Adbusters

Adbusters is the nonprofit, bimonthly publication of Adbusters Media Foundation. In conjunction with the foundation's website (http://www.adbusters.org), Powershift Advocacy Advertising Agency, Blackspot Anticorporation, and various anti-consumerist campaigns and events, Adbusters functions as the selfproclaimed “journal of the mental environment” and urtext of the culture jamming movement.

Currently boasting a staff of 15 people, a magazine circulation of 120,000, and a culture jammers' listserve with more than 91,000 members, the Adbusters Media Foundation was originally founded by filmmakers and activists Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in response to a public relations campaign titled “Forests Forever,” sponsored by the British Columbian logging industry. When Lasn and Schmalz attempted to purchase television ad time to counter the logging industry's claims, they were refused by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). This experience led to the creation of the Media Foundation in 1989 and the first issue of Adbusters in 1991. Imagined as existing within the continuum of revolutionary projects such as Dadaism, Situationism, punk rock, and culture jamming, Adbusters is best known for its use of subvertisements and inversion of corporate and commercial rhetoric through what the Situationists called détournement. Lasn describes the artistic-politico work of Adbusters as meme warfare or a kind of jujitsu battle over the symbols and signs in our lives and the toxic mental environment created by advertising and the fakery of postmodernism. The publication's stated goal is “to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century.” To that end, in addition to the regular publication of culture jamming images and articles, Adbusters and the Media Foundation have engaged in several campaigns that directly target commercial culture, globalization, and neoliberal policies. The magazine sponsors an annual Creative Resistance Contest to reward the year's best new subvertisements and is associated with the for-profit Blackspot Anticorporation—an “anti-brand” socially and environmentally conscious shoe company that allows consumers to become voting shareholders.

Most notably, Adbusters, with Lasn as a leading voice, has doggedly promoted the concept of “media carta”—the right for the public to reclaim the commons of the airwaves, to have guaranteed media access in the communications age, and to protect net neutrality. The organization has attempted to air commercials for “Buy Nothing Day” and “TV Turnoff Week” and subvertisements for “Autosaurus” and “Obsession Fetish,” among others; only the Cable News Network (CNN) has thus far agreed to broadcast the “Buy Nothing Day” spot. This inability to buy televisual time has led Adbusters Media Foundation to file a Canadian Charter legal action against the CBC in 1995, which was dismissed by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1998, and lawsuits against several Canadian broadcasters in 2004. Although Adbusters claims to promote an anti-consumerist ethos and the rights of “media carta,” it has also been critiqued by some activists and culture jammers for its very commercialization of anti-consumerism in the form of its “culture shop,” a naïve vision of revolution, obvious spoofs that are easily subsumed back into commercial culture, and a patronizing attitude toward the masses.

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