Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge–and Why We Must, Kalle Lasn
Published November 2000, read 01.08.03
Written on 2 August 2003 | Posted in book reviews | 0 Comments
Kalle Lasn really gets why society is messed up and he has all sorts of practical ideas for the average citizen on what he/she can about it. Lasn is the editor and publisher of Adbusters magazine, the publication that started out on the fringe and set out to wrestle the advertising/media industries to the ground with citizen resistance campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. And since every citizen action group worth their salt has a catchy name, Lasn called his “Culture Jammers”.
So this book is sort of a mission statement or manifesto for the culture jamming movement and Lasn is a master vituperator who uses every inch of page to rage against the corporate machine (the marketing and media companies and conglomerates). He writes passionately and convincingly about everything that threatens civilisation, from globalisation and the G7, to the erroneous acceptance of GDP as the primary indicator of economic progress, to McDonald’s and Calvin Klein. But Lasn is not just an angry man, he is an organised angry man. This book is a bona fide toolkit, chockful of images and ideas to mobilise potential culture jammers. And this is what distinguishes it, and Lasn himself, from the cacophony of revolutionary voices, heard usually around G7 summits, that know there’s something wrong with the way we live and where we’re headed, and mostly know why, but offer few practical solutions on what to do about it.