by Kalle Lasn; Eagle Brook, 1999, 251 pgs

This was a great book. Kalle Lasn is the founder of Adbusters.org (as well as several related projects), and although we are not completely in agreement with everything he says (we tend to be suspicious of "activists" as a general rule, and cannot condone or endorse such activities as demonstrations, marches, and circulating petitions), he makes some startling observations. Listen:

"Look at the way most of us relax. We come home after work, exhausted. We turn on the TV — a reflex. We sit there passively hour after hour, barely moving except to eat. We receive but we do not transmit. Identical images flow into our brains, homogenizing our perspectives, knowledge, tastes, and desires." (p. 11)

"Ten years ago we didn’t think twice about the chemicals in our food or the toxins generated by industry; we thought they were "well within acceptable limits." We were dead wrong about that and today we may be repeating the same mistake with "mental pollution"— nonchalantly absorbing massive doses of it without a second thought." (p. 13)

"The "whiter" the sound in our environment gets, the more we dismiss it as background and stop hearing it. Ultimately, everything becomes background noise and we hear almost nothing." (p. 14)

"Corporate advertising is the largest single psychological project ever undertaken by the human race. Yet for all of that, its impact on us remains unknown and largely ignored. When I think of the media’s influence over the years, I think of those brainwashing experiments conducted by Dr. Ewen Cameron in a Montreal psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. The idea of the CIA-sponsored "depatterning" experiments was to outfit . . . subjects with headphones, and flood their brains with thousands of repetitive "driving" messages that would alter their behavior over time." (p. 19)

"The reality presented to us by the media always has a spin on it . . . We are constantly being hyped, suckered and lied to." (p. 24)

"A meme (rhymes with "dream") is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power," (p. 123)