Corporate greed. Chronic over-consumption. The widening gap between rich and poor. The beauty myth causing so many eating disorders... Damn, it can be depressing living in the 21st century. But there's hope. A Canadian magazine called Adbusters is here to fight the good fight. To fight the Americanisation of global culture. To fight the corporate big boys' control of your desires. But, most of all, Adbusters is here to fight for your mind. Branching out from their humble headquarters in Vancouver, Adbusters magazine is now sold in 40 countries around the world. Their message has inspired a worldwide network of 65,000 people, who are dedicated to Adbusters' social goals. These activists call themselves Culture Jammers.

Adbusters is a magazine lover's magazine. It is super-glossy, with juicy images and slick design. Adbusters magazine also contains many serious messages; from sustainable use of the planet's resources, to reversing the madness of America's runaway capitalist society. The purpose of Adbusters' unashamedly political editorial is to make readers think about the consumer culture which dictates every part of our lives. Sometimes their message is communicated using humour and other times shock tactics are utilized. However they get their message across, Adbusters is always fresh and insightful - commenting on the critical issues of our time. To put it bluntly, the people at Adbusters want nothing short of a cultural revolution - a revolution of the mind.

I arranged to meet the founder of Adbusters soon after the 46th issue of the magazine had been sent to the printers. When I walked into his office, Kalle Lasn was thumbing through a copy of Pulp magazine (who I was writing for) which I gave his personal assistant earlier in the week. He flicked the pages distastefully and then said to me "You have a lot of ads. I don't quite like the flavour of your magazine. I wonder if you aren't part of the mind-fuck yourself." Oh dear. This was not how I hoped our chat would begin. But, I wasn't about to be burned at the stake as a capitalist sympathiser. Lasn was simply being blunt and I expected nothing less from the advocator of the next cultural revolution.

Lasn, now in his 60s, was born in Communist-controlled Estonia and immigrated to Australia at the age of seven, before immigrating to Canada in1970. A filmmaker by trade, he has helped document many of the social upheavals of America in the later 20th century. " I've seen the Berlin wall fall and I've seen mighty empires vanquished," Lasn tells me. "I also lived through three huge movements of my time. I was in San Francisco around the time the Black Panthers were strutting their stuff. I've been involved with the black liberation movement in America and after that I was part of the feminist movement. I saw the environmental movement change every nook and cranny of culture all around the world."

So, with these impeccable references as an activist, Lasn and a small group of friends began to plant the seeds of what would become a new social movement in the late1980s. "Our feeling was that all the old activist movements had somehow crested and now we needed a new movement. We knew this new movement would be something to do with culture. It wasn't about race, or the environment, or about gender. It was about the fact that our culture was somehow being hijacked," says Lasn of the genesis of Adbusters. "When we were young we were the people who created our own culture: we sang the songs, we told the stories. Then suddenly we were living in an age where the culture was being spoon fed to us by TV and advertising. It was the beginning of this whole mental-environment movement. If we - the people - don't control our own culture then we've lost everything.

So, Lasn began producing a newsletter which quickly attracted like-minded volunteers. Soon the newsletter had developed into a magazine, known as Adbusters, which was printed on humble black and white newsprint for its first years. Lasn admits that at first Adbusters magazine was something of an amateurish effort. "We were running on volunteers and the quality of the writing was pretty poor. The best thing about the early issues of Adbusters were the spoof ads and people bought us just for that sometimes."

With practically no money Adbusters began taking on the multi-million dollar corporate mega-brands with their spoof ads. These ads, also known as subvertisements, are made to look like legitimate ads on first glance, but closer inspection reveals them to be a parody. A send-up. A fake. Their purpose is to make the reader think critically about how advertising is manipulating them. They also make fun of a brand's carefully controlled image, question the ethics of the company and work to destroy the aura of "cool" surrounding these brands.

Often it wasn't the spoof ad itself which got Adbusters' anti-advertising message to the public, so much as the arrogant and bullying way their targets decided to respond. One example was when Absolute Vodka tried to muzzle Adbusters in 1994 because of a spoof ad they ran on their back cover. "They sent this powerful international law firm after us and scared the shit out of us," says Lasn. "They demanded we destroy every one of those magazines, publish a written apology and promise never to do it again. They threatened to put us out of business - which at that stage would have been fairly easy to do, because we had no money. So, we put out a 'David and Goliath' press release saying how Absolute Vodka was coming after a little non-profit organization. Some big American newspapers like the Washington Post and the LA Times picked up on the story. As soon as their stories started appearing Absolute Vodka phoned us up.

I remember that day really well. They said 'We've re-assessed the situation and we guess it's okay you run those spoof ads'. They thought they could just get their lawyers to shut us up."

But Adbusters wouldn't be shut up. Like a ferocious Chihuahua, they have tormented the biggest dogs in the corporate world. Super-brands like McDonalds, Calvin Kline, and Coca Cola have come to fear them. Lasn's theory is "if we are going to launch a successful movement it should be driven by visuals and by the most powerful means of our time. We figured, if you're going to fight back, fight back with images and icons," says Lasn. "So the heart of Culture Jamming was sort of icon versus icon. The corporates have their image factory and we have ours. And this is the only way we can beat them."

And beat them they have. After years of financial trouble in the 90s, Adbusters has now blossomed into a well-respected journal of cultural activism and creative resistance. Lasn credits much of their success to a major shift in global consciousness around the time of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) riots in Seattle in 1999. "Two years ago, around the time of the battle in Seattle, suddenly activism became cool again," he says. "Wearing a black shirt and smashing a window at a protest became really cool. And I think that somehow saved us."

Lasn believes the WTO riots marked a turning point in thought for many young Americans. "I think if you asked those people in the WTO battle in Seattle why they were there, they would have said 'I'm here because I've been mind-fucked. Ever since I was a kid I've been lied to and propagandized and now I feel there's a barcode on the back of my head and my soul has been sucked out of me'."

Riding this new groundswell of global activism, Adbusters is going from strength to strength. However, Lasn is still unable to explain the exact reasons for Adbusters global impact. "I must admit I don't quite know why we're succeeding; we've got no demographic and we don't play any of the marketing games. But I do know that people like our straightforwardness. We don't bullshit around. We say what we want to say about a corporation, about a government, about a leader, about anybody. Bluntness is possibly the ultimate weapon against consumer culture."

So, what is Adbusters problem with American-style consumer culture, Mr Lasn? "Most of us here believe that consumer culture is rotten to the core, that it's ecologically destructive and is killing the planet. Also that it is psychologically destructive - it is mind-fucking all of us in some way." Lasn believes that, like rats on a treadmill, we go to work every day to make enough money to buy unnecessary luxuries.

Marketing and advertising have made us believe that if only we can make enough money to buy that new car, those new sunglasses, that big-screen TV, that we'll find true happiness. Wrong, says Lasn. Our lust to accumulate more and more objects simply keeps us trapped in the cycle of working and spending.

So what's the solution? According to Adbusters, we - the citizens of the world - need to take back our culture from this American corporate/ capitalist/ consumer brainwash. We need to un-cool the mega-brands that keep our spirits chained by the desire for more unnecessary products. We need to consciously fight the power of advertising and marketing that makes us slaves to brand names. Lasn says that Culture Jamming is the answer. Culture Jamming involves everything from the act of "liberating" advertising billboards, through to the boycotting of ethically-irresponsible brands. And Lasn likes to lead by example: "I remember liberating my first billboard right in downtown Vancouver. It was a billboard that made me absolutely sick to the stomach. It was put out by a big tobacco company. It showed their trademark and then underneath said "we give to cancer research". A bunch of us climbed up there in the middle of the day with our paint and changed the billboard."

Yes, billboard "liberation" is illegal. But, in the time-honoured tradition of all social revolutionaries, Adbusters sometimes advocates breaking the law to achieve its goals. "In every cultural revolution there are those who wish to just be intellectual and not get involved," says Lasn. "But at the same time there has always been the heavy side as well - the people who break the windows, or sit down and take over places. They're prepared to be arrested and getting arrested is all part of the strategy."

There are so many greedy and socially irresponsible companies in the world that Adbusters can't fight them all. However, for Lasn, one particularly evil corporate holds special meaning for him. It is Phillip Morris Inc. - one of the largest and most crooked tobacco companies on the planet, makers of Marlboro and Camel cigarettes. Lasn - now an ex-smoker, after 25 years of poisoning himself - has vowed to take Phillip Morris down. "Part of the reason I kept smoking was because I remember the Marlboro cowboy. I always thought I should give up, but the tobacco companies were good at saying 'it hasn't been proven yet that smoking is bad for you'. I finally gave up smoking in 1987 and suddenly realized I'd been duped. Not only had the cowboy duped me, but the whole tobacco industry. So I decided right then that Phillip Morris was the number one corporate criminal in the world. Think about it: they have willingly, knowingly killed more people than died in the holocaust."

Adbusters currently have their disruptive sights set on another target: one of the "coolest" footwear makers on the planet. It is a brand that spends millions creating a super-slick image through worldwide marketing and advertising campaigns, yet still uses sweatshop labour in third world countries - paying their dirt-poor employees mere cents a day. It is a brand whose logo is one of the most recognized and desired symbols of "cool" throughout the western world, but continues to use environmentally unsafe materials and manufacturing processes. This brand is, of course, Nike. And Adbusters plan to use their own marketing power against them.

Lasn tells me that Adbusters' plan is to release its own Black Spot brand of sports shoe in direct competition to Nike. Their shoes will look almost identical to Nike's. In fact their logo will resemble the iconic Nike swoosh as closely as possible, without leaving them vulnerable to copyright lawsuits. However, Adbusters' Black Spot brand sneakers will be cheaper than Nike's, as well as being made from environmentally safe products and they will pay their factory employees a fair wage. Lasn is very excited about the Culture Jamming possibilities of the Black Spot project. "In some weird way it actually says 'Fuck Nike. Fuck the swoosh'. We're un-swooshing the swoosh," he says.

"But the point of the logo will be that it is an anti-brand. And if we can launch an anti-brand then we will have done something that can be used again and again to un-cool a whole bunch of these bad corporations. Then, hopefully, people everywhere will start launching their own anti-brands and there will be a real battle between civil society and corporate power - which is really the big struggle of our time."

Adbusters' goals may be lofty, but judging by their successes so far it is entirely possible that this tiny organisation could be the catalyst that sparks real change in our world. Could Adbusters really be the medium that rallies the forces of global disgust against the system? Kalle Lasn certainly thinks so: "I think that with the proper mind-shift the first true global culture can be something quite different from this excessive, decedent, obese kind of American culture that is trying so hard to control the world. You can call me optimistic, but I honestly believe we're at a very historic moment in history. Something big is going to happen over the next five years..."