"They wanted access to my people."
That's the phrase used by an acquaintance of Anne Elizabeth Moore's in talking about her work for a major car manufacturer. They wanted access, as in: Bring your stitch-n-bitch friends to a knitting circle at a DIY festival that our car company happens to be sponsoring; it will be fun, and, just coincidentally, they'll associate their art with our latest make.
They wanted access: Starbucks brings in plenty of free coffee to a zine-making workshop at Bumbershoot, one led by Anne Elizabeth Moore. Moore would bring the zine acolytes, who would then link their DIY expressiveness with the cafe monolith. Moore (who also worked at Richard Hugo House to start one of the nation's only zine libraries) came away from the zine workshop with a clearer idea of what independent artists, writers, and cultural producers are up against these days.
She writes in her new book Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (New Press, 2007) that corporations want access to the passionate intensity of a punk and DIY culture characterized by "inherently political acts, responses to and critiques of rampant consumerism, social class differences, and access to media resources."
That's problem number one. But their motive is clear: Punk music, zines, graffiti, and underground comics, she writes, "provide exactly what we think we are buying when we buy organic produce: a locally produced, delectable commodity created not to be sold to you but to speak to you." Which is exactly what corporations, in an endless quest to win our hearts and minds, want to offer us.
That's problem number two. And where both problems lead is the point where artists face endless requests to inhibit their ability to act independently of the mainstream American norms -- which are corporate norms -- they have tried to hard to evade.
Unmarketable is an intelligent and often hilarious meditation on punk culture in a world where not only are countercultural fashions made available at the mall, but even that unimpeachable emotion, passion, can be tapped for the sake of a buck. Or a piece of candy: How did Moore, in a series of workshops, get punk rockers and zinesters to sign away their independence for king-size bars? Heated discussions of "selling out" aside, everyone, she discovered, has a price. The marketers know it. And if you happen to be in a tribe that prizes a handmade culture of purpose and authenticity, they want access to your people, too.
Moore, the former editor of the indie mag Punk Planet, was in Seattle, her former home, this winter, and she agreed to talk to us.
It's not addressed in your book, but can you tell me why your magazine, Punk Planet, folded?
The reasons for the end of Punk Planet are mirrored in the entire structure of the book. The book describes corporate infiltration of the underground and the underground's drive to adapt to the profit-minded way of doing things. Not only all of our friends, advertisers, sponsors, associates, and peers were out of business by the time we were faced with the same issue, but the distributor we were working with [had] made a decision at some point a number of years ago to actually start trying to compete with the sort of profit-minded corporate periodicals distributor who had quite literally taken over the entire periodicals distribution industry.
And in needing to compete, they also needed to act like them, and so they started eliminating smaller magazines and eventually started charging more, and eventually just not paying us.
Do you see a Punk Planet being distributed by some other means?
By no means can any truly independent periodical start up and remain viable until all media is restructured. I don't see a way that we can resolve that.
But what we can do is rethink the ideas behind creating small media. We can start challenging all of those questions that we were forced to believe in when media consolidation became the standard. In 1996, all of a sudden, to get everyone to kind of sell out and sign the big record label contracts and allow their work to be sold in [big-box stores], all of a sudden the conversation shifted away from "We've got to connect with our audience, the people who understand our message," to "We've got to get our message out to the widest number of people."
That was really damaging. Because the widest number of people aren't necessarily going to connect with every message.
What marketers are doing now -- and they're the ones who are funded to think about and test these theories, so as much as I despise every single one of them, I do respect that they're the only ones who have figured this out -- [what they understand is] it is more important to connect with a small audience that actually understands and believes in what you do than it is to quote-unquote "get your message out" to everyone who could possibly hear it.
The marketers who worked on the Tylenol Ouch campaign [the pharmaceutical company's bid for younger consumers]: Were they exemplifying that aspect of "Let's connect to an audience that is just totally tuned out"? Or is a better example the Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith thing, where ads for the movie are so ubiquitous that they crop up in a DIY format?
Well, a little bit. For Tylenol and Star Wars those were options, right? They could go small media if they wanted, but they could also put their same ad on a Doritos bag in the grocery store and have it distributed everywhere in the entire world. To them it's a style, whereas to me it's the only choice I have.
But what is slightly more, I think, telling about that is the general shift towards word-of-mouth marketing, which is really just one-on-one communication about a product which [consumers] see value in. It does promote connection to integrity and passion that's really hard to find in a nationally televised commercial.
That is what I think that we can do as individuals, as well: Start scaling back these demands to send our messages out all over the world and start communicating with each other in a small, one-on-one way.
You describe in the book these acts of corporations raiding smaller, non-commercial cultures for passion and integrity. Is there something that the corporations give us in return?
The King of Zine health insurance contest co-sponsored by the Tylenol Ouch campaign was a really good example: You would submit your hard-won integrity and acts of passion and small media to Tylenol, and then, if you won, you got a year of health insurance.
Which was great for that one person, right? But it's being offered as a reward in a contest for something that corporate culture hasn't until then actually appreciated because the stuff was deliberately anti-corporate. And also, it's being offered by a pharmaceutical company, which has a vested interest in actually making sure that most people don't have health insurance most of the time.
What was the lesson of the Bumbershoot event for you?
I enjoyed that project, and of course working with the [Richard Hugo House] Zine Archive and Publishing Project, which is sadly on hiatus now: Helping to develop that space as not only a physical archive for zines and independent publishing available to the public, but also to really gear it with an educational component in mind, was really important in my work.
But what that proved to me was how little understanding there was of independent media by the general public. I'm basically OK with that, I'm OK that it is taken for granted. But it made me think about the ways that I wanted to present independent media to people. And after that I got really involved in experimenting with putting stuff out there in a non-traditional way and making sure that people had access to it and that it was presented in a language that they would understand when they came across it.
What were some of the best experiences with that? Did you find any great ideas for distributing content in small-scale non-commercial ways?
It influenced the project that I just got back from, which was a little bit more complicated. Because of my frustrations with how independent media seems to be losing vitality here on a daily basis, I went to Cambodia to teach young women about publishing there in a one-to-one way. And that was really an amazing experience, to bring the concept of small, independent girl-focused media to a select group, and then explore all the things that we can do with it: How are we going to distribute it? What are we going to write about? What do we have to say that's important?
Do you feel like the cooperation of artists with corporations in marketing their products is conscious or justified?
I think you aren't given all of the information that most people would need to be able to make up their mind. [The corporations] want something from you, and they want to not pay you for it. You sort of aren't allowed the information that I think that you would need to be able to make a decision like that.
I don't have a problem with those people [who make art for corporations], because I did it too. That's the most important thing to remember. But when we overlook the fact that we might have ignored our own integrity and ignored our own interests in maintaining it, and we allow ourselves to be swayed by some of these commercial aims, we are losing something that is going to be really hard to buy back. And that is our opportunity to communicate in the ways that we ourselves developed in order to promote noncommercial messages in this culture.
And so, you know, integrity does end up being the most important issue here, but integrity is really hard to address. After the Bumbershoot stuff, it was really hard for me to say to myself, "Oh, that was a really big mistake. I just did everything I worked my entire life to not do." And so you can't really walk into a conversation with an office mate or with a friend or a cartoonist I've known for many years and say, "Dude, you totally lost your integrity!" Because A, I'm not the judge of their integrity, and B, like me, nobody's going to need to hear that.
It ends up being a thing you kind of have to think about on your own, but hopefully I've provided at least one tool that will allow you to measure it a little bit more accurately than the messages that people get from the corporate marketers, who are convincing them that what they are doing retains all the integrity that they have ever had.