Meanwhile, on the other side of North America, Adam Neiman was intrigued. Neiman is president and co-founder of No Sweat Apparel, in West Newton, Mass., which sells a variety of clothing -- T-shirts, jeans, yoga pants -- that it pledges are "100% union-made." In the Blackspot, he saw an opportunity to link the "anarchista aesthetes" that Adbusters reaches with the "workers' rights crowd" No Sweat courts. He called Lasn and offered to handle the production-sourcing issues in exchange for co-promotion -- because, he says, "Kalle's a great promoter."
In the Blackspot, Neiman saw a chance to link Lasn's anarchists with his own workers' rights crowd. Instead, Lasn told him to f--- off.
According to Neiman, Lasn was interested but with the notable caveat that he didn't want a formal contract. No Sweat had a line on a factory in Indonesia and worked with a nongovernmental organization that interviewed its workers -- but Neiman didn't want to give Lasn the details until he had more of a commitment. "And he said, 'I don't think we're going to do anything with you at all," Neiman says. Lasn's version of this is both less specific and less diplomatic: "We told them to f--- off," he recalls breezily.
And that was that -- until Neiman saw an article that quoted Lasn bashing the antisweatshop movement as handwringers and whiners. "I blew my stack," says Neiman. "I was just furious. And I said, 'F--- it, let's just do this ourselves." In January, No Sweat sent a note to 6,000 people on its e-mail list announcing plans to make a sneaker -- black, low-top, Converse-like -- at the Indonesian factory. A few hundred preorders quickly followed. This was used to produce 1,500 pairs of No Sweat sneakers, which have since sold through the company's website and a handful of stores. Neiman borrows some of Adbusters' anti-Nike rhetoric, adding strategies like putting a leaflet in every shoebox with a reassuring rundown of workers' benefits. Subsequent batches have been produced and sold, and Neiman has cut a co-branding deal with female antiwar group Code Pink for a pink model and with lefty magazine Mother Jones for a red high-top. He says he plans more deals like that and is hearing from more retailers.
Lasn seems totally unfazed by the existence of a shoe that, to most observers, delivers the things that he's merely talked about. The Indonesian factory No Sweat uses, he claims, "wasn't good enough for us." Talking to Kalle Lasn in person is a bit of an exercise in cognitive dissonance. He is by all appearances a friendly, 62-year-old man with a charming accent, smiling like the neighborhood baker who wants your repeat business. Born in Estonia, Lasn says that as a small child he lived in a German displaced persons camp during World War II; his parents then moved the family to Australia, and as a young man Lasn founded a market-research firm in Tokyo. He "made a lot of money," married a Japanese woman, immigrated to Vancouver, and pursued documentary filmmaking. Passionate about nature, he got involved in a public relations tussle with the Canadian logging industry -- a guerrilla information skirmish -- and that led him to Adbusters and "culture jamming." The point of culture jamming is to undercut the endless stream of manipulative sales pitches that come at us from all directions, wearing down the mental health of the media-saturated consumer.
Despite his affable presentation, a good chunk of what Lasn has to say seems designed specifically to make someone else very angry. He goes out of his way to insult both left-wing activists and corporate titans -- always with a grin. This is not a man who is interested in compromise or bridge-building or the sharing of control, and indeed his employees refer any question of the slightest substance back to him: Adbusters and Blackspot are both extensions of Lasn's singular mindset, period. But in a way that is much more important than production details, it's this mindset that he believes will set the Blackspot apart. It goes to the heart of the intersection between ideas and consumption. How much power does a brand -- or an antibrand -- really have?
To Lasn, the Blackspot exemplifies a new kind of grass-roots capitalism, driven by entrepreneurs motivated by something other than accumulating wealth. It could give consumers a new voice in the marketplace, allowing them to buy into a set of ideas that challenges the megacorporations that dominate so many industries. Lasn's attitude toward Nike is particularly visceral, and in conversation he refers to its CEO, Phil Knight, as a "mind-f---er" at least six times. Why this level of personal anger? Partly because he dislikes the way Nike handled the sweatshop allegations of the 1990s. Knight "kind of ignored the no-sweatshop movement for as long as he could," Lasn asserts. "Cleaning up those factories is not something he did out of the goodness of his heart, as far as I can tell. It's something he did because the times changed and the pressure was put on him."
But mostly, he says, he opposes Knight because the Nike brand offers a false promise. Lasn describes a hypothetical teenage boy, insecure, trying to fit in and find an identity. Where does he turn? To Nike. The awesome brand power offers instant cool. But, Lasn continues, it's a fleeting cool -- a lie, a concocted image that stands for nothing but profit, manipulation, and exploitation. "I want to offer that kid a real form of empowerment," Lasn declares, "and that's what Blackspot is." So this is his way of fighting the "guerrilla information war" against Nike's cool: Be cooler.
