Kalle Lasn

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Kalle Lasn
Born 1942
Tallinn, Estonia
Occupation CEO of Blackspot Anticorporation

Kalle Lasn (born 1942, Tallinn, Estonia) 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 currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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[edit] Documentaries

Lasn has produced a number of TV documentaries and commercials, including a 30-second ad about the disappearing old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. However, no commercial TV stations would sell Lasn airtime to broadcast his work.[citation needed]

[edit] Activism

Difficulties buying airtime on commercial TV for his documentaries and ads led Lasn to establish the Adbusters Media Foundation, its Adbusters quarterly magazine and the Powershift Advertising Agency to fight for the rights of citizens and activists to access the public airwaves.[citation needed]

[edit] Books

In his first book, Culture Jam, Lasn lists facts about big business and describes what he calls the "meme" war; a war of subconscious writing of brand names to control the mass media. The book contains images of modern society and an insight into Western culture's origins. His second book, Design Anarchy, calls on graphic designers, illustrators and other creative professionals to turn from working in service to corporate and political pollution of both the planet and "the mental environment," and instead embrace a radical new aesthetic devoted to social and environmental responsibility.

[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."[citation needed]
  • "The aggregate level of American life fulfillment peaked in 1957, and with a couple of brief exceptions, it's been downhill from there."[citation needed]
  • “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-fed this commercial culture [from the] top down.”[citation needed]
  • “Deciding exactly who is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the US is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of them are Jewish.”[citation needed]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Lasn, Kalle (2000) Culture Jam, New York: Quill.
  • Lasn, Kalle (2002) Design Anarchy, Vancouver: Adbusters Media Foundation.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] External links

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