ADBUSTERS ALSO RUNS CAMPAIGNS. On "Buy Nothing Day", the day after Thanksgiving Day, people were urged to take a break from the shopping frenzy and reflect on the fact that a mere 20 per cent of the world's population uses 80 per cent of its natural resources. Over consumption is killing the planet: "Relish your power as a consumer to change the economic environment."
Its latest campaign was a Corporate America Flag Jam. On 4 July, Independence Day, it delivered what it called a blast of symbolic disobedience by creating a alternative version of the Stars-and-Stripes, a Brands-and-Bands, an American flag with the stars changed to rows of miniature corporate logos. It was, it said, a symbol of all that was wrong in America.
"Corporate America is revelling in a Golden Age. A shrinking number of the planet's biggest businesses – AOL Time Warner, Shell, Nike, Microsoft, McDonald's – are the money behind presidents, the power that drives global trade rules, the voice of authority on how we live and the way we think."
Five hundred of the special Adbuster flags were waved by protesters across the US, hung over bridges and paraded in front of giant retailers like Wal Mart and the White House. Some rallies attracted crowds, others were a one-man protest. The point was made well and powerfully, says Adbusters' editor, Kalle Lasn.
"The big reason behind the flag's success was that America more than any other country in the world has moved away from being a radical democracy where the people decide what's going to happen," he says. "It's become closer to a corporate state."
KALLE LASN BELIEVES THAT America has sadly strayed from the original vision of its founding fathers. He says that it's time to look back at the meaning of the country's original revolution, the desire for a true democracy, for liberty and justice for all. It's time to question the power of big business.
"Citizens have become consumers and culture has become a consumer culture," he says. "Commodities and commercialism have become dominant values."
Mr Lasn says 40,000 people are now on Adbusters' email network, receiving news about campaign activities. About 10,000 people visit its website daily. Magazine sales are rising steadily. The circulation of 100,000 – two-thirds of which are in the US – leaps up by between 4,000 and 5,000 an issue.
Clearly, Adbusters' activities are gaining momentum but some critics wonder whether its work has had any real impact. In many senses, it is still an "insiders" magazine. It lacks popular appeal, they say.
But the growing numbers of subscribers and campaigners indicate otherwise – and the movement is growing. In the UK, the Subvertise project (see banner ad above) is collecting an archive of parody ads and photographs of billboards that have attacked with anti-advertising graffiti.
Worldwide, culture jamming has had some impact. Nike, in an apparent response to allegations that it uses child labour in its factories in the developing world, recently produced its own "jammed" ads in suburban Australia: "The most offensive boots we've ever made. 100 per cent slave labour."
Nike has begun to trade on public cynicism, declared Adbusters.
OTHER ADBUSTER CRITICS – and not just in big business – simply feel that shopping is fun. They don't mind being manipulated. They feel that they are perfectly in control of the choices they make.
"The fundamental problem with Adbusters is that it wants to define what happiness should be and what things have meaning and what things do not," reads a reader's letter in a recent issue. "One of the pillars of freedom in the US is your right to the 'pursuit of happiness'. Note that 'happiness' is not spelled out for you, because, well, that's what freedom is."
But the magazine has high ideals and Mr Lasn believes it taps into a growing global anxiety, a feeling that things aren't quite right.
He speaks of a desperate need to stop and preserve a space for other forms of thinking and ways of being. He yearns for a world free of the commercial inferno, a protected zone. He fears there is a real danger that the forces of corporate marketing might snatch this from us.
He feels, too, that without this mental space, we cannot really find ourselves.
Seneca, 2,000 years ago, said very much the same thing.
"Survey everything that lies about you, as if it were luggage in a guest room; you must travel on," he wrote. "Nature strips you as bare at your departure as at your entrance."
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