Kalle Lasn

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Kalle Lasn
Born March 24, 1942
Tallinn, Estonia
Occupation CEO of Adbusters Media Foundation

Kalle Lasn (born March 24, 1942, Tallinn, Estonia) is the founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy and is the CEO of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which owns the magazine. Lasn currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Contents

[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.

[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] Views on Activism

Lasn believes that humans struggle with activism because they have failed to identify the key issues. He sees corporate rights and power as deeply problematic and a pressing issue. He has attempted to examine what he sees as the greater structural problems at hand, and declared a need to “recode the corporation.”[1]

[edit] Quotations

  • "We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped."[2]
  • “Drawing attention to the Jewishness of the neocons is a tricky game. Anyone who does so can count on automatically being smeared as an anti-Semite. But the point is not that Jews (who make up less than 2 percent of the American population) have a monolithic perspective. Indeed, American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and many of them disagree strongly with Ariel Sharon’s policies and Bush’s aggression in Iraq...
    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.”[3]
  • “Advertising is brain damage.”[4]

[edit] Bibliography

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

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wendi Pickerel, Helena Jorgensen, and Lance Bennett, "Culture Jams and Meme Warfare: Kalle Lasn, Adbusters, and media activism", April 19, 2002
  2. ^ Lasn, Kalle (March/24 March 2009). "Hey President Obama". Adbusters. http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/82/obama_economics.html/. Retrieved on 2009-04-04. 
  3. ^ Lasn, Kalle (March/April 2004). "Why won't anyone say they are Jewish?". Adbusters. http://canadiancoalition.com/adbusters01/. Retrieved on 2008-06-24. 
  4. ^ Lasn, Kalle (July 2007). "Advertising Is Brain Damage". Adbusters. https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Advertising_is_Brain_Damage.html. Retrieved on 2009-07-06. 

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalle_Lasn"
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