We’re stuck in a machine.

Its gears chew through us every day — capitalism, war, tech, finance . . . mechanized reality, swiped and scrolled.

It’s whirring faster and faster every day. Cooking the planet. Bleaching the coral. Mowing the ancient trees. Filling our oceans, our forests, our lungs with plastic.

Its algorithms scramble our minds and turn children into addicts. It captures every semblance of humanity and turns it into a product.

Now, with AI, it’s found a way into our souls.

And if we don’t stop it, this beautiful experiment of ours on planet earth will collapse into a ten-thousand-year dark age.

So we tried to come up with a solution . . .

The final volume of our DESIGN ANARCHY trilogy will pull you out of the slop . . . it’ll reignite the fire in your eyes and whack your soul into an all new, wild and wobbly kind of future.

This is a must read!!!

Pre-order it now — $5, shipping included. Offer goes poof this Monday midnight.

Stay human . . . or die trying.

I can’t believe it.

Raoul Vaneigem died. He was one of my heroes in the 60s.

His book, The Revolution of Everyday Life, was such a powerful force. The idea that every intimate, little aspect of your life can change if you really want it to. Fuck, what an epiphany.

That’s how I want to be . . . that’s the way I want to live!

Back then, it felt like we were on the cusp of world revolution. Young people were awake, alive, and fighting like hell to swerve our sicko world in a bold, beautiful new direction. In Haight Ashbury, Chicago . . . Tokyo, Beijing, Mexico City . . . Prague, West Berlin, and Frankfurt too . . . we all felt the spark. Raoul Vaneigem and other Situationists like Guy Debord carried it through.

The Revolution of Everyday Life has stayed with me ever since. Everything we’ve done at Adbusters — Buy Nothing Day, Occupy Wall Street, and now this idea of giving birth to a new political ideology and launching Blackspot Parties around the world — it’s all been driven by people like him and that extraordinary spark.

Now, the big question hangs over us:

Is there enough of that spark left to morph this doomsday machine of ours into a new orbit?

— KL

Hey all you blackspotters out there,

Here’s the idea that scared the shit out of us in our brainstorms last week:

Social media made addicts of three generations. Now AI may turn us into zombies.

The more powerful these LLMs become, the more tempting it is to hand over your life to them. Bit by bit, you give away the very essence of what it means to be an empowered human being. Then one day you’ll have outsourced so much of yourself that you can’t even remember who you are.

Just a sad sack of zombie slop.

The secret to surviving this AI psychopalyse is to learn when NOT to use it . . . and never, ever, let it suck your soul.

Maybe we should look back at one of the green movement’s big wins: The Precautionary Principle.

Whenever a new technology raises a serious or irreversible threat, it is on the creator to prevent that damage.

Think of it as doomsday insurance.

Environmentalists pushed this idea until it became a part of global environmental law. If we mental environmentalists had done something similar 20 years ago, we could’ve nipped social media addiction in the bud.

It’s not too late to get it right with AI.

If the mindlords want to gamble with the fate of the human race, let’s demand they put some chips on the table.

You want to move fast and break things? Fine. Drop 1-trillion dollars in a DOOMSDAY INSURANCE STAKE. You break it, you buy it.

What d’you think?

*

Let’s fly this flag while we still can.

The symbol of a new world to come.

*

Vol. 2 of our design anarchy trilogy hit newsstands worldwide last week. It’s a must see for all designers and creatives trying to fight against the AI aesthetic now engulfing us. Check it out HERE.

That’s it for this week.

- Team AB.

Hey,

India’s cockroaches have captured the attention of the world . . . and now it’s 1-0 in their face off with Modi.

Here are a few bangers from the battlefield:

• Protesters had lots of fun filming themselves outrunning panting, middle-aged cops charging at them with batons.

• They stuffed foam pads down their trousers to blunt baton hits.

• Shout out to the protester with the sign that said: “detain me daddy”.

So we’re sitting around HQ here, throwing darts at a photo of donnie, wondering why the hell we in the global north haven’t caught up yet.

Then one of us hit the bullseye . . . the roaches are clearly having a great time fighting for systemic change. but we here in the west are just fucking . . . joyless, aren’t we? When are we going to start having some fuck-it-all fun?

What if every time you prompted AI, it ended with a message like this:

One last thing from the current issue of our mag:

Jazz player Abdullah Ibrahim died in June. Ninety-one years on this earth, and he could still say more in nine words than we manage in a whole issue.

It’s been gnawing at us, because somewhere along the way the West misplaced the sacred.

We lost our sense of awe and wonder.

Maybe finding it again is move one.

If that stirs something in you then grab a copy of this issue, the whole flow builds to Abdullah.

That’s us for this week. Oh, and there’s a full moon tonight . . . go have yourself an epiphany.

— Team AB

Karoline Leavitt calls us lazy . . .
Born with silver spoons in our mouths . . .
Raised with everything handed to us.

When it actually feels like we grew up with the total opposite.

Ask yourself, is rageposting really all we can do about it?

Something’s stirring in the global south . . .
Nepal, Madagascar, Kenya, Peru, Bangladesh, Morocco, India . . .
Young people are rising up . . .
ousting corrupt governments . . . creating political parties
taking back power

It’s time for us to do the same.

Time for Gen Z in America, Canada, UK, Australia, Europe to start fighting for systemic change . . . ditch boomer politics . . . and create something we can actually believe in.

A new political vibe that . . .

Upends surveillance capitalism
Fixes the climate crisis
Cuts mega corps down to size
Makes markets tell the ecological truth.
Eliminates secrecy
Stops stupid wars
Cuts through all the bullshit

. . . and leads the way to a bold new future.

join us
spread the word
become a founding member
of Blackspot World

In high school the cool kids smoked. So I started smoking too. And I continued to smoke in university. I just changed brands. Gaulois were too pretentious; I went for British brands like Peter Stuyvesant, with its pure white pack.

Then I started to hear murmurings: cigarettes cause lung cancer.

It was still just a rumor — at least that’s how the industry spun it. “The link hasn’t been proven,” said Philip Morris. PM had marshaled a team of corporate lawyers and PR flacks — not to mention publicly skeptical doctors on their payroll. The evidence just isn’t there, they said. The average smoker’s chances of getting lung cancer from cigarettes is roughly the chance of being struck by lightning.

So I kept puffing.

But I tried to quit, again and again. Problem was, I couldn’t edit a film without smoking. You can imagine it: you’re immersed in the flow, the rational part of your brain is in park, the wild reactive part firing on instinct, and your hand instinctively reaches for a dart. For me back then smoking was woven into the ritual of doing creative work on a deadline.

The magic of tobacco is that it’s both a stimulant and a relaxant. The smoke cloud itself is hypnotic.

One morning, after a lot of boozing and chain-smoking through many nights of editing, I woke up feeling like shit. And I stopped smoking. Again.

But this time I stayed clean. One, two, three days. On day four I woke up feeling … amazing. Clear skies.

Not long after, I ran into one of my mother’s neighbors. He looked awful. I learned he was dying of lung cancer. He had only a few months to live. I looked in his eyes and saw that he had given up. I’d gotten lucky; many hadn’t.

It dawned on me that Philip Morris did this. They knew they were killing people and they covered it up. They built their empire on a business plan to sell toxic addictive products to people who didn’t know any better. They were literally getting away with murder and had been for decades.

That’s the moment I started to hate corporations.

“Hate” may be the wrong word. What do you say about someone who betrays your trust? It sounds insane now, but back then people actually did trust corporations. You took it for granted that they were acting in the public interest. They were synonymous with progress, and faith in them seemed as sensible as faith in anything else.

The more that emerged about Philip Morris’s duplicity, the more I could feel the red mist of rage clouding my vision. Those lying bastards. Just so diabolically calculating. Hook the customer early and squeeze a lifetime’s worth of profits out of them — and when regulators close in, you shift your focus to the developing world where the rules are looser and you target those kids.

I thought: How can a company like that even be allowed to exist?

That rage bubbled on the back burner for years. I didn’t really know what to do with it. Until the day in 1991 when Richard Grossman walked through the door of Adbusters.

He asked if I had a few minutes to chat.

Richard was a lawyer and a legal researcher. He’d spent the last decade immersed in American history, connecting the dots of corporate ascendance. He knew where the bodies were buried.

Richard spoke softly, with the quiet authority of someone who has done the work. There was something about him that was totally free. He was tracking to true north, his mission as tightly defined as marching orders, and as large as the future of democracy itself.

Corporations, he said, were “worms in the body politic.” (He talked like that.) They are nothing more than “legal fictions” and we the people need to redefine our relationship with them. We have to change the way we speak and even think about them.

People have no idea how insidious corporate culture is, Grossman said. It sculpts the personalities of consumers, encouraging the very traits Americans claim to hate: self-censorship, low aspirations, soul-crushing conformity.

And then he told me a tale that would change my life and work at Adbusters. Call it The Unofficial History of America.

The official history of America is one every kid knows. It’s a story of fierce individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the service of a dream. A story of hungry settlers carving a home out of the wilderness. A story of a revolution, beating back British imperialism and launching a new colony into the industrial age on its own terms.

It’s a story of America triumphant. Of its rise after World War II to become the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world, the land of the free because of the brave, an inspiring model for the whole world to emulate.

The unofficial story of America is quite different.

It begins the same way — in the revolutionary cauldron of colonial America — but then it takes a turn. A bit player in the official story becomes critically important. This player turns out to be not only the provocateur of the revolution, but in a sense its saboteur.

The corporation.

We tend to think of corporations as a fairly recent phenomenon, the legacy of the 19th-century robber barons. But they were front and center in pre-revolutionary America. They had a beachhead before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock; the language of their charters is in the DNA of the Constitution. The Virginia Company of London, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the British East India Company: these were the Amazon and Wal-Mart and Google of their day.

But back then our dealings with these behemoths were very different. The colonials were highly suspicious of them. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to plunder resources and bring them to the motherland.

The colonials pushed back. When the British East India company slapped duties on its incoming tea (and they had the colonials over a barrel; that’s how monopolies work), well, you know that story. Radical patriots protested, ships were turned back at port and 342 chests of tea ended up in the saltchuck.

The Boston Tea Party gave young America a glimpse of its own strength. Self-determination was starting to seem not just possible but inevitable.

The Declaration of Independence freed America not just from British rule but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years Americans remained deeply wary of corporate power. Corporate charters were granted very selectively and for a specific purpose. Limits were set on how big and powerful a corporation could become.

Even the enormous industry trusts proved no match for the state in those early years. Antitrust legislation kept their appetites in check. Corporations couldn’t participate in the political process. They couldn’t buy stocks in other corporations. If they stepped out of line, the punishment could be severe. Charters could be revoked and some were. In 1832, the state of Pennsylvania found ten banks to be acting against the public interest and wiped them out of existence.

The people — not the corporations — were in control.

So what happened? How did corporations come to wield more power than the individuals who created them?

The shift began in the last third of the nineteenth century — the start of a great period of struggle between corporations and civil society. The turning point was the Civil War. Corporations made huge profits from procurement contracts. They took advantage of the disorder and corruption of the times to buy legislatures, judges and even presidents. President Lincoln foresaw terrible trouble. “Corporations have been enthroned,” he warned, shortly before his death. “An era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people … until wealth is aggregated in a few hands … and the republic is destroyed.”

Nobody listened. Corporations continued to roll. They had the laws governing their creation amended. State charters could no longer be revoked. Corporate profits could no longer be limited. In hundreds of cases judges granted corporations minor legal victories, conceding new rights and privileges.

Then came a legal event that would not be understood for decades (and remains baffling even today), an event that would change the course of American history. In Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railway, a dispute over a railway route, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed that a private corporation was a “natural person” under the U.S. Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights. Suddenly, corporations enjoyed all the rights and sovereignty previously enjoyed only by people.

Santa Clara was nothing less than a corporate takeover.

It’s still widely considered one of the great legal blunders of the nineteenth century.

Corporations employed 80 percent of the workforce and produced most of America’s wealth. They had become too powerful to legally challenge.

Many of the original ideals of the American Revolution had been quashed. America was being ruled by a coalition of government and business interests. The shift amounted to a slow-motion coup d’état — a gradual subversion and takeover of the institutions of state power. Except for a temporary setback during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (the 1930s), the U.S. has since been governed as a corporate state.

Today, corporations have nearly all the same rights as people: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, religious liberty, due process, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to counsel and the right to trial by jury. They freely buy each other’s stocks and shares. They lobby legislators and bankroll elections. They manage the flow of information, set our economic and cultural agendas and grow as big as they damn well please.

We the people have lost control. Corporations, these legal fictions we ourselves created two centuries ago, now rule over us. And we accept this as the normal state of affairs. We go to corporations on our knees. Please do the right thing we plead. Please don’t cut down any more forests. Please don’t pollute any more lakes and rivers (but please don’t move your factories and jobs offshore either). Please don’t use pornographic images to sell fashion to my kids. And please don’t addict them to your algorithms. We’ve spent so much time bowed down in deference we’ve forgotten how to stand up straight.

The unofficial history of America, which continues to be written, is not a story of rugged individualism and heroic personal sacrifice in the pursuit of a dream. It’s a story of democracy derailed, of a revolutionary spirit suppressed, and of a once-proud people reduced to servitude.

Richard Grossman had literally been pacing around the office as he laid all this out.

“Two narratives,” he said. “The difference between them is the difference between a country that pretends to be free and one that truly is.”

— Kalle Lasn

From Manifesto for World Revolution

hey,

lately, the global south has been a hotbed of political upswings. nepal torched parliament and elected a rapper. bangladesh bumrushed a 15-year dictatorship and revamped their whole political system. madagascar. tanzania. kenya. morocco. peru.

again and again, gen z are uprooting dead-end systems & sowing the seeds of revolution.

and just last week it happened again.

india’s chief justice surya kant lit the fuse when he called the nation’s unemployed youth cockroaches. Overnight, an online platform for the cockroach janta party emerged & caught millions of eyes. now the swarm is rising. there’s talk of making the cjp a legit party. modi’s playing it cool at the podium, but look closely … he’s sweating through his kurta.

>>> don’t doomscroll. the manifesto for world revolution is here. <<<

wow. cockroaches. what a meme.

isn’t that exactly how it feels to be alive right now?

our world is increasingly uninhabitable & hostile. we survive on the scraps of billionaires. our leaders treat us like pests if they acknowledge us at all … squashing out any hope for our future … and it seems more and more like they’re actually hellbent on exterminating us.

but rebellion is snowballing all around the world. maybe the world revolution we’ve been calling for kicks off with six legs and a bad reputation.

so scuttle up, all you roaches and pirates and blackspotters out there.

join the swarm.

My fellow creatives,

Remember grey goo theory?

The idea that in the future, self-replicating nanobots will consume all biomass and matter to generate more of themselves, reducing our beautiful planet to a sad slop of grey goo?

It’s still just hypothetical when it comes to the physical environment…

But our mental environment?

AI-generated memes, reels, and images . . . entire albums on Spotify made with a prompt . . . LLMs in your browser, your feed, your mother’s social life . . .

Over half of the internet is 100% synthetic slop and Gen Z huffs Italian brainrot.

This is a siege on humanity.

Something deep in your gut recognizes it instantly, making you cringe like you’re watching a crow eat a rabbit. Your own flesh and blood — begging you to pull the plug before this grey matter goo gobbles up future generations . . . our imagination and creative spirit . . . anything out there that’s still . . . real.

Stay human (if you can.)

think about how long shoes have been with you.

the light-ups in kindergarten. the pair you begged for in fourth grade. the first pair you bought with your own money and the small shock at the register . . . oh, oh that’s what they cost. that’s what someone’s been paying my whole life. the pair you wore till the sole came off. the pair you wore to a funeral. the ones on your feet right now.

a logo has been riding on your foot your whole life and you stopped seeing it.

capitalism may never die. we may live our whole lives inside it. fine. but somewhere along the way it stopped being a thing and became the weather, the wallpaper, the backdrop, everywhere for so long it became nowhere, and that is how it wins, not by being loud, by getting so deep into the background of your one life that it shapes what you want and what you buy and what you wear and what you think makes you you and you don’t even notice anymore, none of us notice, and that cannot be the deal, that cannot be what we agreed to, a thing that soulless does not get to be the wallpaper of a human life.

so.

take a marker. find the logo. put a blackspot on it.

and what you just did, in that small stupid moment, is drag the whole thing out of the background and into the room, made it stand in the light, made it look strange again, made it look like what it actually is. and it matters. it really fucking matters. all it takes is a marker and the will to do it.

next time you look down, you’ll remember.

maybe one day someone on the bus glances at your shoes and gets a thoughtful look and for a second the spell loosens for them too.

and under all of it, quiet,

you will feel free.

want some more?

Dear smartphone user,

In the late ‘60s, an overwhelming sense of environmental doom rolled across the USA.

Smog enveloped Los Angeles and New York City. A Union Oil drilling platform exploded off the Santa Barbara coast. Industrial pollution set the Cuyahoga River on fire. Rapid population growth and resource depletion were termed The Population Bomb.

Waiting for legislation was suicide.

We spiked trees, chained ourselves to bulldozers, and threw red paint at CEOs . . .

So began THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT.

Now, the doom’s gone digital. Algorithms feed our biases and kill consensus reality. Our attention spans are shorter than goldfish. Our lives are just data for sale. We’re spiraling into depression, anxiety, and isolation like never before. The pollution is in our minds.

Waiting for legislation is suicide.

Let’s block the digital Straits of Hormuz and beat Big Tech into submission.

So begins THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT OF THE MIND.

Our aim: to clean up the streams of our psyche.

Join the Mental Liberation Front.

Eight million people. Nothing happened.

Why?

Because it was reactionary.

Eight million people took to the streets, pointing fingers at a tyrant.

And we call THAT progress?

What if…

Eight million people put their heads together, came up with a groundbreaking new vision for America, and took that to the streets?

Not just to be seen, but to demand real change.

So what kind of future do you want to live in?
Get the app and join the most important brainstorm in history.

Hey, you,

Yeah. You with the sign.

Get this:

Women’s Suffrage Parade, 1913.
Eight thousand suffragists swarm the Capitol Building. Demanding voting rights.
The result?
The 19th Amendment.

March on Washington, 1963.
Two hundred fifty thousand people swarm the Lincoln Memorial. Dreaming of equality.
The result?
The Civil Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act.

Earth Day, 1970.
Twenty million people swarm the country. Pushing for cleaner industry standards.
The result?
The Environmental Protection Agency.
The National Environmental Education Act. The Clean Air Act. The Clean Water Act.

No Kings Day, 2026.
Eight million people swarm fifty states. Saying hell no to Trumpian Tyranny.
The result —

Until we get it together, until we quit reacting, until we craft a bold new vision, all this waving of signs and shouting of slogans doesn’t add up to shit.*

*If you want the answer, click the frog.

Behind the strongman speeches, the missile-slinging bravado, the endless tough guy machismo . . . Just a hungry little boy who never got enough love.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

And with this spot running night after night from now to November, even his most diehard supporters won’t be able to either.

The next time they see him beating his chest at a podium, something will wiggle in their subconscious.

Canada’s national public broadcaster (CBC) refused to sell us airtime, but Fox just gave us the green light.

We’ll start in Minneapolis. Then New York, San Francisco, Chicago . . . we’ll air it from Oscar night all the way to the midterms . . . and then, hallelujah . . . we take back the House, the senate . . . and in 2028 maybe our country.

Help us air this Mindbomb.

Every revolution, every authentic revolution, promises to redeem the failures of its predecessors. This is what Walter Benjamin thought — or at least, this is what Slavoj Žižek says Benjamin thought at the end of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012). Paraphrasing Benjamin, Žižek says in the film that all the unsettled ghosts of the past will at last find rest in the new freedom born out of the true revolution to come. Yet he warns the path to this freedom comes with no guarantees. There is no train of historical inevitability that can be ridden to the safe harbour of emancipation. Getting there all depends on a fickle crowd of free riders, a ragtag huddle of the flighty and the faithless. They should be a familiar bunch because, it turns out, they are us. Our liberation rests on nobody’s shoulders but our own.

Lend your ear for a moment to the strain of Judgement Day that sounds through Benjamin’s thinking. What ghosts haunt our present? What injustices await deliverance from the purgatory of lost causes? Following Benjamin’s logic, if we want our fight — for a better world, for a livable world, for life itself — to be a successful fight, we had better make sure we know what undead armies stand behind us. Without setting their struggles to rights, they will remain our curse. Plus, there is always the risk that we might fail, and in failing join their ranks, dooming ourselves to wait for the next righteous heave to drag us out of the boneyard and into the future. That is, if a shred of hope for any kind of future — indeed, if the planet itself — survives us.

Of course, to try to list all the neglected wrongs of the past would be a futile exercise. The point here is not to be exhaustive but selective. Some cry out from the dark dungeons of history with more urgency than others. And if you listen closely, you just might recognize something familiar in their voices, even something of your own. True to Benjamin’s thinking, it seems injustice doesn’t die so easy after all.‍

‍The first unavenged cause to consider is the cause of democracy. Not just your newscaster’s or your pundit’s democracy but the kind of democracy that reaches beyond the legislature and into the bank, the hospital, the break room, the trading-room floor. Make no mistake: democracy, in the narrow sense of elections and day-to-day political life, is everywhere either broken or threatening to break. Yet at the same time, a deeper erosion is taking place. Before even getting a ballot in your hands, the wind-up toy of politics has determined what kind of candidate you can vote for, and which is off limits. Even more radical candidates, in the rare instances in which they win, face stiff constraints as to what money-power will allow once they are in office.

More and more, it is the interests of private wealth, not of the popular will, that decides the limits of political possibility. The big firms hold the pen that writes the law. The platforms own the means of communication. The oligarchs pull the strings of global finance. Money sloshes back and forth across international boundaries a million times a minute, while human beings pile up at militarized checkpoints only to face deportation, depredation, and death. Calls for a democratic workplace are throttled, and our needy neighbours are left for all-but-dead, while the proprietors of the workplace enjoy the privileges of legal leniency, tax delinquency, and the relief of public funds. There is one rule for the rich and another for the rest. So long as this two-tiered system exists, there can be no true democracy. It will remain a dream of the abstract, ancient past.

A regime of pillage calls out for redress, a regime of world-spanning imperialism. While the last empires seem to have died out by the close of the last century, they did so only in name. Today, there still exists a system of exploitation and expropriation that preys upon the vulnerable from the remove of the wealthy West — or more accurately, the Global North. It is based on the historically entrenched notion of racial and cultural superiority of some, on the one hand, and the expendability of rest, on the other. It deems some resources, and some lives, the justifiable targets of plunder, and a minority living far away its rightful beneficiaries. It is what gives shape to parallel forms of oppression based on the constructions of gender and race in the imperialist, which is to say capitalist, core.

Imperialism is at play when workers paid less than a living wage in, say, Bangladesh make the cheap clothing bought by hard-pressed workers in North America. It is also at play when some, for the simple fact of their class or race or gender, face a disproportionate risk of complication and death when giving birth, for example, in the wealthiest nation on Earth. While the most brutal shape of imperialism has receded from view — the unabashed imperialism of slavery and genocide — it lives on in the hardly subtler forms of coercion, colonialism, apartheid, and debt discipline. Marching hand in hand with the forces aligned against democracy, imperialism — if it is allowed to persist — will ensure that a sane, sustainable world may never come to be.

Once upon a time, it was decided there is a divide separating “Man” from “Nature.” It was deemed the proper place of the former to dominate and despoil the latter. We are living today, as we face the total collapse of the possibility of life on Earth, with the consequences of this ideology when taken to its logical extreme. For centuries, despite all cries of warning, the nonhuman world around us has been treated as a neutral, infinitely renewable fount of exploitable resources. By whom? By the “Man” on the other side of “Nature,” who is no universal human being, but rather a highly particular one: white, wealthy, and male, comfortably inhabiting the cities of the Global North on the backs of legions at the fringes. Only in time did collaborationist counterparts outside his race, gender, and geographical milieu come to crib his method and play his games.

Now, we live in a world crying out for relief. Yet for all the signs pointing towards our doom, we keep on marching along the cusp of the abyss. Even as the word “extinction” becomes part of everyday speech, the forests are razed, the oil is extracted, and the fumes belch forth into the warming air. Sea levels rise, threatening not only property values but the lives of millions. The temperature climbs. The storms get deadlier. The droughts become more frequent and more devastating. The altered climate threatens to unravel everything. Still, we are told there is nothing wrong with the way things are, only there are certain things about it that could be fixed — for the right price tag.

This is the logic of species-level suicide, to say nothing of the plight of other life forms. It is baked into the machinery of capitalism, which runs blind on the inertia of profit. We cannot hope to go on as we have done without bringing on the conditions for our annihilation. We must cut the engine before it is too late. The trouble is, we don’t hold the keys; corporations, their operators, and their enablers in government do. It might be time to consider how we take them for ourselves, and by what means.

Imperialism, democracy’s erosion, the death of nature: these three agents of historical peril are united, like an unholy trinity, in a further, overarching force. That force hardly needs naming: it is capitalism itself. Capital is what seeks to justify plunder at large in the interest of profits at home. It seeks to dismantle any real system of representation, and instead hold the reins of power for itself. It sees as its domain the whole of the Earth, which it will gladly squeeze to exhaustion, its own furtherance be damned. Capital is in it for today and for itself alone. Come tomorrow, if we do nothing to stop it, there may be nothing left for the rest of us. If we do nothing.


— Trevor Clarke

“The Beauty Industry is the Beast.”

What the fuck?!

America, you’ve been slimed.

That’s culture jamming, baby!

Ridiculous, yes. But is it any more ridiculous than what we were trying to disrupt? The passive acceptance of a one-way flow of marketing messages that tickle your id and sculpt your feelings and shape your values and dictate what you should do with your time and your energy, your politics and your dreams?

What I felt back then, a quarter-century ago, is what I still feel today: that one-way corporate mindfuck is approaching a level where a massive pushback is inevitable. An anti-corporate uprising will be the next great social movement of our time. The fact that three other major social movements leapfrogged it makes me more, not less, certain of its inevitability. The beauty and power of #OccupyWallStreet, #MeToo, and #BlackLivesMatter is that they’re training people to detect hidden patterns — to notice who’s being shafted. We don’t see logos, we don’t hear corporatese, we don’t feel overly angry about their total surveillance, or too let down when heinous criminals like Wells Fargo, Purdue and ExxonMobil walk free. We’re so far up the butt of America Inc. that we’re on the side of injustice without even realizing it.

This was the work, then, back in the early days of Adbusters: to smash the commercial monopoly on the production of meaning. The first generation raised on television was mounting a resistance, pulling together a game plan on the fly.

We were inspired by how a handful of low-budget anti-smoking campaigns had toppled the billion-dollar PR might of Big Tobacco. Suddenly, on every cigarette pack, sickening pictures of diseased lungs. On TV, celebrity actor Yul Brynner, just before he died of lung cancer, looked you straight in the eye and said: “Whatever you do, don’t smoke!” These jams basically rewired our response to images of smoking — from seduction to revulsion. Now every time the Marlboro cowboy lit up, people winced. Philip Morris realized that every dime they spent on advertising was actually doing self-damage. So they stopped.

We were chuffed. A well-crafted, low-budget attack was all it took to bring these fuckers down. It isn’t about the size of your war chest; it’s about the condensed power of your message. Small and cunning beats rich and lumbering and on the wrong side of history. Our upstart “journal of the mental environment” had a chance. With deft judo-like moves we would throw mega-corporations to the mat with the power of their own misplaced momentum. We’d beat them at their own game.

If it could work on Big Tobacco — one of the biggest, baddest industries of all — we reckoned it could work across them all — food, fashion, automobiles, communications, finance. Every area of our lives where someone had broken in and shoved their swagger down our throats.

We decided to lead the charge. We’d detourn their logos, dick around with their ad campaigns, inflict brand damage and duke it out with them on TV. We’d neutralize the cultural power these corporations had claimed as their own. McDonald’s, Absolut, Calvin Klein, Nike. None were too big to fall.

I was in full double-agent mode now. Every advertising trick I learned in Tokyo could be used in reverse. Instead of showcasing the client’s unique strength, we’d identify their unique vulnerability. We’d make folks understand — not intellectually but viscerally — what is fraudulent about their seductions.

Take Absolut Vodka. Their flood-the-zone PR strategy had them on the back covers of magazines on newsstands around the world. What’s the Achilles heel of Big Spirits? Same as Big Tobacco. It’s showing people what really happens when you use their product as directed. What alcohol’s actually about? Not the shining promise of turning you into a hilarious party animal who gets laid in the car, but brain-fog, impotence and puking on your shoes. Career suicide. Actual suicide. AA meetings. Death and suffering and humiliation: Make folks feel it.

A mindbomb delivered in a goodie bag. What was it Billy Wilder said? If you’re gonna tell the truth, you’d better be funny or they’ll kill you.

Absolut had a global print campaign centered on the shape of their bottles, and we countered with a riff on the same theme that got a lot of attention. It amused everyone but Absolut. They sent an international law firm with a cease-and-desist order.

This was actually pretty intimidating. They implied they could destroy us if we didn’t stop our spoofing campaign and of course they were right. Fear works on a power differential, and you never know how far they’re willing to go.

But then we fought back and the press got hold of the story. They picked up on the David-vs-Goliath angle. Suddenly the dynamic reversed. Absolut looked like a bully and they quickly backed off.

It was a delicious moment. Absolut had scared the hell out of us. But it became clear we had also scared the hell out of them. They knew we had the people behind us and could inflict severe brand damage.

When Absolut first came after us, we added an “e” to the word on our spoofs for legal protection; but when they pulled their lawsuit we exhaled, put the five-finger flag to our nose and took the “e” out again.

We could tell Nike CEO Phil Knight was rattled too when he got wind of a billboard spoof we were planning near the company’s HQ in Beaverton, Ore. Phil could not countenance the thought of an unswooshing message welcoming his employees as they drove to work in the morning.

So now here we were again, faced with another multinational bringing all its horses. But this time we knew better than to be intimidated. When reporters called us up, one minute we’re talking about Tiger Wood’s swooshy smile, and the next minute we’re talking about Indonesian sweatshop labor. The stories come out, Phil Knight looks like an asshole and his swoosh has lost a bit of its nuclear glow.

And I realized something. The wild, sledgehammer-on-a-fly overreaction of these multi-billion-dollar corporations exposes how fragile is this thing called cool. And how you can’t impose it on people. Real cool is a revolutionary impulse — a reaction to power. Top-down corporate cool is a fraudulent algorithm, and deep down the big guys know it. That’s why they’re scared. The emperor is buck naked. We the people rule!

Buy Nothing Day was our first big success. The fledgling environmental movement was banging the drum that overconsumption was at the core of all our planetary woes, and we caught the zeitgeist. We produced a 30-second TV spot featuring a burping pig wallowing on a map of North America. The voice-over threw out some sobering figures about consumption levels and chided that “the world could die because of the way we North Americans live. Give it a rest, November 26 is Buy Nothing Day.”

The meme spread. Buy Nothing Days popped up in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, New York. It jumped the ocean, to Sydney and Melbourne, then to London (where they called it No Shop Day). Within a few years, Buy Nothing Day was a yearly celebration of frugal living in more than 60 countries.

We learned that if you let loose a tantalizing meme at just the right cultural moment, it can hit the public imagination with incredible force.

We then produced a flurry of 30-second TV spots. First we called them “anti-ads,” then “uncommercials,” then “subvertisements,” and finally “mindbombs.”

In our meetings, we plotted a full-fledged onslaught against the corporate advertising machine. We wanted to turn television into a battleground of competing narratives; fight an all-out guerrilla war where our mindbombs are constantly popping up all over the TV mindscape, neutralizing the corporate pro-consumption agenda. We thought that this kind of meme war would capture the imagination of the world, and we were confident that in the end, we would emerge triumphant.

We published a book called Culture Jam, which skirted the bestseller lists alongside Naomi Klein’s No Logo. The movement took off. At its peak, the term became a meme in itself. “The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large,” the great experimental musician Don Joyce put it, and you saw that playing out big-time. People scribbled over bus-stop ads. They “liberated” billboards. They rubbed out the logos on their clothing and shoes and appliances. High-school teachers had their students make spoof ads and sent them to us.

Jesus, it was fun. We were playing jazz now, becoming a legitimate cultural counterforce. We’d cracked the code! We were doing… something. It was hard to tell exactly what. Or for whom. But it was exhilarating suddenly to be standing toe to toe with corporate execs and sometimes landing a punch.

Like satire, culture jamming only seemed light-hearted. Underneath, for many of us, it was serious business about who creates culture. Will culture be spoon-fed to us top-down by corporations, or will we the people generate it from the bottom up?

By now advertising had mushroomed into a trillion-dollar-a-year industry, pumping hundreds of pro-consumption messages into our brains every day, colonizing every bit of literal and figurative space. Product placement in movies sparked outrage at first, but then became ho-hum invisible. Ads popped up in video games, golf holes and referees’ armpits. Companies paid kids to carve their logo into their haircuts. One company wanted to put brand logos in space next to the moon. Advertising was transforming authentic culture into commercial culture and citizens into consumers.

We circled back round to Nike. We had a special beef with these guys. Paying millions of dollars to sports celebrities to dispense bogus cool to teenagers: that is graceless behavior.

Nike would be a test case for a new move. We wanted to take on one of the giants not just in the marketplace of ideas but in the marketplace of… stuff. So we started our own shoe operation. The Blackspot Unswoosher: the take-no-prisoners pirate shoe, which we had ethically made in Portugal. We think our brand can beat your brand. Of course, Nike sold way more Air Jordans than we sold Blackspots. But then again, we weren’t really interested in market share.

If our Blackspots could take even a fraction of a percent of business from Nike, then we’d have set a precedent that would inspire business- minded social activists to get involved in other areas — to become a virus at the heart of corporate capitalism.

We declared the Blackspot to be an open-source brand. Uncopyrighted and uncopyrightable. We wanted a nimble new breed of entrepreneurs to rise up — we called them “antipreneurs” — to launch Blackspot Coffee shops (with books & music, part library, part meeting place, part altar to caffeine). We wanted to revive the proud underground tradition of coffee shops as incubators of dissent.

We’d sell fair-trade, organic coffee — revolution in every cup — and gradually push Starbucks out of our neighborhoods in the bargain.

We dreamed of a chain of Blackspot restaurants, selling only locally sourced food (a slow surprise in every bite), so tasty and easy they’d chase McDonald’s out of the dinner plans of even the most harried parents.

We saw a world with Blackspot Cola, Blackspot Water, Blackspot Apparel, Blackspot Books, Blackspot Music labels. You’d even be able to get a Blackspot loan. It was anticapitalism in capitalist overdrive — all the profits plowed back into community projects. If you gave capitalism a conscience, this is what it would look like: small trumps big, local beats global, and shared, open-source brands roll over jealously guarded copyrights. Bit by bit, industry by industry, our little Blackspot would reverse capitalism’s top-down dynamic and change the way people lived their lives.

Looking back, that level of idealism seems almost crazily naive. But that’s also what was great about it. We didn’t second-guess ourselves. Didn’t get swamped by existential angst and the impossibility of pulling much of it off. We just reveled in the fuck-it-all spirit of it all.

These days, when network TV is pretty much a trifle in most people’s lives, it’s easy to forget how much power the networks once had over us. Television was the circulation system of the culture in the same way the Internet is now. For us, it was the holy grail. We’d get the leverage there to break the hold that advertising-driven culture had on us. We’d slip our mindbombs in there and fight a meme war. Put cultural power back into the hands of the people.

But something happened on the way to the revolution.

The TV stations refused to sell us the airtime. I had many angry phone calls with them, but there was no way they would take our few thousand dollars and risk angering their million-dollar sponsors.

The ABC network’s commercial clearance boss Art Moore was defiant. “There’s no law that says we have to air anything,” he shouted at me on the phone. “We’ll decide what we want to air or not.” NBC’s Richard Gitter said, “We don’t want to take any advertising that’s inimical to our legitimate business interests.”

And Robert Lowery at CBS finally put it straight about our Buy Nothing Day spot. “This commercial . . . is in opposition to the current economic policy in the United States.”

An eerie sense of déjà vu set in. I was born in Estonia where during Soviet rule people were not allowed to speak against the government. There simply were no media channels for debating controversial public issues because the government did not want such discussion to take place. And here I was 50 years later in “the

land of the free” and there was a lack of media space in which to challenge corporate agendas — you were not allowed to speak out against the sponsors.

We spent over $100,000 fighting a legal action against the Canadian Broadcasting Commission (CBC), arguing that every citizen has the right under the Canadian Charter to walk into their local TV station and buy 30 seconds of airtime for a message they believed in. The CBC fought us tooth-and-nail asking for ourcase to be dismissed. After 10 years of legal wrangling, the British Columbia Court of Appeal finally gave us a tiny opening. They ruled that Adbusters Media Foundation did indeed have a legitimate freedom-of-speech case under the Canadian Charter of Rights, and our legal action should be allowed to proceed. But by that time, we could no longer afford to pay the lawyers their $650-per-hour fees. We were exhausted and broke. Our dream of duking it out with megacorporations on commercial television was fading.

But it turns out that nothing is more tantalizing than something you aren’t allowed to get your hands on. People wanted to see the banned ads, to know why they were rejected. Our culture jamming mindbombs began to circulate like wildfire.

And we made a lot of people question what television, the most powerful social communications medium of that time, was really all about if citizens can’t buy airtime under the same rules and conditions as corporations do. After all, doesn’t Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly state that: “Everyone has the right . . . to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes . . . the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”?

When you google “culture jamming,” it’s sometimes represented as a fad. Something that flared brightly for a decade in fin-de-siècle America. It was everywhere and then it was nowhere. Why? Was it because the TV networks refused to run our ads? Or because we lost our First Amendment legal battle? Or because the corporations themselves pivoted, dropping those monolithic, years-long campaigns that offered up such fat targets, in favor of quick-and- dirty hits tailored to the Internet age? Or maybe it was because culture jamming, for all its cheeky verve, wasn’t actually solving anything. That’s what some folks said. We set ourselves up as aresistance community seeking to discredit and devalue consumerist culture and corporate rule, but at its core our jamming was better at tearing things down than building things up. We were vehemently anti-something, but not really pro-anything. We weren’t able to articulate a set of values, meanings and alternate ways of seeing and talking about the world — which is what any successful oppositional culture must learn to do.

I don’t entirely buy that.

Here’s what I think happened to culture jamming: it never actually went away. It just evolved from a ruckus on the fringes of mainstream culture to part of mainstream culture itself. We are all culture jammers now. Everybody on social media is a cultural warrior. The Net is the jam. It scatters pulses of meaning and sends them on a collision course with other pulses.

Meme warfare is the next evolutionary phase of the people’s resistance. This is where our metameme insurrection will take place.

This is where the planetary endgame will be won or lost.

Read Manifesto for World Revolution

This little cat-and-mouse game starts the moment you wake up.

Your newsfeeds . . . your podcasts . . . you’re about to click Buy Now on Amazon . . . but no. You opt out.

Wham! You just scored a touchdown.

*

On the way to work you pass McDonald’s.

Your stomach growls. The Egg McMuffin looks good. But wait. It’s a US corp. I’m not going in.

*

At work, you tell your friends you’re boycotting everything MADE IN USA.

Some nod. Some grin. Others think you’re dreaming.

“Crash the evil empire? Really?”

“Yeah. Damn right.”

And somehow just saying that feels good.

*

After work you hit the supermarket.

You’re all charged up. Every time you see MADE IN USA, you put it back on the shelf.

*

First a few thousand, then a million, then billions around the world start playing this cat and mouse game.

Then the headlines start rolling in:

Worldwide Boycott of America. GDP In Freefall.

Trump’s Economy Collapsing.

Americans Are Waking Up.

This is how We The People bring the evil empire down.

Near the end of Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, the hero finds himself standing in the gallows, about to be hanged. In one minute it'll all be over. It suddenly occurs to him what an enormous amount of time that is. A full minute. He takes ten seconds to think about his family, then allows his mind to roam over the play of light on the church steeple in the distance, the granular subtleties of his entire life. His impending demise – or so he thought – had smashed his last moment on earth like an atom.

You could say that's all of us now. We're standing on the gallows having an existential moment together. And performing in our heads what the writer Mitchell Jackson called "survival math" – a term he hatched after being held up at gunpoint and realizing his odds of living would swing wildly depending on what he said and did in the next thirty seconds.

Call it a hinge moment.

The world has been through these before. Robert Oppenheimer, crouched amid the tumbleweeds in the New Mexican desert, knew there was a nonzero chance that pushing the button on the Trinity test could end the world, even as he gave the okay to do it. Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet functionary kenneled in a missile silo watching a barrage of incoming American nukes on his radar display, chose not to pick up the phone to alert his bosses to launch a retaliatory strike – guessing, correctly, that it was a false alarm.

In those cases, most of us never knew how close we came to oblivion. What's different about this hinge moment is that we're all pretty much aware of what's going on. When a financial crisis wipes out Wall Street and a lot of people's savings – and then because no guardrails were really put in place another comes along and does it again – that's hard to miss. It sounds like the landlord knocking to tell you your rent cheque bounced.

And now you're driving on the highway and you notice you're not using your windshield fluid to get the bug splats off. At all. Wait, what? Where'd all the bugs go? In fact, insect populations have crashed just in our adult lifetimes. No bugs splatted; and no birds sang. At this rate end of the century, half of all species on earth will have disappeared.

In every dimension of our lives, the hard truth closes in. Human behavior has upset the ecological applecart to the point where the status quo will almost certainly kill us. Funny thing about the status quo, though. We feel no great urgency to change it. Because it's not hurting us – yet.

If you've ever visited Easter Island, the second question that probably occurred to you (after "Holy crap, how'd they get these giant heads here?") was "Where did everybody go? The Islanders once had booming little life going. They thrived by exploiting their natural resources. But they never figured out that they were eventually going to have to change their m.o. The island was finite: they were going to have to plan for the future or curb their appetites or both. They didn't. The wood ran out, they descended into cannibalism and just winked out.

And so. This is where we are. Everything depends on how we pivot, en masse, right now. All we know is that if we survive, the world on the other side will be transformed so fundamentally it, and we, might be almost unrecognizable.

Hinge moments are like levers. They present rare opportunities to get monumental things done. They demand two things of us: first, recognizing that we're in one. And second, seizing the disproportionate power super-optimal moment before it slips away and is gone forever.

It could be that the hinge moment we're teetering on now will require something new of us, a stretch we've never had to make. More than a pivot in technology or ecological or political strategy. Something more like ... an evolution of consciousness.

"The earth needs something from us right now," the philosopher Jacob Needleman said, toward the end of his life. "It needs us to become more fully human." We're far more developed intellectually than we are morally, Needleman said. We're basically children, swinging blunt instruments around without much regard for whose noggin or window they break. "When a civilization develops one side of itself like that, so lopsidedly, it's racing toward destruction."

In Needleman's view, we have infected the planet with our own "soul sickness." We treat the planet like shit because we treat one another like shit. Like it or not, we are the biggest change agents in the sandbox now, for good or ill. The earth's survival depends on us ... growing up. And not in the usual meander-y way that people and animals usually grow up, but lickety-split.

And we feel that spike of urgency to spread the message, to shake awake our fellow passengers who are still snoozing. We are a little crazy now with this desire to live, this desperation for all of us to live.

We are shouting now. Shouting through an open window between worlds.

– Harry Flood

Most of us, whether we’ve experienced it directly or not, are familiar with the idea of a comedown. A comedown is what happens when a drug, usually a stimulant, begins the long, painful process of withdrawing from your system. As the euphoria of the high begins to wane and the anxiety washes in, you suddenly start to feel dizzy and disoriented. The drug, previously situated between you and reality, is wearing off and, as it goes, you’re left to navigate the void created by its absence. That means going through the process of reconnecting to yourself, to your body’s natural rhythms and your mind’s natural pace. And when it’s finally over, you’re left feeling listless, lifeless and blank … the soaring high replaced by a crushing melancholy.

That’s how I feel every year after Christmas.

Once the cheer I’ve been mainlining since the day after Thanksgiving dries up, I’m left with an emptiness I can’t quite describe. There’s nothing like the sight of Christmas decorations after the holiday has passed. Walking into a room strewn with yuletide detritus is like returning to the scene of Bacchanalian excess the morning after, when all you’re left with is a headache and a vague sense of shame. The thought of candy, cookies, credit cards – consumption in any form – invites feelings of guilt and disgust. I can’t wait to eat a salad, go to the gym. I vow never to go to the mall again. I just want to get clean. Coming down from Christmas – reconnecting to my body’s natural rhythms and my mind’s natural pace – takes days.

I doubt I’m alone. Most people seem a bit pallid and disconnected, not quite themselves, in the days following Christmas. It’s as if we’re all trying to traverse the void that the holiday, with its attendant excess, has left in its wake. But what if we were to introduce some elements of Ramadan into our celebration of Christmas? Muslims, during the month-long observance of the Islamic holiday, abstain from eating, drinking and sex during the daylight hours. The practice of fasting is meant to teach patience, humility and restraint. It is meant to inspire empathy and appreciation. It’s a way to achieve “God-consciousness” and repent for past sins and misdeeds. Above all, fasting is meant to bring one closer to one’s spiritual self. By denying the body, practitioners are strengthening the soul and the mind. It is an exercise in discipline and meditation that, once completed, should leave one feeling more connected, more whole.

Westerners have a long tradition of borrowing from other cultures to temper an immoderate nature. Yoga brings us calm, Tao brings us balance – so why not look to Islam for a bit of restraint? Maybe we can begin this year at the height, rather than the depths, of self.


— Sarah Nardi, Adbusters #87

Over three decades ago, the BND meme was born. Conceived by artist Ted Dave, the ritual sprang out of the realization that addiction-forming advertising had polluted our mental environment, and it was killing not only our wallets but our culture, our souls, our planet. Hence the one-day challenge to “participate by not participating.”

A handful of years later, we rescheduled it to fall on the all-American consumption blitz of Black Friday. Riding the wave of an early viral campaign, soon the annual shopping moratorium was being observed in over five dozen countries. Then, the meme mutated from a single day to a whole season: Buy Nothing Xmas was brought to bear on the emptiness and waste of the modern yuletide holiday.

And then it mutated again. Now, in over 6,500 Facebook groups across 44 nations, millions are living by its tenets every single day. They share tools, clothing and food, hand-made goods, hand-me-downs, and everything in between. Buying, selling, trading and bartering are all strictly forbidden.

Welcome to a cashless, wireless, wasteless world.

From a single day to a season-long tradition to a daily habit — Buy Nothing has evolved from a crazy idea to a widely practiced way of life. No leaders, no capital, no outside meddling: with nothing but numbers and the spark of a great idea, it has revolutionized the lives of millions — and potentially the warming world.

After three generations of Buy Nothing, what will the fourth look like? Will it dig deeper, move further, adapt faster? Can it be wielded with force against climate change, putting humanity onto a sane sustainable path?

The answer starts with a single day.

Buy Nothing Day over the years . . .