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.

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.

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 #155: A NEW RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND CORPORATIONS

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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