Through creativity/machine, found a few links to some critiques against the magazine AdBusters, which has always pissed me off, although I’ve never really explicitly laid out why exactly. Some of these people do a great job of just that though. Read on…

I guess the shorthand explanation of why I hate AdBusters is that it feels the same way art school felt: a bunch of quasi-smart & cool people who are stuck running on an intellectual hamster wheel instead of getting out there and throwing down in the “real” world in a useful way.

From Antipopper’s Branding: Just Do It:

I’ve said this elsewhere before, but while I’m obviously sympathetic to the whole anti-corporate culture-jamming mission, I’m somewhat dubious about the tendency for anti-consumerist types to fetishise “brands” as being the ultimate evil — a move which I think is a tragic misattribution of the way power operates in culture and the wider material world, which leads to an impotent politics of product boycotts and the like. This kind of phobic disavowal of mass culture is actually quite reactionary, I find, and is a covert form of commodity fetishism, deflecting analysis away from how society is actually organised.

From Abstract Dynamics: On AdBusters:

But even in the consumerist paradise of America, people sometimes feel a bit bloated. And Adbusters is where they go to purge. Feeling guilty about buying that handwoven toilet paper in a custom carved wooden box? Or maybe the fact that it only took 94 minutes to get bored of your new cellphone/vacuum cleaner has got you down? Adbusters sells the perfect remedy, anti-consumption in nice bite sized, well designed chunks.

Most readers don’t even need to really purge, they just need the dream of purging. A fantasy of anti-consumption to occupy brainspace next to the dreams of having a body like Giselle or becoming the next Tiger Woods with that $5,000 golf club. “You too can save the world” screams the Adbusters salesman. Its a good fantasy, worth maybe $6 or whatever it is they charge.

And then tomorrow you can wake up, toss Adbusters on top of Wallpaper in the pile and read Look Look for a while.

And then there’s this one that I haven’t read yet cause it’s really long and the font is hard to look at, called Authoritarianism in Adbusters.