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.

Surviving the Plague

Ordinary life was suspended during the epidemic. Confraternities, associations that brought laypeople together for charity work and socialising, could no longer hold meetings. Public sermons were forbidden. The city’s schools were closed. Taverns and inns were shut. Gambling dens and barber shops were closed, ball games forbidden.

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Hope in the Time of COVID-19

The virus seems well-turned to exploit the specific characteristic of the world we’ve created for ourselves - with our massive population tightly linked by air travel, exotic tourist excursions and just-in-time supply chains, and marked by brutal inequalities in health care and physical well-being.

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Can we break the spell?

At its start, the internet was still relatively scarce, in the sense that we generally wanted more of it everywhere. iPhones were new; we were still excited about carrying portals to that utopia in our pockets and finding new ways to integrate two domains that were previously separate. Ten years ago, I could sit in a bar and wish that it better reflected the future I was experiencing.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

World Revolution

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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