Dear Adbusters

Think they’ll print it? Think it’s provocative enough for them? 

 

Dear Adbusters,

I won’t be renewing my subscription.

I first gave you a serious look in 2009 while studying abroad in London, and you became a necessary aid to my studies and my sanity—and soon, to my vision of the world.

It was an appropriate time to find you, as we were taking an economics course on “what went wrong” in Ireland (and everywhere) in the fall of 2008. We were told, of course, that capitalism would recover; this was just another blip in a long line of blips, but that capitalism always adapts. “Bet on it,” we were told, “it always wins.” 

I didn’t bet on it, but instead went to debates where scholars and economists were actually putting capitalism on the chopping block and asking can it, should it survive? Both sides were persuasive, and I didn’t leave with an answer, but I felt the excitement of witnessing a serious historical debate of our time. It was relevant, and people were talking as if it mattered. Never before in my own country had I experienced such a healthy form of academics. It was public and scholarly, theoretical and practical, contested and relevant. Our public debates seem unscholarly and usually tilted from the start. The questions aren’t serious. We already know the outcome but go through the motions anyway. Capitalism always wins.

I’ll admit, you didn’t really convert me. I was already sympathetic to your counter-cultural opinions, but you helped me articulate what I’d only sensed before as a queasy feeling. You also helped me see how pervasive consumerist ideology really is, helped me blast it from its last hiding places within me. I knew it from commercials, yes, and media, but now I see it every second. The myriad little vectors, all of which point toward accumulation and excess, are hiding in every corner—on the edges of our words and ideals, on napkins and coffee cups, in universities, government, and churches. They are the small tugs of ideology that amass into the strong undertow. They are the small phrases that add up to the big seduction suggesting the world is for me, about me, and most frighteningly, that I deserve it.

        I know you’ve helped thousands reach this same stage. Many are angry with you for destabilizing them but offering no solutions. I too am angry, but not with you. I’m angry with those who abuse power, those who dilute our language with excess packaging, different but equally dangerous as the kind piling up in landfills. I’m angry with those who bastardize our ideals, who divorce names from their meanings, lives from their purpose, and religions from their humble thanksgivings. I’m angry with those who think art is worthless and freedom is individual.

The only reason I’m not angry with you is precisely because you don’t presume to have the solutions. You recognize our collective hypocrisy but don’t embrace it further by dethroning one ideology and crowning another in its place. You know that the solutions are plural and that, however frustrating, they are left to us to find. I’m leaving you now, so that I may go out and find them. I don’t want to read you forever. I don’t want to be entertained by you. I hope the need for you ceases to exist in my lifetime. I hope that I say, ‘good riddance.’

Sincerely,

 MICHAEL SHORT