from Toronto Star 12-13-99
IT'S A JUNGLE: A surreal shopping image from
Adbusters magazine shows how it uses slick techniques
to critique slick advertising.
Artful, witty and angry
Adbusters magazine takes aim at
rampant consumerism
WE ALL SAW the protesters at the
World Trade Organization meeting in
Seattle, but many of us didn't have a
clue what they wanted.
Here's an opportunity to get into the
head of one protester, Kalle Lasn, an
outspoken Canadian who's garnering
an international reputation as a critic of
capitalistic excesses.
Lasn is the publisher of Adbusters magazine, a
10-year-old
quarterly with 60,000 readers, including 40,000 in the
United
States. It was named magazine of the year at the
National
Magazine Awards in June.
(Check out the Web site at http://www.adbusters.org.)
His book, Culture Jam: The Uncooling Of America
(HarperCollins, $37.95), is a manifesto for a new social
movement taking aim at consumption.
He lays out his ambition in the book's introduction:
``Our aim is
to topple existing power structures and forge major
adjustments
to the way we will live in the 21st century.
``We believe culture jamming will become to our era what
civil
rights was to the '60s, what feminism was to the '70s,
what
environmental activism was to the '80s.''
So what is culture jamming?
It's using the modern language of persuasion -
advertising and
marketing - to attack the glamourization of certain
products and
lifestyles.
Just as cigarettes lost their allure because of social
opposition,
Lasn hopes to demonize greasy fast food, trendy fashions
and
gas-guzzling cars.
He's now targeting automobiles as the next pariah
industry.
``We want auto executives to feel just as squeezed and
beleaguered as tobacco executives,'' he writes.
``We want them to have a hard time looking their kids in
the eye
and explaining exactly what they do for a living.''
Culture jammers aim to ``demarket'' the car by running
anti-car
ads, breaking the industry's uncontested, uninterrupted
50-year
run on TV.
So far, however, Lasn has struck out in getting his
subversive
ads on Canadian television.
His challenge against CBC Newsworld's rejection of his
commercials went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which
refused to hear his case.
``Corporations are doing all the talking now,'' Lasn
said in an
interview from his home in Vancouver.
``We'd love to have a tussle between product marketers
and
social marketers and let the best ideas win.''
Only one network, Atlanta-based CNN, will accept his
ads. He
bought $35,000 (U.S.) worth of air-time to run
anti-World Trade
Organization messages before and during the Seattle
meeting.
He also collected $5,000 (U.S.) from donors for three
downtown
billboards, which protesters walked by every day.
Lasn went to Seattle, with five others from his
Adbusters Media
Foundation, and, yes, he did get tear gassed.
``Your eyes just water, you can't see and you can hardly
breathe; your anger wells up,'' he says.
``It was an experience I'll never forget. It had a
radicalizing
effect.''
At 57, Lasn was older than most demonstrators.
He jokes he wore his baseball cap backward, not to be
cool, but
to hide his bald spot.
He was born in Soviet-controlled Estonia, and finds the
same
censorship of subversive ideas at work in North America.
Westerners watched the Soviet Union fall apart with a
sense of
vindication, he says, but don't recognize their own lack
of media
space to challenge corporate agendas.
``In the former Soviet Union, you weren't allowed to
speak out
against the government. In North America today, you
cannot
speak out against the sponsors.''
As a social critic, Lasn is angry and extreme, and makes
gross
generalizations: A free, authentic life is no longer
possible in
America today; the automobile is the most destructive
product
ever produced; consumer capitalism is by its very nature
unethical.
But he's also a visionary who's capable of shaking up
our
perceptions and making us see things in a new way.
I like his optimism. He truly believes he and his
cohorts can
launch another revolution. No fight is too small, Lasn
says.
At one end of the continuum are little tussles on the
phone and
in the bank, and at the other end are critical choices
about
genetic engineering, trade rules and global warming.
His U.S. publisher, William Morrow & Co., has great
hopes for
Culture Jam and has paid the author a hefty advance of
$125,000 (Canadian).
The first printing of 50,000 came out a week before the
Battle in
Seattle.
And the book is now on sale at Chapters for 20 per cent
off.
