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.

Outfox the algorithms! One man’s attempt to live one day absolutely free

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

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Rewiring Society for Survival

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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Defying the Straight Line

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.

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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 editor Micah White interviewed for Q Ideas

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.

No Cease-fire for Apartheid in Israel, No Cease-fire for Injustice Worldwide

Since the cease-fire, the mainstream media has all but gone silent on the suffering in Gaza. But don’t take that silence for a resolution. Despite the pause in the fighting, not even Al-Aqsa mosque, a holy house of worship, has been let alone. Even...

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Social Media Is Silencing the Voices of Oppressed Palestinians

Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are cracking down on voices decrying Israel's vicious oppression of Palestinians, shutting down accounts and silencing dissent.

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Art or Insult?

Vice recently ran an article in which photographs of Cambodians disappeared by the genocidal Khmer-Rouge regime were colored and altered to appear as if smiling.

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