BOOK REVIEW: Lasn, Kalle. Culture Jam. New York: Harper Collins. 1999.

Americans spend more money on material goods than any other country in the world. Why is this? Does our consumption say something about our autonomy? If you ponder such questions, then read Kalle Lasn’s Culture Jam. Lasn is an internationally known, award-winning documentarist who fights for the democratic process in the media world. He is the founder of projects, such as The Media Foundation and Adbusters,that strive to establish freedom of disseminating ideas in the media world. Culture Jam is a continuation of this mission.

In Culture Jam, Lasn argues that corporate America has “kidnapped our real lives, co-opting whatever authenticity we once had” (101). Corporate America drives this conformity with an emphasis on consuming, through which people’s identities are lost because they simply become a cog in the economic wheel of America. Lasn believes that we can change the world, that is, we can change how we interact with the mass media and how we produce meaning in society (xii), by culture jamming. Through this culture jamming, we reclaim our identity and world that corporate America has usurped from us.

Corporate America and its ensuing consumerism define our identity. The electronic mass media shapes our lives and separates us from the natural world in which we live. This separation causes us to lose our sense of the divine and our identity (4-7). With its focus on consuming and being cool, the media drives “mental pollution” in the “ecology of our mind” so that we focus solely on our image (13, 74).

Unfortunately, advertising and marketing, mediums of mental pollution, have become invisible powers because of their ubiquity (166-167). Consequently, we cannot challenge the “consumptive, commercial and corporate agendas” (33), and we have lost our authenticity because we have become brands in the “multitrillion-dollar brand” (xii): America. Culture Jammers are Lasn’s solution to this problem.

Culture Jammers “share…an overwhelming rage against consumer capitalism, and a vague sense that our time has come to act as a collective force.” (112) They hope “to topple existing power structures and forge major adjustments to the way we live in the twenty-first century” (xi) by fighting corporate America with “guerilla information [warfare]” (124). This war is fought with the power that Corporate America has created.

The jammers “detourn” the avenues that corporate America has used to appropriate our identity. In other words, they take the images and practices of corporate America and reroute them in order “to reverse or subvert their meaning, thus reclaiming them” (103). They transform culture through subverting commonly held ideas and practices, much like Jesus did in his ministry. This culture jamming is a bilateral approach. From above, they use media attacks. From below, they empower the people. With this approach, the jammers establish their credo: “To obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption” (172).

Although Lasn’s approach rides the fence of anarchy, some of his ideas resonate with Jesus’ approach to the powers. Lasn sees American history in four acts. The fourth act, the act in which we are currently playing, “is an act of reversal, recovery, [and] redemption” (145). Similarly, Jesus used the concept of the kingdom of God to show that the redemption and delivery of God’s people from oppression begins now by our taking part in this process. Lasn may not mention Christ, and he may stress using our anger and rage too much, but when guided correctly, his approach could make a positive contribution to our consumerist culture.