Kalle Lasn
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Kalle Lasn (born Tallinn, Estonia in 1942) is the founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy. He is the CEO of the Blackspot Anticorporation. Lasn was born in Tallinn, Estonia. Before founding the Adbusters Media Foundation, Lasn produced a number of documentaries and commercials including a 30-second television ad about the disappearing old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. However, no commercial TV stations sold Lasn airtime for the advert. This incident led Lasn to found Adbusters Media Foundation, Adbusters magazine and Powershift Advertising Agency to fight for rights to access the public airwaves. In his book Culture Jam he lists facts about big business and the "meme" war; a war of subconscious writing of brand names to control the mass media. It contains dark images of modern society and an insight into the way our culture has been "made". Lasn currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
[edit] Quotes
"Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for non-smoking areas ten years ago."
"The aggregate level of American life fulfillment peaked in 1957, and with a couple of brief exceptions, it's been downhill from there"
“All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon feed this commercial culture top down.”
