JAMCON '26

For immediate release.

Following the success of the original JAMCON in 1984, it is now time to the bring the convention of cultural signal jamming back to the future. A lot has changed in the cultural landscape over the  intervening 42 years. Ham radio, CB’s and illegal operation of said equipment to jam the same over a network of interlinked repeater systems doesn’t hold the same appeal to todays bored teenager or artistic adult looking for an enjoyable way to spend time making pranks over the airwaves. There are still plenty of signals to jam, but most of these are now controlled and operated at the data centers operated by the Borg hive mind. Artificial Idiotic slop must now be fought with Analog Intelligence.
 
For this reason the Situationist Intergalactical has put the call out for any Mentat who may wish to use their skills in the battle of the Borg. It has come to our attention that AI Slop is actually a form of soul sickness, known to some under the name of “garmonbozia.” It is a product of “pain and sorrow” emanating from certain subetheric entities who are inhabiting the internet and use it as a way to create conflict and anomie in human beings. These entities, who use silicon as a host, are currently coalescing into the form of huge data center cubes from which they will beam their phasers, currently set to stupefy.
 
It has been thought that one way to minimize the potential damage of Artificial Idiocy is to develop Analog Intelligence. For more on this, please see the Mentat Handbook, which should be seen only as a starting point, not as the sole authority on the matter. In the battle against the Borg, a multipronged approach is most helpful. As heirs to many different cultural and subcultural movements, we have taken it upon ourselves to reinvigorate once again the dada art movement. With its focus on irrationality, it seems to be immune to the cold logic emanating from the coded computers of the data centers. That’s why one of our charms against the digital monstrosity is the mantra “dada not data” or “dada centers not data centers.” Either works to rewire the brain in favor of sound poetry and analog cut-up techniques not  possible with the reductionist techbro version of recombinant art.

Jamcon ’26 also operates on homeopathic principles. The first is that “Like cures like.” This is the idea  that a disease, in this case Artficial Idiocy, can be cured by a substance that produces similar symptoms in healthy people. In other words AI slop can be fought using AI slop. For this some hacker skills are useful. If those with the knowhow start sending sending garbage each and every time a bot from meta, openai, anthropic, googleai make an appearance and feed them garbage, the system itself will go septic. Inputting dada into the data will help the process along because dada does not compute. This can be accomplished through shitposting strange experimental texts on all your unfavorite platforms, or with technical know how if you have the know how. 

The second homeopathic law to be applied is the “Law of minimum dose.” As a citizen of the American empire it is hard to not always reach for more, and that bigger is always better. Yet little and often is another way to have large lasting effects. Homeopathy notes that the lower the dose of the medicine, the greater its effectiveness is. Small scale dada inserts into the data sets might be enough to throw off the Borg and jam its circuitry. Many homeopathic products are so diluted that no molecules of the original substance remain. Even so, they somehow seem to cause shifts in entire systems. Operating from the sidelines in small doses can thus lead to dramatic changes across entire systems. It is not so much about reaching critical mass as it is about reaching an effective fringe.
 
 Still, for those of you who may be wondering about the whole thing, maybe never heard of JAMCON ‘84 , we have a little refresher for you on the original its continuing importance. It all started in 1984 when a group of culture jammers decided to start messing with incoming and outgoing signals over the airwaves. Once again we have Crosley Bendix and the Universal Media Netweb to thank for their efforts.

​JAMCON '84 was one of the early efforts of Bendix and the experimental media collective Negativland in association with the shows that they released under the auspices of the Universal Media Netweb, transmitted locally to the Bay Area over KPFA, part of the pacifica network of radio stations, on the Over the Edge show. The original radio album was edited together from a number of these transmissions, which themselves were edited together from other transmissions, scanning, and radio work by the delectable culprits involved.
 
During these broadcasts Crosley Bendix coined the term “culture jamming.” It was later taken up with gusto by the likes of Kalle Lasn and his work with Adbusters and others. Major precedents for culture jamming go back to the Letterists and Situationist International and their deployment of détournement. This is a broad term for practices that take the language and rhetoric of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions that produce that culture. These two groups were of course indebted to the surrealists and dadaists of old. Their official rejections of various aspects of the Surrealist program reveal their own metaphysical anxieties. Their anxieties however, need not be our own. Other groups such as the Billboard Liberation Front, the Firesign Theater, or the pranks of Joey Skaggs and Abbie Hoffman, can be seen as part of the lineage.
 
To go back to Bendix, he put it this way in one of the JAMCON ’84 broadcasts, “As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.”
 
Now we are not up against the signals of the legacy media so much, though they are there as constant background noise and irritation, as we are against the collision of multiple fragmented media siloes whose outputs are being amalgamated and fed into the Borg. The purposeful enshitification of Artificial Idiocy itself is one strategy against this computational architecture, hence the announcement of JAMCON ’26.
 
This convention is in no way organized. It is decentralized. But wherever you are in the web of existence, certain threads may be vibrated. Find the ones that you can vibrate, and jam on, because we don’t have enough dada.

Special thanks to John O'Neil for the JAMCON '26 idea.

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