Vancouver Magazine Inspired Global Occupy Movement

If Adbusters is not on everybody's list of 100 Best Things About BC, it should be. ADBUSTERS is a MAGAZINE published in VANCOUVER since 1989 by the non-profit Media Foundation, a group of social activists promoting the decommercialization of everyday life. The magazine, billed as a "Journal of the Mental Environment," features parodies of advertisements and articles about advertising, media, ENVIRONMENTALISM and the corporate economy. Under its founding editor and chief adbuster, Kalle Lasn, a former market researcher and filmmaker, Adbusters was named Canadian magazine of the year in 1999. The foundation also sponsors a variety of anti-consumerism activities, including Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week, and the production of "uncommercials" through its own ad agency, Powershift.

Adbusters’ clever and sustained campaign against mindless consumerism and what its publisher considers self-destructive capitalism has made it arguably the most influential publication in BC. What other BC publication can claim to have started a global movement? According to the Guardian newspaper, “Adbusters is most famous for: culture-jamming, or subvertising, which sees the magazine's team create spoof versions of well-known adverts. It's also the organ that invented the concept of Occupy Wall Street, and Lasn is the man who first registered the movement's website.”