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.

Long Justice

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.

Read More...

Democracy or Autocracy?

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.

Read More...

An Existential Threat

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...

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.

Every Country Is a Living Organism

How do you feel about being Canadian, British, Australian, Spanish, or American? Are you proud of your country? Do you like how the politics work, the decisions are made, the economy’s run, the problems and crises are handled?

Read More...

Are You in Denial?

You know the story. An irreversible extinction event is about to drop – literally. A meteorite is on a collision course for earth, and earthlings can’t get their shit together to deal with it or even acknowledge it in any productive way.

Read More...

Zones of Hope

Is it possible — in a world crisscrossed with roads, railways, pipelines, and shipping routes — to carve out a little freedom from the free market?

Read More...

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 161: Hope/Nope

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.

The Monster Fox News Created

Turning on their maker, Trump supporters chanted "Fox News sucks" and "Shame on Fox" outside a vote-counting facility in Arizona.

Read More...

Our Planet Is Out of Options. Does Anyone Care?

The earth is getting measurably hotter, each year breaking records set the year before, while Arctic sea ice continues to thin. Wildfires are growing hotter, more frequent, more widespread and more deadly.

Read More...

So let's keep playing

Times like this, indeed. 2020 is a rupture year. Local markets are imploding, economies are in the brink of collapse. The spectacle of politics seems to offer no solution but only adds to the reigning chaos and uncertainty.

Read More...