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Chapter 12 examines culture jamming, a tactic that Klein says has become central to the rising anticorporate movement.

The term “culture jamming” was coined in 1984 by the San Francisco group Negativland (281). Klein defines the activity as “the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages” (280). By using the tools, images, and techniques of the advertising industry to subvert and distort the messages of major corporations, Klein claims that culture jamming offers “an X-ray of the subconscious of a campaign, uncovering not an opposite meaning but the deeper truth hidden beneath the layers of advertising euphemisms” (281-82). A classic example is the cancerous “Joe Chemo” figure meant to satirize the famous Joe Camel mascot for Camel cigarettes (282).

Much of Chapter 12 looks at the origins and development of cultural jammers. A key representative is Adbusters magazine, founded in 1989, which regularly prints altered or parodied ads designed to undermine the efforts of corporate branding (286-87). Klein interviews New York City artist Jorge Rodriguez de Gerada, who specializes in altering billboards, and Carly Stasko, a University of Toronto student who has mainly used self-published zines to skewer marketing campaigns (279-80, 289-92). For Klein, these individuals embody the combination of vandalism,