Week 9: Letter to Lasn & Coporation (Part Deux)

Part 1:

Dear Mr. Lasn,

I am writing you because I have just finished reading your book "Culture Jam," and I have a few topics which I would like to bring up that I connected with, as well as a few that I found to be a bit foreign. I am currently a student at the University of Vermont, and I am an Environmental Studies major, who has spent many semesters toiling within the realms of consumerism and media marketing (I worked for a food & beverage consultant for two years), and I found your book like that of William McDonough's "Cradle to Cradle," to be an experience in new methods of thinking.

On that note, I find that the most inspiring topic you discuss is that of our disconnection with the natural world, through media inspired internalization and commercialization of natural experiences. The means by which corporation's use media and the environment to sell things, to as they put it "create an experience" with their product, I find to be one of the most haunting facets of your novel.

I have a few disagreements with the manner in which you develop and portray your ideas, and I found that even though you state in your book that "someone has gotten into our brains. Now the most important task on the agenda is to evict them and recover our sanity," but other than pointing out certain aspects of media's influence in our lives you fail to really delve into how to beat the system. Perhaps the honest answer is that there is no straight answer, I understand your book to be that moment of realization for the reader, rather than the blueprints for a revolution.

You, like McDonough, question the manner in which the industrial age gave birth to the domination and removal of nature from the American psyche, but where McDonough gives examples as to the manners in which people are tearing down the old system with new designs and models for the future, I felt with your book that I was only finding a means in which to fear what I already knew existed. I need some positivity, some means by which I can stop disconnecting completely, and instead connect and dissent, to create change rather than dissolve defeated.

Cheers,

Pete Moseley

Part Deux:

The end of the Corporation I found to be just as scaring as the first half. If I had to state in one word or phrase why I found the second part horrifying I'd have to say I'd put down, "Competitive Intelligence Professional." What the Hell! So freaky. "The Death of Birth."
I loved the battle between the news crew and the Fox studios over what was news, and who controlled it. But I hate that they lost, same with the loss of control over life, the idea that we have so much life that's patented in our country makes me sick to my stomach.
Probably one of my top five documentaries I have seen in the last year. Up there with Food INC and the likes.