Police and security forces carrying batons confront a young protester on a crowded street.

Hey,

India’s cockroaches have captured the attention of the world . . . and now it’s 1-0 in their face off with Modi.

Here are a few bangers from the battlefield:

  • Protesters had lots of fun filming themselves outrunning panting, middle-aged cops charging at them with batons.
  • They stuffed foam pads down their trousers to blunt baton hits.
  • Shout out to the protester with the sign that said: “detain me daddy”.

So we’re sitting around HQ here, throwing darts at a photo of donnie, wondering why the hell we in the global north haven’t caught up yet.

Then one of us hit the bullseye . . . the roaches are clearly having a great time fighting for systemic change. but we here in the west are just fucking . . . joyless, aren’t we? When are we going to start having some fuck-it-all fun?

What if every time you prompted AI, it ended with a message like this:

Claude answering “Is Adbusters magazine still in print?” with an impact notice reporting 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent, 0.34 watt-hours of electricity, and 39 milliliters of fresh drinking water.

One last thing from the current issue of our mag:

Jazz player Abdullah Ibrahim died in June. Ninety-one years on this earth, and he could still say more in nine words than we manage in a whole issue.

Collage portrait of jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim with the handwritten quote: “There is only one sound. The rest is echo.” Music at the center

It’s been gnawing at us, because somewhere along the way the West misplaced the sacred.

We lost our sense of awe and wonder.

Maybe finding it again is move one.

If that stirs something in you then grab a copy of this issue, the whole flow builds to Abdullah.

That’s us for this week. Oh, and there’s a full moon tonight . . . go have yourself an epiphany.

— Team AB

Capitalism cult
join us . . .
Quick, go outside

From behind Israeli bars Marwan Barghouti is making a run for Palestinian presidency

Marwan Barghouti behind Israeli bars

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Artwork by Eduardo Castaldo

Eduardo Castaldo

What it feels like to be a dog — Adbusters 185
An excited World Cup crowd

World Cup 2026: The Beautiful Game as Compliance Ritual

Do not call it sport.
Call it a mood stabilizer for empire.
Eleven men run. A billion eyes obey.
The screen glows. The flag waves. The sponsor smiles.

Trump gets his photo op. FIFA gets its cut. The platforms get the data. The beer companies get the chant. The banks get the logo. The tech firms get the stream. The billionaire class gets the one thing it always needs:

Your attention.
You know this.
You know the spectacle is poisoned.
You know the stadium is a billboard.
You know the match is a laundering machine.
You know the whole thing turns joy into obedience.

And still, when the whistle blows, you reach for the remote. That is the politics of our age:
“I know, but.”
I know, but I love the game.
I know, but I need a break.
I know, but everyone is watching.
I know, but one person won’t matter.
“I know, but” is the anthem of the defeated consumer.
Not the oppressed.
The comfortable.

The comfortable radical.
The streaming anti-fascist.
The Prime-shipping anti-capitalist.
The algorithm-fed revolutionary.
The person who wants a new world, as long as it loads in HD.

The machine does not need you to believe in it. It only needs you to watch.

Cody Dalton is a PhD student in history at Virginia Tech.

Hey all you cockroaches, the world is on fire, why not do something about it? Join us.

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