The Canadian magazine Adbustes was founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn with a group of anti-capitalist activists. Today, it keeps thriving and fighting, with no ads
Adbusters, founded in 1989 by Kalle Lasn
Vancouver, Canada, July 2023. Kalle Lasn founded the magazine Adbusters thirty-four years ago, with a group of early environmentalists, «the early green people» – as he calls them. It all started from anger. The anger of realizing how unfair and anti-democratic the communication and political system can be. At the time, the Canadian forest industry was cutting down the forests, fast.
«There was only a mere seventeen percent of the old growth forest left » Lasn reports. People were starting to get angry. So, the industry made a brilliant move: they aired a tv spot to promote their ideals – and the forest destruction. «You have forest forever», was the slogan – along with the claim that they were doing a good job managing the land. They had to react: «we came up with our own thirty-seconds tv spot that spoke back against that ad».
They wanted to play by the rules; pay the money and get it on the air to create dialogue. Should be encouraged in a democratic country. Yet, the tv station refused: «Mr. Lasn, » they said, «this is not an ad you have here, you are just trying to make propaganda». The refusal brought to a bitter awareness: «I realized that there is something wrong in this free society of ours».
Companies and corporations were able to go ahead and buy as much airtime as they wanted, to tell their side of the story, but a Canadian citizen was not able to walk into a local tv station, put some money on the table and say « I also have something to say». So they founded a magazine to say it. It was 1989.
Kalle Lasn’ history – From a regime to North America, «the land of the free»
Sometimes, democracies are not free. For Lasn, the experience meant something else too. It has to do with his personal history. Born in Estonia in the middle of the Second World War, he recalls: «after the war the Soviet Union completely controlled everything in my country, and you were never ever allowed to speak back against the government».
When the tv commercial incident happened, he had a deja-vu, of the worst kind: «thirty years later, here I was in North America, the land of the free, the home of the brave, and all of a sudden I found out that you are not allowed to speak back against the big corporations». The root of injustices is in the system, in consumerism.
Unlimited freedom seems to be for corporations only, crushing individuals with the ever-increasing socio-economic divide. We are still witnessing it: «we have allowed corporations to grow so big and strong that now they control the agenda on climate change and so many other aspects of our lives».
Advertising and the omni-channel promotion of a lifestyle that is not affordable for either the people or the planet is at the heart of the issue. An urgent call: «we will not have a future on the planet unless we the people learn how to control those corporations».
Adbusters – the need to tax advertising
Already in the 80s, «we were disgusted with commercial television – it was infested with advertising and brainwashed the kids and made everyone grow up to be a good member of the consumption society». Advertising is toxic. Inspired by poetry, its language induces what Lasn calls an «emotional blackmail». It presents an idealized – and frankly unreachable – version of life in images.
The beautiful model, perfect body, the happy couple, happy family, rich handsome man, interesting adventurer. The message is simple: all you need to become them, to have that life, is to buy the products they are selling. If we are to survive the XXI century, we need to dismantle this system, to «re-brand advertising».
As toxic, hurting our mental health. It can start with money: «we have to come up with what I call an ad-tax». If you grew up in a society where advertising was taxed because it was bad, that would change everything: «we have a tax on carbon because it is creating climate change – we also need a tax on advertising because it pollutes the brain».
Adbusters usa of a commercial language to fight commercial society
It goes deeper, inside each of us. «The bottom-line fact» Lasn says, «is that we are in an existential crisis». It’s getting hotter and hotter. Because our consumption pattern is heating the world up.
The first enemy we need to fight is indifference: «with climate change, we know that in the rich countries of the world our footprint is so huge and that we have to do something about it, and yet somehow it is invisible – everybody is in denial, everybody is enjoying their lattes and their cars, their refrigerators, and their lifestyle and in the meantime it looks like we may not have a future, the future does not compute».
Business as usual is no option, but acting often seems impossible. Adbusters uses a commercial language to fight commercial society – overthrowing it. The raw material we are missing to do it is anger. We have a shortage and it is killing us all.
The younger generation and the fear to be canceled – Adbusters
Everything around is a mess, and yet: «somehow there is not enough anger – especially the younger generation are so scared to be canceled, so scared to really say what they mean». If we are going to make it through the XXI century and fix climate change and fix the economic system and take back some power from corporations, we have to come up with a new aesthetic and «a new way to live, love and think on this planet».
An effort of imagination: «then we will have to start getting more angry, we will have to turn some of these gentle souls into rough souls. We have to create a new kind of human being that has the guts to fight back and win the planetary endgame». As simple as that.
Adbusters’Fuck It All Fridays campaign – re-appropriating time and power
To get back in touch with anger, Adbusters created a campaign: Fuck It All Fridays. It started from reflection: «lately I have been thinking about why we are human beings – especially the rich human beings – why is it that we are so useless? Why is it that we are so timid? We cannot get angry enough to really do anything». A need for action: Adbusters wants to turn Fridays into a day of action.
It can be a success. It is not hard in the end: «if we can do that and work up a movement so that it starts speaking up and it starts to scare the status quo, it starts to scare the world leaders and the political people who are running the global system in our countries, then we can get our leaders to do what we want them to do: to call a global climate emergency, to stop giving subsidies to the oil companies, and to take some power back away from corporations».
It was transformative for Lasn too, after thirty years in the business: «I’ve been doing it for about a year and it has completely changed how I feel and think about activism». The beginning is looking inward. Adbusters is asking everybody who wants to join the movement to take a first brave step: «every Friday morning you go and stand in front of a mirror, you take off all your clothes and you look at yourself for five minutes. Look at yourself really deeply, with sort of an empty zen mind. think about your own life: are you ok? Are you consuming too much? Is your footprint too big? Are you too weak and timid? Do you have enough anger in you to really make a difference? We want people to look at themselves first – and then to work up some emotion and go out into the world and start changing it».
Adbusters roughness, the path to a world revolution
Starting from you – then getting into the world. Change can happen in many ways. Every human being is different, some people just want to fight back by writing a poem and disseminate it on the internet.
Other people want to go out and put a poster on lampposts and other people want to come up with anti-ads or visual memes and have them go viral so there are millions of ways to become an anti-consumer activist. It is just about making the first step.
Adbusters teaches, leads the way. It is rough, a path to a world revolution, inside the soul and out. A lifetime of work, a struggle, with nothing but happiness and strength in his voice. Lasn:
«In 1968 there almost was a world revolution. Then, during Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, it looked like for a while there was another possibility for a world revolution with the young people rising up and creating a new world. Now we need to have a third crack. The young people of the world, faced with an existential crisis, have to rise up and change the world – and that’s what I’m fighting for».
Kalle Lasn
Born in Estonia in 1942, but has lived in Canada since 1970. He is the co-founder and editor in chief of Adbusters Magazine, a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators, and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.
