* Anti-capitalist collective that detests American consumerism and the advertising industry
* Played a key role in launching the Occupy Wall Street movement
* Said in 2011: “Now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path.”
* Accuses Israel of expropriating Palestinian land and practicing apartheid
* Warns that pollution created by human industrial activity will lead to “catastrophic climate change”
The Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) is a not-for-profit, anti-consumerist organization founded in 1989 by author/activist Kalle Lasn and wilderness cinematographer Bill Schmalz in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Foundation describes itself as “a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age.” Further, AMF describes its activist supporters and members as “anarchists” and “neo-Luddites” whose aim is to “topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century, by challenging the way information flows, institutions wield power, and multinational companies set their agendas.” In the fall of 2011, AMF issued the following directive to its members and backers:
“Its now time to amp up the edgy theatrics … deviant pranks, subversive performances and playful détournements of all kinds. Open your insurrectionary imagination. Anything, from a bottom-up transformation of the global economy to changing the way we eat, the way we get around, the way we live, love and communicate … be the spark that sustains a global revolution of everyday life!”
AMF proudly declares that its activists commonly engage in “culture jamming”—a term denoting efforts to challenge and discredit the dominant advertising messages disseminated in the mainstream media. By AMF’s reckoning, advertising is a form of “mental manipulation” that invariably corrupts American culture by creating and perpetuating a societal obsession with materialism and consumption. The San Francisco rock band Negativland coined the term “culture jamming” in 1984 to describe their own efforts to subvert mass media, advertising, and corporate culture. In her 1999 anti-globalization book No Logo, bestselling author Naomi Klein defined culture jamming as “the practice of parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to drastically alter their messages.” According to ActivistFacts.com: “Culture jamming runs the gamut from painting bicycle lanes on roads to covering logos on billboards, from affixing ‘GREASE’ stickers on fast-food restaurant trays, to replacing outdoor display ads with messages that are decidedly antithetical to the advertiser.”
AMF publishes Adbusters, a not-for-profit, reader-supported, advertising-free “ecological magazine” that, like its parent company, rejects consumerism, condemns “the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces,” and advocates the elimination of “injustices in the global economy” as well as “any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.”
Adbusters magazine started in 1989 as a local quarterly with a circulation of about 5,000 copies, and within 15 years it grew into a bi-monthly periodical that reached 120,000 people per issue. By 2022, its circulation had declined to approximately 60,000. Notable past and present contributors to this periodical include The Nation Institute senior fellow Christopher Hedges, polemical journalist Matt Taibbi, environmentalist Bill McKibben, science-fiction author Jim Munroe, documentarian and media-studies instructor Douglas Rushkoff, Marxist philosopher Michael Hardt, Marxist sociologist Antonio Negri, British filmmaker Jonathan Barnbrook, historian and social critic Morris Berman, author and translator Brendan Connell, English philosophy professor Simon Critchley, anarchist and activist David Graeber, Canadian writer and mathematician David Orrell, and Slovenian neo-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
Since its inception, Adbusters has routinely characterized American society as unjust and inhumane; condemned the negative environmental and psychological consequences associated with widespread automobile use; urged people to find creative symbolic ways of standing up defiantly against the evils of capitalism and technology; advocated property destruction as a form of protest; and occasionally urged outright violence against human beings in the form of “busting” people while videotaping the act. Some examples:
Among AMF’s most prominent campaigns over the years have been the following:
* Buy Nothing Day: Typically celebrated in the U.S. on “Black Friday” (the day after Thanksgiving) — and then the following day elsewhere in the world) — this initiative, which was launched by AMF in 1992, emphasizes that “with catastrophic climate change looming, we the rich one billion people on the planet have to consume less!” “As the Christmas season approaches,” says Adbusters, “keep in mind that buying something will never make you happy. It might lift your spirits for a few hours, maybe even a day or two, but in the end (especially the real end) your connections, your friends, your family, your human experiences are really all you’ve got. So this year, at a moment in human history when global warming is breathing down our necks, why not do something wildly different:Ignore Black Friday! If enough of us do that, each in our own sweet way, we might be on our way to the most joyous holiday season we’ve ever had.”
In 2002, AMF purchased 30 seconds of advertising time on CNN’s Moneyline to promote Buy Nothing Day. The ad featured a burping pig as a symbol of the gluttony typically exhibited by Americans each Thanksgiving.
An outgrowth of this tradition was “Buy Nothing Christmas,” which urges people not to purchase Christman presents but instead “give your friends and family a ‘gift-exemption’ card; go to stores and ask holiday shoppers, ‘What would Jesus buy?’; and ‘dress as Santa and meditate in the middle of a busy shopping mall.’”
* Blackspot Shoes: As an “affront to the consciousness of hyper-capitalism and profit-dominated boardroom policies,” AMF promotes and markets a line of shoes—produced in so-called “fair-trade” factories and made from hemp, recycled tires, and vegan leather—bearing the label “Blackspot.” Blackspot is an open-source brand, which means that it can be used by anyone, for any purpose, at no cost.
* Kick It Over: Seeking to “power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path,” this initiative encourages economics students around the world “to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs.” The campaign’s signature document—the Kick it Over Manifesto—calls for “an economic revolution” that will yield “a new economics” which is not centered around Gross Domestic Product or any other “fundamentally flawed and incomplete” measures of economic progress. “Deep in recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming,” said AMF in 2011, “now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new sustainable path.”
* One Flag: This was a competition that encouraged Adbusters readers to design and create a flag that symbolized “global citizenship,” without using language or commonly known symbols.
* TV Turnoff Week: This initiative — rooted in Kalle Lasn’s belief that excessive television viewing represents “a major mental health problem” — calls on AMF supporters to completely refrain from watching television for seven days.
* Unbrand America: On July 3, 2003, AMF placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times consisting of fake stock-market listings below these words:
“July 4
Because my country has sold its soul to corporate power
Because consumerism has become our national religion
Because we’ve forgotten the true meaning of freedom
And because patriotism now means agreeing with the president
I pledge to do my duty … and take my country back.”
In addition to the aforementioned campaigns, AMF has urged its likeminded supporters to engage in public actions that convey their contempt for capitalism, such as:
Frequently critical of Israel, AMF and Adbusters magazine have often condemned the Jewish state for allegedly expropriating Palestinian land; instituting a discriminatory system of laws reminiscent of South Africa’s former apartheid regime; illegally demolishing the homes of peaceful Arabs; and routinely using excessive force and violence in an effort to humiliate and terrorize Palestinian civilians.
On June 9, 2011, Kalle Lasn registered the domain name “OccupyWallStreet.org” and thus gave birth to the movement which he hoped would help “pull the current monster down”—i.e., the two-headed serpent of capitalism and consumerism.
During the ensuing three months, AMF was a key organizer—along with such groups as Anonymous, NYC General Assembly, Occupy Wall Street, Take The Square, and USDayOfRage—of a September 17, 2011 “Day of Rage” protest to be staged in the vicinity of New York’s Wall Street financial center, which AMF viewed as the very emblem of the capitalist system which it so despised—“the financial Gomorrah of America” and “the greatest corrupter of our democracy.” Seeking to build on the anti-globalization movement and striving to promote “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” AMF called for “20,000 people [to] flood into lower Manhattan [on September 17], set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months.”
In its communiques to the “radicals and utopian dreamers” who were planning to participate in the September 17 demonstrations, AMF warned that: “Strategically speaking, there is a very real danger that if we naively put our cards on the table and rally around the ‘overthrow of capitalism’ or some equally outworn utopian slogan, then our Tahrir moment [i.e., opportunity for revolutionary change] will quickly fizzle into another inconsequential ultra-lefty spectacle soon forgotten.” To guard against this possibility, AMF called for “a deceptively simple Trojan Horse demand” that was “so specific and doable” that it would be “impossible for President Obama to ignore.” Thus, under the slogan “Democracy Not Corporatocracy,” AMF issued a demand for Obama to “ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”
According to journalist Aaron Klein, the September 17 New York City protests—which ultimately drew about 1,000 participants—apparently represented “the culmination” of a campaign by Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN and president of an SEIU local in New Orleans, who in March 2011 had issued a call for “days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase.” Rathke’s efforts were supported by Stephen Lerner, an SEIU board member and radical-left organizer who candidly aims to “destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement”; “bring down the stock market”; “bring down [the] bonuses” of executives in the financial sector; and “interfere with their ability to … be rich.”
The NYC protests of September 17 marked the start of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that would dominate America’s news headlines for the next several months. Thus, it can be said that AMF was the most visible and influential initiator of OWS.
Between 2001 and 2011, AMF received $176,500 in grants from the Glaser Progress Foundation, and $309,773 from the Tides Foundation.
In August 2020, Adbusters posted an online message announcing its plan to initiate a massive protest in Lafayette Square, located directly across the street from the White House, for 50 consecutive days beginning on September 17, 2020:
“It’s been nine years since we set off the political earthquake of #OccupyWallStreet, laying siege to NYC’s Zuccotti Park and inspiring thousands of similar protests around the world. The Occupy anniversary arrives September 17th, 2020. And it may be the perfect day to trigger another global big-bang moment — a massive collective action of the sweetest kind of disobedience.
“The why hardly needs recitation. Because, for these nine years, the shadows have only grown longer. Inequality has soared. Not a single Wall Street CEO spent a night in jail for his role in the 2008 financial meltdown. Politicians and corporate criminals continue to savage the public trust with impunity. And all the while, this howling void of a president, his sins too many to name, sits smugly atop a corona death-toll that may surpass two-hundred thousand Americans by Christmas.
“It’s time again for dramatic, decisive action. Which is why, on September 17th, in the original and enduring spirit of Occupy, we and tens of thousands of our fellow citizens will stream into Lafayette Square, in Washington. D.C.”
But September 17 came and went, with no AMF-led protest taking place in Lafayette Square.
Though Adbusters did not indicate any ties to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa movements, which were key leaders of the mass protests and violent riots that had swept the U.S. during the summer of 2020, the organization said that it planned to “multiply power by strategic collaboration with BLM and Extinction Rebellion to bring in a revolution for a ‘new world order.’”
AMF has a public relations arm called the Powershift Advocacy Advertising Agency that creates advertisements for nonprofit groups whose values and objectives are consistent with those of Adbusters.
In 2026, AMF’s internet homepage featred the following disparagement of capitalism (absence of capital letters in original):
“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.”
Starting with the March/April 2015 edition of Adbusters magazine and continuing with all the subsequent editions of the periodical through the end of that calendar year, AMF published separate installments of a Manifesto for World Revolution, authored by Kalle Lasn. Ten years later, in May 2025, AMF released an updated, book-length version of that same Manifesto for World Revolution.
Excerpt from the 2025 Manifesto’s Prologue
Below is an excerpt from the 2025 Manifesto pamphlet’s Prologue:
“[O]nce you realize that consumer, corpo-capitalist system we live in is by its very nature unethical, and therefore it’s not unethical to fight back; once you understand that civil disobedience has a long and honorable history that goes back to Ghandi, and Thoreau and King, Jr.; once you start trusting yourself and relating to the world as an empowered human being instead of a hapless consumer drone, something remarkable happens. Your cynicism dissolves. Your instincts sharpen.
“Direct action is a proclamation of personal independence. You act. You thrust yourself forward and intervene. And then you hang loose and deal with whatever comes. In that moment of decision, in that leap into the unknown, you come to life. Your interior world is suddenly vivid. You’re like a cat on the prowl: alive, alert and still a little wild.
“We’re raised to be polite and civil, but sometimes polite is exactly the wrong thing to be. Polite lets bullies off scot free. Polite lets corporations walk all over us. Polite lets our leaders do nothing about climate change. Polite lets cancerous systems grow until there’s no stopping them.
“That’s pretty much where we are at now.
“To those who doubt that massive global breakdown is coming I say: It has already started. Look around. Everything we’ve considered stable and enduring for centuries is slipping away. Corporations rule by fiat. Big Finance plays countries off against each other. Economists push for more growth while ecosystems crash. Algorithms swing elections. Unanswerable lies proliferate. And lately, brutal crazy stuff: The emergence of evil monsters like Assad, Sisi, MBS and Putin. Rape and torture are now routinely used as weapons of war.
“As temperatures rise, natural systems collapse and social structures crumble, there’ll be water shortages and food riots. The number of failed states will jump from the current twenty to thirty, then fifty-plus. Refugees by the millions will first beg and then fight their way into every corner of the rich world.
“And then, in a geopolitical moment of reckoning, a conflict will escalate out of control. Rage will ignite even in the most tranquil minds. All hell will break loose. Nobody will be able to control it. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, will perish in a massive die-off. Those who survive will huddle up and cower through a dark age that could last a thousand years or more.
“This is not hyperbole. The fate of this six-million-year experiment of ours on Planet Earth is hanging in the balance, if only we had the clarity of mind to see it.”
Another Excerpt from the 2025 Manifesto
And here is an excerpt from “The Metameme Revolution,” a section of the same 2025 Manifesto pamphlet:
“We are now waking up to the fact that the world runs on a handful of well-entrenched, largely unquestioned precepts. Most of us take it for granted that economists know what they are doing. That toxic financial instruments like derivatives and credit default swaps are business as usual. That flash trading is an efficient way to run stock exchanges. That money can move freely across borders but people can’t. That advertising is harmless. That secrecy is a normal part of democracy. That arms trading cannot be stopped. That no matter how heinous a crime a corporation commits, it’s untouchable.
“But now, caught in an existential crisis with no obvious way out, we begin to question these hidden coordinates of our reality and start thinking about a new operating system for Planet Earth.
“We hatch a new grand narrative, a set of ideas so fundamental, so systemic, so profound that a sane sustainable future is unthinkable without them.
“And then we deploy them.
“We crack the global mind on seven critical fronts:
“On the ecological front, we get Adam Smith’s invisible hand working for us instead of against us. We lay a plan for a capitalist reformation — a painful but necessary move towards a new kind of global marketplace, a bioeconomy — in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth.
“On the corporate front, we launch the mother of all boycotts against one of the most criminal corporations in the world and wipe it out. Once the mightiest has fallen, the rest will follow, and a Corporate Charter Revocation Movement will be born.
“On the financial front, we force our leaders to eliminate all tax havens. We march worldwide for a 1% Robin Hood Tax on all stock market and currency transactions. We push for new rules to cool down insanely feverish bot-run trading. We propose the simple idea that you must hold a stock for 24 hours after its purchase before selling it.
“On the economic front, we set up subversive cells in the economics departments of universities around the world, and start disrupting classes, popping posters in the corridors and nailing manifestos on professors’ doors. We expose the current science of economics as a hindering profession, disastrously out of tune with planetary biorhythms. We seed a revolutionary leap in economic thinking — a paradigm shift toward a new bionomic model that works in the real world.
“On the political front, we push to rewrite the constitutions of nations, recalibrating the role of humans in the ecological chain. We make secrecy taboo in all but the most sensitive areas of national security. We clamp down on the arms trade. In nation after nation, we propose a constitutional amendment for global adoption, calling for national referendums requiring 50 percent of voters to assent to any war.
“On the psychological front, we expand our concept of human rights beyond our physical bodies into the digital realm; your data becomes part of your new hybrid self. Then we launch the Mental Liberation Front (MLF) and start reclaiming our mental space — hacking into the networks and monkeywrenching the algorithms that are manipulating us and undermining our individual and collective will.
“On the aesthetic front, we call on architects, artists, designers and creatives to transform the ambient tone of the world. The way it feels to walk around our cities; the mood of watching television; the knack and smack of navigating the internet; the emotional valence of money and status; the way it feels to be alive today. We step off the godless and immoral straight line we’ve been stuck on for the past century and learn how to wobble again. […]
“As our ecosystems crash, as our minds become muddled, as the center gives way and we start spiraling into a new dark age, millions of us will embark on a revolutionary adventure of social transformation. Our mission: to demolish corpo-consumercapitalism as we know it. […]
“We’re in a geopolitical power-shift moment. The hierarchical, top-down power structures that have ruled the world for thousands of years are collapsing before our eyes. The street now holds unprecedented sway. We know what we want. After centuries of rule by kings, emperors, tyrants, mad men, fascists, communists, military dictatorships and mega-corporations, We the People of the world are now ready to take charge of our own destiny and start calling the shots from below.
“And if the leaders, politicians, intellectuals and pundits of the old-world order refuse to listen to us, then, armed with our metamemes, we rush into the streets and get the job done by the sheer power of enraged swarms of humanity howling for deliverance from a future that does not compute.”
Adbusters
By ActivistFacts.com
Adbusters
By InfluenceWatch.org