The “spectacle” of Adbusters

Adbusters is a glossy, freewheeling leftie magazine that publishes images that are normally both fun and disturbing and often thought-provoking.

This full-page image from their third 2026 issue titled Design Anarchy 2 brought the phrase “Jürgen Habermas on LSD” to mind.

Is there actually such a thing as a Mental Liberation Front? Who knows?

Adbusters’ main claim to fame – maybe a footnote in history but an important one – is that they are credited with sparking the Occupy Wall Street movement back in 2011. Martin Kaste explained in a piece for NPR:

The Occupy protests seemed to come out of nowhere. But the early participants, like John Garcia in downtown Seattle, point to a very specific catalyst. ...

Adbusters is an anti-consumerism magazine based in Vancouver, British Columbia. This summer, it proposed a Sept. 17 "occupation" of Wall Street, and the idea caught fire.

Adbusters ... sees itself more as an idea shop, sort of an "anti-advertising firm" that takes special glee in creating fake ads to subvert the message of real products. ...

The man behind all this is Kalle Lasn, a puckish, Estonian-born former adman who still considers himself to be, in the language of the industry, a "creative."

In a 2006 speech, Lasn said, "I have a feeling that right now, this human experiment on planet Earth is hitting the wall!"

He was speaking to an audience of fellow "creatives" — graphic designers, in this case — at a conference in Berlin. Lasn lamented the environmental and psychological cost of modern capitalism, and he laid special responsibility on the shoulders of advertising professionals.

Adbusters’ style reminds me some things I’ve seen from the Situationists of decades ago:

Situationist International (SI), [was a] group of artists, writers, and social critics (1957–72) that aimed to eliminate capitalism through the revolutionization of everyday life. Instead of focusing on traditional sites of economic and social change, such as the factory, the Situationist International (SI) argued that a revolution would take place in the realm of everyday life because the alienating effects of capitalism were pervasive in modern society. Although it was an association of art movements from across Europe, its primary figures were French, and its primary writings, including its eponymous journal, were composed in French. 

One of the best-known political works from the Situationists was a pamphlet by Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. This was the cover of an English version published in Detroit in 1970 which proudly identified itself as “a Black & Red translation unauthorized.”

It contained some stereotypically “Sixties” highbrow leftie language. For instance:

The spectacle, understood in its totality, is simultaneously the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, its added decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, advertisement or direct consumption of entertainments, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The form and the content of the spectacle are identically the total justification of the conditions and the ends of the existing system. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, to the extent that it occupies the principal part of the time lived outside of modern production.

I’ve never felt like I quite grasped what that was supposed to mean. And maybe that’s the point. The Spectacle is a real thing - but not quite - but its still tells us something profound? Whatever that might be …

My reaction to that pamphlet is still pretty much like Huck Finn’s when listening to one of Tom Sawyer’s grand explanation of how the world works: I don’t understand it, but boy, it sure sounds grand!

Adbusters reminds me of that in being cool and interesting, even if What It Means isn’t always clear.

Notes:

(1) Kaste, Martin (2011): Exploring Occupy Wall Street's 'Adbuster' Origins. NPR 10/20/2011. <https://www.npr.org/2011/10/20/141526467/exploring-occupy-wall-streets-adbuster-origins> (Accessed: 2026-17-08).

(2) Editors (2024): Situationist International. Encyclopedia Britannica 03/20/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Situationist-International> (Accessed 2026-17-08).

(3) Debord, Guy (1970): Society of the Spectacle, 6. The explicitly “unauthorized” edition specifies that it has “No copyright/No rights reserved.” Consistent with that spirit, you can download it for free from the Brown University Library website: <https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:89211/>