Adbusters presents:
Something wicked this way comes!
Black Friday and the powers that be are urging us to get out there and spend ‘til we can’t spend no more.
Black Friday
[blak frahy-dey]
noun
Example:
But this year, we’re not getting sucked into their evil, doomsday ritual! When the existential threat of climate change breathes down our necks, and EXTINCTION REBELLIONS break out everywhere, millions of us around the world will opt out of Black Friday shopping and go on a 24 hour consumer fast instead!Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop thrashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t.
— George MonbiotAnd if you do buy a present then, go local, go indie . . . don’t get sucked into the corpo-consumerist doomsday machine!
In the face of climate catastrophe, will we spend our Friday at a shopping mall, sinking ever deeper into the pits of consumption?
Join us on November 23rd (November 24th if you live outside North America) to celebrate the art of living lightly . . . find out what it feels like to go cold turkey on consumption for 24 hours . . . halfway through the day you might just have a life-changing epiphany!
2018s Buy Nothing Day also falls on a full moon, which marks the second celebration of our digital-era tradition, #moonstruck. If you’re up for the challenge, go cold turkey on shopping and tech throughout the entire day.
And when night dawns and the moon is full, get moonstruck with some friends and do something wild!
Here are some ways you can participate in Buy Nothing Day:
Set up a table in your local shopping mall—all you need is a pair of scissors and a sign, offering passers-by a simple service: freedom from extortionate interest rates and mounting debt with a single considerate cut.
Follow the logic of capitalist consumption to its inevitable, cannibalistic conclusion: wander the malls as the walking dead.
Congregate a crew of friends and drive your empty shopping carts around in a long, inexplicable conga line. Without ever buying anything, of course.
There are two ways to do this. One: stay home, eat leftovers, and drink the last of the beer from the fridge with your friends. Throw a game of cards in the mix. Two: gather your friends and hit the shops to stand in line, and when you get to the cashier, have them ring through the product you are NOT holding because you are buying NOTHING. Don’t forget to say thank you!
Download our Buy Nothing Day posters—plaster your local shopping mall with them. Cover your neighbourhood with Buy Nothing Day images, spread them all over social media, email them to your friends, family, co-workers, and classmates. Tell the world to do NOTHING this November 23rd!
And . . .
. . . Off the after-glow of your shopping-boycott extravaganza, swoop into December with a renewed holiday spirit. Now you can prepare for #BuyNothingXmas—by doing nothing! Feel the holiday stress melt away . . .
While the West has been in a war on feeling, we’ve been rallying together through shared emotions, examining why consumer Culture is so unsettling to so many of us.
So we asked our Instagram community, “In the spirit of #BuyNothingDay, what do you FEEL?”
Adbusters is one of a handful of magazines in the world that receives zero funding from advertising (print or online), corporate sponsorship or government/foundation grants. We are entirely reader-supported, allowing us to remain fiercely independent in what we do and say. We operate as a non-profit organization, which means that every dollar we raise through the sales of our magazines and other merchandise goes directly back into our campaigns and the production of the magazine. When you subscribe to Adbusters, you are joining a network of artists and activists committed to speaking truth to power without reservation.
