Kalle Lasn spent his twenties working for an advertising firm in Japan. He was good at it. He was also, by his own account, increasingly disgusted by it — an ethically neutral business where nobody cared whether they were selling cigarettes, alcohol, or soft drinks, where the social repercussions were somehow irrelevant. He left the industry, moved to Vancouver in the 1970s, and spent the next decade making environmental documentaries. Then, in 1989, when British Columbia's forestry industry ran a slick ad campaign touting its own ecological responsibility while clearcutting old-growth forests, Lasn made a thirty-second counter-commercial and tried to get it on television. Every station refused to air it. So he and his cinematographer Bill Schmalz founded the Adbusters Media Foundation, and with it a magazine.
Adbusters is not really a magazine in the way most people understand the term. It is an ideological project that happens to take the form of a bimonthly print publication — ad-free, reader-funded, and devoted to the proposition that the tools of advertising can be turned against the culture that created them. The practice is called culture jamming: taking the visual language of corporate messaging — the logos, the slogans, the polished imagery — and subverting it, rewiring the circuit so that the message collapses into its own critique. Joe Camel becomes Joe Chemo, dying of cancer. An Absolut Vodka bottle wilts under the headline Absolut Impotence. A swoosh is redrawn as a sweatshop. These are not jokes. They are, in Lasn's framework, acts of cognitive liberation.
The magazine, published out of a basement office on Vancouver's west side, has been in continuous production since 1989. Its circulation peaked at around 120,000 in the wake of Occupy Wall Street — the movement that Adbusters sparked in the summer of 2011 with a single poster of a ballerina balanced on the Wall Street bull, a hashtag, and a date. That a magazine with a few thousand subscribers and a staff of young volunteers could ignite a global protest movement involving hundreds of cities in over eighty countries was, depending on your perspective, either the ultimate vindication of culture jamming or a spectacular accident. Lasn, characteristically, would say it was both.
The Estonian-born, Australian-raised Lasn is now in his eighties and still editing the magazine from the same neighbourhood where he started. His 1999 book Culture Jam was translated into seven languages and became a fixture of communications courses across North America. His campaigns — Buy Nothing Day (held on Black Friday), TV Turnoff Week, the Blackspot sustainable sneaker — have all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to wedge themselves into the gears of consumer capitalism. What makes Adbusters more than a protest pamphlet is the quality of its design: the magazine has always been visually stunning, using the aesthetics of high-end advertising to deliver messages that those advertisers would rather you did not receive.
It has also, over the years, attracted legitimate criticism — for its occasionally grandiose rhetoric, for the tension between its anti-corporate message and its own use of corporate design techniques, and for moments when its provocations have crossed lines that even sympathetic readers found uncomfortable. Lasn regularly begins sentences with the phrase "Not to be grandiose, but…" and then finishes with something grandiose. That self-awareness, or lack thereof, is part of the package.
What cannot be denied is the magazine's longevity and influence. Over three decades, Adbusters has survived on passion, volunteer labour, and reader subscriptions in an industry where most publications backed by real money have failed. It has shaped the visual vocabulary of anti-consumerist activism worldwide. And it proved, at least once, that a magazine can still change the course of history — or at least occupy a small corner of it.
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