The next revolution--World War III--will be waged inside your head. It will be, as Marshall McLuhan predicted, a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or around international fishing boundaries on the high seas, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV, and in cyberspace. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing worldviews and alternative visions of the future.

We culture jammers can win this battle for ourselves and for planet Earth. Here's how: We build our own meme factory, put out a better product, and beat the corporations at their own game. We identify the macromemes and the metamemes--the core ideas without which a sustainable future is unthinkable--and deploy them. Here are the five most potent metamemes in the culture jammer's arsenal:

True cost: In the global marketplace of the future, the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.

Demarketing: It's time to unsell the product and turn the massive power of marketing against itself.

The doomsday machine: The global economy is a juggernaut that must be stopped and reprogrammed.

No corporate 'I': Corporations are not legal 'persons' with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must control.

Media Carta: Every human being has the right to communicate--to receive and impart information through any media.

Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society whose members spend a great deal of their time in the irrelevant worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

Aldous Huxley was on the spot in the foreword of his revised 1946 edition of Brave New World--which, perhaps more than any other 20th-century fiction work, predicted the psychological climate of our wired age. There's a clear parallel between 'soma'--the pleasure drug issued to BNW citizens--and the mass media as we know them. Both keep the hordes tranquilized and pacified, and maintain the social order. Both chase out reason in favor of entertainment and disjointed thought, encourage uniformity of behavior, and devalue the past in favor of sensory pleasures now. Residents of Huxley's realm willingly participate in being manipulated. Only you, the reader (and a couple of 'imperfect' book characters who somehow ended up with real personalities), know it's dystopia. It's a hell that can be recognized only by those outside the system.