Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge--And Why We Must

by Kalle Lasn

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America is no longer a country but a multimillion-dollar brand, says Kalle Lasn and his fellow "culture jammers". The founder of Adbusters magazine, Lasn aims to stop the branding of America by changing the way information flows; the way institutions wield power; the way television stations are run; and the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music, and culture industries set agendas. With a courageous and compelling voice, Lasn deconstructs the advertising culture and our fixation on icons and brand names. And he shows how to organize resistance against the power trust that manages the brands by "uncooling" consumer items, by "dermarketing" fashions and celebrities, and by breaking the "media trance" of our TV-addicted age.

A powerful manifesto by a leading media activist, Culture Jam lays the foundations for the most significant social movement of the early twenty-first century -- a movement that can change the world and the way we think and live.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review: 4 out of 5 stars

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

Great book, 2007-12-31
I read this book after a good review on-line. The Canadian author has real issues (as do I) with the way this country consumes useless junk and the way they are sold these items by the major manufactures. This book should be required reading by all high schoolers BEFORE they start smoking, and for sure by all shop happy people who do not know why buying stuff does not make their life complete.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

Good points but they are extreme, 2007-12-17
I recommend this book to anyone because it deals with many issues that are extrememely relevant to Western Culture. Technology vs Nature, problems with the "American Dream", cultural hegemony in the media, problems with overconsumption, etc.

Read it with a grain of salt because at times it seems like less of a book than anti-corporate/technology propaganda. Some of his suggestions like buy nothing day and to stop driving cars are just silly. What happened to innovative green technology? His vision seems like a step back in time 100 years. He doesn't talk about appreciating what we have or about solutions to our disposable culture. People are always going to buy stuff if it breaks or becomes outdated--how should we fix this Lasn? It's an interesting book but the criticism is over the top considering he doesn't offer practical solutions.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 stars

The newest culture movement?, 2007-07-13
He sets the stage for culture jammers to take on the newest set of problems being discovered in our culture, Corporate rule, causing people to be addicted to tv, shopping, eating, and consumption in general.
Wanting us to be what feminism was in the 70s, and what environmentalism was in the 80s.

he tries to show how the culture jammers can fight their meme fight using the media, yet starts to fight the wrong people a few times, yet quickly gets back on track.

Maybe culture jamming with be the movement of the 10's, but right now its a fight few are participating in.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

Subversion at its best, 2007-07-11
This is an exceptional book. It is written by the founder of Adbusters. This is a book that challenged me to my core about my consumption habits. And in more specific the marketing that goes on to sell me things that I may or may not need. The book is sort of what you would imagine if an Old Testament prophet were to challenge the American Dream today. It's raw, honest, and thought provoking about how do we challenge and subvert the system without withdrawing from it. And what type of alternatives do we have besides living in a hole and pretending like nothing is happening. It's a bit of an older book (written in 2000) so some of the cultural references are obviously a bit out of date. But the content and ideas are really intriguing. The author shares a lot of stories about their battles and conversations with executives from all of the privately owned television stations and how they wouldn't take their money to run perfectly decent and normal ads. It shows how biased our entertainment industry is towards consumption and how embedded our entertainment is with commercialism. Just watch American Idol and you can see the gross product placement in that one show. This is the first book I bought all year (a fact to which I am proud since I bought close to 50 last year) because they didn't have it at any of my local libraries. So I bought it used on Amazon and gave it away to a friend, who will hopefully pass it on to someone else.

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 stars

Interesting and different, 2005-10-25
This book is excellent for studying culture. The author is interesting and relates to the reader easily. The topics vary and bring many different ideas to the plate for anyone interested in culture. I would suggest that this would be interesting for a teenager to an adult to read. It will change your perception of culture.

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