It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.

The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment

I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.

America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself - from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence.

The most powerful narcotic in the world is the promise of belonging.

People have tried all kinds of ways to fix things, like electing Obama and having a debate about decreasing the power of corporations. Then the Supreme Court gives them personhood with the Citizens United decision. You realize that no matter what you do, who you elect, how wonderful your article is, how eloquently you speak on CNN, none of it will make a difference. Ultimately, the only choice is a revolution that pulls off a soft regime change.

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us-by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.