kalle lasn (monkey see -do)
L.A.: But what about the good ideas? Do they really come from cyber these days, as some people are saying?
Kalle Lasn: I don’t know, I’m from the old school. I don’t see it yet. I see a lot of frenetic activity in cyberspace, but a lot of it is like the postmodern hall of mirrors. It’s just people sending email messages to each other, hand on the mouse, and you think that you’ve done something great if you get some big idea here and send an email to your friend, and pass it on, and you think you have made some sort of a big thing for the day. I don’t actually see too many really new ideas coming out of cyberspace yet. I see a lot of new ideas still coming out of philosophers, musicians, thinkers, sociologists, a few economists. I think that the big ideas are still coming out in the traditional way, and then they start to reverberate within cyberspace. They are amplified there in cyberspace.
for the rest of the interview go to adbusters
soundbites for this reading provided by dub.com dubcast #6
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2 comments:
Good read!
I think even the next paragraph says even more about the current activist culture:
L.A.: How do you view the activist community, the people who are trying to speak out against what goes on with the big brands and their communications?
Kalle Lasn: I think that the political left, and activists in general over the last few years, we have been quite ineffective. We haven’t really come up with any really radical ideas, or cutting- edge advertising. We’ve been on the defensive, and ever since President Bush got elected, quite a few years ago now, and got elected a second time, the activist community has become a bunch of whiners and complainers. We have created a kind of complaint-based activism. Where we point a finger and say, “Oh, look how terrible, look what the neo-cons are doing here, look what they are doing in Iraq!” and, “Look at what they are doing to our privacy” and, “Look how horrible the situation is here, and there and everywhere!” So we have become kind of politically ineffective, and not at all radical any more. And I think now there may be some kind of new politics coming up again, and I think a lot of young people are sort of starting to jump over the dead body of the old political left and starting to get radicalized again. We are at the very early stages of that movement. And I notice on a few websites lately, and on … in some little pockets of cyberspace, I notice some pretty cutting radicals that are coming up. It hasn’t really added up to a movement yet, but I think there is some promise there.
truly.
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