Kalle Lasn () (born March 24, 1942) is an Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor, and activist. Near the end of World War II, his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent some time in a German refugee camp. At age seven he was resettled in Australia with his family, where he grew up and remained until the late 1960s, attending school in Canberra. In the late 1960s, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Over the course of twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. He currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the co-founder of Adbusters magazine and author of the books Culture Jam and Design Anarchy and is the co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which owns the magazine. He reportedly started Adbusters after an epiphany that there was something profoundly wrong with consumerism. It happened in a supermarket parking lot. Frustrated that he had to insert a quarter to use a shopping cart, he jammed a bent coin in so that the machine became inoperable. This act of vandalism was his first (quite literal) "culture jam"—defined as an act designed to subvert mainstream society. Life and work Born in Tallinn, Estonia, during World War II, Lasn's family fled to Germany and he spent several years after the war in a displaced-persons camp before his family were offered resettlement in Australia. In Australia he earned a degree in applied mathematics and then relocated to Tokyo, where he spent five years running his own market-research firm before eventually immigrating to Canada in 1970. Lasn’s life works are applied within the philosophical lens of the French Situationists theory and the philosophy of detournement. His concept pertained to the "rerouting [of] spectacular images, environments, ambiences and events to reverse or subvert their meaning." Lasn has also contemporized the concept of the Spectacle, in which he applies to explain the thousands of images encountered by consumers on a daily basis. In an interview with PRWeek magazine, Lasn recalls the moment in 1989, as an environmental campaigner, when he realized that all brands carry a "political message". In response to a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign launched by the forest industry, which sought to reassure the Pacific Northwest that they had nothing to worry about, Lasn and his team developed a 30-second advertisement of their own which would challenge