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.

Be Fucking Brutal

A psychiatrist told Nan Goldin she would end up just like her sister. Instead, Nan left home at 14 and discovered the camera. It became the only way to preserve the world around her as it crumbled after her sister’s suicide.

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Young Adult Dystopia

Walking through downtown Vancouver is a striking spectacle, a study in contrasts. Teenage and young adult shoppers browse Brandy Melville, Sephora, and for the edgier consumer, Urban Outfitters, while homeless vagrants sleep through the day on sun-baked sidewalks. The perma-tanned, thin-wristed stars of CW teen shows are filmed on Snapchat idling at traffic lights as visibly disturbed veterans, dazed under the glare of the midday sun, stumble from car to car murmuring about change. Alleys where heroin addicts sit with their small children and shoot up are painted pastel pink in order to give the city a veneer of uniform corporate colour.

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The commercialization of knowledge

An important artifact in the history of mental pollution is found between pages 90 and 91 of the 1974 paperback edition of Robert Silverberg’s sci-fi novel Time Hoppers. Here, permanently interjected by the publisher into the flow of the story,

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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.

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.

Robin-Hood Redditors Are Sinking Wall-Street Hedge Funds

Whether incensed or inspired by Wall Street's misdeeds, the memers of r/WallStreetBets are taking up the Occupy torch.

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Amazon Prime Won't Let You Go? Time to Break Free

If you've ever made the mistake of becoming a member of Amazon Prime, you should already be familiar with how painstaking it is to cancel your membership.

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Keystone XL Is Dead. Now What?

In his first day in the Oval Office, President Joe Biden did much to undo his predecessor's atrocious legacy on climate-change, rejoining the (inadequate) Paris Agreement on behalf of the U.S., reinstating over 100 environmental policies weakened or wasted under Trump — and revoking president

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