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.

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...

Looking Back in Anger

In matters of life and fate, timing is everything. Culturally, socially, materially, the setting of your upbringing, specific to time and place, cannot but impress itself on you. And the parts of your upbringing that are not unique to you, but which are shared by all your coevals, likewise inform their sensibilities, bringing about a cohort of young people with similar experiences, common attitudes, kindred beliefs — in other words, a new generation. At least, that is the first assumption of the theory of generations. Generations, the theory holds, are defined by the events that their constituents witness together; by the culture that shapes them and which in turn they shape. Some generations are noted for the upheavals they lived through, others for those they precipitated.

Read More...

Sarah Lucas' Boner

Is Sarah Lucas the indispensable artist of the #MeToo Movement? Is her work even more important in this epic feminist uprising? Are we projecting our feelings onto her art? It really doesn’t matter.

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.

Now is the Time of Monsters

When I first heard about "illiberal democracy," and what Victor Orban was doing in Hungary, I didn't give it much thought. Then when Marine Le Pen became a rising star in France, and a Nazi-tinged party started winning big in Germany, I just shook my head and hoped this far right trend would pass.But instead, the dissolution of the liberal world order quickened: Narendra Modi transformed India into a Hindu dictatorship... Jair Bolsonaro pulled off a coup in Brazil... Javier Milei feverishly waved a chain saw around Argentina... and then, fuck it, unbelievable, Putin's tanks rolled into Ukraine... Bibi Netanyahu ripped apart the bodies of 20,000 children... and finally, the coup de grâce: Trump's landslide victory last November.

Read More...

Mad Cow AI

GENERATIVE AI JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER AND BETTER, UNTIL IT'S INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE THING IT'S MIMICKING - NAMELY, US. AND THEN IT GETS SMARTER THAN US, UNTIL WE ROLL OVER AND SUBMIT.At least that's the drumbeat we hear.But what if it's bullshit? What if it's as big a bag of bullshit as generative AI itself is threatening to become?What if the feedback loops we assume will make generative AI better start spinning in the other direction, making it worse? Magnifying its imperfections. Each successive copy is a little more corrupted. Little white lies morph into monstrous, whole-cloth hallucinations … until whatever's left of anything that's authentic on the whole goddamn internet is buried irretrievably in inane slop.

Read More...

YOU HAVE TO KEEP AT IT, AGAIN AND AGAIN, THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE

YOU HAVE TO KEEP AT IT,AGAIN AND AGAIN,THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE.From the moment you start dreaming as a teenager, start delving into philosophy and following artists, sense a first hint of awe at your existence and wonder if life has any meaning at all.Riddles wrapped in enigmas wrapped in mysteries. What the hell happened before the Big Bang? Does AI totally vanquish the idea of a human soul? And who is this "I" asking all these things, anyway?You'll keep asking questions like that ... again and again and again.

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.

TV Turnoff Week (2007)

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.

We Must Not Abandon Myanmar!

As the remaining shreds of Myanmar's long-troubled democracy disintegrate, atrocities are being committed against civilians. But where is the rest of the world?

Read More...

Navalny's Beginning a Hunger Strike — So Should We

On Wednesday, imprisoned activist Alexei Navalny began a hunger strike to protest the unfair treatment he has received as an inmate of a penal colony outside Moscow. But while Navalny's hunger strike highlights the shameful handling he has been subjected to, there is much that can be done from...

Read More...

How Much Does It Pay to Propagandize on Behalf of Tyrants?

What do the dictatorial Mugabe regime, the Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, the Sudanese junta, and now Myanmar's genocidal military government have in common — that is, besides a shared taste for blood and brutality?

Read More...