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 . . .

Our editor in chief Kalle Lasn sat down with Daniel Pinchbeck to talk about the big ideas from Manifesto for World Revolution, the history of Adbusters, BUMs, Gen Z uprisings . . . how to save the world . . . and how to wobble.

Check it out. Share widely. Grab a copy of Manifesto.

Roosters and owls and gold toilets and dinosaurs and hot dogs and out-of-order ICE machines and Bernie Sanders and lots and lots of signs, and seven million Lefties going, “Finally we got our shit together.” Emphasis on the together.

Fun!

Also: one epic flash in the pan.

Let’s face it: October 18 did not move the ball for the left one inch.

Here’s what should have happened: Instead of organizing 2500 protest marches, we needed to huddle up into 250,000 brainstorm sessions all across the country to figure out an actual position – one that doesn’t start with “No.”

You can’t just push back – time’s done for that. You need a counter-narrative that meets Trumpian tyranny and annihilates it – because it has justice and science and humanity on its side.

Find that, articulate it, weaponize it. And then hit the streets with a protest that actually means something.

— KL

Sign this petition and let’s force Israel to release Marwan Barghouti from prison.

SIGN HERE

Reports last week from Tel Aviv suggested that after 20 years in prison, he might finally walk free as part of the hostage release deal. But at the last moment, those moral midgets at Netanyahu’s office struck his name from the list.

We all know why.

Without Marwan, there will only be more subjugation, more barbarity, more of the same nightmare Palestinians have endured since the Nakba.

The only way to break this vicious cycle is to release Barghouti and give Palestine its Mandela moment.

But this moment is slipping away — fast.

We the people of the world must act now.

SIGN, share, and make it happen.

Hot off the press is the newest report of the Global Flourishing Study — an ongoing project managed by Harvard and Baylor which checks in with hundreds of thousands of folks in 22 countries to see how they’re doing. “Flourishing” might best be described as truly crushing this thing called life. You’re happy, you’re healthy, you’re at peace. Once again this year, the Scandinavian countries came out on top.

The big surprise was who came out on the bottom: Japan, the UK, and the United States. Countries with among the highest GDP in the world.

WTF?

For most of human history “prosperity equals happiness” was taken as a kind of natural law; our whole economic system was founded on it. Then came the New Age countermessage that “money doesn’t buy happiness,” repeated so often it became cliché (though nobody actually believed it). The new Harvard data pushes the case. Not only does money NOT buy happiness, too much money actually buys UNHAPPINESS. In general, in the Harvard study, the higher a country’s GDP, the lower its flourishing score. In terms of quality of life, the lower-income countries measured have it all over the wealthy ones. The richer the country, the “poorer” its citizens, in this sense.

Poring over the results of their Flourishing study, seeing the scores of countries like Indonesia blow away their own U S of A, the American psychologists floated the million-dollar question: ‘How do we get to Indonesia?’

The answer might be hiding in a scientific paper published a quarter century ago.

Appearing in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences under the title The Weirdest People in the World, the paper called out the arrogant egocentrism of Western social science by revealing a gross bias in the way research is conducted. The test subjects from whom psychologists draw their generalizations about how “people” behave come from a select pool. Mostly, the guinea pigs are psych undergraduate students trying to earn beer money by participating in studies. The wild leap is that this small and largely homogenous group accurately represents “the universal human.”

Turns out that’s bonkers.

These sample subjects are actually WEIRD. That is, they come from Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic societies. “Our sample is the West, but not the Rest,” as co-author Steve Heine put it. The Rest is much bigger than us, and it’s growing much faster.

And, as it turns out, “The Rest” has much to teach us.

The traits that constitute Western WEIRDness add up to a certain kind of mind. We rely heavily on analytic thinking over more holistic approaches to problem-solving. (Thanks, Aristotle.) We toil away in silos, rather than co-operatively, and we press on deep into the night; we are capitalism’s cowboys, its shoeleather entrepreneurs and silent giggers and solo coders (Thanks, Protestant work ethic). We’ve thrown off childish spiritual pursuits — like going to church or even believing in a higher power. We’re bowling along, and that is a weird thing to do — and a dead-end on the camino of the fulfilling life.

By contrast, the rest of the world has structures of kinship and social interdependence — including economic and political and inter-generational bonds — that are alien to the modern Westerner. It has thrown in with family, tradition and faith — the very things the West is retreating from, with disastrous results.

Outside the climate-controlled bubble of Western WEIRDness, the secret of life is being run up the flag. That secret turns out to be the very things the flourishing study identified. Things like physical and mental health. Civic engagement and a will to vote. A comfortable place to live. A spiritual story that gives your life meaning. And people around you who love you. To truly flourish, the elements of your life must resonate with your deepest values. Yes, having enough money to pay the bills matters; having enough to blow on a speedboat does not.

In fact, material wealth is the one trait that actually seems to come at the expense of others. The things that drive up GDP — an ethic of long work hours and eyes-on-the-prize individual focus on making partner or crushing your quarterly numbers — actually drive down happiness and connection and fulfillment and peace. (Japan, which came dead last in the flourishing sweepstakes, emerges as a cautionary tale. In its breakneck embrace of hyper-capitalism over the last century and a half, it tossed many of its cultural and social and religious traditions over the side — the very things that could have balmed the widespread mental-health crises the country is seeing now, especially among its young.)

So this is how we get to Indonesia — that is, how we recover from the state we find ourselves in, socially and spiritually bereft: We lose the arrogance and stop being so WEIRD. We make the effort to hang out with our families and neighbors. Eat together. Co-create stuff. Find common cause. Volunteer. Reflect. Hold hands and face the sunrise.

It’s simple. Not easy, but simple.

Morally we are slackers, and the supposed best and brightest among us are the biggest slackers of all, according to the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. He singles out for particular scorn hard-driving students who charge out of grad school into the hindering professions — hedge funds or corporate law or PR or consulting. He urges them to instead investigate sectors that generate more meaning and social value ... even though they pay less money. Because making meaning — in your own life and as part of the weave of your community — is just better than being rich.

(”In the Sixties, fifty percent of college students said making as much money as possible was a really important life goal,” Bregman told a reporter recently. “Today that’s eighty to ninety percent. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change.”)

As for young Lefties, the challenge is to be less self-involved and self-righteous and borderline pious in their purist abstemiousness. (Don’t eat meat, don’t fly, don’t use plastic straws, don’t have kids...) Instead, take some of that energy you’re burning playing defense — reducing your footprint to so close to zero you might as well not have existed — and use it to make positive, ambitious change.

These things are good for the world and good for us: Building community. Doing good for good’s sake. Being grateful for what you’re able to manage. And not posting about any of it, ya bastard.

That’s the way most of the rest of the world gets it done.

And the rest of the world is right.

Our culture has fooled us into a wrongheaded way to live. It’s time to unwind all that now. When the writers at this magazine talk about the “vibe shift” Western culture desperately needs right now, this is what we’re talking about.

Step into it.

— Harry Flood

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Just as Adbusters' worldwide circulation climbed beyond 100,000 and our NGO was becoming a geopolitical force to be reckoned with, a strange thing happened. I became disillusioned. Or rather, I became profoundly disappointed with politics on the Left. I felt that we had lost our way.

We Lefties just weren't . . . making things happen. A protest could draw a million people, but then everyone went home and resumed their routines. Internet campaigns whipped up great anticipation, but a week later you hardly even remembered what they were about.

We whined a lot. Read many books. Knew what was wrong with the world but had no idea how to fix it.

When did we start taking ourselves so seriously? Where did the "people's laughter" go? Weren't we the ones who knew how to live, love, think and have fun? And, you know . . . care? About the big stuff?

I saw my compadres fighting smaller and smaller battles. Gorging on critical theory. Eager to cancel anyone who disagreed. A sort of self-purification program seemed to be happening — an "I can hang my head lower than you" one-upmanship of gooey liberal guilt that was frankly embarrassing.

The Left suddenly just wasn't cool anymore.

And that's not trivial. Because when you lose your cool you lose your influence. Cool's sneaky superpower is its ability to propagate, to replicate in a critical mass of human minds. Lose that and you've lost the game. After 50 years of identifying as a Lefty, I realized I couldn't in good conscience wear that label anymore.

And then, at the peak of my disillusionment, as often happens in life, the story took a new twist.

In Tunisia, young people rose up and kicked corrupt President Ben Ali out of power. In Tahir Square people kept pulsating until long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak fell. The Arab Spring spread quickly through the whole Middle East. It was exhilarating. In our brainstorms at Adbusters, we kept asking ourselves: Why can't we do something like this? Why not . . . an American Spring?

In our strategy sessions we kept obsessing over the coke-sniffing high-flyers of Wall Street who brought on the crash of 2008. Then came the idea of marching into the iconic heart of global capitalism and occupying it. That's when we all got truly excited.

We chose September 17 as the kickoff date because that was my mother's birthday. For me, it was personal.

My mother, Leida Lasn, was the soul of the image we chose: a ballerina on a bull. Serenity in chaos. Like a Basho poem read on the floor of a stock exchange, or welders at Toyota laying down their torches and praying to the fire gods.

We started pumping out tactical briefings. The first one read:

We collaborated with activists in New York. David Graeber and local community organizers mustered. And on September 17 it happened: a peaceful battalion of a few thousand marched from their base camp in Zuccotti Park to the statue of the charging bull in the heart of the financial district.

Support started flying in across a ridiculously wide spectrum — from the Anonymous collective to Michael Moore to Elizabeth Warren and even Barack Obama. Electric speeches from the philosopher Slavoz Žižek to political analyst Naomi Klein to actress Susan Sarandon kept occupiers' spirits high.

It was leaderless, joyous and intense.

The energy built, fanned unwittingly by Mayor Bloomberg's tone-deaf pushback and a NYPD beat cop caught on camera viciously pepper spraying a couple of teenage girls. On October 3, more than 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.

And it spun out. Occupations popped up in Chicago, LA, Seattle, Atlanta, Miami, Washington. The spark jumped borders: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver. Then oceans: London, Paris, Madrid. Sydney. Jakarta. Bangalore. By October, there were occupations in more than 2000 cities around the world.

This was more than a protest against greedy bankers and the shenanigans of the global financial system. It was a great howl from the soul from a whole generation that said: We are the 99% and we're sick of you 1% lording it over us.

It felt uncannily similar to what happened in 1968 when a student uprising in the Latin Quarter of Paris spread like wildfire, across borders, over oceans. For a few heady weeks in 1968 and again in 2011, a tantalizing question hung in the air: Could this be the beginning of a world revolution?

Looking back, what killed the momentum in both 1968 and 2011 wasn't that people failed to put their asses on the line. They did. But we failed to deliver what every revolution needs: one big issue to galvanize around. We didn't have our memes figured out. We had the attention of the world but couldn't muster much beyond a few cryptic pronouncements. We kept shouting, "We are the 99%!" But when winter crept in and Mayor Bloomberg ambushed Zuccotti Park in the wee hours of the morning, we lost our momentum and will to fight back.

OWS fizzled out, went down with a whimper. At least that's what people say.

But I don't quite see it that way.

Those three months in 2011 reinvigorated the Left and stoked a worldwide social movement whose consequences are still working themselves out today. You can trace a direct line from #OWS to the rise of #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter and many of the protest and liberation movements now springing up around the world. Occupy Wall Street politicized a whole generation of young people, just like my generation got politicized back in 1968.

What Now?

Life is much more precarious today than it was fourteen years ago. Young people can't find jobs, can't pay the rent, can't see a way out of this pileup of existential crises we face. Wall Street is greedier than ever. Brutal wars rage. World leaders have abandoned all hope of fixing the climate crisis. And wherever you look, climate-denying fascists are running away with the ball.

Now more than ever we need another Big Bang moment like 1968 and 2011. But is the revolutionary spark still there? Have too many of us stopped believing? Has life ground us down? Are we too exhausted and broke?

I don't think so. Our spirit of resistance may be dormant, but it's still there deep inside us. It just needs a compelling reason to spring back to life.

A couple of things need to happen now.

First we must answer the question we never answered 15 years ago: "What Is Our One Demand?" We'll keep thrashing around in the weeds until we figure that out.

This won't be easy. It's going to take some serious soul-searching. We'll have to hunker down . . . congregate in thousands of little groups around the country and brainstorm our hearts out. Zero in on a new grand narrative, a radical set of big ideas — metamemes — ideas so profound and fundamental that a sane and sustainable future is unthinkable without them.

And then, we'll have to come up with a whole new paradigm of protest.

The hundreds of one-off demonstrations that have flared up around the country since Trump got elected are just quick reactive jabs, born of frustration. We're just gushing out anger at the guy. When will we wake up and realize that traditional one-offs like No Kings don't add up to a hill of beans? To start winning again, we have to pick up the pace, the rhythm, the tempo of our resistance. And, most importantly, face this fact: Words without deep personal commitment behind them have the shelf life of lettuce. To pull out of this death spiral we must, each of us, change the way we live.

For centuries we've followed the same routine — the playbook of the industrial revolution: we've worked weekdays, partied on Saturday, rested (sometimes) on Sunday. Toiling, and then escaping from the week's toil. Five-sevenths of our lives spent punching a clock. That leaves no time for growth, for transformation, for dreaming.

So we steal some. One day a week. Friday. We just take Friday back. Make it ours. Repurpose it. Rededicate it to the service of the wild human spirit and a sustainable future. Turn it into a new kind of 21st century holiday: A global day of action.

From now on, think of Friday as a call to personal revolution.

Instead of working, we start the day by staring into the mirror, building resistance in the circuitry of the heart. And then, armed with our metamemes, we hit the streets to sow inspired anarchic bliss.

We turn our cities into carnivals, our universities into hotbeds of revolutionary fervor, our supermarkets into staging grounds, our financial districts into fiery zones of contention. We churn everything up!

Some of us will write poems and shoot them into cyberspace. Others will wander around détourning ads, posting ultimatums and manifestos on lampposts, singing in Starbucks, taking our dogs into Cartier stores, strolling into Safeway and folding a banana. Each of us, each in our own sweet way, will find our mojo . . . dedicate our Fridays to winning the planetary endgame — match the dark insanity of the present moment with a crazy exuberance that is ultimately full of light and hope.

Oh yeah, baby. It's time to be reborn.

For the wild, KL

All this time we’ve been discussing Dead Internet Theory. With the rise of AI, and all media being flooded with mindless words, text-generated pictures and slop videos, the internet sure feels dead. Too much useless stuff and all for engagement farming.

According to the University of New South Wales, “The Dead Internet Theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet, including social media accounts, is predominantly being created and automated by artificial intelligence agents.” Are we surprised that this happened in a greedy, profit-maximalist world? I’m not.

Discourse on this topic has a certain helpless “What have we done?” sentiment to it. Like we’ve let AI roam wildly and now have to deal with the consequences. We view it like we’ve just let another great thing, the internet, go to shit because we let AI go out of hand...

Sounds familiar.

What about a Dead Brain Theory? Right now, we discuss how all the content on the internet will be infested with AI, but what about our brains? With all the media I consumed as a child, and now as an adult, I wonder how many of my thoughts have actually been incited by some Tech Giant or crafted by a corporation. Idolizing an influencer or having an echo chamber of friends, it’s just monkey see, monkey do. And we wouldn’t define that as using your own
brain freely...

Here’s what I mean by Dead Brain Theory: it’s the slow erosion of original thought. It’s the mind stuck on autopilot, constantly reacting but rarely reflecting. To use your brain freely is to let yourself sit in thoughts and feelings, not immediately going on TikTok for a few scrolls and a quick dopamine fix before bed.

I believe that taking the time to reflect in a meditative way is something that frees your mind as you let it wander without influence.

I would like to coin the term Dead Brain Theory now, so when the iPad-kids are no longer iPad-kids but iPad-in-their-mid-30s, maybe will it be clear enough that their minds have been overtaken by the media they have consumed.

If Dead Internet Theory describes a web full of bots and filler, Dead Brain Theory describes a mind full of noise, running someone else’s script. Either way, we can try to stop letting every moment be filled, every thought shaped, every silence interrupted.

As they say, use it before you lose it, but I’m not sure this can be executed to be rendered effective. Maybe this is just how things evolve. Or maybe something subtle is slipping away.

— Sydney Ung in Adbusters 180: World Uprising Now

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