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.

“Come drink beer here!”

Hearing English in a town where our white faces are exotic makes us pause, and several hours later we’re still drinking pitchers of Tsingtao beer with our new friend—a local named Laogai. He’s a musician and deeply political in a way that makes us uncomfortable. In China to criticize the government is a very, very serious crime—especially for a foreigner.

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Break the Trance

Advertising is the biggest psychological experiment ever carried out on the human race. Hypes, jolts, infoviruses, infotoxins, fake news and emotional blackmail have worked their way into the very fabric of our lives generating anxiety, mood disorders and mental dislocation on an unprecedented scale. If we hope to stay sane, keep our minds clear and create any kind of a viable future for ourselves, we need to stop seeing ads as a mere irritation . . .

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Time For Big Tech to Pay Up

Once called the “fourth estate” for its power, crucial to democracy, to check the three official branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial — journalism has suffered a hemorrhage of resources since the advent of the digital era. While social media became a vaster and faster channel for news, papers’ print circulations and advertising revenues dwindled, forcing major newspapers to go online and many smaller, local ones to shut down entirely. “Between 1970 and 2016,” Jill Lepore wrote last year in the New Yorker, “five hundred or so [American] dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough.”

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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.

Culture Jamming 2.0

In Early 2020, as the pandemic shut down the world and drove everyone deeper into cyberspace, word began to spread online about a massive and sinister cover-up. One that ought to have every every freedom-loving American very afraid. Had you heard?

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Kensho Moment, a Quantum Transformation

“This is what capitalism does best, right?” she told the journalist Ezra Klein on his podcast not long ago. “It first creates this enormous appetite for things, and then it tells us that whatever we have is not enough. I mean, I think that is a form of madness. It seems to me there’s no question about that.”

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What Would The Buddha Do?

Maybe every generation feels confronted by some crisis that will determine the fate of the planet. But unless your head is buried in the sand, it’s not possible to be ignorant of the extraordinary planetary crisis that confronts all of us today.

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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.

Virtual/Life

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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