Occupy Wall Street, Kalle Lasn and Culture Jamming

Want a grip on Occupy Wall Street’s ideology? Check out Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge—and Why We Must. Lasn is the co-founder of Adbusters, the Canadian corporation (double irony there) behind Occupy Wall Street.

A lot to like

Lasn is disturbed by the anxiety, depression, boredom and alienation that characterize our culture. He grieves for failing families, for individuals with no sense of purpose or meaning. He’s down on TV violence. He wants to reclaim holidays from marketers and return the evening meal as a joyous ritual of family life. He yearns for more time, less stress and more balance. What’s better than being rich, he asks? Being “spontaneous, authentic, alive.”

Sometimes he sounds like an old-time evangelist:

• modern Western culture is based on wealth, power, fame, sex and recreation;
• America is in need of being liberated from its own excesses and arrogances;
• What we need is a new “great awakening.”

What’s not to like, eh?!

We-e-e-ll. . . .

1. He wants to throw out capitalism, which he calls “an even more insidious form of social control than communism.
2. He claims “a belligerent attitude toward authority,” and characterizes culture jammers as “anarchists . . . neo-Luddites, malcontents and punks.” He challenges them to “let go of all their old orthodoxies,” conduct Marx’s “ruthless criticism of all that exists,” and boldly announce, “We will wreck this world.
3. He wants a “true-cost marketplace” where cars cost a hundred grand, and a tank of gas, $250.
4. He says governments will like the true-cost marketplace “because it gives them a vital new function to fulfill: that of calculating the true costs of products, levying ecotaxes and managing our bioeconomic affairs for the long term.” (I don’t know about you, but giving government any more vital new functions sends shivers up my spine.)

Conservative or liberal?

Let’s go back a generation and grab an older tag: Kalle Lasn is thoroughly bourgeois. In some ways, he goes too far. In others, he stops too soon.

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