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Adbusters is a magazine that attacks the culture of consumerism by turning its own tactics against it--employing the glossy tactics of advertising to encourage people to take part in "Buy Nothing Day" and "TV Turnoff Week." Culture Jam takes the revolution to another level, as the magazine's publisher, Kalle Lasn, issues a call to arms to "the advance shock troops of the most significant social movement" of the early 21st century. Dissatisfied with the results of both academic and mainstream liberalism and feminism, Lasn harks back to the situationist roots of the 1968 Paris uprisings, a brief moment when it seemed possible that men and women might be able to wholly re-create not only their own lives but society as well.
That revolution stumbled and fell, however, and Lasn views contemporary existence as one in which people have almost entirely succumbed to the cultural mandates of consumer capitalism, turning to corporations for guidance about how to look and what to desire. He offers several tips on how you can "demarket your life," including talking back to telemarketers and intensified boycotts (want to strike a blow against tobacco giant Philip Morris? Stop buying Maxwell House coffees, Kraft dairy products, Post cereals, and Miller beer). Lasn also pushes for the return of corporations to a subordinate role in people's lives, citing the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court decision that rendered corporations "natural persons" in the eyes of the law as a horrendous miscarriage of justice that must be overturned. (One of his biggest targets is media conglomerates who are able to disseminate their ideology throughout the information spectrum; in an ironic twist of fate, perhaps, the publisher of Culture Jam became a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation scant months before the book's release.)
Culture Jam is an extreme book--among its declarations: "consumer capitalism is by its very nature unethical"--and Lasn's reasoning is not without flaws. One of the weak links in his argument is his insistence that, because none of the major television networks will allow him to purchase airtime for his "subverts," there is "no democracy on the airwaves" and his freedom of speech is being denied. The First Amendment says only that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"; it says nothing about what he deems the "right to communicate ... through any media." On the other hand, he also raises a more plausible line of attack--since it's the government that grants broadcasters access to the airwaves, citizens should press for more say in how broadcast licenses are distributed. But whatever the book's excesses, Lasn is driven by a righteous anger--and Culture Jam may likely convince you, too, that the models of material success presented to us are not only inadequate to true happiness, they must be overturned. --Ron Hogan
From Library Journal
For Lasn (publisher of Adbusters Magazine), "America is no longer a country but a multitrillion-dollar brand": the media and corporate greed, he argues, have hooked Americans on conspicuous consumption, turning vigilant citizens into hypnotized consumers. America's salvation lies with culture jammers, "a loose global network of media activists" whose activist program is to topple the system the book sets forth. Lasn provides lots of statistics on the harmful effects of television and advertising, but his arguments tend to rely more on intuition than proven facts. The media's pervasive influence on American culture cannot be denied, but it's not clear that its influence is as pernicious as Lasn claims. Still, while his urgent, sometimes sanctimonious tone may not convince anyone but the already-converted, Lasn's book raises important issues that deserve discussion. Recommended for public and academic libraries.AWilliam Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Lasn, a proponent of social marketing campaigns to reduce television viewing and consumerism, laments what he sees as an American culture so materialistic that the U.S. "is no longer a country. It's a multibillion-dollar brand." Concern about consumerism has sparked a backlash movement on the order of the civil rights and feminist movements, according to Lasn. He advises resistance to the strong forces that seduce Americans (and the world) to spend more than they should to satisfy vague desires without ever addressing real problems. In a straightforward way, documentarist Lasn assesses the current situation, analyzes the problem, explores the possibilities for change, and looks at what our lives could be like without the ever-present pressure to spend and acquire. In his discussion, he examines such hot topics as the impact of televised violence on children and the effect that so much television viewing, in general, has on the level of human contact and physical activity. Lasn concedes that he himself embodies American contradictions--for example, hating the U.S. car industry and its planned obsolescence and image manipulation but loving his own car. Americans are so susceptible to media images that we've developed a penchant to shop to assuage boredom and loneliness or some other emotional void. This is an interesting examination of American culture and what can be done beyond complaining about it. Lasn is featured in the PBS documentary Affluenza and is the publisher of Adbusters magazine. He's keeps active by coming up with such media-grabbers as "Buy Nothing Day" and "TV Turnoff Week." Vanessa Bush
From Kirkus Reviews
An eloquent manifesto of anti-commercialism worthy of predecessors like Thoreau and Huxley. Kalle Lasn is the publisher of Adbusters magazine, and the launcher of campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. Lasn was raised in Germany and, like the Native American in Brave New World, was able to live beyond the soma cult of American corporate consumerism and its Big Brother of TV, which dictates our culture, fashions, even dreams. Spontaneity can only be won back by ``demarketing your life'' in order ``to escape the consumerist script.'' Culture Jamming is what Lasn hopes will constitute America's second revolution. To the author, the colonies broke off from England's corporate control, only to enslave themselves in the McDonaldization of America (the label less of a country than of a brand name). Sure, this proposed revolution is formidable, but so were the civil rights and feminist struggles. Lasn is more optimistic than many cynical and ironic slackers, punks, and downsiders, because, after all, we did win a thirty-years war against the tobacco giants. Other corporations, from ecologically damaging polluters to media mind-polluters, can be defeated when they too are held criminally responsible. It took slick marketing and TV spots to beat the corporations at their own game, to make smoking ``uncool.'' While the challenge of making the polluting BMW, fatty fast food, or porno-hyped Calvin Klein garments uncool will require a cultural awakening comparable to a hookers breaking away from her pimp, Lasn gives us specific ways to participate in the ``joy of jamming.'' If you get junk mail on the fax, send back a toner-breaking black piece of paper. When telemarketers call, say you'll call back at THEIR home. There are 32 b&w illustrations, not finished but wickedly effectivesuch as the sketch of a bald Joe Camel on a hospital bed under the caption, ``Joe Chemo.'' Organized, like Walden, by season, this is the best call to simplify and renew natural life since Thoreau and the American Renaissance. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
According to Kalle Lasn, publisher of Adbusters magazine, culture jamming will become to our era what civil rights was to the '60s, what feminism was to the '70s, and what environmental activism was to the '80s. Culture jammers are a global network of media activists who assert that America is no longer a country, but a multitrillion-dollar brand, built on a cult of celebrity and marketing brand names. These brands, products, celebrities -- the spectacles that surround the production of culture -- are our culture now. The architect of Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week, Lasn believes it is only by "uncooling" these symbols of culture, by organizing resistance against the institutions that manage the brands, that America can reassert herself. With cutting-edge design, this manifesto for the new millennium has the potential to completely alter the way we think and live.
About the Author
Featured in the PBS documentary Affluenza, Kalle Lasn, whose documentaries have been broadcast on PBS, CBC, and around the world, has won 15 international awards, and has been profiled in Time. As publisher of Adbusters magazine and founder of Media Foundation and Powershift Advertising Agency, Lasn has launched social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. He and his wife, Masako Tominaga, make their home in Vancouver, Canada.
Excerpted from Culture Jam : The Uncooling of America by Kalle Lasn. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Imagine that you are a member of a typical postmodern family, living in a typical house, in a typical neighborhood, in a typical North American city. You're overleveraged and overworked. You eat a lot of takeout, your kids holler for Nikes and the TV is on five hours a day. One day it dawns on you that, as a family, you're failing. You aren't so much a family as five strangers sharing power and water. You decide, as a tonic, to go on a camping trip--a pit-latrine-and-flame-cooked-wieners experience uncorrupted by phones, faxes or Bay-watch. In the absence of electronic distractions, you will get to know each other again. After only a few hours in the wilderness, though, it becomes clear that you don't know how to do this. You might as well have been shot into deep space, so psychologically ill-equipped are you for the enforced camaraderie of the outside world. Your kids experience actual physical withdrawal from television. Your seven-year-old can't finish a whole sentence or stay focused on more than three bites of her Van Camp's beans. She wears a Village of the Damned expression and asks you to repeat almost everything you say.Your fourteen-year-old finishes his meal in silence and excuses himself to the tent, where he scavenges for magazines and, finding none, just konks out. There are no signs of life. The kids' senses have become so deadened from disuse they can't touch, taste, smell or see that they are in a marvelous place. To them it doesn't feel marvelous. It doesn't feel like anything at all. If you have read Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, you will recognize that the stages your kids are going through--denial, anger, depression, bargain-ing--closely mimic the stages of grief, as if they are adjusting to a loss. 'Which in a real way they are: the loss of their selves. Or rather, the loss of the selves that feel most authentic to them. Their mediated selves. Those selves that, when disconnected from the urban data stream, cease to function. Your family, like most postmodern clans, finds itself adrift at a historically significant time. The last couple of centuries have marked a radical transition in human lifestyle. We've gone from living in a natural world to living in a manufactured one. For two million years our personalities and cultures were shaped by nature. The generations alive today--who cannot recognize an edible mushroom in the forest or build a fire without matches--are the first to have had their lives shaped almost entirely by the electronic mass media environment. Most of us are now fully detached from the natural world. We can barely remember the last time we drank from a stream, smelled wild skunk cabbage or saw the stars from a dark remove, well away from the city. We can't remember when we last spent an evening telling stories, instead of having Jerry or Oprah or Rosie tell stories to us. We can't identify three kinds of tree, but we know how much Mike Tyson received for his last fight. We can't explain why the sky is blue, but we know how many times Susan Lucci has been passed over for a Daytime Emmy Award. This detachment from nature may not seem like much of a problem, but it is. In fact, it's a disaster. In her 1994 book Bird by Bird, writer Anne Lamott reflects on a California vineyard in early fall. It is "about as voluptuous a place as you can find on earth: the sense of lushness and abundance; the fullness of the clumps of grapes that hang, mammarian, and give off an ancient autumnal smell, semiprotected from the sun by their leaves. The grapes are so incredibly beautiful that you can't help but be thrilled. If you aren't--if you only see someone's profit or that in another month there will be rotten fruit all over the ground--someone has gotten inside your brain and really fucked you up." I think she has it right. Someone has gotten into our brains. Now the most important task on the agenda is to evict them and recover our sanity. Rediscovering the natural world ought not to be difficult. It ought to be an instinctive act. Not just in random bursts of virtuousness should we be moved to replace our divots. If the Earth felt less like something out there and more like an extension of our bodies, we'd care for it like kin. We'd engage in what German philosopher Immanuel Kant called "beautiful acts" rather than "moral acts." We'd pull in the direction of global survival not because we felt duty-bound to do so, but because it felt right and good. At a 1990 conference titled "Psychology As If the Whole Earth Mattered" at Harvard University's Center for Psychology and Social Change, panelists concluded, "If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction." Sounds promising. But don't hold your breath. To "ecopsychologist" Theodore Roszak, our rampant, oblivious consumption at the expense of the planet is, simply, a sickness--one no less harmful than the disorders catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statis-tical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV), the encyclopedia of modern psychiatric complaint. It's too new a phenomenon for psychologists to have given much consideration to it. Roszak views the current widespread sense of malaise as a kind of separation anxiety" from nature. It should be an easy metaphor to connect with. We're bombarded these days with analyses of failed relationships, of the psychological havoc that breakups wreak. The psychological fallout from our breakup with nature is like that. When you cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people's lives, their spirit dies. It's as simple as that.
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