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The easy narrative about Adbusters , accepted by its friends and enemies alike, is that it’s at heart an anarchist project. To those wishing it well, the magazine is one of the cornerstones of the Left, a wellspring of anti-authoritarian tools meant to revive progressive activism and shake things up for the greater good. For curmudgeonly detractors, “culture jamming” is little more than a powerless rehash of old Yippie protest tactics. Yet anarchism, nearly everyone assumes, is either the best or the worst part of Adbusters . But those explanations miss a much weirder side of the magazine’s underlying politics. This March, Adbusters jumped into what ought to seem like a marriage made in hell. It ran a glowing article on Beppe Grillo — Italy’s scruffier answer to America’s Truther champion Alex Jones — calling him “nuanced, fresh, bold, and committed as a politician,” with “a performance artist edge” and “anti-austerity ideas . . . [C]ountries around the world, from Greece to the US, can look to [him] for inspiration.” Grillo, the piece gushed, was “planting the seed of a renewed — accountable, fresh, rational, responsible, energized — left, that we can hope germinates worldwide.” Completely unmentioned was the real reason Grillo is so controversial in Italy: his blog is full of anti-vaccination and 9/11 conspiracy claims, pseudo-scientific cancer cures and chemtrail-like theories about Italian incinerator smoke. And, as Giovanni Tiso noted in July, Grillo’s “Five Star Movement” also has an incredibly creepy backer: Gianroberto Casaleggio, “an online marketing expert whose only known past political sympathies lay with the right-wing separatist Northern League.” Casaleggio has also written kooky manifestos about reorganizing society through virtual reality technology, with mandatory Internet citizenship and an online world government. Adbusters could have stopped flirting with Grillo at that point, but it didn’t. Another Grillo puff piece appeared in its May/June issue. Then the magazine’s outgoing editor-in-chief, Micah White (acknowledged by the Nation as “the creator of the #occupywallstreet meme”) recently went solo to form his own “boutique activism consultancy,” promising clients a “discrete service” in “Social Movement Creation.” Two weeks ago, in a YouTube video, White proposed that the next step “after the defeat of Occupy” should be to import Grillo’s Five Star Movement to the US in time for the 2014 midterm elections: After the defeat of Occupy, I don’t believe that there is any choice other than trying to grab power by means of an election victory. . . This is how I see the future: we could bring the Five Star Movement to America and have the Five Star Movement winning elections in Italy and in America, thereby forming an international party, not only with the Five Star Movement, but with other parties as well. The day after Adbusters ran its first pro-Grillo article, Der Spiegel compared Grillo’s tone — and sweeping plans to restructure Italy’s parliamentary system — to Mussolini’s rhetoric. Ten days before that, a Five Star Movement MP, Roberta Lombardi, faced a media scandal after writing a blog post praising early fascism for its “very high regard for the state and protection of the family.” Most progressives might reconsider their glowing assessment of a party as “the seed for a renewed left” when its leaders peddle absurd conspiracy theories and praise fascists. No such signs from Adbusters or White.

But Grillo may be more than a random ally for the gang at Culture Jammers HQ. Just where did Adbusters get its defining philosophy? Why was it always so obsessed with ads and consumerism, while hardly focusing on class dynamics until the financial crisis? In 1989, Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn claimed to have had an epiphany in a supermarket and started a movement to fight branding and advertisement. This wasn’t to be a repeat of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book! -style anarchism, with roots in Proudhon’s famous “property is theft” dictum. Culture jammers weren’t acting to collectivize most products, but to “uncool” them by taking on those products’ ads, with their own slickly-produced spoofs. To them, the brand names bearing the coolness were more important than what the branded products did. It wasn’t drinking itself that their anti-Absolut vodka ads seemed to target, but glamorous logo-brands — as if smokers and alcoholics were hooked solely on label prestige. The earliest Adbusters website on the Wayback Machine reads like a tamer, more Canadian, version of Alex Jones’s operation. Greeting you on the intro page is a Marshall McLuhan quote about “guerrilla information war.” Above its table of contents is the all-seeing eye engraving from US currency. “There’s a war on for your mind!” is the current InfoWars tagline. Not too far from the early Adbusters (the “Journal of the Mental Environment”) which promised to “take on the archetypal mind polluters — Marlboro, Budweiser, Benetton, Coke, McDonalds, Calvin Klein — and beat them at their own game.” Oddly for a site now considered left-wing, Adbusters 1.0. was cheesily evasive about its political position, claiming to be “neither left nor right, but straight ahead.” There’s good reason to be suspicious of anyone who pulls that “neither left nor right” line. Though Alex Jones’ InfoWars may not have been directly based on early-days Adbusters , the two were undeniably similar in sentiment. Both take a hostile view to mass media and widely-available consumer products, pushing readers towards an ascetic alternative lifestyle that insulates them from “The System” and its toxic worldliness. And, as luck would have it, both are also the merchants of the (rarer, more expensive) alternative products needed to live this lifestyle. Alex Jones expounds the virtues of food hoarding and drives Truthers to amass his survival packs, anti-fluoride filters, and nascent iodine drops; Adbusters flogs Blackspot shoes, Corporate America protest flags, and overpriced culture-jamming kits to “create new ambiences and psychic possibilities.” With Lasn as its guru, culture jamming became popular among activists in the 1990s. Behind all those “sub-vertisements” lay one big assumption: regular sheep-le were so brainwashed by consumerism that they couldn’t even snicker at rose petal-ly tampon ads without an enlightened jammer to spell everything out for them. Every adbuster got to feel like Morpheus, unplugging Sleepers from the Matrix with the Red Pill of Situationism. This view of society wasn’t Marxist, left-liberal, or anarchist, so much as Don Draperist: “We are the cool-makers and the cool-breakers,” Kalle Lasn told an audience of advertising “creatives” in 2006. “More than any other profession, I think that we have the power to change the world.” Lasn might claim not to believe in leaders, but he believes in elites: marketing professionals with a higher calling, responsible for shepherding public consciousness to save humanity from brands, from themselves. And by exaggerating the mass media’s ability to zombie-fy the public, jammers could imagine that they, too, had Svengali-like powers over ordinary proles. For all the “tools” Adbusters offered to sway public consciousness — stenciling, stickering, page defacement, supermarket trolley sabotage — there was never much emphasis on social skills, on persuading people with politics instead of bombarding them with theater or treating them like hackable machines.