The Yes Men say: "You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people—turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that's what we try to do, anyhow—but as it turns out, the image always seems to look normal to them."[cit]

Culture jamming "sticks where rational discourse slides off. It is, simply, the viral introduction of radical ideas. It is viral in that it uses the enemy's own resources to replicate itself—corporate logos, marketing psychology, clean typography, 'adspeak.' It is radical because—ideally—the message, once deciphered, causes damage to blind belief."[cit]

Detournement and recuperation ("radical" ideas and images being commodified and incorporated within mainstream society[cit]) are terms from Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967).