Truth In Advertising

Breaking The Spell Of Consumerism — An Interview With Kalle Lasn

Most Americans haven't heard of the Media Foundation or its magazine Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment, but each day, more and more people get hit by one of its "mindbombs." That's what Kalle Lasn — editor of Adbusters and cofounder of the Media Foundation — calls the organization's "subvertisements": advertisements aimed at subverting consumer culture.

Nearly everyone is familiar with Joe Camel, the cartoon camel used by RJ Reynolds for ten years to sell cigarettes — especially to children, critics said. In response, Lasn's Media Foundation gave us Joe Chemo, a bald camel lying in a hospital bed with IVs in both arms. Another cigarette-ad parody showed a Marlboro Man look-alike smoking a limp cigarette over the caption "Smoking Causes Impotence."

Still other counterads have taken on alcohol (a battered child seen through a vodka bottle, with the caption "Wipe That Smirkoff"), food monopolies, the fashion industry, and consumer culture in general.

In addition to its advertising campaigns, the Media Foundation sponsors annual consumer campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. And, of course, it publishes Adbusters, which started out as a little Pacific Northwest alternative publication and now has a circulation of eighty thousand. "It's an ecological magazine," the editors say, "dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons."

Central to all of Lasn's work is the fight against corporate control, not only of politics, but also of our hearts and minds. He has written, "I see Americans and Canadians as having lost spontaneity, verve, individuality and having become consumer drones. We are like rats in a box, and the box is the shopping mall. It's funny but also very sad. You have to wonder sometimes, 'Are we really still free?' . . . Corporations, these legal fictions that we ourselves created two centuries ago, now have more rights, freedoms, and powers than we do. And we accept this as a normal state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees: Please don't cut down any more ancient forests. Please don't pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don't move your factories and jobs offshore, either). Please don't use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids. Please don't play governments off each other to get a better deal. We've spent so much time bowed down in deference, we've forgotten how to stand up straight."

Lasn was born in Estonia, a republic of the former Soviet Union, in 1942. His family fled the country in 1944, and he grew up in Australia. In the 1960s, he worked as an advertising executive in Japan, until he got fed up with the immorality hidden behind the industry's claims of "ethical neutrality." In his thirties, Lasn immigrated to British Columbia, Canada, and took up documentary filmmaking.

He cofounded the Media Foundation in 1989, after he ran afoul of corporate control over the so-called public airwaves. "The lumber companies had begun an ad campaign blanketing viewers with propaganda about how clear-cutting was good for British Columbia," he says. "All lies, of course. They'd cut so much timber that only 15 percent of the old growth was left." But when Lasn came up with his own thirty-second advertising spots criticizing the clear-cutting, he found that the networks would not sell him time.

"I came from Estonia, where you were not allowed to speak up against the government," he says. "Here I was in North America, and suddenly I realized you can't speak up against the sponsor. There's something fundamentally undemocratic about private control of our public airways."

Lasn and his fellow adbusters make no bones about their mission: "to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the twenty-first century." Lasn lays out his strategy for how to accomplish this in his book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge — And Why We Must(Quill). He describes in detail how we can go about "uncooling" brands, "demarketing" fashions, and breaking free of our "media trance."

Lasn lives on five acres of land outside Vancouver, British Columbia, with his family, animals, and gardens. "When I come home after a stressful day," he says, "I just immerse myself in nature. It rejuvenates me."

I met Lasn for this interview at the Media Foundation's offices (1243 West Seventh Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6H 1B7, Canada). I liked him immediately. He is warm, frank, and openly revolutionary. We talked all through the afternoon about the insidious effects of advertising and the battle to control the culture.

All the images that appear throughout this interview are courtesy of www.adbusters.org.

Jensen: What is "culture jamming," and how did it come about?

Lasn: More than ten years ago, when we first started the Media Foundation, we had a feeling that all the old political movements had run out of steam, and many activists had burned out. Some of us were feminists who'd grown jaded; others were discouraged environmentalists; many were leftists who couldn't feel that fire burning in the belly anymore. As we plotted and brain-stormed, we found that we got most excited whenever we talked about culture.

By that time, we'd put out a couple of issues of Adbusters magazine, and the feedback we'd received told us we were on to something — that the really important battle of the future might not be over race or gender or the environment, and it certainly wouldn't be that old left/right opposition. What it might be, instead, was the fight to control the culture. The people no longer sang the songs and told the stories and created the culture from the bottom up. The culture was spoon-fed to us now by advertisers, sponsors, and a commercial mass media. Our reliance on cars, our overconsumption, our hollow lifestyles, our lack of democracy — we saw all these as parts of the same package. And the question we kept asking ourselves was "How can we break out of this top-down media trance and start creating an authentic culture from the bottom up again?"

Then we came across the magic phrase "culture jamming." I first saw it in a New York Times article by cultural critic Mark Dery, but the term actually had been coined long before by the audio-collage band Negativland. "Culture jamming" seemed the perfect description of what we were trying to do, so we adopted it as the name of our fledgling movement. We became culture jammers — people who opt out of the mainstream and devote our lives to hacking and pranking and provoking and trying any which way we can to break up the seamless charade our culture has become.

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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