He sat transfixed. Staring.

Paralyzed, it seemed.

There’s a saying: The lights are on, but there’s nobody home. Most often this is used to describe the senile, the catatonic, the mentally ill, or the paralyzed unfortunates we seem to encounter with ever-greater frequency these days.

He could do nothing but stare straight ahead. In turn, I found myself staring at him. The lights are on, but there’s nobody home. If he knew I was in the room, he didn’t show it.

"Jason." His mom spoke, trying to elicit the tiniest response. "Jason…son?" He didn’t twitch.

I felt uncomfortable being there, seeing this. Shouldn’t this be a private moment? If he didn’t respond she’d be understandably upset and if he did eventually respond, wouldn’t her joy be best shared only with him?

No recognition. Autism, I wondered? "Jason, honey, come on, sweetie." She rummaged through her purse, looking for her keys. "Jason." Nothing. "Honey?" Still nothing, and I tensed, anticipating the explosion a millisecond before it occurred.

"Jason, turn that damn television set off right now!" she screamed.

He snapped out of it, suddenly transported at light speed back into the living room. He stared at her, looking like a junkie on the nod, and I could see the question forming in his seven-year-old skull: Why is mommy yelling at me?

"Let’s go, son! We’re going to be late!" And as she turned to leave, thinking her son was finally on her wavelength, he turned once again toward the television set and…

…sat. Transfixed. Staring.

There’s the environment, and then there’s the mental environment. Both are subject to pollution, and both have their champions. Chief among the champions of the mental environment is a group of people headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, known as The Media Foundation.

The Media Foundation is a media activist organization counteracting those who would pollute our physical and mental environments. They describe themselves as "Neither left nor right, but straight ahead." Their supporters include media and environmental strategists, teachers and students of media literacy, communications professors, media professionals, ad agency executives, think tanks, and average citizens worried about what television is doing to their kids…and to adults, for that matter.

They also publish ADBUSTERS magazine, an intelligent, at least somewhat irreverent quarterly journal. ADBUSTERS is "dedicated to reinventing the outdated paradigms of our consumer culture and building a brave new understanding of living." They’ve devised an activist movement known as culture jamming.

Culture jamming takes various forms. The Media Foundation has created brilliant 30-second television spots and parody print ads, which take the very techniques employed by the sophisticated, savvy marketing pros and turn those techniques against them…a kind of media Aikido which has the managers of local television stations and network brass alike falling all over themselves. While The Media Foundation has actually managed to buy air time for these important spots in a few rare cases, for the most part they are never aired locally or nationally…the "suits" are simply too scared to do so. We wouldn’t want the consumer/catatonic viewer actually thinking about what he or she allows into his/her head, would we?

A rather controversial technique in the culture jamming toolbox is known as "Billboard Liberation." Guerilla activists—acting on their own initiative—alter billboards with the creative use of spray paint, completely obfuscating the original brainwashing message. It leaves observers wondering about the thousands of messages shoved into their brains on a daily basis: When you first view a liberated billboard, it’s much easier to see how we’ve all been led down the path. A liberated billboard, you see, helps snap you out of the trance.

The Media Foundation also organizes events like "TV Turn-Off Week" (held each April) and "Buy Nothing Day" each November…timed, appropriately enough, to coincide with the busiest shopping day of the year: the day after Thanksgiving.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kalle Lasn, head honcho of The Media Foundation and ADBUSTERS magazine. In print, without the benefit of experiencing his even-toned, reasonable inflection, his comments may sometimes appear a bit harsh, as if they’re coming from a pissed-off college kid. In truth, Lasn is a mature, friendly, thoughtful, and pleasant conversationalist who graciously spent a couple of hours on the phone with me patiently answering my questions. While he’ll be the first to admit that we’ve a long way to go in our culture jamming mission, Lasn also suggests we’re steadily building toward a critical mass which will eventually—hopefully!—result in a Brave New World consisting of informed, conscious people who are skeptical of efforts by the advertisers to annex our individual and collective mental environments.

Our organization was catalyzed out of an incident that occurred in 1989. Here in British Columbia we have wonderful forests, and our biggest industry is harvesting those forests. Anyway, the forest industry here had a $6 million campaign trying to convince British Columbians that they—the forest industry—were doing a wonderful job of managing our forests. A few environmentalists, including myself and a man named Bill Schmalz, came up with a counter-campaign that said, "No, you guys are NOT doing such a wonderful job managing our forests." When we tried to buy air time for this counter-spot of ours, none of the television stations would sell it to us. It was this realization, that there is no democracy on the TV airwaves, that gave birth to our organization.

This fight to get our version of reality on TV happened as soon as our ad was rejected. We went on television and radio talk shows, we put out press releases, we challenged the TV industry here in British Columbia, and there was a lot of public support for us. One of the things that grew out of all that was ADBUSTERS magazine, and very shortly after that we began our non-profit organization called The Media Foundation.

Every now and then we receive contributions, but most of our funding comes from sale of the magazine. Circulation is climbing; we’re up to about 40,000 copies per quarter, with about twenty thousand in the US, ten thousand in Canada, and ten thousand in the rest of the world; those are approximate figures.

I notice in reading the magazine and in visits to your website that much of your attention is directed toward television, much more so than to other media, like print and radio. Are you concerned exclusively with television?

No, we focus on all the media, but we believe that television is by far the most dominant social communication media of our time. I remember listening to radio with my family, and it was a powerful way to tell stories but television, with the visuals and the music can really pull you in and can make you believe that what you see is a form of real life. Television is a much more powerful device in terms of being able to press people’s emotional buttons.

If you want to effect any kind of social change, you have to use television to do it. It’s no longer enough to take out a little ad in a newspaper or put out a press release or to wave banners around in the streets. If you want to change society, you’ve got to go to television.

Television is like the command center of our consumer culture. Television is where this illusion that we’re living is instigated…this illusion that we have to keep on growing, that happiness comes from buying products, that everything is just fine with the environment, and that the world is unfolding as it should. This whole illusion is mainly propagated by television, and if we want to change anything, to come up with alternative visions of the future, then we have to break that bubble; we have to break that illusion.

I’m fifty-five years old, so I remember when television first came around. The buzz at that time around television was very similar to the buzz around cyberspace now; you know, it was going to change the world! It was going to create a wonderful global village where we’re all educated and understand each other, and it was really going to be a wonderful thing for all of us. But slowly, over the next thirty or forty years, the public interest component of television was eroded away. The commercial interest started to dominate as corporations and advertisers realized they could use this "salesman in every living room" to create the sort of society that they wanted, to sell the sort of products they wanted to sell.

About five or ten years ago we saw the total triumph of commercial forces on television, and today television has become very much a mass-merchandising tool. The broadcasters are selling our attention spans to the highest bidders.

You know, the cost of producing a program is about $3,000 to $5,000 a minute. But for the ads, it’s actually closer to $100,000. So the production values are very, very high…they pull out all the stops. All the very best minds—the most creative, artistic, cinematic minds—are working for the ad industry.

Twelve minutes of every television hour in Canada is advertising; in your country, I think it’s fifteen minutes of every hour. Now, I think fifteen minutes per hour of this kind of onslaught will eventually have a very profound impact on you. That’s the reason they’re so frightened of our "Subvertisements," of our "Uncommercials." Because if they sell us the air time, we have the power to pop that bubble…the power to say, "Hold on a second. What about TV addiction?" or "Hold on a second. Maybe you shouldn’t buy a car; maybe you should buy a bicycle instead," or maybe, "Hold on a second. Maybe you shouldn’t be eating so many Big Macs because they contain so much fat…maybe you should change your diet." Those kind of messages on commercial television would absolutely pop their bubble.

That’s why they’re refusing to allow us on the air, even though the airwaves legally belong to you and me, to the public. The airwaves are only entrusted to these broadcasters by the FCC or CRTC [Canada’s equivalent of the FCC] for five to seven years at a time, and they’re supposed to be working in the public interest. It’s outrageous, really, that a citizen can’t walk into his or her local TV station, put the money on the table, and say, "Hey. Give me thirty seconds of air time. I’ve got something to say." It’s quite outrageous that we don’t have this freedom to buy air time.

The ideal situation would be a free marketplace of ideas, where someone could come on and say, for instance, "Hey, why don’t you buy my car? It’s a fantastic car," and somebody else could come on and say, "No, we should really be weaning ourselves off the automobile and explore more sensible alternative transportation." That kind of free marketplace of ideas is something we desperately need in North America, and I think we’re living under some kind of illusion that we live in a wonderful democracy, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, when in fact a citizen can’t even walk into a local TV station and say his or her own piece!

But it shows to what extent we’re in this media-consumer trance. With our Foundation, for the past seven years, we’ve been saying, "Hold on a second. There’s something terribly wrong! We can’t buy air time." But this makes very, very few waves…the TV executives can just spew their blather and nobody really gives a damn. It’s as if we’re living some sort of Orwellian illusion. We can’t say our piece, we can’t create an alternative future, and yet somehow we keep dashing off to the malls and eating our Big Macs and running around in our cars, and doing all these things the television tells us to do.

Commercial television has many things wrong with it. There are certain taboo subjects, never to be discussed. One is television addiction. They’ll have all kinds of programs about everything from kinky pornography to everything you can imagine, but they’ll never seriously tackle the problem of television addiction.

Secondly, they’ll very rarely if ever talk about the problem of over-consumption. They’re in the business of selling things. If someone comes on and says, "Over-consumption is a huge problem in our society. Americans are only 5% of the people in the world, but we’re consuming a third of the world’s resources and spewing a third of the world’s toxic waste, and that’s too much. We can’t keep going on like this," well, that upsets the apple cart. That sort of message never comes through on television. That’s not the sort of message commercial television likes to put out.

Commercial television is a business, and it’s a business of selling audiences to advertisers. Therefore, it has its own very special dynamics. It is, of course, a numbers game, where the more numbers you have, the more you can charge for your thirty-second time slot. That means they’ll create programs that are good vehicles for the ads. A program about over-consumption, then, just obviously wouldn’t work. No advertiser would want to be on a program that keeps saying, "We’re consuming too much!"

They also like to produce programs that appeal to upscale viewers. They’d rather have a hundred thousand rich people watching a program than a hundred thousand poor people. The programs, then, are designed to appeal to such upscale people who can be convinced to dash off to the malls.

The past two years, we were actually successful in buying air time on CNN for our "Buy Nothing Day." The reason we succeeded is that the Wall Street Journal reporter who was doing a story on "Buy Nothing Day" got wind of the fact that nobody would sell us air time. The reporter phoned CNN and said, "Why aren’t you selling air time to The Media Foundation in Vancouver?" Within two hours, they changed their mind and said, "Oh! We have no problem selling them air time!" So it’s wonderful to see that spot breaking into the air waves.

Right now we’re trying to buy thirty seconds of air time for the "Buy Nothing Day" spot from ABC, CBS, and NBC and they’re stonewalling us. We can’t put our message on the air.

Every time one of our spots does air it generates an incredible response. We have a video that has a dozen or so of our most powerful Uncommercials on it, and there are about 10,000 copies of that video circulating around communication departments of universities, media literacy classes, and high schools, and they also air quite frequently on public-access television programs.

Still, buying air time on commercial stations is something we’ve rarely achieved. Here in Canada a couple of years ago we were able to buy thirty seconds of air time to run one of our anti-car spots. But the very next week, Toyota and Pirelli complained and we were knocked off the air again. We actually have a court case against the TV stations here, winding its way through the courts. We’re also trying to launch a First Amendment legal action against ABC, CBS, and NBC in the United States, because for the last six years they’ve consistently refused to air any of our spots in the cities where we’ve tried to run the ads: Boston, Los Angeles and New York. We’ve just found a lawyer in Los Angeles willing to take this on, so we may be embarking on this action very soon now.

It feels to me like it will be a very long fight. We’ve already been fighting for 7 or 8 years. Recently there was a show called Affluenza on PBS. I was interviewed for that show and managed to tell the few million viewers that I can’t buy air time. This generated a certain amount of interest but it doesn’t really seem to be an issue that captures people’s imagination any more. Americans and Canadians enjoy our freedoms, and I don’t think we’re going to forever tolerate a system that keeps people off the air. But somehow something has happened to our spirit, and these kind of freedom issues don’t seem to motivate us as much as they used to. I think to some degree we’re disempowered and dispirited at the moment.

Almost none. We get a little more response from the CRTC. They at least answer my letters, talk to me on the phone, they ask the TV stations to account for their actions, but they never enforce anything…they just say, "The TV station has the right, for the five years we’ve granted them a license, to run things any way they like." But all the messages and petitions and so on we’ve sent to the FCC are just met with silence. They are simply uninterested in this kind of issue. They have a long history of going to the same cocktail parties as the broadcasters, and they’re part of the same media culture. They see themselves dealing with the larger issues of bandwidth allocation, and the idea of public access to the airwaves is something they want to keep under wraps, I guess.

So what we’re trying to do is launch a culture jamming movement…a media reform movement to get things back in balance again.

[Laughs] Concerning Billboard Liberation, some people don’t like the fact that there’s mutilation of someone else’s property—the billboard—but civil disobedience has a long and honorable tradition throughout the last two or three thousand years of Western history. So I don’t mind people who say, "I’m prepared to go to jail for defacing these billboards."

In some cities like New York and Toronto, there are grass-roots Billboard Liberation movements with up to a hundred people who go around doing this, and they’ve managed to liberate so many billboards in their cities that the cities have a different feel. If you drive around Toronto or New York you get the feeling that, yeah, there are people putting out the same old messages on these billboards but also that there’s a resistance movement of people who don’t like their public spaces being taken up that way, who are trying to co-opt that sort of business. So they do make their cities look different, and put out the message that there is a resistance movement.

Yes, it can pop the bubble, just like an Uncommercial can break the trance on TV. There are some people in Great Britain who have developed something called "glop art," where they take chewing gum wads and shoot them up onto the faces of billboard models. There are various methods people use to re-frame these product messages.

We have a similar philosophy. We figure there’s no way we’re going to get co-opted by advertisers, but if we’re doing something that’s interesting and people want to get involved, they’ll eventually end up subscribing, or buying the magazine on the newsstand, or buying our video, or whatever.

However, our philosophy differs somewhat in that we do accept ads, even though very few people want to advertise in a magazine called ADBUSTERS! [laughs] We have a philosophy that our magazine is a free marketplace of ideas, and we will accept any kind of an "idea" ad, even if we don’t agree with the idea. So, for example, if an anti-abortion group wants to put an ad in our magazine, then we will run it. And, if a pro-abortion group wants to run an ad, we’ll gladly sell them space as well. That policy exists for "idea" ads or "advocacy" ads.

When it comes to product ads, we have a very straightforward policy: We may run it if we like the product or if it’s something our readers may be interested in. But if we don’t like the product, then we reserve the right to reject the ad.

Yes. I feel that even if somebody I don’t like—for instance, a skinhead or a Nazi— wants to come in, pay the money, and run the ad, I would rather do that than say, "Listen, I don’t like what you’re saying and I don’t want to run your ad." When it comes to ideas I think we have to have the courage to have a philosophy: May the best idea win. Because that’s exactly what I object to when I go to ABC and try to buy 30 seconds of air time: I don’t like the fact that they can say to me, "Sorry, I don’t like your ad. I’m not going to run it!" Of course, there’s a big difference between the public airwaves, which are leased to them, and a private magazine owned by our group. There’s a difference between private and public ownership.

We have a story about that in the Autumn issue of ADBUSTERS. I’m not sure if they’ve actually gone ahead and painted the ad yet, but the fact that they have this kind of a deal is something we verified by talking to the headmaster of the school.

Many high schools now have Channel One beamed into them every morning. The broadcast is a current affairs program but it does contain a couple of minutes of ads, which is a rather incredible incursion into schools which heretofore have been ad-free zones. Universities are often so strapped for money that corporations are moving in and making exclusive deals with them, so that Pepsi, for instance, is the only cola sold. School buses sometimes have ads on them. So there’s an incursion into this previously sacrosanct realm.

It’s so close to the truth that most people, when we first ran that story in the magazine, believed it. Some people, even after reading the tag line which reads, "New York Times, 1999" thought it was a misprint and they still believed it. We’re a culture that is very, very close to actually doing something like that. There are cases, of course, of people who think the Nike logo is so damned cool that they actually tattoo it on their body. There are many Nike employees who for whatever reason have decided to tattoo the Nike "swoosh" onto their bodies.

We live in an age where governments are losing their power but corporations are really on the rise. They’re filling the void governments leave behind. Whether it’s our nutritional agenda—what we eat—or our transportation agenda—what we drive—or the way we feel about our sexuality and our bodies—the fashion agenda—more and more, in all these areas of our life, the corporations are learning how to manipulate our lifestyles and how we feel. I think this tattooing of corporate logos on our bodies is a scary phenomenon. If we don’t watch it we’re going to be living in a future that’s very scary.

That’s right. Right now in the U.S. there are four very large media corporations. Time-Warner, Disney, Westinghouse, and one other whose name escapes me at present. But if you look at those four corporations you find out that they own TV stations, they own video rental outlets, they own publishing companies, radio stations, and daily newspapers. In Canada, more than half the daily newspapers are owned by one company. We’re living in an age of media monopoly where Disney, for instance, can have ads for its latest movie appear on ABC and can have stories appear in a lot of newspapers. They can come at you from a million different angles because they own the whole mental environment, to some degree. It’s quite easy for these mega-corporations to massage our minds.

In 1989 when we first launched ADBUSTERS there was a section called "Battle of the Minds." We included all these encroachments into our mental environment. We documented examples like the golf courses which put ads in the bottom of the cup so that when you lifted the golf ball out, there was an ad there. It started off almost as a joke, how the marketers are finding all these crazy ways of bombarding us with ads, but it doesn’t feel so much like a joke any more. In Vancouver or Toronto, you walk in to the restroom and there’s an ad stuck there above the urinal or in the stall! Some places have even put little televisions in the wall above the urinals.

We documented one company that tried to put a billboard up in space with a satellite, and they would have logos right there next to the moon. That hasn’t quite come off yet but they’re working on it. So there’s a colonization of our mental environment. According to the Wall Street Journal we’re already getting three thousand advertising messages a day, seeping into our brains from all sorts of places.

Every April we have a "TV Turn-Off Week." Hundreds of thousands of people do try to go on a media fast for a week. Some schools now challenge their children to have a week-long media fast. Many people succeed, and even those who don’t succeed realize what an incredibly powerful addiction television is. It’s like giving up smoking; after two days you can’t take it any more and you’ve just got to turn the damned thing on! Otherwise you just can’t go on with your life!

My TV-addict friends turn it into a joke. It’s like smoking was thirty years ago. We made jokes about "coffin nails," etc. but we really didn’t take it that seriously until just recently, and I think it’ll take some doing before TV addicts take it seriously as well.

But again, I don’t think the medium of television itself is really the problem. If television was more community based, if people with dissenting messages were allowed air time, if some sort of balanced could be reached, I think television could be a wonderful tool. But there’s something terribly wrong about the way we’ve allowed the medium to develop over the past fifty years.

You know, the incidence of mood disorders has been rising quite dramatically over the past thirty or forty years, and nobody can quite figure out why. My theory is that it has something to do with the rise of the mass media and the commercial clutter seeping into our brains, from the moment we’re babies crawling in front of the TV, right up until the time we’re ready to die. So I think we’re on to something significant here when we talk about the pollution of the mental environment and the mood disorders it creates and the TV addiction, etc. It’s an untapped territory we ought to explore.

That’s definitely part of it. The other part of it is that the advertisers are using more and more shock tactics. You get jaded. Let’s say you’re watching one of those TV shows that depict emaciated kids in the Third World who they’re desperately trying to raise money for. At first you say, "My God, I can’t believe it!" and you’re upset and you contribute money to the cause. But after so many times, when you realize they’re actually trying to manipulate you with the worst kind of images they can possibly find and you can’t stand looking at another dying baby, then you switch channels. You become jaded to dying babies.

Advertisers also use sex to sell their products, but after a while you become jaded on sex. They use violence, and after a while you become jaded on that. All of this jadedness eventually adds up to a mood disorder, and, in order for the advertisers to reach you they’re going to have to turn up the voltage on their ads. It gets ever crazier and eventually you’re mentally sick.

It’s a way of being cool. The Nike "swoosh" has lately become so cool that people with no endorsement agreement with Nike will still wear a cap or T-shirt with that symbol affixed, just to show they’re cool. Somehow they’ve managed to make their product seem so cool that people will pay big bucks to advertise the product for them.

That’s why it’s important to have some Culture jamming techniques. In a recent issue of ADBUSTERS we took the Nike "swoosh" and we "un-swooshed" it by drooping the bottom; instead of having the tip of the "swoosh" rising proudly upwards we made it look like a drooping penis. We’re challenging young people to sort of "un-cool" the Nike "swoosh."

If a company can show a kid that something is cool, that’s everything. Coolness is everything. But if you can show that being anti-fast food, or going against Nike is important because of what they’re doing in Indonesia, young kids will sometimes go the other way. Then it’s cool not to buy Nike or eat a Big Mac.

When I’m arguing with TV station managers and asking them why they won’t sell me some air time, I can feel that they’re scared. If we actually won the legal right to access the airwaves and were able to run our anti-Nike spot right next to Nike’s commercial, then I think we could beat the pants off them. Just like the anti-smoking ads beat the pants off the smoking ads thirty years ago. If you tell the truth and you can do it in a compelling and profound way, then that will always be more powerful than this BS that the corporations are putting out.

One thing I’ve always admired about North Americans is that they really do believe in freedom. They don’t look kindly on anyone who tries to stifle free speech. I think this is a battle we’ll eventually win, because I don’t think the American people will put up with TV stations playing the sort of game they’re playing now.

I must admit I don’t see it as optimistically as you. Yes, David is starting to win now, but you have to remember the fight has been going on ever since the ‘60s when the anti-tobacco ads first appeared on television, and it’s been raging on ever since. To me, the tobacco issue is so cut and dried; you have a product which actually kills the customer, yet for many years we’ve allowed the corporations who sell this killer product to continue hooking our kids and creating new smokers. Now, finally we’ve got them crying "uncle" a little bit and we sort of lift up our hands and say, "Hey, we won!" I don’t think it was such a great victory.

My point is, if it took us thirty years to get the upper hand in such a clear-cut, black-and-white case as tobacco, then how are we going to win the battle against bad food and bad television and bad fashion and all the other, much more complicated, much more debatable problems that beset us?

How many years is it going to take us to beat the global auto makers back to the point where we finally look at cars in a different way?

Of course. These are all isolated events; the tobacco issue or the car issue or the global warming issue. What we’re trying to tackle at The Media Foundation is the whole damned culture. The whole culture in some sense has been kidnapped by the $162 billion-dollar-a-year advertising industry and the corporations behind it who are giving us this dream of never-ending material progress. They’re conditioning us to a false reality.

Once everybody agrees, without even arguing about it anymore, that commercialized information delivery systems are the way to go, then a whole new dynamic comes into place where the name of the game is to get as many people as possible watching a particular program so you can sell 30-second time slots for the highest possible price. The whole imperative in any TV station then becomes to maximize this dynamic. Once you start playing that kind of game then you get what we’ve been seeing these past thirty or forty years.

Once someone gets into bed with the advertisers, it’s very difficult to wean themselves from their dollars.

It’s impossible. Once you give an instrument as powerful as television to commercial interests, of course they’ll use it to the max. Children who grow up in front of that device will become commercialized. Television is the command center of our consumer culture.

I’ve dealt with TV station managers and owners, and they take that exact position. They basically tell me to go to hell, and they say they have the right to run their business and make a profit. But the much larger question is, do we want to have a society where the economic imperative, the commercial imperative, takes precedence over the citizens’ right to free speech? If we want that kind of society, then let’s continue to keep people like me off the airwaves. But if we want to continue the long and honorable tradition of "the land of the free and the home of the brave," then for Christ’s sake let’s have a free marketplace of ideas, and may the best person win. To me, this idea that television stations have the right to keep me off the air is very Orwellian; it feels very much like an Orwellian system where a large power is crunching the rights of citizens.

I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, "Here are the models from which we can choose: The British system, PBS, public access…" I think television is an incredible tool, especially now that it’s merging with cyberspace. I think we should allow television to be open-ended and develop in surprising new ways that we can’t even imagine right now. But we have to keep the fundamentals straight. We have to say that the mental commons, the mental environment, has to remain free and that we cannot allow large corporations and TV stations to run away with the ball. We need to have a constitutional amendment which basically guarantees peoples’ right to communicate, and that doesn’t just mean freedom of speech. We have to go one step beyond freedom of speech to what I call "the right to access" which basically says every citizen has the right to access all these different systems, no matter what they may be in the future.

That’s what most people think: We live in a free market, a free country. But the fact of the matter is that the most powerful social communication tool of our time is not democratic. People with dissenting messages can’t get on, and to a large degree people are living in a sort of media-consumer trance where they’re getting only one side of the story.

I don’t think either is bad. A thirty-second television spot is a very powerful tool, a wonderful tool in many ways if it isn’t used exclusively to sell products. I’m using the exact same methods of advertising to get my message across. I try to get the very best photographers, designers, actors, and I try to pull out all the stops. Advertising is the vehicle, but I think that vehicle should be used more for selling ideas and less for selling products, and we should have more of a balance, especially on television where 99% of the ads are just pushing consumption.

I don’t mind GM or Toyota coming on and spending $100,000 to create an incredible 30-second spot; I have no problem with that, as long as I can also have a chance to do my best to produce my 30-second spot that says, "Cars are not so great. They pollute the environment, etc." So if I’m allowed to use those techniques to get my message across, then I have no problem with the other side getting their message across.

Many years ago, when we first pioneered the kind of television system we now have, we could have been smarter and taken a different tack. Now we’ve made our devil’s bargain with the advertisers and said, "OK, for giving me my free TV channels, you’re allowed to fill up 25% of the time with ads." We’ve made that bargain and now it’s going to be very difficult for us to go back on the pact we’ve made with the devil.

Years ago, when we were a society that didn’t have equality between the sexes or equality between the races, we had a Feminist movement and a Black movement. Then when we began to realize that nature was dying, we had an Environmentalist movement. So I think what we need now is a culture jamming movement…a movement that recognizes that our culture is dysfunctional, that we have to jam that culture and come up with a different kind of culture which is sustainable and which doesn’t have toxic spills in its mental environment. That’s what we’re trying to do…we’re trying to launch a culture jamming activist movement!

To some degree you’re right. This is the Information Age and culture jamming is an Information Age movement, and I think the rules are a little bit different. The breakthrough of the culture jamming movement will probably have something to do with freedom of speech…maybe not a march, but perhaps a legal battle that educates everybody that there is no freedom of speech and that there’s something undemocratic about the way society disseminates information.

At the moment a lot of culture jammers are liberating billboards and there are a lot of ad parodies which make fun of our consumer culture. There are other things like "anti-ads" which we’ve produced which, though they haven’t yet been aired, do enjoy underground circulation. Communications professors show them to their students, and environmental groups show them at their meetings. So I think this movement of ours will unfold by a different set of rules; I can’t predict exactly what will happen, or what will be the catalyst, but we’re certainly looking for it!

I don’t think we consciously lease our minds out but, bit by bit, without being conscious of it; we lose our autonomy. It’s like smoking: every time you take a puff, you’re losing some of your health. And, every time you turn on the TV, you’re losing a bit of your mental health.

At the moment our culture is very cynical; I call it "The Culture of Malaise." Young people don’t really believe anymore that they can change the system or that they can change themselves. They just believe the world is the way it is, and you’ve got to make the best of it. And, in that kind of a world, nothing much changes! You just basically keep running on the treadmill.

Oh, yeah—that’s the way change has always come about. It starts small and if it’s really strong and vigorous, then it keeps growing and more and more people join and it ends up thriving.

We’re trying to clean up what has become a polluted mental environment and you know, I think it’s beginning to happen. In recent months I’ve gotten intimations of more people actually using phrases like "the mental environment" and "mind pollution" and talking about "information overload" and participating in "media fasts;" so in some ways I think this is encouraging.

As I’ve told you, once we open the airwaves, perhaps by winning one of our legal battles, then there will be a possible avalanche of new memes propagating themselves through the media and at that point the tide will start turning and we may have some success in cleaning up the mess. So I think the solution to our problems is to open up the airwaves, to have a free marketplace of ideas on television, and to allow a real battle of ideas to occur on TV.