Jensen: What's wrong with the way things are?

Lasn: We've been reduced to spectators, consumers. We're discouraged from actively participating in society. We're just supposed to listen and watch, and then to buy. The mass media keep us in a trance by dispensing a kind of Huxleyan "soma" that drives us to conform and consume: to buy the best cars, to wear the trendiest fashions, to be "cool." The most powerful narcotic in the world is the promise of belonging, and in this culture, we belong by being cool. Our desire for belonging can be satisfied at any store, for the right price.

American "cool" has become a global pandemic. Communities, traditions, and entire cultures are being replaced by American consumer culture. And it's killing the planet. It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.

Culture jamming is about jamming the signals that put us in this trance in the first place. It's about creating cognitive dissonance, disseminating as many seeds of truth to as many people as you can, with the ultimate goal of toppling existing power structures and changing the way we'll live in the twenty-first century. Because the way we live has become intolerable.

It's impossible to live a free, authentic life in America today. We've been so deeply manipulated; our emotions, personalities, and core values have become programmed. We sleep, eat, sit in a car, work, shop, watch TV, go to sleep again. I doubt there's more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. Sometimes, in a bank or a mall or a supermarket, I get the sense that real life has passed me by, and I'll do anything to escape the consumerist cage.

Jensen: What are some examples of culture jamming?

Lasn: One of our best jams so far happened in November 1999, during the "Battle in Seattle" — the protests against the World Trade Organization. We produced a powerful sixty-second TV spot questioning globalization, which aired repeatedly on CNN as the protests unfolded, and on dozens of community and public-access stations in the weeks leading up to the protests. A radio version aired on many college radio stations. We also put up three "System Error" billboards in Seattle to inspire the protesters as they marched by. And activists all over the world who didn't make it to Seattle visited our Culture Jammers Headquarters on the Internet. It was very exciting and a great example, I think, of a new kind of pincers strategy that combines street action with sophisticated mass-media thrusts.

Over the years, we've produced dozens of print "subvertisements" and TV "uncommercials." You may have seen some of them. One shows a male model holding out the elastic waistband of his underwear to peer down at his genitals, with the caption "Obsession for Men." The "Obsession for Women" TV spot begins with a collage of cool, sexy fashion images and a voice-over asking, "Why do nine out of ten women feel dissatisfied with some aspect of their own bodies?" A model then vomits into a toilet, and the voice says, "The beauty industry is the beast."

The old activist movements, especially of the left, relied heavily on text — dense manifestoes and critiques, with a drawing or a cartoon thrown in every now and then. Right from the start, we decided that culture jamming would be driven not by text but by images, sounds, and video, which slip easily into the collective psyche.

Jensen: How are Adbusters and culture jamming perceived among mainstream designers and advertising people?

Lasn: Maybe 70 or 80 percent dismiss us as the lunatic fringe, but the other 20 or 30 percent welcome us as a breath of fresh air.

Jensen: That's not a bad percentage.

Lasn: Many ad-industry people feel disenchanted with the work they do and with the ethical neutrality that reigns in their profession. But advertising is a $350 billion-per-year business worldwide, and, if you've got a mortgage to pay, it's very hard to opt out of it.

Jensen: Is advertising ethically neutral?

Lasn: If you ask ad executives, "How can you possibly work on a campaign for Ford SUVs?" and you begin to explain to them about smog and the paving of the planet and global warming, they'll cut you off in midsentence with: "That's not our problem. We're artists, technicians, highly creative people. We provide a service to clients, and we don't take sides. Sure, we'll work for Ford, but we'll just as quickly do a job for Greenpeace, so stop bugging us about it." Advertising people are morally detached — and proud of it. That's why they can, with an untroubled conscience, promote even a killer product like tobacco.

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