It is a cold winter afternoon, and I am sitting outside the biggest Starbucks in Manhattan, drinking – for reasons of camouflage – the cheapest coffee it sells. Ten minutes late, a man with a vast bouffant of bottle -blonde hair, and a grin so toothy you can see your face in it, pulls up on a bicycle and greets me with a large outstretched hand. ‘You must be Paul,’ he says. ‘You didn’t pay for that, did you?’

The Reverend Billy (for it is he) escorts me across the square to a truck where a friend of his sells much better coffee. Billy will not drink in Starbucks. He is, however, quite happy to hang around on the premises. Usually, though, he is not a valued customer. For when the Reverend Billy, spiritual leader of the Church of Stop Shopping, visits Starbucks, he is on a mission: to convert the heathen.

He enters the premises and begins to spread a gospel of anti-consumerism. Sometimes he will stand and – in his booming voice, his dog collar and white tuxedo – deliver a sermon on the evils of consumerism and sweatshops and the perils faced by New York’s independent coffee houses. On other occasions he will organise performances. Fellow participants will: pose as customers and talk excitedly about how they’re about to have sex in the toilets; pretend to be recently -released prisoners discovering they glued the Starbucks packaging themselves while inside; discuss loudly the bovine growth hormones in the milk; and say things like ‘we have global logo tattoos on our genitals because we are good Americans’.

Starbucks hates the Reverend Billy. The Reverend Billy has an uncanny ability to empty out Starbucks branches in a very short time. Such is Starbucks’ loathing of the reverend that it sent a memo to all its staff entitled ‘What to do if the Reverend Billy is in your store’. Read
it, along with suggested scripts for your own Starbucks performance, at www.revbilly.com.

The point of all this, Billy explains as we sip our non-Starbucks coffee, is to take on this monster coffee chain in a way that will make people sit up and think. You could write letters to Starbucks, or hold demos which no-one would attend. Or you could drink coffee elsewhere. But it wouldn’t make much of an impact. Billy does make an impact, because he has an entirely different approach, one that is creative, cunning and thespian – he used to be an actor. In a society saturated by adverts, marketing and wall-to-wall consumerism, new approaches are needed to get alternative messages across. This, in a nutshell, is culture jamming.

A mile or so away from Billy’s ‘favourite’ Starbucks is Times Square. Here, a group calling themselves the Surveillance Camera Players is performing subversive street theatre into the lens of a surveillance camera. The point is to make people think about how they are being watched. Meanwhile, over in San Francisco, the Billboard Liberation Front and the California Department of Corrections are smoothly altering the billboard ads that corporations pay through the nose for, and putting out an anti-consumerist message instead. Elsewhere, the Biotic Baking Brigade is throwing pies in the face of the powerful. And a scurrilous bunch known as the Yes Men is posing as WTO executives – giving speeches at business gatherings in favour of slavery and the punishment of idle employees by electric shocks. These are just the tip of a very subversive iceberg.

This is activism for and by the consumer generation. How can such a modern phenomenon as mass consumerism be tackled with traditional methods of protest like banners, marches and letters to the editor? It can’t, say the culture jammers. They say the way forward is to take on the purveyors of the buy-it-all, buy-it-now culture on their own turf. Subvert their message by stealing their methods. Could Starbucks’ profit margins ever be threatened by a crusader in a dog collar? Who knows? But even if the reverend fails in his mission, at least he can say: ‘Whatever else happens, I’m having a lot of fun.’