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.

City of Thieves

Which island country plays host to the most egregious financial misdeeds? Hint: it’s no beach-blanket paradise. It’s the UK, and London — its crime den of a capital — is at the heart of a globe-spanning system of money laundering, tax evasion and fraud, pumping dirty cash and facilitating dirty dealings around the world. Forget Switzerland, Luxembourg and Ireland, Hong Kong and Singapore, Delaware and South Dakota, Panama and all the rest. Britain, including its overseas holdings such as the Cayman Islands, is the world’s crowning tax haven. Over two-thirds of the 956 companies named in the Panama Papers and linked to public-office holders were incorporated in the British Virgin Islands — which, as its name suggests, is very much a part of the UK. But far from the tropical shores of the former empire’s colonial conquests, London itself — the place where the really bad stuff goes down — sits at the center of the spider’s web.

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Pay Up

The truth is out. The crimes of colonialism have been laid bare. Now, in return for centuries of rape, pillage, slavery, and exploitation, the moment has come to ensure the descendants of colonised peoples get their fair share of the spoils. Calls for reparations are as old as the evils they seek to redress. Yet in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, new energies are being harnessed to compel the onetime tyrants of Europe to compensate those they tyrannized. “Pay up” is on the lips of every half-righteous observer of the imperial legacy — and for good reason. The time is ripe for the expansionist West to pay reparations not merely for the suffering it caused but for ruining ways of life going back ages, leaving behind scars both psychological and material which may never heal.

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World War 3

The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist, was carried out by Israel's Mossad using an autonomous machine gun.‍Russia is developing an undersea Poseidon nuclear torpedo that can travel across an ocean under its own guidance, evading existing missle defenses to deliver a nuclear weapon days after it is launched.‍This is the brace new frontier of the 21st century warfare. Nothing will stop the current crop of nuclear powers from pushing their autonomous warfare capabilities to the limit. It will be an arms race like no other (with China quite likely coming out on top).‍Will autonomous killer robots lock out their human creators and duke it out in WW3? ‍Is a ghost-nukes showdown between the forces of autocracy and democracy inevitable?‍Only We the Poeple of the world, coming together forthefirsttimein history as a global community, can stop the madness.

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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.

Outfox the algorithms! One man’s attempt to live one day absolutely free

As a once-and-future free-range human, I’ve been thinking about how to shake off the commercial algorithms that have hacked into my life and are now driving it. The key, I’ve concluded, is novelty. Whether it’s true, as the ethobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna claimed, that the pursuit of novelty is “the only one way to live a truly progressive life,” it’s a mighty tempting strategy to air out. “From a species perspective, the job of each individual is to be unlike anyone who’s living or who ever lived,” McKenna wrote. “To do things, and react to things, in a way no one has quite done before.” This is of course pretty much an act of cultural treason. There’s a reason Atomic Habits was a #1 world bestseller and nobody has written Atomic Novelty. Habits are safe. Flout them and people in charge start furrowing their brows, because now you’re likely to start breaking rules, too. Even

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Rewiring Society for Survival

Inventing a new way to live, one that will allow us, as a species, to go on living, is what economists call a "wild problem." It will take a mighty imaginative leap, really a heave of consciousness. But we can do it. We have to.It's easier to imagine the end of the worldthan the end of capitalism.— Frederic JamesonI. The TaskThe time for tiny tweaks to the status quo is over. We've run out of time for that. The only thing that will save us is massive buy-in to a major paradigm shift, a different way of living and loving on planet Earth. A lighter, looser, sparer one. More, because less.Here's how people typically change their minds. They do it the way a climber scales a rock face, inching out beyond the last point of protection — so that if they fall, they fall only as far as what they last believed.Our rethinks are not big stretches, in other words. Just variations on what we think righ

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Defying the Straight Line

He couldn't stand straight lines and right angles, which aren't much found in nature. Things not made by us mostly curve. Nothing worthwhile is plum, level or square.So observed Gaetano Pesce, the great Italian designer, who died at age 84.From this man's brow burst organic, protoplasmic designs for things like bookcases and sofas, blazing with intense, saturated color.

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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.

My Friend the Fly

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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