Book Review of CULTURE JAM by Kalle Lasn

Author Kalle Lasn helped literally coin the book’s titular term during an epiphany he had when he realized that he hated the “sterile chain store that rarely carried any locally grown produce” he was shopping in, so he expressed his feelings of purchasing powerlessness by jamming a bent coin into the grocery cart slot of one of those bins which requires a quarter deposit in order to check out a basket, and then refunds you once you’re good enough to return it. From then on he opted to shop at the “little fruit and vegetable store down the road.”

What undoubtedly may seem like petty vandalism to some can actually produce the feeling of liberation from societal constraints, Lasn argues, which accompanies any act of rebellion, however small, against the expectations of faceless franchises that presume your contentment with and obedience to their often substandard service and product homogeneity.

Lasn wrote this book prior to founding AdBusters, an advertisement-free magazine committed to promoting “media literacy” and “changing the way meaning is produced in our society” by challenging the existing communications monopoly. Culture Jam lays out his complete anti-corporate manifesto persuasively, in always uncompromising, sometimes grandiloquent, often inspirational language. Beginning with the radical thesis that America is no longer a country but a multi-trillion dollar brand, Lasn goes on to describe everything he thinks is in desperate need of change, from the advent of the what he deems the “Manchurian Consumer” to the export of our prepackaged goods and values via “The Global Economic Pyramid Scheme.”

“Culture jamming” emerges as an empowering way for anyone who feels disenfranchised or sick of the status quo to strike back, and is defined as any creative (or destructive) act of defiance directed towards the corporate power structure’s much greater crimes against society. Thus, simple actions like spray painting a PSA over a Calvin Klein billboard, encouraging people to participate in a national “Buy Nothing Day” (November 27th), or printing parody ads satirizing famous product slogans (“Absolut Impotence,” anyone?) all work to rid ad campaigns of their power and subvert their “cool” factor by using the huge amounts of money these corporations invest in devising commercials and universally-recognized logos, their massive market size, to bring them down. Lasn asserts that this tactic of “corporate jujitsu” has proven effective in past battles, and cites the victory of health proponents over televised cigarette ads by successfully getting the public to forever associate tobacco companies’ products with lung cancer and death. The spokes-cartoon intended to appeal to minors, Joe Camel, can thus be jammed as Joe Chemo, for example, and the intended message is immediately clear. If these acts of noncompliance catch on, the idea goes, national awareness to the extent of intrusive media saturation is heightened and people are increasingly jolted out of the “media trance” and confronted with the option to join the fight, thus potentially leading to even more spontaneous expressions of what Lasn believes is a growing dissatisfaction with the ubiquitous presence of advertisements in our cultural landscape, corporate-dictated concepts of happiness and fashion, and increasingly pervasive marketing tactics that threaten to leave no crevice of our society (or its denizens) un-branded.

The book asks us to imagine an America where shareholders are held responsible for their company’s actions, where businesses with dishonest track records routinely run the actual risk of getting their corporate charters revoked by their state, and where people begin to demand access to local airwaves which are supposedly “public.” While Lasn’s passionately idealistic rhetoric sometimes verges on preachy and he could be chastised for mimicking the very sound-byte style employed by those he wishes to see usurped from power, it is the opinion of this reviewer that the author’s intentions are sterling, and one could argue that he is merely using the corporations’ own pop style and profit-maximizing constructs of “cool” right back against them, to demonstrate the very opposite. Overall, I found Culture Jam to be highly readable; it’s a rare book that challenges you to not only envision, but enact. Is the author being naively optimistic? It depends what you do after you put his book down.
-Andy Gately, Feb. ‘05