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Grant Rosenberg interviews |
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As the publisher and
founder
of Adbusters Media Foundation (and its magazine), Kalle Lasn is at the forefront
of media skeptics. A gadfly in his own right, he
also created Culture Jammers (WWW.CULTUREJAMMERS.ORG), an organization
that sees itself as "one of the most significant social movements of the
next twenty years. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a
major rethinking of the way we will live in the 21st century... It will alter
the way we live and think. It will change the way information flows, the way
institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food,
fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas.
Above all, it will change the way we interact with the mass media and the way
in which meaning is produced in our society." What is this movement
all about? It's about reversing the obsessive, snowballing consumer culture
we live in. Part of this is done through mindset and part is done by acts of
non-violent resistance; culture jamming, as evidenced by manipulated
billboards, the hacking of corporate websites to reveal the truth about their
real goings-on and protesting it all with public service announcements. Lasn, angry at the plenitude of Americans and our spoiled
sense of materialism, created a protest against our consumerism: "Buy
Nothing Day," which falls on the biggest shopping day of the year, the
day after Thanksgiving. Lasn writes of his movement
as one that unites people on the left as well as the right; it isn't bound by
any ideology besides its own. Atheists and Believers, Democrats and
Republicans, rich and poor, alike—anyone who rejects the consumerism of today
and does something about it is a culture jammer.
It's about reclaiming democracy, returning this country to its citizens as
citizens, not marketing targets or demographics. It's about being a skeptic and not letting advertising tell you what to
think. I’m assuming many of
our readers haven’t read Culture The book is a
manifesto for the culture jamming movement. It’s
saying, "Let’s go out there and start a cultural revolution." It’s
a rabble-rousing book. I think it’s really an
optimistic book. You kind of have to be an idealist at heart to envision the
changes you're seeking. I don’t know about
idealist. There certainly is a bit of idealism, but you have to be very
practical and come up with strategic breakthroughs for how this cultural
revolution can be propagated. I’ve talked to a lot of young people, and I feel
that they are cynical. They phone me up and say, "You think we can have
this cultural revolution? I don’t think so. It’s gone too far,
we are trapped in a university here, etc." To me, they are cynical. And
the book is exactly the opposite. I actually believe that over the next ten
years, this revolution will happen. That, in fact, it has already started.
Everyone who worked on that book, we tried to turn it into a hands-on manual
for how to actually catalyze that revolution. The book came out in
November 1999, and the paperback one year later in November 2000. If you were
going to do a revised edition, what would you add to it? Are there subsequent
topics you would like to have addressed? Things have progressed
quite a bit since then. I sent the final version to the printer just a few
weeks before I went to You said that you
already see this revolution underway; how do you think the Bush
administration will affect the movement? I think that, quite
frankly, in a perverse way, it will energize it. Because looking at Bush…he
doesn’t quite seem to understand the world. I think he will do a few crazy
things that will allow the new activists and culture jammers
to jam him and his policies. I think I think there is
something to that, that such opposition will energize people. I think that’s
true of Ralph Nader supporters, where having Bush
in office would motivate the left further. I recall you saying in the book that
it’s a "loose network" of people, not necessarily partisan. The 35,000 people
currently part of our network, who we communicate with through the Internet, these people are very hard-nosed activists. A
huge percentage of them would vote for Nader rather
than even consider voting for Gore. These are not people
who pussy-foot around thinking about the next four years; these are people
who think ten or twenty years ahead, who think of fomenting a culture
revolution in the long term. Over the course of the
last few years, I’ve read books like White Noise by Don DeLillo, and watched films like The Insider and Fight
Club…all these address truths behind and the effects of consumer culture.
What are your thoughts on these fictional presentations of these issues? When I saw Fight
Club I said, "Wow, this is quite amazing." I thought only a few
culture jammers and people in the simplicity
movement were really outraged by consumerism. And here is suddenly a film
that was overtly giving expression to it and millions of people were going to
see it and could identify with this kind of rage against consumerism that it
portrayed. To me, it was a signal that things are moving in the right
direction, and some portions of mainstream society are now getting this
anti-consumerist message. Which
is funny, because the film was released by 20th Century Fox. In this post-modern
age, there are lots of contradictions like that. Even my book Culture Jam
started off being published by a small publishing group, William Morrow, and
then one month before publication, it was bought up by Rupert Murdoch and his
Harper Collins. So even my own book is published by one of my biggest
enemies. That was another thing
I was curious about. In the book you talk about how it is unavoidable to
interact in some way with corporations. You even drive a There are lots of
people who confront me on this and say, "Why don’t you walk your talk?"
Every one of us is an incredible contradiction. We are all caught in this
post-modern hall of mirrors. But people who say, "No, you have to be
pure. How can you do this? How can you do that?" I think they are not
being effective. What is my choice? That I’m not going to publish my book
because I refuse to give it to Rupert Murdoch? I think you have to get used
to the fact that we are walking, talking contradictions, all of us. And this
is what culture is right now, a very contradictory culture we live in right
now. They allow you to have
the widest broadcast of your message. Yes, but not only
that. We all have to play footsie with the enemy.
This has been true of every revolution. The revolutionaries have interacted
in very profound ways with the enemy. And that may well be the only way to
pull the enemy down, to play this sort of Trojan Horse game. What are you most
proud of about the movement? The fact that over the
last ten years we’ve built up a global network of jammers,
which is now a part of this new activism which is sweeping around the world.
And the fact that some of our campaigns like "Buy
Nothing Day" were celebrated in over fifty countries around the
world. And our magazine is now reaching a circulation of over a 100,000
people. The growth of this movement has been phenomenal. I’ve read criticism of
your use of the phrase, "Liberating a billboard." It’s obviously
destruction of property, so why not call a spade a spade? We do. To me,
liberating a billboard or doing some of the other illegal things that we do,
to me this is a legitimate part of civil disobedience. Every cultural
revolution has had its lunatic fringes and civil disobedience. The anarchists
in Nor might it have
gotten the attention that it did. Not only that. I don’t
think it’s possible to have that many people together without 0.1 percent of
them being crazies and angry people who feel they have to lash out. How would you say Adbusters the magazine has changed since it began? Well, we started as a
kind of volunteer rag, similar to many other lefty rags that were basically
lashing out and being angry. And, bit by bit, I think we got better artists,
writers and photographers. And now, instead of just talking to the converted,
we’re sitting in newsstands, and I think we’re being picked up by corporate
people, and lawyers, and advertising executives and all kinds of people. I
think we are actually changing minds now telling people that there is a
cultural revolution bubbling away, and you’d better get with the agenda or
used to the fact that it will happen. I can see a lot of
influence of Adbusters in new advertising,
like the Sprite ads that say "Image is Nothing." They are playing
into the anti-advertising to sell their products. We have hundreds of ad
execs who secretly like us a little bit because we have a lot of fun and do
the campaigns that some of them dream of doing. But they also subscribe to us
and buy us to see what the enemy is up to. How much would you say the Internet has helped bring your
network of jammers together? The thing that most
resonated with me in Culture Jam was the changing definition of cool.
Going from unique and interesting to now meaning anything that is the latest
trend. What sections of the book have gotten the most response? What have
people picked up on the most? It’s hard to say. What
they seem to pick up on is that this book wasn’t couching its bets, wasn’t
succumbing to cynicism, that it out front said, "We are going to change
the world, and this is how we are going to do it." I think those that
liked the book liked that sort of modernist belief that we can change the
world. And many other people felt a personal resonance, that the book somehow
described their own disillusionment and their own dissatisfaction with their
lives, their own wrestling with their cynicism. They felt a resonance there http://www.gadflyonline.com/lastweek/kalle%20lasn.html |
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