Running Head: A BEAUTIFUL FIGHT: INTERVIEWS WITH KALLE LASN AND DARREN FLEET
A Beautiful Fight
by Renee Thomson
Adbusters asks us to live without dead time; to play with abandonment, set caution to the wind and embrace our rebellious spirits. It urges us to question authority, seek the other side of the story, and to participate in the movement against establishment; they call for a revolution. But, Kalle Lasn, Editor-in-Chief, voice, and mastermind behind the whole Adbusters operation knows, revolution isn't an easy sell.
Adbusters arose in 1989 out of a struggle to tell the other side of the story. At the time, the BC forest industry was booming; old growth forests were being ploughed for profit, and all the while our televisions and newspapers were promising us, “British Columbians, have no fear: You have Forests Forever” (Lasn, 2012).
Kalle Lasn, a young man filled with revolutionary fervour, knew that this was a lie, and it enraged him. A man of action, he rallied his fellow filmmaker friends and environmentalists alike, and together they created a 30 second subvertisment. They raised enough money to buy some air time and took their ad to the CBC, hoping to counter the disinformation distributed by the forest industry. Not surprisingly, they were rejected; “They said this isn't really an ad, and we can't sell you air time ... even though they were selling millions of dollars worth of time to the forest industry. This was for me personally ... a really sort of an ugly moment in my life; ... I was born in Estonia, a place where for 50 years you weren't allowed to speak back against the government ... [it was] a closed minded society for half a century, and here I was in the heart of freedom and democracy in North America ... and all of the sudden you weren't allowed to speak back against these big time sponsors,” said Lasn (2012).
And so, Lasn and his colleagues decided to fight. They began talking to reporters and publicizing the fact that there wasn't freedom of speech on the commercial airwaves, sparking a public debate that lead to hundreds of phone calls a day to the CBC from Canadian citizens, wondering why they refused to tell the other side of the story. Eventually, the CBC came up with a compromise; while they wouldn’t sell the air time to Lasn and his colleagues, they would stop selling air time to the forest industry. “It was a ... beautiful moment,” said Lasn; “even if you fight against the big bucks, you can still win, even if it was a partial victory” (2012).
With the taste of victory fresh in their minds, along with the sudden upsurge of support, Lasn and his colleagues decided to turn “this tatty newsletter we had circulating around sort of informally” (Lasn, 2012) into an issue of a magazine, and call it Adbusters. They printed seven thousand copies of Adbusters #1 and delivered it to various retail outlets, “and lo and behold it started to take off ... it was suddenly this exciting moment based on this experience we had [with the CBC] where we could start talking spoof to power and actually launch a magazine ... and that's how Adbusters was born” (Lasn, 2012).
Soon after, Lasn realized that if they could fight the forest industry, they could do the same thing with other industries. “Why can't we put these kind of dissenting messages out there and instigate change not just in the forest industry but in all industries. Why cant [Adbusters] be sort of a back voice. Why can't we have a meme war of one industry saying this, and we're saying that, and may the best idea win. So in a way, this little incident, this fight with the forest industry bustled into a larger idea of culture jamming” (2012).
When I began my time at Adbusters as a volunteer in October of this year I will admit, I didn't know what culture jamming meant; in fact, I knew very little about the publication that would soon become my livelihood. I had heard that they created spoof ads, and that the magazine was well known for its gritty, non-design aesthetic. I was only mildly aware that this tiny office of 10 people had been the catalyst to one of the “biggest social movements in 40 years” (La Botz, 2012).
When I asked the Associate Editor of Adbusters, Darren Fleet, about the Occupy Wall Street campaign he told me that no one in the office expected it to explode the way it did; “I was surprised ... Over time, Adbusters has put out a lot of these calls [to action] ... nothing happened” (Fleet, 2012).
The Occupy campaign, on the other hand, “was 100 times bigger than [any other campaign instigated by Adbusters]. It was huge. It's like a global atom. It has pervaded every nook and cranny of our culture ... It's a beautiful example of revolutionary spirit unfolding on the world” (Lasn, 2012).
Fleet describes Occupy as a meme, an idea that rapidly reproduces itself on its own throughout a culture. “A meme is ... a powerful idea that breeds itself and captures people's imagination ... It's a term, it's a slogan, it's an idea, it's an image that embodies a certain amount of political beliefs that people are willing to follow and sacrifice for ... if it had been Protest Wall Street I don't know if anyone would be there” (Fleet, 2012).
At Occupy's fruition, the art department at Adbusters created a visually striking poster and the team put out the call to their 90-thousand-person culture jammer network. Anonymous, the international Hacktivist group, picked up on the idea and Occupy's network grew, until it reached some activist groups in New York who had been dreaming of a protest similar to what happened in Egypt's Tahrir Square, or the acampadas resistance in Spain, and it steadily grew from there.
That initial poster, dubbed The Ballerina and the Bull, is now one of the most contested images of the Occupy movement.
“Poised atop the bull, which is an iconic—and possibly ironic—symbol of aggressive financial optimism and prosperity, the ballerina extends her arms, her leg, serenely posed against the grey skies.
But they are not alone on Wall Street.
In the fog behind the bronzed beast, a crowd emerges wearing gas masks and holding batons, arms linked together against whatever is ahead.
The poster is scenic, striking and ... perhaps even revolutionary.” (Beeston, 2011)
Adbusters has since been banned by both the ballerina's lawyers and the bull sculptor's lawyers from reproducing or distributing the image (not Adbusters' first run-in with the law, I can assure you) . However, it still remains an iconic symbol of the Occupy Movement, posing the question, “What is Our One Demand?”
While Adbusters is responsible for putting out the call to action for Occupy Wall Street, “It’s the people who are in New York City, and now all over the nation who ran with it and are making it what it is,” explained Adbusters Senior Editor Micah “The credit has to go to the people who are down there” (Beeston, 2011).
Meanwhile, a 70 year old Kalle Lasn calls Occupy “a dream come true. I have been dreaming of revolution for half my life and finally it looks like we may have even helped to catalyse, to spark [one] ... just the mere fact that we've produced a movement that is some sort of antidote to the tea party and that it has ... made the political left cool again to some degree ... I just wish I was 10 years younger so I could enjoy it more. A lot of my energy is used up” (2012).
When I asked Kalle about the future of Adbusters he explained that the magazine had been through many “ups and downs ... there were a few times when we were swimming in a lot of red ink ... and it looked like we were going to go bankrupt and not be able to continue ... and then ... when the internet suddenly became a big phenomena ... people just didn't want to subscribe any more ... magazines were suddenly in big trouble” (2012).
However, Adbusters is not your typical magazine; while many in the industry fear the erosion of hardcopy magazines, Lasn is confident that visually driven magazines like his, ones that “deliver something that people love, rather than pandering to the advertisers” will indeed survive; “there is something quieter and deeper about the hardcopy magazine” (Lasn, 2012). Adbusters does not just deliver content, either, explains Lasn: “most magazines just give information, but we have always given people information plus activism. Activism has always been an integral part of who we are” (2012).
Lasn likens reading an issue of Adbusters to a spiritual, philosophical journey. Generally, each issue centres on a broad theme, which is broken up into six sections, each one dealing with a different aspect of our mental and environmental landscape pertaining to that broad topic. Fleet explains that “Adbusters is meant to be an experience from the beginning to the end. Every page is standing back from a big picture, and every page is in a context, it's within a section, it's within a bigger section” (2012), and this, along with its primarily visual nature, does not transpose well on the web. Furthermore, “because we are a bi-monthly magazine, a lot of our ideas have to be really big, or else they just wont last on the news stand ... and so to transpose the hyper reality of the internet is a bit of a struggle” (Fleet, 2012). While the Internet lends itself to quicker bites and shorter information, Adbusters requires a medium with a certain longevity.
Now, with the Occupy wind in their sales, the Adbusters team is striving to pioneer the hardcopy magazine of the future. “Because we are very visually driven, and we are so special because of activism and now because of Occupy, we are dreaming of coming up with the New Aesthetic. What will the magazine of the future look like, how will it feel, what sort of content will it have, how visually driven will it be?” (Lasn, 2012).
Lasn also speaks of his distaste for the standard advertising driven business model that we are taught in school, in which anywhere from five percent to 100 percent of revenue is earned from advertising: “As soon as advertising kicks in, you don't rely so much on the people buying the magazine ... you're just giving a venue for advertisers, and there's something wrong with that. There's something sick about that” (2012). Instead, he believes that if magazines are to survive the Internet Revolution, they must earn their revenue by producing a product that people love and are willing to pay for.
“In some strange way,” Lasn explains, “Adbusters may have actually stumbled upon some sort of formula for the future, where the advertising model is marginalized ... the people who have that sort of a ... non advertising kind of labour of love model, they will every now and then break through and will be able to have some kind of sustainable model that doesn't depend on advertising.” Adbusters is fuelled only by its readers, along with a few sustainable cultural products, including shoes made from 100 percent recycled material, a Media Kit with lesson plans for high school teachers, along with the text books that Lasn has produced over the years. Its survival does not depend on corporate sponsors, but on its readers, who faithfully subscribe and buy copies on the news stands each month.
At 70 years old, however, Lasn is attempting to pull back from Adbusters, and is hoping the young people in his team will share some excitement about pioneering this new kind of magazine and continuing the revolutionary fervour that was unleashed with Occupy. He notes, however, that “in the culture that we live in ... it is very had to have a revolutionary spirit and commit yourself to a cause that doesn't necessarily give you riches ... the people who delight in that creative revolutionary spark are few and far between” (2012).
While Lasn is confident in our team of 10 at Adbusters, since I began there I have said goodbye to two key members, and will bid adieu to Will Brown, the art director for the past five years, in May. Our creative director, Pedro Inoue, however, will be taking on a much more integral role, and made his most recent visit to the office from Brazil in March. His ability to visually encapsulate the revolutionary spirit is truly moving, and Lasn is confident that Adbusters will only flourish under his direction.
I too will be moving up the ladder at Adbusters; In the seven months that I have been here, I have moved from Volunteer, to Administrative Assistant, to Office Manager, and now to Marketing and PR manager.
My time at Adbusters has been enlightening. I entered the basement suite that these incredibly passionate, creative workers call home a naive young girl, unaware of the powerful voice that Adbusters has in our society. I have since learned how to copy edit, how to track sales and donations and manage nearly 120, 000 subscribers. I have learned about production and how to market a magazine that doesn't believe in advertising. While all of these things are surely valuable assets to add to my repertoire, I think Adbusters has also taught me something much deeper about the state of the world.
As for Kalle Lasn, after nearly 25 years of hard work, he has succeeded in changing the world with his magazine. Although he claims to be pulling back, I have a feeling that Occupy Wall Street wont be the last that we hear of him. In the words of Lasn himself, “it's a beautiful fight.”
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References
Beeston, L. (October 11, 2011). The Ballerina and the Bull: Adbusters' Micah White on 'the last great social movement.' In The Link Newspaper. Retrieved from http://thelinknewspaper.ca/article/1951
Dery, M. (December 23, 1990). The merry pranksters and the art of the hoax. In The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/23/arts/the-merry-pranksters-and-the-art-of-the-hoax.html
Dery, M. (October 8, 2010). New introduction and revisited edition of Culture jamming: Hacking, slashing and sniping in the empire of the signs. Retrieved from http://markdery.com/?page_id=154
Fleet D. (personal communication April 2012)
Heath, J. & Potter, A. (2004). The rebel sell: Why the culture can't be jammed. Toronto: Harper Perennial.
La Botz, D. (February 7, 2012). Occupy: The biggest social movement in forty years. Retrieved from http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3516
Lasn, K. (personal communication, March 2012)
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