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.

Manila traffic

Something that caught my eye as we were stuck in the dreadful Manila traffic, with cars bumper to bumper as far as your eyes can see, was the countless murals of Rodrigo Duterte plastered around the city. I was confused, I thought “don’t they hate their president?”

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Metameme Insurrection

We’ve been through cataclysmic periods of lush growth . . . spent entire eras encased in ice . . . witnessed volcanic eruptions, clouds of ash that blocked the sun and choked all life out of the sky. And we saw the first magical inklings of life leap from cell to amoebae to frogs to crocs to monkeys. Then once Homo Erectus began strutting the Earth 200,000 years ago, a terrible “beauty” was born. From the earliest farms and settlements we saw the rise of towns, cities, nations, empires and with them, the birth of music, poetry, art, literature, philosophy . . . but also slavery, brutal revolutions, genocides, an unspeakable holocaust, and two savage world wars. Yet through it all, we’ve always bounced back — the human story just kept moving along.

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Radical Paradigm Shifts

The methodology and ideology of modern economics are built into the frameworks of educational methods, and absorbed by students without any explicit discussion. In particular, the logical positivist philosophy is a deadly poison which I ingested during my Ph.D. training at the Economics Department in Stanford in the late 1970s. It took me years and years to undo these effects.

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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.

Lone Wolf Activism — Live Without Dead Time

The only thing that gives me satisfaction lately is going out and getting my nose dirty. Pulling off some little act of subversion — like placing an OUT OF ORDER sign on an ATM, or taping an Ultimatum to World Leaders poster on a bus stop shelter. Once in awhile I’ll drop by the economics department of the University of British Columbia and pin KICKITOVER MANIFESTOs on professors’ doors. In future I might, I dunno, let the air out of some SUV tires; place a stink bomb in a bank; throw a handful of pixel dust in Justin Trudeau’s face. Such acts of civil disobedience aren’t exactly denting the universe. But they always turn my day around. Like, now I have the strength to fight another day.

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Capitalism has Failed and Degrowth Communism is the Future

An Interview with Kohei Saito, Kohei Saito, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tokyo, seems poised to become the new Thomas Piketty, winning scores of converts to anti-capitalist economics within mainstream Western culture. His new book has just been released in the United States as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto

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I am Four

I am four. A man who is supposed to take care of me touches me in a way that I know is wrong, even when I don't have the vocabulary to explain it. When my mother, white with rage, complains to my family, she is told off. In Kerala there is a saying: whether the leaf encroaches on the thorn or the thorn encroaches on the leaf, it's the leaf that tears. In other words, it is not their job to protect the girl; it is the mothers' responsibility to protect her daughter.I am eleven. I hear what's said about me: Too bossy. Talks too much. Doesn't have enough girlfriends. Doesn't help out in the kitchen. At a family vacation, a man six times my age puts his disgusting mouth on mine without my consent. My aunts and uncles are in the room just next door. Many years later, recounting this story to my mother, I realize the violence I experienced was a mere slight compared to what she and her mother

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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.

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.

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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