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.

Read More...

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 . . .

Read More...

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.”

Read More...

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.

There's a Peculiar Strangeness to Being Canadian in America

It is a long way from the west coast of Canada to central New Jersey. In August, I moved from the Lower Mainland to Middlesex County, some 35 miles southwest of New York City, and found out just how vast the width of the continent can feel. I traded not just the Pacific for the Atlantic but the city for the suburbs, mountains for flatlands, wilderness for concrete, green for grey. I gave up forests of cedar and spruce and gained (far fewer) oaks and sycamores. I swapped dollars for dollars, the only currency that counts. I left behind the rains only to find myself parched. I was no longer in the land where I was born. I had become an alien.

Read More...

A Fundamental Shift in the Nature of Value

I’ve never quite understood finance. It’s a nut I just can’t crack. I don’t get why the stock market goes up when there’s bad news.Or why at a time of climate crisis the Dow Jones is breaking all records. I don’t know why 30 percent of new wealth is speculative — no physical objects bought or sold. Or exactly what work the three trillion dollars sloshing around the global economy every day is actually doing. Nobody has ever been able to explain this to me in a way that makes sense.And how come tax havens still exist? And why did no one on Wall Street go to jail after the meltdown of 2008?It’s all a mystery to me.But I think maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place.

Read More...

Touch Grass: A Gardener’s Pandemic-era Political Awakening

Over the last two years, I have developed one of the most politically clarifying of all my habits. I became a gardener; I was not alone. The global spread of green thumb, which tracked intimately with the tally of Covid infections as they rose and dipped and rose anew, is well documented. Since...

Read More...

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.

What Does JPMorgan Call Its Crime? "A Little Razzle-Dazzle to Juke the Algos"

The case against JPMorgan Chase for manipulating precious-metals and Treasury markets has many of the usual features. On September 29th it admitted to wrongdoing in relation to the actions of employees who, authorities claim, fraudulently rigged markets tens of thousands of times in 2008–16.

Read More...

Eat the Rich

People have been told all their lives that this economy is inevitable and indispensable, and that if they just give it free rein it will ultimately work for them.

Read More...

America at the Edge of Autocracy

In an established autocracy — like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, or Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia — it is nearly impossible to criticize or to investigate the autocrat.

Read More...