Lasn, Kalle

Popular legend has it that Kalle Lasn (1942–) was in a shopping center parking lot and came upon a coin-operated shopping cart dispenser. Frustrated and angry that he would have to pay simply to use a store's shopping cart, he jammed a coin into the slot, rendering the machine inoperable. This incident of activist vandalism is rumored to be the origin of “culture jamming,” a worldwide activist movement, with Lasn at the media helm, that has a broad and ambitious objective of stopping the spread of commercial culture and consumerism. Although some attribute the origin of the concept of culture jamming to a 1993 New York Times article by Mark Dery, Lasn has undoubtedly become a highly visible figure in the culture-jamming movement—and one of the movement's media darlings.

Lasn was born in 1942 in Estonia. At the end of World War II he left, spending time in a German refugee camp with his family before being resettled in Australia. Lasn then lived in Japan, where he founded a market research firm, before moving to Vancouver, Canada. For 20 years Lasn worked as a documentary filmmaker for PBS and Canada's National Film Board. Today he oversees the Adbusters Media Foundation, the multimedia organization that serves as the predominant voice of the culture-jamming movement.

The Adbusters Media Foundation describes itself as a “global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. [Its] aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.” The most visible media vehicle of the Adbusters Media Foundation is Adbusters magazine, which was founded in 1989 and today states that it is “concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.” Perhaps the best-known feature in every issue is the spoof advertising campaigns that aim to focus a critical eye on consumer culture. Joe Camel, the former and long-suffering mascot for Camel cigarettes, became “Joe Chemo,” complete with hospital gown and intravenous drip. The super-skinny supermodels featured in Calvin Klein Obsession perfume ads are shown in the spoof spots to be hovering over a toilet as if they are purging their last meal. In spoofs of the Absolut Vodka campaign, chairs are arranged in the formation of the iconic Absolut bottle, with body copy that states, “Absolut AA,” a juxtaposition of the vodka brand with the arrangement of chairs in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Another, grimmer Absolut spoof shows a chalk outline, of the type found at a murder scene, in the shape of the vodka bottle, with “Absolute [sic] End” as the copy.

In addition to its magazine and Website, the Adbusters Media Foundation sponsors a series of activist campaigns, including TV Turnoff Week and Digital Detox Week. The most famous of these campaigns are likely the Buy Nothing Day and Buy Nothing Christmas campaign, which parallel Black Friday and the Christmas season, respectively, [Page 194]to persuade consumers that going without is more fulfilling than accumulating packaged gifts. Other culture-jam efforts include the December 2010 worldwide boycott of Starbucks.

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