Deconstructing the politics of culture jamming

Culture Jammers, an activist guerilla-like movement, entered the global scene in the 1990s and, through public performances, attempt to draw attention to their claim that the US economic structure is facing a fundamental need to shift away from a consumer-oriented capitalist economy. As an alternative, the activists propose--True Cost economics, a model that would include the costs of negative production and consumption externalities in the pricing of commodities. In this paper, I focus on culture jammers' critique of neoclassical economics, more specifically, the clash of the--new paradigm (True Cost economics) and the old paradigm (neoclassical economics). In evaluating whether True Cost economics is a feasible alternative, I graphically examine how the True Cost solution and the neoclassical market model correct for negative externalities to reveal similarities in the two models.