BIG emotion [logo]

Print Action, Feb 2005 by Robinson, Jon

"I'm at a moment where I'm sort of trying to jump over the old left, which I believe has got things fundamentally wrong."

- Kalle Lasn, founder, Adbusters Media Foundation

BLACKSPOT DECIDED TO LAUNCH ITS advertising campaign with a billboard down the street from Nike's Oregon-based headquarters. The original plan was to include a personal message to Nike's CEO, Phil Knight, about what Adbusters Media Foundation and its Blackspot movement sees as Nike's socially irresponsible labour practices and manipulative advertising. But lawyers from both Viacom and Nike became involved and the billboard ended up as an abstract ad for Blackspot sneakers, calling for passersby to rethink the cool.

The day after the billboard appeared, Phil Knight retired as CEO of Nike and the group of blackspot "anti-preneurs" sarcastically claimed victory on their website, which receives 15,000 unique visits a day. The Blackspot campaign is designed to mix activism with grassroots capitalism to fight corporations with anti-branded products like sneakers.

Posting ads on billboards, transit shelters and street furniture marks a significant change of attitude for Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters and arguably Canada's most influential activist. Lasn has always been an entrepreneur, but now he is purposely polluting our environment with his own logo printed across large outdoor displays, something he vehemently opposed in the past - even built a 120,000-circulation magazine around - as an offense to what he calls Planet Inc.

"I'm at a moment where I'm sort of trying to jump over the old left, which I believe has got things fundamentally wrong," says Lasn, from his Vancouver office. "I do not think there is anything necessarily wrong with branding; it just depends on who is doing the branding and for what reason."

Many activists share a misconception that all logos are evil in the world, even when such iconic branding, if nothing else, helps to hold a company accountable for its actions. Lasn's new plan of action accepts the importance of logos in society and how they might be used as a tool of disruption. "After about 30 years of growth and consolidation, we've gotten to the point where there are three or four huge corporations that basically control 80 to 90 per cent of the marketshare in any area of our lives and in any industry."

Despite his notoriously apocalyptic views of where the world is spinning, Lasn says he is very optimistic by nature: an enigma someone could only try to explain by pointing out his day-to-day slogan "Live without dead time." He credits his optimism to growing up at a time when cynicism was not part of our culture, and he now fears the most dangerous thing in the world is a new generation of cynical youth.

His ability to learn lessons from the physical environment by swimming in rivers and hiking in forests is something completely different from the electronic environment where most of the youth learn cynicism. And the internet is finally just starting to take the shape of a viable commercial engine. "1 don't know if its Orwellian or if it's Huxley, but it is a very insidious new development that could become the biggest mind fuck of all time," says Lasn. "I think we are heading toward a wall and the way to solve the problem is to start creating information delivery systems where we the people start saying what we want to say."