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Usually exclusive to our physical magazine, we’ve treated non-subscribers to a selection of some of our best print pieces.
Every revolution, every authentic revolution, promises to redeem the failures of its predecessors. This is what Walter Benjamin thought — or at least, this is what Slavoj Žižek says Benjamin thought at the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). Paraphrasing Benjamin, Žižek says in the film that all the unsettled ghosts of the past will at last find rest in the new freedom born out of the true revolution to come. Yet he warns the path to this freedom comes with no guarantees. There is no train of historical inevitability that can be ridden to the safe harbour of emancipation. Getting there all depends on a fickle crowd of free riders, a ragtag huddle of the flighty and the faithless. They should be a familiar bunch because, it turns out, they are us. Our liberation rests on nobody’s shoulders but our own.
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The UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the liberal international order sought to guarantee rights on an individual level. These promoted freedom of thought and expression, of religion, of movement and association and of sexual orientation, whereby ‘any particular freedom is to be respected only insofar as it does not violate the equal freedom of others.’ Within a liberal international order, such ‘rule by the people’ encompassed freedom of political participation, representation, expression and association. It also included having regular free, inclusive and equal elections, the presence of accountable and transparent political institutions to guarantee the individual liberties and rights of citizens, and access to competing information. At its core, the US endorsed electoral democracy as the central and unquestionable pillar of its preferred international order. Such social and political rights are seen as being generalizable to the internal basis of all countries, and hence the whole international system. They also produced a sense of solidarity among Western countries concerning the preservation of a common social and political basis.
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Scientists used to think there were only six human emotions — anger, surprise, disgust, enjoyment, fear and sadness. We now know there is a seventh: awe. Awe is the feeling, registering more in our body than our mind, that we’re in the presence of something so vast and deep and powerful that it swamps our present understanding of the world. A skyful of stars in the middle of nowhere. A soaring piece of art. An act of wild kindness, fugitively glimpsed. Or an existential threat.
Read More...Dive deep into long form features on everything from smartphone addiction to what a True-Cost global marketplace would mean for the economy.
As a once-and-future free-range human, I’ve been thinking about how to shake off the commercial algorithms that have hacked into my life and are now driving it. The key, I’ve concluded, is novelty. Whether it’s true, as the ethobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed, that the pursuit of novelty is “the only one way to live a truly progressive life,” it’s a mighty tempting strategy to air out. “From a species perspective, the job of each individual is to be unlike anyone who’s living or who ever lived,” McKenna wrote. “To do things, and react to things, in a way no one has quite done before.” This is of course pretty much an act of cultural treason. There’s a reason Atomic Habits was a #1 world bestseller and nobody has written Atomic Novelty. Habits are safe. Flout them and people in charge start furrowing their brows, because now you’re likely to start breaking rules, too. Even
Read More...Inventing a new way to live, one that will allow us, as a species, to go on living, is what economists call a "wild problem." It will take a mighty imaginative leap, really a heave of consciousness. But we can do it. We have to.It's easier to imagine the end of the worldthan the end of capitalism.— Frederic JamesonI. The TaskThe time for tiny tweaks to the status quo is over. We've run out of time for that. The only thing that will save us is massive buy-in to a major paradigm shift, a different way of living and loving on planet Earth. A lighter, looser, sparer one. More, because less.Here's how people typically change their minds. They do it the way a climber scales a rock face, inching out beyond the last point of protection — so that if they fall, they fall only as far as what they last believed.Our rethinks are not big stretches, in other words. Just variations on what we think righ
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He couldn't stand straight lines and right angles, which aren't much found in nature. Things not made by us mostly curve. Nothing worthwhile is plum, level or square.So observed Gaetano Pesce, the great Italian designer, who died at age 84.From this man's brow burst organic, protoplasmic designs for things like bookcases and sofas, blazing with intense, saturated color.
Read More...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.
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.
Listen to the voice of Adbusters proffering sweet ASMR vibes about the end of capitalism and where Occupy Wall Street went wrong.
Memes can be cinematic too. Turn up the volume and watch the chaos of the world unfold and disintegrate before your very eyes.
The case against JPMorgan Chase for manipulating precious-metals and Treasury markets has many of the usual features. On September 29th it admitted to wrongdoing in relation to the actions of employees who, authorities claim, fraudulently rigged markets tens of thousands of times in 2008–16.
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People have been told all their lives that this economy is inevitable and indispensable, and that if they just give it free rein it will ultimately work for them.
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In an established autocracy — like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, or Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia — it is nearly impossible to criticize or to investigate the autocrat.
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