It was the time of the Arab Spring and we decided that the moment was right for something to happen in America as well.  A special moment after the 2008–2009 financial troubles. Young people were really disillusioned. They had their university degrees and were still getting nowhere. They felt the future doesn’t compute for them. So, Occupy was a very special sort of one off-kind of an event. It was just something for people to get excited about.

MONUMENTAL IDEAS

Kalle Lasn

The biggest lesson that we learned from Occupy Wall Street is that sometimes the near impossible actually is possible, that you can actually sit around a table like this and you can say, well, what’s the one big thing that we can do that could really disrupt America right now? And then somebody stands up and says, ‘Well, why don’t we go to the iconic heart of global capitalism, which is Wall Street, and why don’t we just fuck the place up for a while and see what happens?’ And then somebody will say, ‘Oh, no, that’s too big, it’s too idealistic. And, we can’t do that.’

And then somebody says, ‘Fuck it, let’s do it.’

And then you come six months before the event, you have a poster, and you come up with the hashtag and a website. You start putting out tactical briefings and you talk to some of the people in New York who are actually on the ground and able to organize, people like David Graeber. And suddenly, something happens and then you have a few lucky breaks along the way. Like some police stupidly attacking young girls and suddenly creating headlines, which we didn’t actually create ourselves, and basically knock this whole Occupy Wall Street thing into the national limelight. I think the biggest thing we learned is that it’s okay to dream big, and think big, and not to be afraid of monumental ideas. And even if a meta-meme feels like a sort of idealistic pipe dream, you can still go for it. As the global situation gets worse and worse, then somewhere along the line, there’s going to be a meeting of your idealism with the severity of the situation. And suddenly an idea, a meta-meme that felt impossible even a year ago, can take off all of a sudden and start transforming the culture in the deepest way that you can imagine.

CULTURE JAMMING AND META-MEMES

Lasn first uses the term “meta-meme” two decades back in Culture Jam. He claims that just about everybody is operating on a surface level. His prime example is the fight to stop pipelines.

They get all these people together. And they march against pipelines. And they do something in front of the White House, and they get arrested. Sometimes they’re successful, most often they’re not, but now they are in the business of stopping pipelines. And yet, it’s quite obvious that you’re not going to, that it’s a mug’s game. Because you can stop all the pipelines you want, but ultimately, you have to stop the system that creates the pipelines. That is one level deeper that environmentalists have to think: what do you need do to really disrupt the culture, to somehow dig as deep as you can into what I call meta-memes, without which a future is unthinkable, without certain changes to the very DNA of our culture? We’ve identified a bunch of those.

Brian Gruber 

What’s your definition of a meta-meme?

Kalle Lasn

Just a really big idea, an idea that is so big that, without it, we probably won’t have a future.

Brian Gruber 

Was there an element of the Occupy Wall Street project that had to do with your “Culture Jam” idea of a “suicidal consumerist binge?

Kalle Lasn

I grew up watching TV, and every few minutes you get a few pro-consumption messages thrown at you. When you grow up in a mental environment when even important political events and presidential speeches are interrupted by ads, when you’re living in that kind of wrap-around advertising environment, then that warps everything, right across the board it warps everything. I think that’s one of the reasons why we can’t really get to the heart of what we need to do to solve climate change. There are big ideas which have the potential to fix climate change, but we human beings who grew up in the so-called first world have been mind-fucked. And when you’ve been mind-fucked as far as we have been, I think there’s very little hope for you. If you’re lucky enough, like I did, you go traveling and spend a few years having epiphanies about what life is really like on the planet. Then maybe you can break out of that media/ consumer trance, but most of us can’t, most of us are just stuck there. And it’s probably going to take a generation or two to snap out of it. And that well may be too late.

In Silicon Valley, venture capitalists and tech startups talk a lot about disruption, how to disrupt certain business trends or categories. What was Adbusters, what was Occupy Wall Street trying to disrupt?

A leading question. I guess our culture needs various disruptions. When I wrote my first book, the Culture Jam, the game we were playing was to disrupt culture in various ways with ideas like ‘Buy Nothing Days’ and then ‘Digital Detox Weeks.’ They give people epiphanies, and they’re also able to give structure, and launch a bit of a wave of activity, then launch a movement if your disruption is potent enough, like Occupy Wall Street.

If you want to change political culture, then you can keep on voting for the right people, playing this tweedledum, tweedledee game of who’s gonna win the next election. But if you really want to change political culture, then one has to go deeper. And one way to go deeper is to start asking questions, like, ‘Why do we need all this secrecy?’ Democracy just can’t work if there’s just these all these secrets everywhere. If you were to muck around with the DNA of political culture, and over a generation, have the people demanding like, We the People need to know everything. If we don’t know everything, then how can we have really a democracy? It’s not a new idea. Radical transparency has been part of the discussion on the left for a long, long time. But I think one can go even deeper than this talk about transparency, or we need a bit more oxygen, this idea that making secrecy taboo is a meta-meme. I mean that to me feels like a monumental step in the right direction for how we do politics.

Brian Gruber 

How does your learning from Occupy inform new projects as you were obviously so close to it?

Kalle Lasn

I must admit that the big slogan we put on top of our poster – what is our one idea – that never really happened.

There was that a suggestion in an early tactical briefing for Barack Obama to ordain a presidential commission, tasked with ending the influence of money on the electoral process.

In the very early days, I remember trying to make the Robin Hood tax one of the simple demands, because (it) had already made headway in a lot of countries. And it’s one of those ideas, of slowing down fast money, and then figuring out how to use that incredible amount of money that you can collect by having even a 0.1% tax on all financial transactions and currency trades.

But, again, that didn’t quite stick. I don’t know exactly why. I understand the criticism that, somehow, we were never able to do what the Tea Party people did, get people elected and come up with some ideas that really change the culture. And yet, I never thought of Occupy Wall Street being something along the Tea Party track. I saw it as being something similar to 1968, the phenomenon that politicized me, when a tiny protest in Paris somehow exploded into this global phenomenon where the young generation suddenly realized that they don’t like the way things were being run by the old generation. And they came up with what I saw at the time as the beginning of the first global revolution.”

And I always saw Occupy Wall Street just being one more step along the way. And all these people’s, ‘Oh, you guys did a bunch of shit together. You never did this. Never did that.’ (They) just don’t get it. You know, we politicized the whole generation. So, if you think about it that way, if you think about 1968 as the first little test, then Occupy Wall Street, other little bangs as well, like #MeToo, all kinds of other skirmishes. There’s gonna be a third moment, and Occupy Wall Street will be remembered as one of the milestones along the way.

Brian Gruber

In the civil rights movement, activists reached a certain point in Albany, Georgia, where their voting rights protest just didn’t work. And they learned from that, and pushed forward. There was a phrase, from a recent issue of Adbusters, that failure can be a springboard. Do you think that trial and error and being willing to embrace failure is an important part of social movements?

Kalle Lasn

My way of thinking is different from the way you phrase the question, like, I don’t like the word failure. I never saw Occupy Wall Street as being…

(Former Adbusters editor and Occupy Wall Street co-creator) Micah White called it a constructive failure).

Yeah, whatever. But I don’t think it’s a failure. I don’t think it’s even a constructive failure. I think it was one step along the way. And now we are more ready than ever to take it to the next level. The factors that gave birth to it are still there, they’ve only intensified. And somewhere along the line, there’s going to be more Big Bang moments like Occupy Wall Street and 1968. Somewhere along the line, I think there will be a global revolution. And then I don’t think people will look back on Occupy Wall Street and talk about it as a failure.

Brian Gruber

How does a young person who has grown up in the mental environment you’ve described engage in the world effectively?

Kalle Lasn

For most people, I just feel like saying to them, you’re all fucked up, go back and start from zero. That’s really my advice. I think that if we can somehow replace all those surface kind of lefty books that have been coming out for the last 30-40 years, and God knows I’ve read many of them, if we can identify the memes and meta-memes and come up with books with big ideas, a new set of first principles, this is something I still believe in. Trying to talk some guy in San Francisco into living a more benign life, I don’t have time for that.

Let’s face it, I think we have one more crack at the whip, it may already be too late. And the only way to do it is to change the system in the most fundamental ways, go all the way down to the very bottom of the swamp if you like, and pull out the bad roots and hopefully grow a few new ones. To me, that’s the only thing that can now save this human experiment of ours on planet Earth.

Brian Gruber 

In the Culture Jam book, you made some provocative statements; one of them is, a free, authentic life is no longer possible in America today.

No, I don’t think so. The Internet hadn’t kicked in when I wrote that book. It was motivated by the reality of what a constant barrage of two or three thousand marketing messages actually does to your brain. I mean, once your brain has been pickled with emotionally coercive advertising like that, from the moment that you’re a little kid, you’re running around the living room, you’re looking at the TV set, then you’re a cooked goose.

Brian Gruber

Do you think you have a unique perspective coming from Estonia, living in Canada, in a number of places, the ability to look in a unique way at what’s happening in American culture?

Kalle Lasn

I think that I’m a strange kind of guy. I left Estonia when I was two, was in refugee camps in Germany and other places until I was 13, then growing up in this totally alien culture of Australia, and finally finishing up in Japan, five years in the advertising industry, and then with the money I made, traveling for three or four years around the world, experiencing as much as I could, eventually settling down here in Vancouver. I have no allegiances to anybody, I’ve seen good or bad in a lot of places. And I think my brain is suited to look at the world in a fresher way.

Brian Gruber 

For many people, the experience of travel is a kind of revolutionary personal act.

I’m still running on that juice, I have never forgotten many of the lessons and epiphanies I had during those three years. And actually, there is an answer to that young guy in San Francisco, the answer is go traveling. Go traveling, go and find yourself. Find your true self. Go traveling, go to Thailand, go to magic mushroom village in Mexico. Look at the people in the streets of Calcutta (Kolkata) dropping off like flies and then come back and figure out what has to happen.