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.