Kalle Lasn

Who is Kalle Lasn?

Kalle Lasn is an Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor and activist. Near the end of World War II his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent some time in a German refugee camp. At age seven he was resettled in Australia with his family, where he grew up and remained until the late 1960s, attending school in Canberra. In the late 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver, Canada. For twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

He is the co-founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy and is the co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which owns the magazine. He reportedly started Adbusters after an epiphany that there was something profoundly wrong with consumerism. It happened in a supermarket parking lot. Frustrated that he had to insert a quarter to use a shopping cart, he jammed a bent coin in so that the machine became inoperable. This act of vandalism was his first "culture jam"—defined as an act designed to subvert mainstream society.