The spark for occupy Wall Street.

• Author: Middlewood, Erin
• Position: 'Adbusters'

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the months before the Occupy Wall Street protests exploded, the magazine that sparked it all was fighting to stay afloat.

Adbusters--"A Journal of the Mental Environment"--was confronting the same financial forces pummeling print publications everywhere.

"We were losing circulation," says Kalle Lasn, Adbusters' co-founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief. "The Internet was eating into our sales. We were swimming in red ink," Lasn said. "I was having to borrow money to keep the place going. It felt like we were sort of fading."

But the magazine was also coining a Twitter hash-tag: #OCCUPYWALLSTREET. It was creating a poster of a ballerina poised on Wall Street's bull sculpture. It was broadcasting to an e-mail list of 90,000 supporters.

"The whole idea behind Occupy Wall Street was that we, the people, would go to the iconic center of global capitalism, which is Wall Street, and we would take it over. It's a hell of a sexy idea, right?" Lasn says, almost with a giggle. "It has a certain audaciousness to it. It has a certain 'luck it all' quality, which the Left hadn't had for about twenty years before that. We aren't playing the old lefty game where you are pointing your fingers and going, 'Look at this terrible thing that's happening here. Let's go there and get those bastards.' We're actually in some strange way saying something positive. We're saying, 'Let's occupy Wall Street. Let's go there and have a good time.' "

Then, on September 17, protesters actually showed up on Wall Street.

"It was like riding a tiger after that, and it had a life of its own," Lasn says. "Now, suddenly, we're not fading." He's quick to credit those who actually camped in the parks. "It's not as if we ran the whole thing," he says. "We just sparked the damn thing."

Talking in the basement offices of Adbusters in Vancouver, British Columbia, Lash figures he's given perhaps a hundred interviews. He turns seventy in March, but he shows no weariness, and answers each question--doubtless asked before--with passion, as his eyes sparkle and his bushy gray eyebrows bounce up and down.

Lasn's office is a small, spare space that also serves as a conference room. There's no computer. The OWS poster hangs on the wall, as does a to-do list that includes such prosaic items as "pay back long-term loan" and "Craigslist handyman."

Lasn works mostly from his home on five acres outside of the city, where he and his wife care for her ninety-four-year-old...