Adbusters Archive

The (almost) complete archive of all the stuff that Adbusters has ever made - Articles! Podcasts! Spoof ads! - in one convenient place for your viewing pleasure.

Articles

Usually exclusive to our physical magazine, we’ve treated non-subscribers to a selection of some of our best print pieces.

World War 3

The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist, was carried out by Israel's Mossad using an autonomous machine gun.‍Russia is developing an undersea Poseidon nuclear torpedo that can travel across an ocean under its own guidance, evading existing missle defenses to deliver a nuclear weapon days after it is launched.‍This is the brace new frontier of the 21st century warfare. Nothing will stop the current crop of nuclear powers from pushing their autonomous warfare capabilities to the limit. It will be an arms race like no other (with China quite likely coming out on top).‍Will autonomous killer robots lock out their human creators and duke it out in WW3? ‍Is a ghost-nukes showdown between the forces of autocracy and democracy inevitable?‍Only We the Poeple of the world, coming together forthefirsttimein history as a global community, can stop the madness.

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Vibe Shift

You know this world, where the sunlight is electric and the currency is fame, and all the taxis heading there are single- occupancy, and your driver had better gun it cuz the stale-yellow light’s about to turn. You know this world if you’re a Gen Z kid – or at least, a certain kind of Gen Z kid, one who has bought the ticket and is enjoying the dream, from the comfort of your gaming chair, as the dopamine hits come fast, and someone on a scooter is bringing you dinner, and the future is a joke.

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What Happens When AI Completely Decodes and Synthesizes Reality?

As we realize A.I. can do what we do, better – and for free — we’ll experience a kind of false dawn of euphoria. It steps up, and we happily step back. Students stop writing essays. Job seekers stop writing resumes. Designers use MidJourney to create book covers. All life’s gruntwork is over, and the finished product isn’t suffering at all. Hallelujah! But here’s the deal we can’t quite grasp: Bit by bit we humans lose our skills . . . our agency . . . our creative spark . . .

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Deep Dives

Dive deep into long form features on everything from smartphone addiction to what a True-Cost global marketplace would mean for the economy.

Now is the Time of Monsters

When I first heard about "illiberal democracy," and what Victor Orban was doing in Hungary, I didn't give it much thought. Then when Marine Le Pen became a rising star in France, and a Nazi-tinged party started winning big in Germany, I just shook my head and hoped this far right trend would pass.But instead, the dissolution of the liberal world order quickened: Narendra Modi transformed India into a Hindu dictatorship... Jair Bolsonaro pulled off a coup in Brazil... Javier Milei feverishly waved a chain saw around Argentina... and then, fuck it, unbelievable, Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine... Bibi Netanyahu ripped apart the bodies of 20,000 children... and finally, the coup de grâce: Trump's landslide victory last November.

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Mad Cow AI

GENERATIVE AI JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER AND BETTER, UNTIL IT'S INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE THING IT'S MIMICKING - NAMELY, US. AND THEN IT GETS SMARTER THAN US, UNTIL WE ROLL OVER AND SUBMIT.At least that's the drumbeat we hear.But what if it's bullshit? What if it's as big a bag of bullshit as generative AI itself is threatening to become?What if the feedback loops we assume will make generative AI better start spinning in the other direction, making it worse? Magnifying its imperfections. Each successive copy is a little more corrupted. Little white lies morph into monstrous, whole-cloth hallucinations … until whatever's left of anything that's authentic on the whole goddamn internet is buried irretrievably in inane slop.

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YOU HAVE TO KEEP AT IT, AGAIN AND AGAIN, THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE

YOU HAVE TO KEEP AT IT,AGAIN AND AGAIN,THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE.From the moment you start dreaming as a teenager, start delving into philosophy and following artists, sense a first hint of awe at your existence and wonder if life has any meaning at all.Riddles wrapped in enigmas wrapped in mysteries. What the hell happened before the Big Bang? Does AI totally vanquish the idea of a human soul? And who is this "I" asking all these things, anyway?You'll keep asking questions like that ... again and again and again.

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Spoof Ads

Our fingers are on the global pulse, counting beats as we stutter towards the throes of death. If you want to know what Adbusters thinks about the news, this is where you find it.

KalleCasts

We're in the middle of a guerrilla marketing war for the future of the planet. Conventional weapons are useless — all we have are ideas. These are the best of our culture jams.

Hummingbird

Media

Listen to the voice of Adbusters proffering sweet ASMR vibes about the end of capitalism and where Occupy Wall Street went wrong.

Junk Thought

The Pulse

Memes can be cinematic too. Turn up the volume and watch the chaos of the world unfold and disintegrate before your very eyes.

Unprime Day

Prime Day, Amazon’s yearly deal-hawking hoopla for its swindled subscribers, begins on June 21. And there’s never been a better occasion to cancel your Prime membership and boycott Amazon and all its subsidiaries (which include AbeBooks, Amazon Studios, Audible, Book Depository, ComiXology, Goodreads, IMDb, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zappos, and dozens more).

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Why Don’t We Put the Head of the Sackler Family in Jail for Life?

For two decades Purdue Pharma peddled the falsehood that OxyContin, the painkiller at the heart of the deadly opioid epidemic, was safe and non-addictive. “More people in the United States died from overdoses involving opioids in 2017,” in Nature’s account, ”than from HIV- or AIDS-related illnesses at the peak of the AIDS epidemic.”

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Who Will Win the Planetary Endgame?

Our world is being carved into two spheres of influence. For now, those spheres are limited merely to economic competition. But as the the tension mounts, there is a real possibility that the China-vs-U.S. face-off could spill over into an all-out war — a global fight for worldwide hegemony — maybe even World War 3.

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