in a world where we have even a corporate face of culture jamming (im told by chris_v that the situationists might call this ‘recuperation.’), it is nice to sometimes stumble across something genuinely good.

so earlier today, i was visiting the anti-advertising agency website, i found this video and a link to its originating site:

the site this video originated from was none other than GOOD Magazine. after a quick overview of their website, i found a bitchin article about the history of culture jamming. not only is this article smart and thorough, but they attribute the coining of the term ‘culture jamming’ to Negativland, which is something i did not know about an already awesome band. its a very good look at the history of analog hacktivism.

while it is cool enough that this is an interesting website, you can also sign up for a years subscription of this magazine, and all the money you pay goes to directly to one of twelve different charity organizations, of which you choose to give your subscription money to. many popular and good ones like UNICEF, but also to my surprise: Creative Commons. i am proud thats now considered a worthy charity. because it really fucking is damn it. i mean damn, Negativland helped write one of the commons licenses.

at first, i was a little skeptical of how they could afford to do this without charging for shipping, so i did a little snooping around the site. on their contact page, there were the standard forms for shooting off an email, but there was something more personal and little less often used on the site: a phone number. after hesitating a moment, i called the number and was soon talking to a GOOD magazine representative.
apparently, the production cost of the magazine is covered by the advertising that is displayed in the magazine. from what i understand (which is not much.), most magazines ship with ‘direct mail’ advertisements in them. you know, the shitty little leaflets inside a magazine, telling you to subscribe. you always throw them away. well, instead of paying for those, they use that cost to cover the shipping so they can donate your money directly, without any skimmed off the top.

also, as i was skimming through the info on their website, i found this on their terms page, which also pleased me:

4. GOOD’s CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE.

Unless otherwise noted on this site, all content created, authored, posted, or offered by GOOD on the Service is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. You can read more about the Creative Commons, and the details of our license, at this link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/.

after searching these guys, i couldnt find any proof whether or not they were creative commons promoters or not.

but in the end, i still wanna know, why cant all just be Yes Men?

Editors Note: the opinions of illogical operation staff members do not reflect the parent company, its subsidiaries, or its stockholders. illogical operation is a proud user of Libre Commons.