I've read and enjoyed Kalle Lasn's "Culture Jam", I own a stack of Adbusters magazines and various other publications under the Adbusters banner. I even took part in
Buy Nothing Day for a few years.
But I no longer subscribe to their publications nor to their ways of thinking.
The ideas of fighting against corporate ownership of everything, public access to television/radio networks, protecting our minds from 24/7 advert brainwashing...all of these are important topics but there really is but so much that you can say about these issues without acquiring a sort of
Us Vs. Them attitude.
My breaking point came shortly after Adbusters released an issue of their magazine that was comprised solely of first person accounts of daily life after the the collapse of the stock market. Every character romanticized the death of money, tedious jobs, drug laws, worldwide communication...
It's one thing to fight for change and another entirely to alienate everyone you'd hope to convert by getting so caught up in your ideas that your message comes across as nothing but a convoluted and pompous mess.
Quote:
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Personally, I enjoy it. I like the idea of ordinary people going up against large conglomerates by defacing their advertising and altering their messages. I’ve never engaged in it myself, but I could imagine that if the opportunity presented itself, I probably would.
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I defaced trains, buses and MTA adverts for years and eventually I came to the conclusion that while I liked the idea of reclaiming public spaces back from major corporations - there are much better ways to go about it. And you aren't exactly raging against the machine by defacing adverts with paint that was manufactured by another major corporation.