Can you still feel awe . . . wonder . . . do you still have a soul?
Advertising is a tax write-off for corporations. They dump a harmful product into our shared mental environment — and get rewarded for doing so. This dodge has been going on for so long no one questions it.
But here’s an idea: why not impose a progressive tax on advertising — an adtax?
Imagine a global debate that asks these questions: Just how is advertising affecting our mental health? Does it warp the way we think about critical issues like overconsumption, personal responsibility and global warming? Is the daily torrent of pro-consumption messages rewiring our brains? Does it make us feel more anxious and depressed?
If we decide the answer’s yes, who pays for the damage? Should advertising join the list of pariah industries like tobacco and oil — kingpin offenders rich enough to absorb the cost of massive class-action suits?
Here’s the most amazing question of all: What would the ambience of the world feel like if we took back the mental space now filled with commercial slop — if advertising suddenly just went … poof? Would we again hear the beautiful signal long lost in the noise? Would our lives be filled with awe, and wonder, and grace?
It’s whirring faster every day. Cooking the planet. Bleaching the coral. Mowing the trees. Filling our oceans, our forests, our lungs with plastic.
Its algorithms scramble our minds and turn children into addicts. It captures any semblance of humanity and turns it into a product.
Now, with AI, it’s found a way to our souls.
Hope is for suckers.
Feels like that, a lot of days. Sweating as the planet burns. Aware that you’re being watched and tracked like a criminal. Being told no job awaits you in the age of AI. Escaping into your phone only to be blasted with news of fascist ideologies and savage wars and bullshit corporate dereliction. And oh yeah: the rent’s due.
Hope is something people have when they can see a path forward. But when everything’s this fucked up all at once, what are you gonna do? Why even get out of bed?
But wait. Bit of a different scene going on down in the global south, in the “emerging” part of the world. There, a wild and primal vibe is brewing. In the streets of Nepal, Madagascar, Indonesia, Kenya, Bangladesh and India, a revolutionary fervor is roaring, stoked by those Gen Z cockroaches who suddenly decided they won’t be squashed. With nothing to lose, they have nothing to fear. Wild, exciting, revolutionary shit happening right under our noses.
Imagine if our two worlds teamed up. What kind of awesome, hydra-headed political vibe would rise to whack this failing experiment of ours on Planet Earth into a new orbit.
As a kid, I watched the little stores in my neighborhood disappear as the supermarkets arrived. Then I watched the malls take over. Then Walmart become the cheapest place to shop. And over the years, I watched as every area aspect of my life, bit by bit, taken over by a handful of megacorporations. And now private equity firms are grabbing whole industries — health care, real estate, financial services, pet care — and turning them into monocultures of profit-making.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the fundamental flaw, the false promise we’ve swallowed, is bigness itself. Big farms, big data centres, big platforms, big media, big finance. Each step along the way we thought: Big is better, more efficient, why not save a bit of dough? And no one had the stones to say, Fuck no!
the emerging post-liberal imagination
The meaning you crave is not out there. It’s not in the memes you stream, not in the democracy you inherited, not in the communities we’ve blown up.
The world you want is not waiting for you.
You have to build it.
Hey,
The year of the horse is galloping to a close and the year of the goat looms tantalizingly on the horizon.
We’re going to have a crack at launching a bunch of Gen Z driven System Change political parties around the world. We think we can whack the boomers’ doomsday machine for a loop and come up with a whole new destiny for our planet.
We need all the help we can get . . . so if you can find a way to give us a boost:
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No 1. Get our year-end issue — it’s all about young people creating a breakaway movement that links arms across the world with a politics of survival.
No 2. Send a gift sub to a friend — give them a dose of revolutionary fervor!
No 3. Rock this tee . . . it’s the shit!
No 4. Fly the One World flag.
No 5. Read this book.
Or stir up our fuck-it-all spirit with a donation.
All love,
Team AB
WE ARE ONE
we break the commercial monopoly on the production of meaning...
