Guerilla Hacks

Here I'll discuss the culture jamming and pranks and such that seem to have been carried out in the furtherance of some at least vaguely political agenda.

I'll give the gold medal to the poet who managed to plant the phrase "Li Peng Step Down!" in the characters of a patriotic poem in the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper.

Barbie Liberation
A silver to The Barbie Liberation Organization for switching the voice-generating units in talking Barbie dolls with the ones in talking G.I. Joe dolls and returning them to the store. The two then made strides against the tyranny of gender roles, Barbie yelling "Vengeance is mine" while Joe offers: "Let's go shopping!"

18th Century classics of the subgenre of literary guerilla hacks include the satirical essays A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift and The Shortest Way with Dissenters by Daniel Defoe.

A couple of things I'd like to think were guerilla hacks were a couple of products sold to police departments. One, a database program called "Crime Tracker" eventually ate up the computer records of the police departments that purchased it (the hacker has since vanished). The other is the Quadro QRS 250G, a fancy sounding electromagnetic detective unit that some departments paid as much as $8,000 for that turned out to be pretty much a plastic box with an antenna.

Some billboard improvements have a political message, like these examples in the wake of the Rodney King beating, or this modification of a military recruitment advertisement.

Tawana Brawley was the seed that grew into one of the most outrageous racially-based hoaxes we've seen in a while. And the campaign to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide parodies the often scientifically illiterate warnings against frightening-sounding chemicals.

Governments live and die by disinformation campaigns, and they're getting pretty good at it. Is The Eremin Letter real, or just capitalist propaganda? When you read about the U.S. government's campaigns against enemies like Castro, or you remember The Maine or the Tonkin Gulf incident, you learn something about who you can't trust.

Arm The Homeless
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is a hoax that has been used by governments as diverse as Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and Idi Amin's Uganda to whip up antisemitism.

The Report from Iron Mountain was dreamed up by a pack of leftists during the Cold War as a satire of machiavellian governmental manipulation. It was an analysis of the effect peace would have on the health of the state, and came down firmly in favor of continual war as good for the country. The report simulated so accurately the voice of authority that anti-government militia types are fond of pointing to it today as evidence of a government conspiracy.

The ever-successful Arm The Homeless advocacy group provides a chance to make fun of society's attitudes towards poor people, as well as the rhetoric of philanthropy and Second Amendment defenders. ATH is joined by satirical political action committees like The National Pochismo Institute, Ladies Against Women, Always Causing Legal Unrest, and People for the Eating of Tasty Animals.

Many of the games that made TV Nation so fun at times were politically aimed; and the same can be said for the pranks of Jerry Rubin.

And speaking of Yippies, the political prankster clowns of the 1960s, here's a cartoon story of the Yippie invasion of Wall Street, the product of the creative genius of Abbie Hoffman.

Luther Blissett's flyers
I tried handing out copies of that old Yippie document The School Stoppers' Textbook to some schoolkids in my town, hoping that it would inspire the inmates of the public schools to acts of rebellion appropriate to their circumstance. I was met by five people with badges who informed me that the First Amendment did not apply to this particular piece of writing. I was held in prison on $40,000 bail and eventually convicted for (I kid you not) nothing more than handing out leaflets on a public sidewalk. So the people who publish this text on-line at places like here, here, here, here (in German translation), here, here, here, here, here, and here are in danger of prosecution if any California student clicks their way to the page.

Here's an idea for you; instead of assassinating tyrants, just pretend to. It'll work just as well, with less mess. Check out The Encyclopedia of Direct Action for examples of creative protest, and How to Break the Law for legal advice. Check out our Theory and Advocacy page for more of this sort of thing.

A tip of the hat to Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California, who responded to the first Rodney King trial's verdict by plastering official-looking flyers around town announcing that police brutality was now legal policy.

To trip up the spambots scanning the web for email addresses, some bright CGI artist has come up with a page that contains randomly-generated email addresses and a number of links that point back to the same page. Well done! (More anti-spam resources can be found at this page)