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[side_show]

I think it is maybe not so much a douchebag thing to do as a douchebag thing to consider yourself to be doing? I mean, it's pretty much glorified pranking, and while I am all for pranking let's call a spade a shovel. At least, this is how I see it.

Ah, but throwing a rotten pumpkin off my balcony was a prank, where as defacing the toilets in Starbucks (not something I've done...yet) is culture jamming.  Were talking civil disobedience here, a sticking-it-to-the-man type thing not a fuck-you-to-whoever-happens-to-be-around-type-thing.  There is a distinction.

[pmcd9]

Defacing the toilets at Starbucks is civil disobedience?

~Paul

[side_show]

okay.  I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.

[jough]

We used to do a thing in college called "dada terrorism" (this was before the word "terrorism" had the icky stigma it has today) and do simple things like re-arrange the grocery store to be more convenient for customer.  Like putting Immodium AD next to the microwave burritos, analgesics and condoms next to the oysters, Vaseline next to the sticks of pepperoni, switching the labels on the no bean chili and dog food, etc.

This wasn't "culture jamming" as much as just good clean intoxicated fun.

Also, I have no idea if it is against the law or not, but food stores tend to freak out when you bring groceries IN to the store and begin stocking their shelves with them.  We never hung around long enough to see what happened when people tried to buy things that they techically did not carry.

[St_Zartan]

There's a big difference between trying to change the way people might perceive / interact with the System (by, say, playing havoc with semantics, or attempting to damage / impugn the Almighty Brand), and just making life that much more difficult for some miserable minimum-wage earner doing an already thankless job. I'm all for culture jamming in its original sense, but the term seems to have been more or less hijacked by people who want to feel good and clever about acting like douchy twelve-year-olds.

Randomly fuck*ng shit up at, say, a Wal-Mart is not going to get your average consumer drone to Snap Into It and say, gee, this wrecked mess in Aisle Nine is really forcing me to rethink the ethics of big box corporations. It just means some dude whose name you never bothered to learn is going to be pulling some unpaid overtime.

That doesn't make you revolutionary; it makes you a fuck*ng bully.

[Pedro Picasso]

We used to do a thing in college called "dada terrorism" (this was before the word "terrorism" had the icky stigma it has today)

Aside: Early 2001 I was selling t-shirts.  I wanted to print one that had the bomb from Counter Strike on the front and the words "Terrorists Win" on the back.  Late 2001 I was really glad I never printed any of those.  I suppose they would have made for a good bonfire.