticated ads in media outlets around the world seduce people with the supposed normalcy of consuming liquid candy, as these beverages contain an average of eleven tablespoons of sugar per bottle. Developing nations are left to deal with the health consequences while Coke and Pepsi investors deal up the profits.

A black spot splattered on a Coke sign in France, a Sprite sign in Argentina, a Nike swoosh in Britain, and a Texaco billboard in Australia give the logo a new meaning embedded in an instant countermessage. In a media-saturated world dominated by a shrinking handful of corporations, the black spot is viral communication. It is nonviolent revolution, twenty-first century style.

The black spot isn't a revolution in the traditional sense; that is, it doesn't oppose a government. This revolution is about culture. It's called culture jamming. It's a fight against a culture which is poisoning us and killing our planet, leaving people anxious and depressed, overworked and mired in debt. It's a revolution against consumer culture. It's a movement whose revolutionaries hail from diverse backgrounds, representing conservative fundamentalist Christians, Pagan anarchist punks, Greens, union workers, liberation theologists, and all sorts of folks in between.

But make no mistake about it: successful or not, this is a revolution. As Adbusters sums it up:

  In the end, the resistance was known for one
   thing--they simply would not participate. Not in
   the 24-hour economy, the 60-hour workweek, the
   flag-waiving parades, the media manias, the permanent
   fear, the cheers for the troops. And then
   there was their mark, of course, it crept into daily
   life, until it became a constant reminder that these
   really were bleak times. Until one day you no
   longer knew who was in control ... the empire that
   was everywhere ... or the invisible revolution.

So far in the United States Black Spot ads have run in print in the New York Times and on television on CNN. On the other hand, CBS, ABC, Fox, NBC, and MTV have all refused to sell airtime to the Black Spot campaign--a telling indication of just what Adbusters is up against.

For more information about corporate branding and sweatshops in the global economy, see Naomi Klein's No Logo. For detailed information about globalization, see William Grider's One World Ready or Not. For more information about the Black Spot campaign, go to www.unbrandamerica.org

Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism in the communication department at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. An earlier version of this article appeared in the July 24, 2003, issue of ArtVoice. His previous articles are archived online at www.mediastudy.com

COPYRIGHT 2003 American Humanist Association
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group