2.1 Kalle Lasn
The head office of Adbusters Magazine is anything but conspicuous. Were it not for my foreknowledge of the precise address and a small sign pointing the way, I likely would have walked right by, assuring myself that I must have come to the wrong place.
In stark contrast to the ornate glass and steel monuments that emblematize the Commanding Heights of global finance, the workplace of Adbusters’ crew of culture-jammers lies at the foot of a wooden staircase, in a residential neighbourhood, sheltered from view behind a solitary conifer. Everything about the location is unassuming – the slope between West Broadway and False Creek in Vancouver’s Fairview neighbourhood, bookended by the Granville and Cambie bridges, is a decidedly under-hyped area of the city, characterized by a smattering of specialty medical clinics and lines of derivative row houses. The Adbusters office itself is little more than a glorified basement suite with a handful of computers, well-worn hardwood floors, walls lined with bookshelves proffering back-issues of the publication, books and miscellany.
At first glance, this hardly seems the sort of place you’d expect the seed of a revolution to germinate – that is, until you meet the magazine’s founder.
“One of the big things that drives me now,” explains Kalle Lasn, in his trademark Estonian-Australian lilt, “is this feeling that [we’re] living through kind of a crisis moment, where – ecological crisis, political crisis, financial crisis and psychological crisis – all these crises are kind of feeding off each other now. And the future just doesn’t really compute.”
“I think we’re living through a moment in human history where we’re waking up to the fact that ‘business as usual’ doesn’t work anymore.”
2.2 A life of tumult
Lasn spent his formative years in transition, at a time of great social and political upheaval. Born in Tallinn in 1942, he and his family were uprooted after Stalin’s Soviet Union seized Estonia from Nazi control; for the tiny Baltic state, it was the geopolitical equivalent of tumbling from the frying pan into the fire. Part of Lasn’s childhood was spent in the angry, ideologically charged atmosphere of a displaced persons camp in Germany, prior to his family’s resettlement in Australia in 1949.
For the youngster, the sentiments of culture shock and displacement were profound and perpetual, and would play a significant role in the development of his worldview. But equally as important in his intellectual maturation, he says, was a shifting perception toward the world’s sole remaining superpower.
“I grew up at a time when America was the big hero, you know, the country that liberated the world from the Nazis. I remember in Germany, after the Second World War, getting Hershey bars from the GIs! Wonderful guys, you know; innocent, ‘Aw, shucks’ kinda guys.”
During his youth, America was practically deified in Australia, Lasn recalls, and it was a sentiment he largely shared. But in the 1960s – a transformative decade for many throughout the Western world – Lasn’s attitude toward Uncle Sam began to change.
“Bit by bit by bit, after the Vietnam War, and after travelling around the world, [I discovered] that things weren’t quite the way I thought they were. So basically, this love affair with America turned sour.”
Among the reasons for his change of heart, he cites not only Vietnam, but the events in Iraq, and the “sheer arrogance” of a nation that believes it is acceptable to continue to consume far beyond its share of the planet’s non-renewable resources—an ideology he views as deeply problematic, yet one upheld as a model for the world’s developing countries.
“We [North Americans] are basically living off the backs of future generations, and there’s just something inherently immoral about that.”
Since 1989, Lasn’s work has targeted advertising—the siren song of consumerist propaganda.
“Culture jamming,” or the disruption of advertising and corporate memes in order to communicate a satirical message and toss a wrench in the machine of conformity, is a tactic that first appeared in 1984, and has since been adopted by numerous artists, intellectuals, anarchists and protest movements. But Lasn is an icon in counter-consumerist circles, thanks to the renown and longevity of Adbusters. And in 2011, his magazine became the megaphone by which to broadcast a message of revolution, one that found a receptive audience in Manhattan and elsewhere.
Still, Lasn believes the fuel that nourished the conflagration was already in place; all he did was provide a spark.
“What really gave birth to Occupy Wall Street was, I think, this feeling—not just by a few thousand people in New York, but hundreds of millions of young people around the world—who feel that the future doesn’t work. And they’re saying ‘Unless I stand up and fight for a different kind of future, I’m not going to have a future.’”
“This core impulse that the future doesn’t compute is manifesting itself in all sorts of ways.”
3.3 A turbulent period of economic history
Indeed, recent history has been laden with turmoil. In late 2007, the house of cards on which America’s real estate and derivatives markets had been built began to show signs of fatigue. By 2008, a full-scale crisis—the worst since the Great Depression—swept the globe, leading policymakers to adopt controversial “bailout” measures to avoid a wholesale economic collapse. In the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and the European Union governments responded to the imminent demise of giant, systemically integral financial institutions with some of the largest transfers of wealth in human history, amounting to trillions of dollars of largesse from federal treasuries. And while the rescue packages succeeded in preventing crisis from spiraling into catastrophe in the short term, they have also preceded government austerity, persistent unemployment and underemployment in many countries that have accompanied sizable losses in individual net worth—not to mention a justifiable outrage that soon made its way to the streets.
President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, and was immediately saddled with the precipitous decline of the U.S. economy, a fall he attempted to break with federal stimulus spending of $787 billion the next month. By April of that year, however, anger over the bank bailouts, a relatively puny initiative to help underwater mortgage-holders threatened with home foreclosure, and Obama’s moderately Keynesian economic strategy, had inspired a new protest movement of radical American fiscal conservatives—the Tea Party—which featured an ideological emphasis on low taxes, dramatic cuts in government spending, punctilious adherence to the U.S. Constitution, and contempt for the country’s new Commander in Chief, whom Tea Partisans frequently benighted as “foreign” and “un-American.”
But the Tea Party uprising was only the beginning of what would soon become a global wave of protest against the establishment, and against an economic system that had left the once prosperous Western middle class in its dust.