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.

Institutionalized: The Films of Frederick Wiseman

Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary, City Hall, is his forty-third, but who’s counting? In the half-century since the release, and prompt two-decade ban, of Titicut Follies (1967) — his harrowing début about a prison for the criminally insane — Wiseman has chronicled the myriad ways (chiefly) American life is raised up and laid low, dignified and debased, spared and squandered by institutions.

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America Begins

America begins, not with ideals of democracy and freedom but with settler colonialism wiping out the Native populations to make room for white development, chattel slavery fueling capitalist growth through the 19th century, and imperialism enabling the economic exploitation of societies abroad.

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I’m W.E.I.R.D.

Ten years ago an academic paper stood the social sciences on their ear. It came out of the psychology department at the University of British Columbia. A certain kind of person, the authors noticed, has been building the models and running the experiments and basically “programming the algorithms that run the world.” The psychologists (Joe Henrichs and Steve Heine and Ara Norenzayan) coined a term for those people: They are WEIRD.

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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.

There's a Peculiar Strangeness to Being Canadian in America

It is a long way from the west coast of Canada to central New Jersey. In August, I moved from the Lower Mainland to Middlesex County, some 35 miles southwest of New York City, and found out just how vast the width of the continent can feel. I traded not just the Pacific for the Atlantic but the city for the suburbs, mountains for flatlands, wilderness for concrete, green for grey. I gave up forests of cedar and spruce and gained (far fewer) oaks and sycamores. I swapped dollars for dollars, the only currency that counts. I left behind the rains only to find myself parched. I was no longer in the land where I was born. I had become an alien.

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A Fundamental Shift in the Nature of Value

I’ve never quite understood finance. It’s a nut I just can’t crack. I don’t get why the stock market goes up when there’s bad news.Or why at a time of climate crisis the Dow Jones is breaking all records. I don’t know why 30 percent of new wealth is speculative — no physical objects bought or sold. Or exactly what work the three trillion dollars sloshing around the global economy every day is actually doing. Nobody has ever been able to explain this to me in a way that makes sense.And how come tax havens still exist? And why did no one on Wall Street go to jail after the meltdown of 2008?It’s all a mystery to me.But I think maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place.

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Touch Grass: A Gardener’s Pandemic-era Political Awakening

Over the last two years, I have developed one of the most politically clarifying of all my habits. I became a gardener; I was not alone. The global spread of green thumb, which tracked intimately with the tally of Covid infections as they rose and dipped and rose anew, is well documented. Since...

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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 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.

A Powerful Moment for Palestinian Unity

Benjamin Netanyahu’s days as a free man are numbered.His opponents in the Knesset are conspiring to end his criminal 12-year premiership (the longest in Israel’s history) by forging an unlikely “change” coalition of small-party ultranationalists, centrists, some leftists and even Islamists.

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Fuck You, Bezos!

Jeff’s no longer the richest person on Earth: he recently had to settle for a paltry second-place position behind French silver-spooner Bernard Arnault. Nonetheless, he’s living larger, and more obscenely, than ever.

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Napoleon: Cancel or Commemorate?

On the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the empreror’s reinstatement of slavery in 1802, saying it was a “a betrayal of the spirit of the Enlightenment”. It was the first time that...

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