Attention All Jammers

Attention all jammers, activists and cultural creatives,

A specter is haunting the mind of the industrialized world – the specter of the virtual. — Metaverse Manifesto

How’s your online life? Are you happily learning, creating, interconnecting … or is your digital existence growing flatter, duller and ever more predictable?

As physical reality crumbles, the bluish glow of the virtual realm beckons and humanity is presented with a Faustian temptation: to abandon our evolutionary home (it’s too damn hot, messy and boring anyway) and become psychic hives of activity in cyberspace. This is the existential choice we explore in Adbusters #86. It hits newsstands around the world next week – check it out. And if you go to adbusters.org and subscribe right now, we’ll send you a bonus issue of Adbusters #85: Thought Control In Economics. You can also subscribe by calling us at 1-800-663-1243 (toll-free in North America).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR OUR YEAR-END ISSUE: THE BIG IDEAS OF 2010

Send us your most profound insights, your wildest designs, schemes and notions, your most deft détournments and slyest of spoofs. Tell us your choice for the best film, book, video and album of the year.

And tell us your picks for this year’s most glorious bastards of activism. Who are the most inspiring artists, designers, philosophers? Is Obama on track, or the biggest disappointment of 2009? And what are the most promising cultural undercurrents coursing just beneath the surface of human imagination waiting to weave their magic in the coming year?

Send to editor@adbusters.org.

POSTER CHALLENGE

We also want your input on the graphic side of things. Take up our Poster Challenge and submit your designs for these four posters:

• A Global General Strike poster for Buy Nothing Day, Nov. 27,
• Advertising is Brain Damage poster for schools,
• Three Strikes and You’re Out … We’re Revoking Your Corporate Charter,
• Let’s Have a Ramadan Christmas poster.

Send your designs to artdirector@adbusters.org

BUY NOTHING DAY

The annual day of consumer abstinence is just around the corner. This year we’re taking it to a new level by challenging people to face up to the root cause of our planetary crisis – overconsumption – AND to resist the global systems that promote that consumption. We’re thinking of calling for a Global General Strike on Nov. 27: no work, no school, no driving, no shopping … and for some of us, a Ramadan-inspired fast from sunrise to sunset. Instead of mindless consumption, we’ll dish up pranks, provocations and actions by day. At night we’ll celebrate like the fate of the whole world depended on us. What do you think? Can we pull it off? kono@adbusters.org.

THOUGHT CONTROL IN ECONOMICS

Deep in a recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming, NOW is the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new path. Adbusters #85 asks economics students around the world to join the movement to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Visit kickitover.org and download the Kick it Over Manifesto – and other posters – and whack them up in the corridors of your campus. Make sure your university is at the forefront of the paradigm shift from neoclassical to ecological economics now underway. If you’re interested in coordinating campus jams, teach-ins and protests, email kevin@adbusters.org.

BLACKSPOT

Amid all the financial doom and gloom, people are beginning to confront the current global capitalist system. They’re asking questions like: How have megacorporations come to dominate every aspect of our lives? Why are we responsible for bailing those corporations out when they collapse beneath the weight of poor judgment and greed? Why are they too big to fail?

A mega shift is now underway in our business culture: a move away from big corporations toward models that are more sustainable, independent and green. As this trend catches on, our Blackspot grassroots business model will be replicated everywhere. Go to blackspotshoes.org and check it out.

Also get ready for the Blackspot video mindbomb coming soon …

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Greetings from the gang at the Adbusters Media Foundation.