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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - THE DECLINE OF YELLING AT PEOPLE ABOUT STUFF

It's weird to think of the Soy Bombs and anti-WTO marionette shows of the 90s as some sort of high point in protest culture, but man has it fallen on some hard times since then. Maybe it has to do with being so ineffectual they couldn't prevent one of the most openly villainous administrations of the past century from serving two full terms, but at some point it seems like everybody got so tied up in trying to be clever they forgot to have a point. Like did you see the fake New York Times that group the Yes Men put out a couple weeks ago claiming that the Iraq War was over? Seriously, what was even the point of that, that it would be "nice" if the war was over? These are the same guys who got Union Carbide to hold a press conference saying they don't apologize for blowing up hundreds of Indians in Bhopal, and now all of a sudden they're copping moves from John Lennon at his most smacked-out and wishy washy. Sad.

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Then there's Adbusters. You used to be able to extract at least a few interesting facts about corporate policies and labor relations from their churning sea of self-satisfied bloviation. Now they devote entire issues to hipsters and Facebook withdrawal and their chief complaint against Nike is that wearing a lot of it is "douchey." Weren't these dipshits just prattling on a month ago about how shallow the kids are these days?

Hang on. Wait, we take everything back. You can still buy their "infamous" Corporate America at the Adbusters online store. That's where they take a regular American flag, but replace all the stars with a grid of business icons like Exxon logo and McDonald's golden arches. If such an image seems eerily familiar to you, maybe it's because you read this week's New York Times Magazine, where they employed the exact same visual for an interview with the advertising world's cream of the crop.

Anyways, the intended use for the flag is to unfurl it at protests, to show all the corporate fatcats that you know the score vis a vis their control of the country. Boy let me tell you, nothing instills fear in the heart of a greedy business executive like seeing his logo alongside a bunch of other successful companies'.