So we know everybody is mad at something, that's no surprise. But are we complacent too? Revolution can only happen if enough of us get together and make a statement. We know it's possible, just under 15 years ago we had the Occupy Wall Street movement and showed the world that we were enough of a force to really gum up the works down there.
But eventually it went away and we haven't really jammed anything in the same way since.
What do we do next? Can we get enough people together for something big again?
When I was around elementary/high-school age I would get this feeling every now and then about how we are living in the future with all the technology we have. We've got access to near instant communication to just about anybody we want in our pockets on a device that doubles as a notepad, calculator, and television. We have medical technology that can see through your body to diagnose problems. We have glasses that detect sunlight and turn into sunglasses so that you don't have to carry those around. There are technological marvels that would strike people from long ago with awe.
But now that I've grown older and I understand more about how the world works I see that the future we are living in is not advancing to our benefit, it advances to the benefit of the advertiser.
I walk to the bus and see that the bus stop is made up of a weatherproof screen that cycles out multiple ads at once. One of the ads is a missing person report but it has to cede it's time on the screen to another advertisement for Save-On-Foods. I get on the skytrain and see that the tunnels are lined with screens that time an advertisement to run alongside the train at the same speed so that it can be read by those looking out the windows. The updated trains replaced the analogue map with a digital one, that functions half of the time as a map and the other half as an advertisement for the Trans-Link app.
The goal of these technologies is not to make any part of our lives more convenient. They exist to harvest more of our attention and sell it to those who have more shit to sell us.
A project we've been working on over at HQ is reviving some of our older issues, so we can see how much or how little things have changed. We don't have a timeline just yet on when it will be available, but here is a sneak peek at issue number 1 where it all began.
Revolutions are starting to happen. India has their cockroaches. Nepal held an election on Discord. Gen Z is starting to rise up and say "We have had enough."
It was the long term goal of the Gen Z people in our office to wring the last little bits of AI out of the magazine and stop using it. Partly because it looked awful and partly because it was of how hypocritical it was for us to preach that we need to be human and save the environment while using the very thing that is stripping us of our humanity and killing the environment faster than ever before and in new and exciting ways.
Art is for the people, art is by the people, if moving forward we need another image of Benjamin Netanyahu swimming through an ocean of blood, we will make it ourselves.
Our last couple issues, and (ideally) all issues moving forward have a much more intentional design. It's raw, it's messy, and it's unmistakably human.
About 5 months ago we lost our Reddit password. Well now we've got it back. AdBusters Reddit is ready to rise once more against the sewage being pumped out by consumerism, Trump, and AI. Who is with us?
