Billboard Liberation Front

"Picture this: you're driving, it's 8 A.M.. coffee is clutched to your chest as you amble toward work in a stupor. You look up, and a billboard for a radio station that used to read 'HITS HAPPEN—NEW X 100' now reads 'SHIT HAPPENS—NEW EXXON.' Whoa! That snaps you out of your trance."

That's one example of the work of the Billboard Liberation Front, who have been modifying, mocking, and manipulating public-facing media since 1977. My favorite:

Laughing Squid has a copy of the BLF's press release, celebrating AT&T's collaboration with NSA in 2008. In 2015, the truly vast scale of that collaboration came to light, a few years after the BLF had retired.

The good news is that the BLF's website is still up, hosting the guide "The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement" (PDF), so you don't have to write away to Processed World magazine and hope they have a copy (they stopped making new zines in 2005).

And despite the fact that the BLF is all for modifying corporate messages, they also realize that there's some schmuck whose job is to maintain those billboards, so they never paint or damage the billboard. Instead, to make it easy and safe, the BLF leaves instructions for the workers to restore the billboard to its original, boring state.

Cacophony Society

"We don't accept the entertainment that's spoon fed to us through TV and other commercial media," says Cacophony Society member Maxwell Maude. The tall, silver-haired Maude has a perpetual mysterious smile and eyes that twinkle with imminent mischief. "We want to create our own entertainment and our own experiences."

Reading this article in the mid 1990s, I was so intrigued. They were edgy, sometimes dancing on the edge of revolting, depending on your viewpoints. For instance, "a year after the Cacophony
Society held their John Wayne Bobbitt memorial weenie roast, they made hundreds of severed latex penises and packaged them as chew toys for pet dogs, under the 'Laughing Bitch' brand name. They sent the products to all the chapters with instructions for members to smuggle the chew toy penises onto shelves at supermarkets. When shoppers saw them for 'sale,' they were delighted. The bar code printed on the label caused the purchase to show up on the register receipt as 'chicken sausage'."And then there was the G.I. Joe Convention Prank, which ended in other con-goers smashing the Cacophony booth in rage and/or disgust.

The Cacophony Society is not widely known, and appears to be less active in areas than in prior years (or decades?), but has been a source for mischief and mayhem that have grown beyond its origins. For example, Cacophony Society invented Burning Man, and inspired Fight Club.

And then there's Santacon ...

Unfortunately, in some places, Santacon has become an excuse for people to be drunken assholes in public, at least in New York City.

Jumping back a point or two.... Oh right, the (in)activity of the Cacophony Society. In 1995, there were four chapters: San Francisco (the original), Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle, with a New York City chapter in the works. Since then, Cacophony spread far and wide, as seen in the list of almost 50 chapters or lodges from the official website. But this central hub for operations was last updated in 2014, for a post about celebrating the closure of another Happy Mutant Handbook organization of interest, the Billboard Liberation Front (more on all that later). Those chapter or lodge links point to a number of defunct sites and services (including Yahoo Groups [2001-2020, sorta—it's now a glorified mailing list], and MySpace [2003-2011, kinda—the site all but died a while back]). It seems like that central site isn't keeping up to date with chapter activities, because most chapters are now organized via Facebook (created in 2004). 

So the good news is that the Cacophony Society lives on, and is bigger than it was 25 years ago. The bad news is that if you're just reading about them now, that list of lodges is misleadingly long. But the central idea of the cacophony society is to make some joyous noises of your own, so don't let the absence of local sanctioned groups get you down. Make your own thing! 


Fun fact and general reminder: don't assume an organization has registered similar domains in other countries. For example, the Cacophony Society's main website is cacophony.org, but cacophony.org.nz is a very different organization,