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.

Unstraight lines

Hello Adbusters, Read and am inspired by your magazine over the last decade. Want to comment on your aesthetic war against the straight line. I was at my job and a client who came from Japan stopped me when I underlined some information with a marker. Startled, I inquired what was at issue. She said how did you learn to draw that line so quickly and clearly.

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The Woman Who Had Many Names

“Deleir Khan has bought a new mare and a Bengali woman.” This news murmured through the square where villagers gathered to wag their tongues. People jostled and bustled, busier than on the holiest of holidays. Gossip was the only entertainment in my remote village. The favorite subjects were horses, dogs, and women. The latest juicy topic stirred their bored souls to life.

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Meme Warfare

In the beginning there was logic... then measurement, geometry and mathematics . . . then, for a few hundred years, we tried to prove the existence of God by using the laws of logic . . . then Descartes came up with “I think therefore I am” . . . then the enlightenment and modernism kicked in . . . and finally, hallelujah! the logical positivists of the 20th century — freaky, anal pipsqueaks all — perpetrated one of the most dastardly logic-freak acts in all of human history: They invented the “science” of economics.

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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.

Welcome to the New Asceticism.

So there you have it. We take a little pain and our bodies reward us for it, instead of punishing us for our pleasure. We take a little pain as a culture and our ecosystems reward us for it, instead of punishing us for our greed. We take a little pain in order to stay above the grass, as a species, for just a little longer. Until one day we realize we’ve been using the wrong language around all this. What we called “sucking it up” is really just “pulling together.”

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The Savior Meme

The late Stanford philosopher and therapist Paul Watzlawick had a good way of explaining how to get out of impossible jams. When change is required, there are different ways to think about the level of creativity that’s needed.A “first-order” change is to stamp on the gas pedal. A second- order change is to shift gears. A third-order change is to get out of the car and find another way to get there.That’s where we are now. Here’s a radical new way to think about it all.

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Erasing Time

On an average day, a Palestinian who works in Jerusalem and resides in the West Bank must wake up at four in the morning in order to arrive at work by nine. The reason is not the distance between workplace and home. With the construction of the separation wall that began in 2002, and is still underway as of 2022, the Israeli state entered into a new stage of encroachment on Palestinian territory. The Palestinian worker has to wait in line for hours at checkpoints staffed by soldiers who are incentivized to make the line move as slowly as possible. Most of these bor-der-crossers have a long day ahead of them in various kinds of construction work. After crossing into Israel, they must spend hours every day passing through checkpoints to get to work, even though they often have only a few kilometres to travel.

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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.

Censorship and Surveillance

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.

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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