Adbusters #161 – July-August 2022

The planetary endgame is upon us. Hope rests with adopting a handful of potent metamemes — ideas so fundamental, so profound that a sane sustainable future is unthinkable without them. But if we can’t manage to hatch a grand new narrative for humankind, we’ll be travelling down the highway to hell — moving inexorably toward a long dark age from which we may never recover. We’re getting a taste of this right now. The erosion of truth, the breakdown of democracy, the wearing down of sanity, the spread of might-is-right despotism and cruelty — all foregrounded by an ecological collapse of existential proportions. The rumblings of optimism, on the other hand, are few. But they are mighty. If we’re going to have a shot at staving off the worst, it’s up to us to heed them. In this explosive dark-vs-light issue we lay out twin visions of what’s to come. Will we get our shit together and act with urgency — or run this experiment of ours on Planet Earth permanently aground? Jump on board, comrade. It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of moment.