On June 9, 2011, Kalle Lasn, an Estonian-Canadian activist and filmmaker, registered the web address OccupyWallStreet.org. Lasn is the co-founder of Adbusters magazine, a far-left anarchist publication established in 1989. Earlier in 2011, the magazine had run an article titled “A Million Man March on Wall Street,” which purported to be a guide on “how to spark a people’s revolt in the West.” Registering OccupyWallStreet.org was the first step in forming a movement that Lasn imagined would spark that revolt.
Lasn’s trajectory of radicalization was in many ways formulaic. He was trained in applied mathematics in Australia and then moved to Tokyo, where he spent five years running a market research firm in the 1960s. The firm used early computer technology to organize data and detect consumer trends. This capability allowed Lasn to create reports about how to increase the sales of various consumer brands. Lasn came to loathe advertising and the system that he saw as having created it: capitalism. In a 2007 interview, he referred to advertising as “brain damage” and deplored our “age of the Manchurian Consumer.”
The notion that advertising possesses awesome and nefarious powers can be traced back to bestselling books of the 1950s, such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1957). In these texts, advertising is portrayed as a form of mind control. This characterization greatly exaggerates advertising’s power over the human mind, but it had currency as part of a larger set of beliefs about the latent totalitarian tendencies of the postwar middle-class consensus, beliefs that animated the 1960s counterculture.
