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.

Rise of the Corporate Charter Revocation Movement

A corporation has no heart, no soul, no morals. When it hurts people or damages the environment, it will feel no sorrow or remorse because it is intrinsically unable to. (It may sometimes apologize, but that’s not remorse — that’s public relations.)“A corporation cannot laugh or cry; it cannot enjoy the world or suffer with it,” as the Buddhist scholar David Loy put it. “Most of all a corporation cannot love.” Its “body” is just a judicial construction, and that’s why it’s so dangerous. The corporation is “ungrounded to the earth and its creatures, to the pleasures and responsibilities that derive from being manifestations of the earth.”

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Four Metamemes to Take Power Back from Corporations

Somewhere between Santa Clara and Citizens United, we the people lost our confidence. We lost our dignity. We rolled over to America Inc. Job One now is to get back some of that arrogance and boldness we had 150 years ago, when misbehaving corporations were ferociously slapped down.

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The Unofficial History of America

The official history of America is one every kid knows. It’s a story of fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a dream. A story of hungry settlers carving a home out of the wilderness. A story of a revolution, beating back British imperialism and launching a new colony into the industrial age on its own terms.

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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.

"The Social Dilemma" director hopes to spark a movement

A new report from the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel deems that Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook have abusively wielded their monopoly-like power. The panel found that the "tech giants" hobbled innovation, slashed consumer choice, and threatened democracy itself.

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In Hong Kong, Beijing Asserts Its "Might Is Right"

The law of the Mainland is coming down hard on long-suffering Hong Kong. In July, teenage pro-independence activist Tony Chung became the first political figure arrested for violating the Beijing-imposed national-security law.

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As hundreds of thousands die, billionaires rake in riches

Amid the global pandemic of coronavirus that has seen over a million dead and millions more out of work, the wealth of the world's richest has reportedly risen beyond $10 trillion.

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