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.

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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The Unofficial History of America

In high school the cool kids smoked. So I started smoking too. And I continued to smoke in university. I just changed brands. Gaulois were too pretentious; I went for British brands like Peter Stuyvesant, with its pure white pack.Then I started to hear murmurings: cigarettes cause lung cancer.It was still just a rumor — at least that’s how the industry spun it. “The link hasn’t been proven,” said Philip Morris. PM had marshaled a team of corporate lawyers and PR flacks — not to mention publicly skeptical doctors on their payroll. The evidence just isn’t there, they said. The average smoker’s chances of getting lung cancer from cigarettes is roughly the chance of being struck by lightning.So I kept puffing.But I tried to quit, again and again. Problem was, I couldn’t edit a film without smoking. You can imagine it: you’re immersed in the flow, the rational part of your brain is in park, the wild reactive part firing on instinct, and your hand instinctively reaches for a dart. For me back then smoking was woven into the ritual of doing creative work on a deadline.The magic of tobacco is that it’s both a stimulant and a relaxant. The smoke cloud itself is hypnotic.One morning, after a lot of boozing and chain-smoking through many nights of editing, I woke up feeling like shit. And I stopped smoking. Again.But this time I stayed clean. One, two, three days. On day four I woke up feeling . . . amazing. Clear skies.Not long after, I ran into one of my mother’s neighbors. He looked awful. I learned he was dying of lung cancer. He had only a few months to live. I looked in his eyes and saw that he had given up. I’d gotten lucky; many hadn’t.It dawned on me that Philip Morris did this. They knew they were killing people and they covered it up. They built their empire on a business plan to sell toxic addictive products to people who didn’t know any better. They were literally getting away with murder and had been for decades.That’s the moment I started to hate corporations.

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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.

#TrueCost

here’s a lot of brainpower converging on the global climate emergency, with green-energy and biosphere-repair ideas being floated in every country on earth. The hope is that each small advance is a piece of the puzzle, and a fair, just, sustainable and secure global system will emerge if we all just commit to reducing carbon emissions through every hack we can think of.

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The #TrueCost Revolution - Where You Fit In

Over the last couple of generations, we in the so-called “developed” world have eased into a very cushy way of living. We love our dish washers, spin dryers and microwave ovens. We love our throw away diapers, pre-washed veggies and ready-to-eat dinners delivered right to our door. And we love cruising in our cars with our favorite music playing. The idea of living more austere lives is anathema. We’re hooked on all of this stuff now. Whatever it takes, we gotta ...

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La Troisième Force

Je veux vous parler de résistance. La résistance, c'est ce que les gens ressentent lorsqu'ils ne peuvent simplement pas faire face à ce qui doit être fait. Quelque chose d'important se trouve droit devant eux, mais c'est tellement effrayant, tellement terrifiant par ses impacts dans leur mode de vie confortable, qu'ils ne peuvent pas y faire face. Ils résistent. Plus la peur est grande, plus la résistance est grande.

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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.

Adbusters Jams CNN - TV Turnoff 2007

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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