The revolution will be memed

Summary

---

The Gray Area with Sean Illing – “The Revolution Will Be Memed”

A conversation with Kalle Lasn on culture jamming, consumerism, and the meme war
Original Release Date: April 6, 2026
Guest: Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters

---

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Sam Adler-Bell (standing in for Sean Illing) sits down with Kalle Lasn, the 83-year-old filmmaker, author, and founder of Adbusters. Lasn is renowned for pioneering “culture jamming”—the subversive remixing of commercial imagery and language to challenge consumerist culture. The discussion traces Lasn’s evolution from early environmental activism to contemporary critiques of consumer capitalism, digital culture, and the “meme wars” shaping modern politics. They tackle vital questions: Is the system reformable? How can activism adapt to the rapid-fire logic of internet memes? What does revolutionary change look like in the age of algorithm-driven media?

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of Culture Jamming and Adbusters

• Founding Story (04:27 – 07:03)

  • Lasn explains Adbusters’ birth out of frustration with the forestry industry’s misleading PR campaigns in British Columbia.
  • When TV stations refused to run an anti-logging ad, Lasn experienced North American censorship firsthand:

    “They said to me... sorry, this isn’t really an ad. You can’t really run this. The other side, they can tell their story... but a Canadian citizen didn’t have the right… That was the moment that Adbusters Media Foundation was born.” (06:04 – Kalle Lasn)

• Leveraging Censorship (07:13 – 07:58)

  • Being censored had an ironic benefit:

    “When we told Canadians your public broadcaster censored this ad… suddenly everybody wanted to see the ad… it created a backlash.” (07:23 – Kalle Lasn)

• Why Advertising? (07:58 – 10:59)

  • Lasn discusses advertising’s enormous cultural influence, learned firsthand in Japan, and its ethical ambivalence:

    “Advertising is one of the most powerful forces in the world... but these are strangely ethically ambivalent people.” (09:01 – Kalle Lasn)

2. Defining and Practicing Culture Jamming

• From Adversarial Ads to Cultural Revolution (11:10 – 13:55)

  • Lasn coined “culture jamming” to describe subversive interventions in consumer culture.
  • The most notable example: Buy Nothing Day—a campaign exposing North American overconsumption:

    “We created a 30-second spot that pointed out... we consume five times more than a guy in India and 10 times more than a guy in China... are you consuming too much?” (12:12 – Kalle Lasn)

• Beyond Culture Jamming

  • Lasn now sees himself as a “cultural revolutionary” asking:

    “What do we need to do to survive the 21st century? That’s the real question I’m trying to answer now.” (11:52 – Kalle Lasn)

3. The State of Consumer Capitalism & The Need for Systemic Change

• Systemic Failure and Political Bankruptcy (13:55 – 17:38; 20:11 – 21:54)

  • Lasn argues both left and right are failing to address existential challenges:

    “Political parties are totally bankrupt... we need a whole new kind of politics that jumps over the old bodies of the old left and right and starts thinking about the future.” (16:12 – Kalle Lasn)

  • Emphasizes dire global stakes—climate crisis, financial instability, systemic inertia.

• Meta-Memes as Vehicles of Change

  “If we can actually take some of those, what I call meta memes, these big ideas... change communication, surveillance capitalism, institute a true cost market... then something can happen.” (21:23 – Kalle Lasn)

4. Practical Revolution: How Change Might Happen

• Idealism, Hopelessness, and Global Perspective (22:06 – 24:19)

  • Lasn is both idealistic (“maybe Gen Z will suddenly get fired up”) and starkly realistic about the overwhelming challenges.
  • Adler-Bell acknowledges real progress in global living standards, yet Lasn pushes back:

    “…in Nepal and Madagascar... the poor 7 billion... life for them is really harsh... Despite life getting better in some ways, in another way, things are getting really dangerous now and we're in a doomsday scenario.” (24:24 – 25:37 – Kalle Lasn)

• Doomscrolling, Gen Z, and the Call for Global Experience (28:32 – 29:25)

  • Lasn prescribes:

    “I want them to pack up and go to Nepal... stop their doomscrolling... become a true warrior for a future that computes.” (28:41 – Kalle Lasn)

5. The Limits of ‘Niceness’ and Need for Radical Honesty

• Direct Language in Activism (30:15 – 31:52)

  “...if you think that Gen Z is really fucking up, then you have to be able to say it to them... Instead of pussyfooting around... I believe in saying it like it is now.” (30:20 – Kalle Lasn)

6. From Culture Jamming to the Meme Wars

• Defining Meme Warfare (36:16 – 38:51)

  • Old school culture jamming was offline; today’s “meme warfare” is native to digital life:

    “Culture jamming in the old days happened in a physical environment... now it happens in the virtual environment... we have to learn how to become meme warriors.” (37:16 – Kalle Lasn)

  • Lasn sees hope in global Gen Z movements that fuse online and offline activism.

• Failures in the US Context

  “In Canada and Australia and the US... we're not talking about the big ideas... We're just in an egoistic trance, scrolling away.” (39:05 – Kalle Lasn)

7. The Challenge of Persuasion Online

• Algorithmic Filters and the Need to Dismantle Surveillance Capitalism (41:46 – 43:53)
  • Questioning whether genuine persuasion is possible in a social media landscape engineered for manipulation:

    “Maybe it's impossible under the current surveillance capitalist system... The first big idea is possibly a surveillance tax... A cataclysmic kind of idea that puts a curveball into the whole surveillance capitalist system.” (42:28 – Kalle Lasn)

8. Lessons from ‘Occupy’ and Preceding Movements

• Why Movements Falter (43:53 – 46:50)
  • Occupy was a starting meme (“Ballerina on the Bull”) that spread globally, but failed to articulate “what we stand for”:

    “We were fighting against something but didn't actually articulate the big things… Now I believe we have a third crack at world revolution... Gen Z will be successful, third time lucky.” (44:32 – 46:38 – Kalle Lasn)

9. Hope, Human Ingenuity, and the Future

• Why Lasn Remains Optimistic (47:04 – 48:09)

  “I grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, which was the most beautiful 50 years in human history... I'm basically a hopeful guy. I believe in the human spirit.” (47:26 – Kalle Lasn)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the deadlock of contemporary politics:

  “What has the political left actually done? Fuck all really. What’s the political right done? Not all that much.”
  (16:05 – Kalle Lasn)

• On “meta memes”:

  “If we can actually take some of those, what I call meta memes, these big ideas...then something can happen.”
  (21:23 – Kalle Lasn)

• On Gen Z action:

  “Stop their doomscrolling and stop their hopelessness... become a true warrior for a future that computes.”
  (28:41 – Kalle Lasn)

• On new activism:

  “In the old days, culture jamming happened in a physical environment. Now, it’s meme warfare.”
  (37:16 – Kalle Lasn)

• On the future of change:

  “There needs to be some sort of a moment of truth, you know, that morphs us into that next level.”
  (39:42 – Kalle Lasn)

---

Important Timestamps

• Adbusters origin story & media censorship: 04:27 – 07:58
• Buy Nothing Day & culture jamming examples: 11:57 – 13:55
• Critique of contemporary party politics: 16:05 – 17:38
• Meta memes and deep changes needed: 21:23 – 21:54
• Global perspective on collapse: 24:24 – 25:37
• Advice for Gen Z revolutionaries: 28:32 – 29:25
• Radical honesty, activism's language: 30:15 – 31:52
• From culture jamming to meme warfare: 36:16 – 38:51
• US activist failures & meme culture: 39:05 – 39:42
• Algorithmic manipulation & need for surveillance reform: 41:46 – 43:53
• Lessons from May ‘68 & Occupy: 44:32 – 46:50
• Why Lasn is hopeful, closing remarks: 47:04 – 48:09

---

Tone & Style

• Lasn speaks bluntly, saltily, and without political correctness—self-described as a "fuck it all language."
• The conversation is passionate, skeptical, urgent, and raw, with moments of optimism and vision for a planetary future.

---

Conclusion

Kalle Lasn’s fierce critique of consumer culture, party politics, and surveillance capitalism is matched by a persistent faith in the possibility of mass awakening—what he calls the next global revolution. The tools and tactics have evolved: from analog culture jamming to digital meme warfare. But the heart of activism, for Lasn, is still about articulating big, visionary ideas and inspiring action that can disrupt the current inertia. His message to younger generations: turn away from digital numbing, experience the world, and fight for a future that is yet unwritten.

---

Transcript

[Katie Milkman]

This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab hosted by Katie Milkman, an award winning behavioral scientist and author of the best selling book how to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to [e-mail] podcast or wherever you listen to

[Stephanie Wu]

if you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat. Same I'm Stephanie Wu, Editor in Chief of Eater. We've just launched the newish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City and save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors and book right in the app. Download the [e-mail] it's free for iOS users

[Narrator/Host]

One of the most frustrating things

[Sam Adler-Bell]

about the world right now is that

[Narrator/Host]

it often feels like the most powerful people are basically edgelords announcing consequential policies by memes and shitposting. If there's an information war out there, it seems like it's already lost. But maybe the problem is that we're

[Sam Adler-Bell]

fighting the wrong battle or the right battle in the wrong way. Maybe we're bringing white papers to a jif fight. I'm Sean Elling and this is the gray area.

[Narrator/Host]

Today's guest is Kalli Lassen. He's a filmmaker, author, magazine editor and activist. Lassen founded an anti consumerist magazine called Adbusters that used culture jamming and subversion of commercial and mainstream language and imagery to put forward radical ideas, turning anti consumerism into something of an art form. You'll hear that term a few times in this episode. Culture jamming. It's basically media sabotage, taking a familiar slogan, image or brand and remixing it to show what's false, manipulative or absurd about it. It's a subversive mix of satire, art and radical action. Lassen is also one of the people who dreamed up Occupy Wall street and the ballerina on the bull image that became its symbol. Now, at 83, Lassen has published a book called Manifesto for World Revolution as a piece of political theory. It's a messy book, but the deeper argument is worth thinking about. Lassen says we're living in a dead consumerist culture, a culture that needs to be shocked back into life through art and creative rebellion. His politics are hard to pin down, partly because the ideological lines are much harder to trace these days. But Lassen is very much a man of the left, and he's taken controversial

[Sam Adler-Bell]

positions on all sorts of topics.

[Narrator/Host]

His ideas can feel like they're all over the place, and they kind of are, but in the end, they flow in a single direction toward a broader philosophy of activism, message control, and understanding the brute politics of commercial culture. All. All of which is to say this

[Sam Adler-Bell]

is a fun conversation with someone who

[Narrator/Host]

has a lot to say.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Kali Lassen, welcome to the show.

[Kalle Lasn]

Happy to be here.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

It's very cool to have you here. You have lived a very interesting life and I think it'll be a lot of fun to talk about it. So I'm pumped.

[Kalle Lasn]

Okay.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

For people who aren't familiar with you or for people who don't know anything about Ad Busters, the magazine you started in Vancouver back in 1989.

[Kalle Lasn]

Yeah.

[Narrator/Host]

What was it?

[Sam Adler-Bell]

How would you describe it? What was the mission of the thing?

[Kalle Lasn]

The mission of Ad Busters?

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Yeah.

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, actually, you know, we were a bunch of environmentalists that kept on meeting every now and again. And then something happened that we didn't like the forest industry here. It suddenly came up with a campaign that tried to make British Columbians feel better about what they're doing in the forest. Even though they were cutting the forest down, the old growth forests were disappearing fast. But they came up with this campaign, they called it Forest Forever. And they said that, hey, British Columbians, we're doing a fantastic job managing your forests. You've got forests forever. And they had full page ads in the newspapers and they had TV ads coming on. And this really pissed us off. They were basically lying to the people. So we came up with our own 30 second TV spot and we tried to tell the other side of the story. And then when I walked into the. Into the TV stations here in Vancouver and tried to buy airtime for that 30 second spot, they said to me, oh, Mr. Larson, sorry, this isn't really an ad. You can't really run this and this. Basically, they said that the other side, they can tell their story, but. But a Canadian citizen didn't have the right to walk into their TV station and put their money on the table and say, give me 30 seconds of airtime. I want to have something to say. They said, no, you can't do that. And that was the moment that AtBusters Media foundation was born. That's the moment that we started a newsletter and we started speaking back. And then I was invited on some TV shows and radio shows and, and it was a cataclysmic moment for me because I suddenly found out that you can speak back. Anyway, that's how we were born. It was born out of this, out of rage, out of anger against being censored, especially for a guy like me who was born in Estonia and in my country, you know, you weren't allowed to speak back against the government. If you were, you really suffered. And all of a sudden, you know, 50 years later, I find myself in the land of the home and this free country and, and all of a sudden, here I found out that you can't speak back against a sponsor.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Well, I know there was quite a legal battle that ensued, but were you actually able to get your ads on tv? Did it make a dent? How did that play out?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, it turned out to be sort of an interesting play because we found out that when you tell, when we told Canadians that, okay, your public broadcaster censored this ad, they refused to run this ad. Then all of a sudden everybody wanted to see the ad. So it was like an interesting activist play where the fact that we were censored actually got more people to watch the ad than if we actually got on tv because we didn't have a huge budget, we were buying fringe time slots and we wouldn't have gotten too much play on it. But because we were censored, all of a sudden, a huge percentage of the Canadian people actually saw the spot and it created a backlash.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

So why, of all the levers that you could pull, why go straight for advertising? What makes advertising such a potent political force?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, of course, in those days, that was before the Internet and basically TV was by far the most powerful social communications medium of the time. But not only that. When I lived for a few years in Japan, in Japan I had my own company and I worked together with the advertising companies there in Tokyo, and I knew all those ad guys and I learned about the power of how you build a brand and how especially spots 15 and 32nd, even 7 and a half second spots on TV can capture the public imagination.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Did that experience sort of convince you that advertising was the enemy and maybe a tool that you could use to your own ends?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, not really the enemy. I mean, I. I found out that advertising is one of the most powerful forces in the world. You know, this is, if you want to get elected or if you want to get a message across, or if you want to say something politically or launch a campaign, then a 15 second spot on TV reaching just the right kind of audience that can make a huge difference, that can tip the balance in any debate. But at the same time, I found out that these are strangely ethically ambivalent people. They would have a tobacco ad for Philip Morris or whatever. They're trying to introduce some tobacco brand into Japan. And. And I'll say to them, well, hey, why are you doing this? Don't we all know that it's creating cancer? And you're trying to sort of now introduce cancer into Japan. What the hell are you guys doing? And they said, oh, Kale, Kale, don't worry about it. Let the client worry about that. Our job is just to sort of come up with the most powerful way to get their message across. So they were sort of ethically neutral types. And so I liked the power of what they were doing, and I loved their creativity, which was sometimes I just blew me away with the subtle ways that they were able to get their message across. But ethically bad people?

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Well, you would call them ethically neutral, I would call them nihilist. But, you know, no need to split hairs.

[Kalle Lasn]

But they have. They're real human beings, you know, and they have their thing. And I think they're like many other people who work for large corporations. You know, they do their job. They think they're doing a good job. And the fact that on some larger level, their corporation is doing some really ugly, bad things, you know, I think we live in a world of that kind of ambivalence.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

So what you were doing, what you've been doing at Adbusters, you know, running these. These counter ads, Is that what you would call culture jamming?

[Kalle Lasn]

Yeah, well, that's something that we started doing in the first few years of our existence. And. And culture jamming was a term that suddenly exploded. And all of a sudden, the young people at that time, they felt like the system they were living in wasn't right. They felt like culture jamming was the answer. But, yeah, culture jamming was basically a term that we introduced. And I guess I still call myself a culture jammer, but these days, I think of myself more as sort of a cultural revolutionary. And I like to think of. I sort of zoom out and ask the question, you know, what do we need to do to survive the 21st century? That's the real question I'm trying to answer now.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

What were some examples of some of your favorite or most memorable culture jams from those early days? What are some vivid examples for people who may not know about it?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, I think that we started this day this buy Nothing Day, Buy Nothing Day. And we created a, a 30 second spot that pointed out that we in North America, we consume too much. We consume five times more than a guy in India and 10 times more than a guy in China and we have to stop. And we tried to buy airtime for that on CNN and a few other stations. And somehow this idea at that time questioning consumption was anathema. Like you even now, I guess you can't really speak back against consumption like consumption. What are you trying to do? Destroy the economy, whatever. And yeah, that was our biggest jam. We were the first people who said consumption, let's rethink consumption and asking the question, are you consuming too much? And maybe you want to experience what it feels like not to buy anything for 24 hours and find out how addictive consumption really is. And we found out that on Buy Nothing Day people just couldn't get through the day, not even one day, without being able to sort of buy a Mars bar or buy something else. So, yeah, so anyway, that was our biggest coffee shop. That's the one I appreciated the most.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

You said a minute ago that these days you think of yourself less as a jammer, culture jammer, and more as a cultural revolutionary trying to figure out how to hell to survive in the 21st century. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about your politics and where you are now and what you think we have to do.

[Kalle Lasn]

Yeah, well, culture jamming was a lot of fun and, and it was great at that time, you know, to fight back against the power of corporations that were increasingly growing more powerful and taking over the way we live and the way we eat and the way we drive and the way we, everything we do. But ultimately it didn't feel like it was enough because, you know, all of a sudden the big, the big moment for me, I guess was when I suddenly woke up to the fact that, yeah, we're now at a time when our consumption is actually creating, putting carbon into the atmosphere and actually heating up the planet. And if we keep on doing that and things get too hot, you know, then this could actually mean the end of the human race. It feels like this experiment of ours on planet Earth was suddenly in existential crisis. All of a sudden. Now we had to answer the question of how does humanity survive through the 21st century if we can't stop pushing the carbon into the atmosphere? And, and if we can't change maybe the global financial architecture, or if we can't shift the paradigm of economic science, or if we can't do some of the big heavy lifts that we have to pull off to actually survive as a people on planet Earth, then nothing else makes sense. All of a sudden, now it became a much more serious project of, of somehow heaving politics itself into a new kind of direction. It's almost like we were thinking in terms of, well, what has the political left actually done? Fuck all really. What's the political right done? Not all that much. What is all this voting for the donkey or voting for the elephant? What is all this tweedledum Tweedledee politics actually achieving? Are they actually dealing with the systemic changes that need to happen for us to make it through the 21st century? No. These political parties are totally bankrupt. They don't know what they're doing. And what we need is a whole new kind of politics that jumps over the old bodies, the dead bodies of the old left and right and starts thinking about the new kind of politics where we're not left, we're not right. We're thinking about how to, how to make our way into a future that works. And to me, that's the sort of mindset that we all have to get into now if we're actually going to avoid going into a situation in five or 10 years time where it's going to be too damn hot to even walk out in the middle of summer because it's so hot. And catastrophic events are happening all the time and the sea is rising and the coral is dying and basically our whole planetary system, this whole experiment of ours on planet Earth just basically crashes.

[Narrator/Host]

Support for the show comes from Shopify. Every thriving business starts with a series of what if questions. There's what if nobody likes me? But also what if they really, really do? There's only one way to find out and you can make it happen with help from Shopify. They say millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e commerce. From businesses just getting started to household name brands, it can help you with everything from payment processing to analytics to website design. You can choose from hundreds of templates to create a great looking website. Their email and marketing tools can help you get your name out there and stay connected with customers. And if you ever need help, Shopify's 247 award winning customer support has your back. You can turn those what ifs into a thriving business with Shopify. Today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial period today at shopify.comvox. you can go to shopify.comvox that's shopify.comvox.

[Katie Milkman]

This episode is brought to you by choiceology an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Choiceology is a show all about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like can we learn to make smarter decisions? And the power of do overs. The show is hosted by Katie Milkman. She's an award winning behavioral scientist, professor at the Wharton School, and author of the best selling book how to Change. In each episode, Katie talks to authors, historians, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how we can make better ones to avoid costly mistakes. Listen and [e-mail] podcast or find it wherever you listen.

[Brene Brown and Adam Grant]

Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant and we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop,

[Sam Adler-Bell]

a podcast that's a place for listening,

[Kalle Lasn]

wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning.

[Brene Brown and Adam Grant]

It's going to be fun. We rarely agree, but we almost never

[Sam Adler-Bell]

disagree and we're always learning.

[Brene Brown and Adam Grant]

That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Do you think that the the system we have, late stage consumer capitalism or whatever you want to call it, do you think that this system is fundamentally broken and therefore something that has to be dismantled and replaced? Do you think we are beyond reform, in other words?

[Kalle Lasn]

I think that the current system that we live in is totally fucked up here. I definitely believe that and I've been thinking about it for years and years and years. It's not a conclusion I came to easily. But I don't think that we need some sort of a revolution that throws the old out and guillotines all the CEOs and somehow puts on something totally new. I think that we have to start brainstorming about what are the deep down ideas, what are the fundamental changes that need to happen for us to have a future. And I think we've sort of zeroed in on half a dozen of them. And if we can actually take some of those, what I call meta memes, these big ideas, and if we can actually change our communication system and change surveillance capitalism and, and get rid of the mind lords, and if we can institute a true cost market, you know, that tells the ecological truth and if we can come up with a new relationship with corporations where we the people put corporations back in their box rather than putting us in their box.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

I don't disagree with your diagnosis, but obviously the question I keep asking myself is how?

[Narrator/Host]

How do we do that?

[Sam Adler-Bell]

What is the path there?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, who knows the future is always up for grabs. Anything could happen. We could suddenly find life on another planet and have some sort of a spiritual awakening on planet Earth. Or maybe, God knows, you know, maybe a religious leader will suddenly come up and a Jesus type character who suddenly makes us think differently about what it means to be alive on planet Earth. Or, or maybe Gen Z will suddenly get fired up because life becomes intolerable all of a sudden. You know, life becomes, I mean things are pretty hopeless now and a lot of Gen Z, especially in the rich countries of the world, I mean especially the men, the boys, I mean they're really feeling hopeless now. If the situation becomes so hopeless, then I think the moment will be ripe for a kind of a, an explosion of the mind. So it's very easy to say that, oh well, you know, what you're saying is, you know, it's idealistic and it's a little crazy and you're talking about magic and you know, when I passed some of this stuff by, I passed some of the stuff by Bill McKibben, you know, and he said, oh Karla, Karla, true cost markets, that's just a talking point. It'll never happen, you know, but I think that as the planet heats, as the life, as things get really bad, I think the moment will be ripe for some kind of a global revolution, hopefully a nonviolent one.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Well, let me just push on you a little bit and really against my own intuitions because I do share a lot of your concerns and I hear you man, I really hear you. But also in so many ways the

[Narrator/Host]

world is a better place than it's ever been.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Less poverty, less suffering, lower child mortality rates, more resources, a revolution in clean energy. We've had Bill McKibben on the show recently to talk about that. We are still a million miles from perfect, don't get me wrong. But we're probably always going to be a million miles from perfect. I mean, are things really that hopeless and catastrophic?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, I think that here in, in North America and in, you know, the 1, the, the rich, 1 billion, the affluent, 1 billion people on the planet, we still have it pretty good. You know, the, for us the shit hasn't hit the wall yet, you know, but, but I, I, when I was young I traveled for three or four years around the world and, and, and I can, and I have a feeling that in, you know, in Nepal and in Madagascar and in Thailand and in a lot of other countries in the world, basically the poor, the not so rich, 7 billion people on the planet. I think life for them is really harsh. It's scary and it's getting worse by the day. And even though on some sort of a. If you zoom right out and you say, oh, hasn't poverty actually got better? And haven't we got all these medical breakthroughs and haven't we done all this? I think it's all true. What you say is true, but nonetheless, that's like scratching. You have a monkey on your back and the monkey is scratching your itch. What's really happening is that we're in a sort of a doomsday scenario where the planet is heating up and our leaders are doing nothing about it. We've sort of given up on stopping our carbon emissions, especially with Trump in power now and leading the. The charge. And our global financial system is totally bankrupt with a trillion dollars of money makes money makes money kind of stuff floating around the Internet every day. And I have a feeling that despite the fact that in some ways life is getting better, in another way, things are getting really dangerous now and we're in a doomsday scenario and if we don't do something about it, then we're going to spiral into a long dark age. I think that we're at the. We're slowly spiraling into a long dark age that could last thousands of years.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

You might be right. I think deep, deep down, I definitely think you are right, that there's a misalignment between our actual interest as human beings on the planet and the incentives driving our institutions. But I honestly don't know if you're right, that the system is going to collapse soon, which is something you do say in the book and you're kind of saying here. I mean, do you ever think that maybe you underestimate the adaptability of this thing to just keep lumbering along and course correcting just enough to not die?

[Kalle Lasn]

I think that, like, I think this is sort of the first world perspective that you're giving me. I think you're. This is the way it feels, you know, right here in Vancouver or in New York or wherever you are. But, you know, recently, if you look at the news recently, then in Nepal and in Madagascar and in Thailand and in a whole bunch of other countries, there were many revolutions. There were young people who just literally couldn't take the degradation of their lives anymore. And they rose up and they burned their Parliament houses and, and they try to pull off revolutions in their countries. And when I look at the devastation that the climate change is causing every day now, it feels like in country after country all over the world, things are just getting dramatically worse all the time. I don't think that we're going to be able to muddle our way out of this. I think that for us to actually have any kind of a future, we have to stop thinking that, let's just ignore it, it's fine, it's going to be no longer, you know, let's just not worry about it. Somehow we'll muddle through. I don't think we're going to muddle. Through. I think we're heading for a doomsday scenario. I think that we're spiraling into a long dark age. And the sooner we wake up to that devastating fact, the fact that this human experiment of ours on planet Earth is now crashing, the sooner we wake up to that fact, the quicker we'll be able to come up with the big ideas, the meta memes, and change our global system in some way that is truly sustainable.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

So to the Gen zers that are watching or listening to this, since they're going to have to save our asses, what do you want them to do?

[Kalle Lasn]

I want them to pack up and go to Nepal. I want them to pack up and travel around the world a little bit and find out what life is really like in the rest of the world. I want them to stop their doom scrolling and stop their hopelessness and stop their all that sort of culture, culture not jamming culture negativity that they're in right now. I want them to stop arguing about which toilet you're allowed to go into and I want them to go and find out what life is really like and then to become a true warrior for a future that computes. The Gen Z in places like Nepal is a quite a different kind of an animal, political animal compared to the Gen Z here in America or Canada.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

I very much agree with your diagnosis of consumer culture and the ways it alienates us, the ways it numbs us. And I can see, especially as I get older, how easy it is to accept things as they are, to just acclimate to the culture. I guess the question here is do

[Narrator/Host]

you think it's helpful, even necessary, to

[Sam Adler-Bell]

judge people, or do you think it's more important to focus on the systems and the institutions and have sympathy for individual consumers who are as a matter

[Narrator/Host]

of fact part of the problem, but

[Sam Adler-Bell]

they're also conditioned by the culture in which they're raised?

[Kalle Lasn]

Yeah, well, you know, I think that,

[Sam Adler-Bell]

I know it's a tough question.

[Kalle Lasn]

Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's sort Of a. Like, I have a feeling that especially on the left, you know, we're sort of in a culture now where you have to be nice, you know, you, you can't sort of attack people head on. You, you can't, you, you can't do. You have somehow have to respect the other human being and so on. But I think that if for somebody like me who really truly believes that we're at the early stages of a spiral into a really bad place, I think it's time to change the aesthetic of how we even speak. I think it's time for us to come up with a sort of a fuck it all language to say, look, we're in, you know, this human experiment of ours on planet Earth is in mortal danger. And we have to say it like it is. We have to learn to be more direct. We have to, you know, if you think that the Gen Z is really fucking up, then you have to be able to say it to them in a way that it's like you really mean it, you know, and instead of pussyfooting around and somehow expecting that, you have to live up to this idea of being a nice guy and, and not pissing. Anyway, I believe in saying it like it is now. And whatever few years I have left in my life, I'm going to speak a sort of fuck it all language that exudes what I believe in. And what I believe in is that we need to fundamentally change a hell of a lot of things and we better get used to it and wake up to it.

[Narrator/Host]

I mean, do you think there aren't plenty of people saying that now?

[Sam Adler-Bell]

And the problem isn't that no one's saying it, it's that no one's listening. It's that to your point earlier, we're too busy fucking streaming Netflix all night and tweeting.

[Kalle Lasn]

I think there's a lot of talk, you know, and I think there's a lot of people who believe, you know, roughly what I'm saying. Perhaps. But the problem is that in our culture right now there's too much talk and not enough action, you know, So a lot of people are able to discuss this thing, I guess, the way we're doing it right now. But, but how do you then, if you really believe that some metametic transformations have to happen in this world, then you have to ask yourself, how do we pull it off? So, for example, recently we had this 7 million people go out and do the no Kings thing. And from my perspective, it was a total disaster. It was totally reactive. The 7 billion went out and they didn't have a vision of their own. They didn't tell people what they stood for. They basically went out and pointed the finger at Donald Trump and said, hey man, you're a bad man, you're a king and we don't like you. So what did that achieve? What we should have done instead of seven, instead of having 2,500 protests all around the country. But what we should have had is 250,000 small brainstorming sessions around the country where 5, 10, 20 people get together and ask themselves, what do we need to do to have a future that computes? And if we had 250,000 people, 250,000 brainstorming sessions like that, then something will percolate up from there and we can reach a point in a few weeks or a few months time when we know what we stand for, we know what the big ideas are that we're willing to fight for. And then we go out and protest and say something positive. We tell the people of America what we believe in. We stand for something. Instead of this reactive bullshit that happened during no Kings.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Well, what is in the way? I mean, I take your point that too much of politics now is just negation. It's just saying no to shit, especially on the left. What is standing in the way of that? What is standing in the way of that positive political project? Is it we don't, we lack a shared story? We don't have some kind of coherent ideology around which to organize what is in the way? Why can't we do that? Or why haven't we? I should say I don't know.

[Kalle Lasn]

I honestly don't know. I've been asking myself that question for years and I don't really know. I think that surveillance capitalism has dulled our senses. It is snuffed out some of our empathy. And you know, we hear about 20,000 bodies of children being ripped apart in Gaza and somehow it's kind of abstract, it doesn't quite compute. You know, we say, oh, somehow it may be okay, you know, but it's not okay. Like, you know, to rip apart the bodies of 20,000 children is not okay. So yeah, we need more people who, who have the power to sort of stand up against horrible injustices that are happening right now, not just in Palestine, but in Sudan and in a lot of other places. And we have to wake up to the fact that it's our over consumption, our decadent ways in the 1 rich billion people of the world. It's our decadent ways. That have created a lot of this suffering that's happening all around the world. So we need to wake up. I don't know how to wake people up. I mean, I write books and I do stuff and whatever, but something has to wake us up, you know, And I think if something spiritual like a new Jesus or whatever doesn't come up and wake us up, then maybe the sheer pain of living in a world where life is getting tougher and tougher and tougher day after day after day, and it gets to the point where you just can't take it anymore. And then you're ready to stand up and wake up one morning and you're ready to fight.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Well, I don't know about a new Jesus, but culture jamming is certainly was the thing to wake people up. And you know, you were doing memetic warfare before it was a thing. But, you know, now the media environment has, has caught up with you in lots of ways. Everything is memes now. I mean, memes, that is how ideas move through the culture. And you know, looking through those old ad buster issues, they feel very modern. I mean, they feel like they are of the Internet age. But, but Adbusters was born in the old media world where it was a lot easier to shock people with images, but now we are drowning in images all the time. What is culture jamming 2.0?

[Kalle Lasn]

Yeah, well, I think that culture jamming is still alive, but I don't call it culture jamming anymore, really. I now call it meme warfare. I think that culture jamming has more meme warfare and that we.

[Narrator/Host]

What's the difference?

[Kalle Lasn]

The difference is that culture jamming in the old days happened in a physical environment. And now culture jamming happens in the, in the virtual environment. And so it's, it's now a college jamming is now a meme war. And I think that we have to learn, I think the people who really want to be revolutionaries, the people who really want to sort of become effective activists, I think we have to learn how to become meme warriors, you know, and at the moment, I have a feeling that governments and political parties and especially mega corporations, they have learned how to play the meme war. They know how to fight the meme war. Whereas we the people are still at the early stages of not quite having figured out how to fight A memoir and how to win. And I think that there are a few tantalizing, like for example, the one dozen kind of mini revolutions that have sprung up recently in Nepal and in Bangladesh and in Madagascar and seven or eight other places. I mean, here, all of a sudden Gen Z was doing something on TikTok and then they moved on to Discord. And then they also talked to each other in the physical world and I think they cracked the code. I think those in those 12 countries that have recently had a mini revolution, the Gen Z has actually cracked the code of how to win the meme war, how to win the planetary endgame. So I think that what has happened recently in those, those poor countries, you know, those mini revolutions, I think they, they give me hope.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Well, I mean, do you, do you see examples of people in the States or movements engaging in memetic warfare in a way that you think is effective and, and something to, to model?

[Kalle Lasn]

No, at the moment, what I see happening in the most of the, like in Canada and Australia and the United States, I mean, to me it feels horribly ineffective. I mean, we're not talking about the big ideas, we're not fighting for the huge heaves. We're not launching third political parties or trying to implement two cost markets, or trying to shift economic paradigms, or trying to sort of vanquish the mind lords. We're just, I don't know, we're just sort of in some egoistic trance,

[Narrator/Host]

just

[Kalle Lasn]

somehow scrolling away and then being totally caught up in the surveillance capitalist panopticon. And very little positive change is actually happening. You know, so there needs to be some sort of a moment of truth, you know, that morphs us into that next level.

[The Vergecast Host]

All the way back in the year 2000, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had this big idea that maybe the future wasn't typing, it was talking to your computer with your voice. Jeff Bezos didn't invent this idea, but he did push his team to invent what would become Alexa and, and the Amazon Echo. Two things that brought voice computing into millions of homes around the world. This week on Version History, our chat show about the best and worst and most interesting products in tech history. We're telling the whole story of the Echo and how Amazon managed to get it right and still kind of miss the future. That's version history on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. This Week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. And so this week on the Vergecast, we're taking stock of where Apple is five decades, decades into its existence. How's the company doing? And we also decided to do something slightly ridiculous, which is identify and rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. After a lot of hours of debating, I think we finally got there. That's on the Vergecast this week, along with the state of OpenAI as it raises a ton of money, tries to go public, and tries to convince you that you also love AI. All that on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

The difficult question for any political activist now, and we're kind of circling around it, is, you know, how do you persuade people? How do you grow your movement? I mean, that's. That is fundamentally the game. And memes mutate a lot faster now because of the pace online. And what they seem to do best isn't persuade. They seem to be much better at just signaling in group identity. But you want the opposite, right? I mean, you want to cut through the tribal bullshit. Have you. Has anyone figured out how to do this in the digital world, reliably, how

[Narrator/Host]

to do ads without feeding the engagement

[Sam Adler-Bell]

algos in the worst way?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, you know, maybe given the current surveillance system that we have that's based on half a dozen of these platforms that. That are sort of run by the algorithms of maybe under that system, what you're asking for is impossible. Maybe the first thing we need to do is to dismantle surveillance capitalism itself. Maybe it's impossible under the current surveillance capitalist system for us human beings to actually talk to each other with those algorithms being the filter that decides, you know, how we talk to each other and what gets through and what doesn't. And maybe we need to sort of come up with the first big idea, which is possibly maybe something like a surveillance tax, where we say to the mind lords, okay, you want to spy on me? You want to take my personal information? Okay, first of all, you have to ask my permission to do that. And if I do give you my permission, then maybe I want to charge you a fraction of a cent every time you do it. And all of a sudden to come up with some sort of a cataclysmic kind of idea that puts a curveball into the whole surveillance capitalist system. Maybe it's only that moment when we can really start talking to each other again and really start persuading each other again. Because at the moment, it feels like whatever we do under the current algorithms of the Mind Lords, nothing can actually happen.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

The transition or the path from memetic warfare to actual power and change is always interesting to me. And, you know, you talk about it in the book in the context of Occupy, right? You were very instrumental in the creation of that movement. It started in many ways as a meme that the ballerina on the bull, and that became a camp. And then it became a worldwide thing, but it never quite translated into institutional change. Looking back on that, what was the lesson for you? That the establishment is too entrenched to reform? That there's too much polarization, too much surveillance, too much control of the media, too much whatever?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, you know, I was politicized in 1968 when a small group of people in the Latin quarter of Paris suddenly had a little uprising there. And that caught the imagination of the world and it spread to thousands of campuses and other youth groups around the world. And in 1968, for the first time, I saw the possibility that world revolution really is possible. It is possible for the young people of the world to suddenly rise up and say, we don't like what these old fogies are doing. We don't like, we want to have a new world, we don't want to live in the old world, we want a new world and we're going to pull it off. And they failed. Fifty years later, Occupy Wall street was sort of like a replay of that where some sort of a, you know, we sort of sparked it and we said, okay, let's go and occupy this iconic heart of global capitalism in Wall Street. And it happened. And suddenly occupations spread all around the world. At the height of Occupy Wall street there was over 2000 occupations all around the world. And again winter came and we didn't quite have our memes together. We were fighting against something but we didn't actually articulate the big things that we stood for. Same as the no kings. And now I believe that the situation is much more serious and we have a third crack at world revolution. Now I think that the Gen Z and maybe the generation that comes after Gen Z, they will be successful third time lucky. I think that there's going to be a global uprising first of all in a bunch of little countries like Nepal and Madagascar and so on. And eventually it'll happen again in rich countries as well. And there's going to come a moment when the young people of the world rise up and say we're not going to make it through on the old order. We need a new world order. We know what the big ideas are, we know what we want to achieve. Here it is, here's our platform, let's fight for it. And there's going to be a world revolution, a non violent, hopefully nonviolent third revolution that will actually put into place all those big ideas without which a future is impossible.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

What gives you hope that the next not necessarily occupy a movement, but the next anti corporate movement, anti power movement what gives you hope that that might succeed where Occupy failed?

[Kalle Lasn]

Well, I think we're learning. I think, you know, we made a step forward from 1968 to, to, to 2011, and, and now, you know, 15 years later, I think that we're much more savvy, and we know that the stakes are much more serious. We know that that is the whole fate of this experiment of ours on planet Earth is at stake. And I grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, which was the most beautiful 50 years in human history. You know, anything was possible. You know, I went to Japan, launched a company, made a million bucks. You know, and so I'm basically a hopeful guy. I believe in the human spirit. And I also believe that the situation is going to get really dire in the next few years and the combination of things growing really dire and being optimistic about the power of the human being. I think between those two, I think we're not going to muddle through like you said, but we're going to push our way through.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Is there anything else you want to say before we get up out of here?

[Kalle Lasn]

No, I think. I don't know. You've. I've enjoyed looking at your smiling face, and you've asked some questions that allowed me to sort of get a few punches in. And I enjoy talking to you.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

This is a real pleasure for me. I admire the life you live, the commitment and the engagement over so many years. I think you're a real one in that way, and I have a lot of respect for that. Whether we agree about everything or not is beside the point. I appreciate that you. You give a shit and you say what you believe, and you've been pretty consistent for your entire life as far as I can tell. So I respect that.

[Kalle Lasn]

Okay, thank you.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Thank you so much. All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode, but as always, we want to know what you think. So drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or you can leave us

[Narrator/Host]

a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749.

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Please.

[Narrator/Host]

Also, if you can rate review, subscribe

[Sam Adler-Bell]

to the podcast that helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Thor.

[Narrator/Host]

New writer edited by Jorge Jest, engineered by Christian Ayala. Fact checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex

[Sam Adler-Bell]

Overington wrote our theme music. Episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays.

[Narrator/Host]

Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and

[Sam Adler-Bell]

if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.

[Kalle Lasn]

Sam.