This is the unedited version of a review I wrote of Kalle Lasn’s new book Design Anarchy (ORO Editions, 2006) for Eye magazine.

He’s a West-coast sneaker marketer with one of the coolest brands around. He’s ironic and media-savvy, and he understands his target audience. He has a singular appreciation of the power of graphic design and advertising, and has a deep-seated suspicion of political movements.

The person I’m referring to is, of course, Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters. (You get half a point if your answer was Phil Knight, Chairman of Nike.) Lasn is the author of a new book called Design Anarchy which, if size matters, is clearly very important: weighing in at over 6 1/2 lbs and 416 pages, Lasn’s new tome is a veritable door-stopper. It’s the second monograph created by the co-founder of the Media Foundation and editor of its magazine Adbusters: Journal of the Mental Environment. His first book was Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America™, published in 1999. Predictably, the book with ‘design’ in its title is also the one with pictures where the words usually go.

Design Anarchy (ORO Editions, 2006) is chock-full of very disturbing eye candy, the voyeuristic gore-porn of the Internet age: an appalling world of degradation, deprivation, and devastation. Unfortunately it’s also rather familiar territory for anyone who reads Adbusters. Here, as in the magazine, Lasn reminds us yet again that graphic designers – yes, graphic designers – are the new political avant-garde; that it is we who will bring capitalism to its knees by, well, designing stuff in a really anarchic way. (One can only wonder what the Chinese folk who printed the book made of all this.) Lasn leads the charge over the barricades by rejecting grids, ditching the list of contents, working without page numbers, and recycling whole chunks of material from back issues of his magazine.

Let me be clear: I am entirely sympathetic to Lasn’s vision of a radically broadened political role for graphic design, distinct from its rather more routine subjugation to the commercial imperatives of capitalism. However, what I continue to find singularly depressing about Lasn’s political stance is that, in repeatedly writing off half-a-century of progressive movements – which between them created massive social change – he is unnecessarily hobbling what could actually be an exciting new development: a significant re-imagining of design practice.

And what is Lasn’s political stance? The most coherent articulation of his position appeared in the revised First Things First Manifesto in 1999. Since then we’ve been treated to an endless reworking of the same old graphic tricks: the juxtaposition of consumer excess alongside abhorrent images of war; advertisements modified, defaced or satirized; snippets of corporate hubris hung out to dry alongside pearls of literary or poetic wisdom; all of it (re)touched and (re)edited by an invisible hand clutching a muddy black pencil. Is this how far ‘design anarchy’ goes – messing with the conventions of magazine and book design as an act of dissent?

Perhaps this is graphic design’s very own, hyper-articulate language, unfolding before our weary eyes. Perhaps Design Anarchy is the storyboard for an imminent revolution, like the prescient graphic novel in the TV show Heroes. We’re left wondering, however. While Lasn has clearly picked up a lot of graphic tricks from Chris Dixon, the old art director of Adbusters who gave the magazine its most significant makeover, the results are in many ways as superficial as the lustrous veneer of the advertised life that he continually attempts to puncture. Granted, it’s a difficult trick to pull off, but even the most pedestrian of the familiar old adbusting ads we associate with Adbusters (‘Joe Chemo’; ‘Absolut Impotence’) achieved more clarity of thought than entire chapters of Design Anarchy.

At one point in Design Anarchy Lasn breathlessly tells us how he discovered that culture is important. Is this a new claim? Hardly. Even the US military is now getting hip to culture, according to a recent article in the New Yorker. And – so what if culture’s important? What can you do with this insight? Because of his own political phobias, Lasn ends up writing and art directing in a vacuum. To address culture on its own terms, where it’s at right now, would mean tossing aside the tired stereotypes that are his stock-in-trade. As long as Lasn sees ‘consumers’ (I’m guessing that means everyone who isn’t a culture jammer) as two-dimensional characters out of a stock photo album, he’s never going to convince those same ‘masses’ that they’re being misled. But then his primary audience is designers. And we’re different, right? In short, Lasn’s analysis would be vastly improved if he took other people’s thinking about culture more seriously.

Elsewhere, Lasn says (or quotes someone as saying, it’s not clear which): “What does design look like after all the commercial/ego pretensions have been stripped away?” I’m not sure I know, but ‘design anarchy’ sure isn’t the answer, either, at least not yet. I’ve met Lasn, interviewed him, even volunteered for him many years ago; in person, he’s a jovial, seasoned soul. So why does Design Anarchy feel like it was put together by a young male design student who’s really, really angry with the world (and his parents) but doesn’t quite know why; someone who’s ventriloquizing through some heady cocktail of first year media studies lecture notes, lots of ripped up fashion ads, and some seriously unpleasant photojournalism?

It’s a troubling editorial approach because the victims of famine or war or poverty are once more hauled out and exploited in service of someone else’s agenda; they cannot speak, they cannot protest their inclusion in this sumptuous, US$65 coffee-table book (sorry, this “revolutionary design manual”). It’s tragic because Lasn doesn’t – won’t – draw on a history of debates about anarchy or syndicalism to illuminate what he means by the title of the book; he won’t tap into the arguments over culture and identity that have been raging for years all around him. In effect, he excludes himself a priori from all kinds of existing debates for fear of… what, exactly? Losing his franchise on culture jamming (a term he himself borrowed from Negativland)? Having his singular vision sullied by the legacy of the movements and moments that make a book like Design Anarchy possible? (Sure, he likes to reproduce their most recognizable protest graphics, but what about their politics, their ideas, their people?)

It’s a very masculinist, sexist, even misogynistic thing, this ‘design anarchy’. For now, at least, it’s the cutting, tearing, slashing, and burning of images of mutilation, suffocation, humiliation, torture, massacre, genocide. The men we see are fighters, soldiers, rioters, protesters, street fighters, body builders, generals, presidents. The women we encounter are overwhelmingly victims, corpses, bimbos, anorexics, zombies, pin-ups, sex objects, beauty queens. Sure, Lasn is showing us the world as it is, at least according to the media. But instead of repeating and reinforcing this parade of sick stereotypes, wouldn’t it be more anarchic to show us a bunch of photos of women and girls (hey! how about photos taken by women and girls!) challenging all those received ideas? No? Why not?

Part of the problem here is that because we all (more or less) live inside consumer culture, anyone who criticizes it can be labeled a hypocrite. This is a point made with glee by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their book The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can’t be jammed (2004), a sometimes smug critique of the culture jamming movement, at least as it is promoted by Lasn, and Naomi Klein, author of No Logo. Klein gets hers for writing her bestselling book from the safety of a yuppie loft conversion; Lasn gets his for being the capitalist entrepreneur who gave the world the Black Spot sneaker. This kind of critique is easy (as I demonstrated in my smug first paragraph) but it’s also disingenuous. Clearly, Lasn’s and Klein’s arguments resonate for many people, which begs further investigation. It’s that thing called ‘culture’ again.

I agree with Heath and Potter when they suggest that Lasn’s view of consumers is unrealistic and unhelpful. Indeed, it’s hard to look at Adbusters or Design Anarchy without concluding that the consumer, as a sociological category, is little more than an undifferentiated mass of zombie shoppers whose best chance of salvation is to be shocked out of their collective stupor with a strong dose of wittily subversive ad jams. Alas, the evidence is all around us that advertisers long ago caught up to the idea that consumers are cynical, detached, and ironic, which might have something to do with why their advertising is often cynical, detached and ironic.

On a fresh note, perhaps, Lasn has just started flagging Adbusters’ masthead with the legend ‘Blueprint for a New Left’. As Lasn says on his editorial page in issue #70 (March/April 2007): “After years of taking a trouncing in many parts of the world, we on the progressive left now seem poised for a major comeback.” Excuse me? Does this mean that the feminists, environmentalists, sundry lefties, and communications professors (hi mum!) he spent much of the 1990s blaming for the state of the world have been forgiven? I can almost feel the waves of relief spreading through the ranks.

There’s more: Apparently “our” problem has been “timidity.” “While the neocons have any number of fired-up ‘thrashers’ who delight in mocking and lambasting us, we don’t seem to be able to muster a single spokesperson (maybe down the road, Obama or Spitzer?) with the assurance and intellectual clarity to take on a Negroponte, Wolfowitz or Perle. Where is our ability to kick ass?” Where is Lasn’s political compass? It might be uplifting to imagine supporting an Obama or a Spitzer, but they’re hardly champions of the Left, new or old (or old-new, or new-new, or Adbusters Lite).

During this, the long, appalling reign of George W. Bush, I have often found some comfort in the actions and antics of folks like Michael Moore, Steven Colbert, Amy Goodman, Jonathan Adelstein, Jon Stewart, Seymour Hersh, Barney Frank, Al Gore, Al Franken, Naomi Klein – hell, even Billy Bragg. They may not be anointed Republicans or Democrats, but they give us hope. The pattern is clear, however: If Lasn can’t see it, it doesn’t exist; if it’s not in Adbusters or Design Anarchy it’s not culture jamming; and, in Lasn’s world you’re either for culture jamming or you’re for the military-industrial-advertising complex. Narrow grounds indeed to launch something as ambitious as ‘design anarchy’.

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A recent piece by me in Voice, the AIGA’s online journal of graphic design.

I’ve just finished an interview with a Slovenian journalist called Barbara Predan for Klik magazine. She contacted me because I was a jury member for this year’s Memefest. I found Predan’s questions about the politics of graphic design, especially logos and culture jamming, both informed and challenging. I’m posting the full, unedited, English version here with her permission.

Q. The Economist regarded Naomi Klein’s initiative for a world without brands as “the world of the old Soviet Union, in which consumer choice has little role.” On the other hand, it seems that, in capitalism, everything is part of a bigger advertising picture. In your film Behind the Screens, Hollywood Goes Hypercommercial you are pointing out that even movies are vehicles for ulterior marketing. Can we really talk about free choice in a world full of brands?

A. Through my prior experience as an ad man and now as a teacher of media studies I have come to believe that advertising is so successful precisely because it addresses fundamental human needs – to be popular; loved; desired. The problem is that the solutions it offers only ever have to do with commodities – the buying of things and services. So of course we exercise ‘free choice’ when we act as consumers, but there’s a great deal that gets overlooked in this process. For example, relationships with one another (friends, family, partners) that are not mediated by things we buy. I think Naomi Klein’s book No Logo has done so well internationally because it perhaps speaks to an underlying sense that there’s something profoundly unfulfilling about living in a world in which we are constantly and increasingly bombarded by commercial messages: logos, branding devices, ads, etc. When I worked in advertising, we were always on the lookout for places to put our ads that would set them apart from the clutter of other people’s advertising messages. Right now these include forcing kids to watch commercials in school classrooms; putting ads in bathrooms; pressing brandnames into the sand on the beach; and, yes, placing products in movies. (Hence my video Behind the Screens, and my new website Brand Hype.) Now, I should add that everything I’m talking about relates to my experience living and working in England, Canada and the US; I know relatively little about Eastern Europe. That said, having worked with the folks at Memefest, I understand that Slovenia, for example, has a very different history and that consumer culture as we know it here in North America is a relative novelty for you.

Getting back to the quotation from The Economist: as smart as this magazine often is, I think their suggestion that “a world without brands” would be “the world of the old Soviet Union, in which consumer choice has little role” is either unbelievably naïve or a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging with Klein’s argument. They seem to be suggesting that if we dare to question the hegemony of branding we’re somehow embracing Stalinism. (And since when has democracy been predicated on having access to twenty-five brands of toothpaste?) It’s a farcical assertion.

And where’s the citizen in all this? The person who keeps up with politics, thinks about real social and cultural issues, and goes out and votes? If the West had anything worthwhile to export to the former Eastern Bloc countries at the end of the Cold War, it should have been democracy, not Coke and McDonald’s. I’ll go further: if you and I are unable to imagine a democratic future relatively free of advertising and brands, that recognizes that we are all full-time citizens and only part-time consumers, I think we’re all in big trouble. For one thing, we know now beyond a doubt that the environment cannot sustain our present level of consumption.

There is a well known analogy between advertising and political propaganda. Both are trying to dictate the so called correct thinking among people by use of visual means. In your film, Mark Crispin Miller states that advertising is a form of propaganda. Why do we still tolerate so much advertising?

I think Miller’s specific point is that advertising, like propaganda, is about repeating the same consistent message over and over again, regardless of its value. The overall message of advertising, as critics like Jean Kilbourne and Sut Jhally have pointed out so clearly, is that we are somehow lacking; inadequate; incomplete as people. This may actually be true on some level, but in a consumer culture there is only ever one solution: identifying with certain brandnames; seeking fulfilment (love; happiness) through buying stuff.

Wally Olins said that brands are as manipulative as relationships among people are. That’s why our role as consumers is to recognize their intentions and avoid being manipulated. To me, this sounds a bit like: if everyone is doing it, it can’t be that wrong. We all know that lies are a part of our lives, but in our knowledge it is still wrong. By acknowledging the manipulative side of advertising, are we approving the right to lie?

Or maybe our role as citizens is to recognize self-satisfied marketing-speak when we hear it. On the other hand, it’s great to hear a branding guru admit that brands are manipulative (although in truth it’s the people behind the brands – like Olins – who are doing the manipulating). That said, there’s a vast difference when comparing relationships among humans and those that involve brands, and it’s sad that Olins can’t tell the difference. It comes down to context, motive and sheer scale: the owners of Starbucks and FedEx and Diesel jeans and whatever else spend many millions of dollars every year to get their brands to ‘speak’ to us; to become our best friends. How can this kind of power compare to, say, the fact that my son lied to me today about brushing his teeth? Is this really the same kind of manipulation? By ‘acknowledging the manipulative side of advertising’ we’re well on our way to finding solutions. Conversely, we ‘approve the right to lie’ every time we knowingly leave our kids in front of commercial TV for an hour (I’m guilty), or fail to speak up when advertisers take fresh liberties with our public and private spaces.

How important is the role of design in today’s society?

For better or worse, it’s vital.

[The architect Thomas] Maldonado once asked: Can we talk about the use or abuse of design in society? How would you answer?

As a practical question, sure we can. For example: take a look at the fight Ralph Nader had with the American automobile industry in the 1960s (see his book Unsafe at Any Speed); or, the way design is used as the key selling feature of grossly overpriced sneakers. On the positive side, Marcia Lausen, a principal at Studio/Lab and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has done some fabulous design work rationalizing voter systems – polling stations, booths and ballots. This is, of course, a very real design problem, especially in the US.

You’ve disagreed with the notion that the world would begin to change if ten thousand designers would finally decide to change the way they work. I’ve read that Canadian designers were thinking about going on strike, back in the seventies, because of their dissatisfaction with their status and working conditions. Croatian theoretician Goroslav Keller once wrote: “Can we imagine for all designers in the world to go on strike for indefinite time. How would this result in a world, would there be any damage? Cynics might even say that society at the end might even prosper.” Can you imagine a world without designers?

I think there are several questions here. For me, it’s highly unlikely that ten thousand designers would suddenly decide to change the way they work because, barring a real social or political revolution, that kind of thing simply doesn’t happen overnight. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether such a change would have any effect on the world. ‘Changing the way you work’ could mean using a computer instead of a pencil, or it could mean working exclusively for ethically sound organizations and actively working against all the others. To paraphrase a famous German philosopher, ‘we make history but not in conditions of our own choosing.’ This is true for designers in particular, but it’s something they generally don’t understand or don’t want to hear. Designers are middle-men; intermediaries. They generally mediate between their clients and the expectations of their clients’ audiences. In strict terms, they’re not producers or inventors or creators at all. I am a graphic designer, and I find it rewarding in some ways, but that doesn’t stop me being haunted by something my dad once said when I was choosing a career. Being an engineer, he told me that designers just make things look nice once the real work is done. It drove me crazy at the time, but I sometimes think he had a point.

On the other hand, Victor Papanek wrote that we are all designers and everything we’re doing almost all of the time is design. Maybe the whole planet should go on strike. This sounds utopian, but – in your opinion – are we able to change and start building a “brave new world”?

I think when it comes to consumer culture, we already seem to be living in Huxley’s Brave New World. The task is to find another way forward by working with what we’ve got, rather than fantasizing about beginning afresh with a clean slate. (Since I’ve never lived through a real revolution, it would be particularly foolish of me to suggest that we start one.)

In Slovenia, we can hardly speak of design theory. However, it is very interesting that many foreign theoreticians are writing about the same problem – the lack of theory. You’ve written that design needs “theory not merely as a design tool, but as a way to make it truly significant and consequential in the decades to come.” How important is design theory for design practice?

Essential. Terry Eagleton once said that ‘Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own.’ The mistake many of us make – especially designers – is in thinking that theory is somehow pretentious and irrelevant; external to what we do. I’m talking about theory as a phenomenally rich set of competing ideas that, in essence, seek to explain why the world is the way it is. But it’s not just homegrown design theory that’s important for designers: it’s every theory going – be it cultural, political, queer, feminist, media, etc.

According to François Burkhardt: “until the sixties, theory existed parallel to design, as did the method of applications, criticism and history, which worked alongside each other and collaborated among themselves, while today we are witnessing the phenomenon that people simply do what comes to mind and go on in all possible directions, but they don’t know why…” It seems that theoreticians need design practice. On the other hand, practice is operating just fine without theory. How big of a problem is that?

It’s a huge problem. Design practised without any conscious reference to – or reflection via – theory, is at the very least unthinking, and at worst irresponsible.

In one of your recent projects, Logo Cities, you’ve decided to map the logos and brandnames that dominate our city skylines. Why is it important to document / analyse this phenomenon?

There’s a growing awareness that we live in a ‘hypercommercial’ culture, meaning a culture in which every facet of our lives is increasingly mediated by commercial messages – logos, brands, products, ads. In a way this a symptom of the unprecedented media conglomeration that is going on around the world. Scholars such as Robert W. McChesney have argued very convincingly that, if four or five huge companies own the vast majority of media outlets, from newspapers to radio stations to cable channels, this has dire consequences for democratic process. How are we to make informed political choices, choices that affect our own communities, if most of what we get is programming produced remotely, geared to maximising profits for faceless shareholders, and delivering lucrative audiences to advertisers? It strikes me that we need better theories, better kinds of analysis, in order to understand and counter these tendencies. Culture jamming – the kind of stuff we see in Adbusters and in Memefest – is one way to respond. It’s also a great first step for someone who’s just getting interested in these issues. It’s also fun to do. For me, however, culture jamming is too often a fleeting reaction rather than a real engagement; about taking one instance of a logo, changing it, and then disappearing. I’m trying to find other ways into the problem by drawing on cultural theory and graphic design.

An ongoing project of mine is to try to facilitate a debate about product placement in movies, a practice that is a direct effect of hypercommercialism. The site traces the connections between movies, brands, and studio owners. Logo Cities is another, more speculative project, which started out as an attempt to map the highly visible logos in just one city (ie Montréal). They’re not quite advertisements and they’re not really buildings, so they tend to get overlooked in the debate. The designer in me also finds them fascinating as graphic signs; as examples of ‘public lettering’. The first, basic version is up on the web and the next version is currently being built. It will include audio testimony from people living in the city who have some connection to these signs: city planners, architects, downtown workers, designers, signmakers, residents, and so on. The idea is to build up a fairly nuanced picture of the way these huge logos become part of our everyday, branded lives. They’re not evil, they’re not sublime; but they’re there.