Let me air a grievance.

I was reading Adbusters this Sunday. This is not typical, but I sometimes pick up a back issue and glance through it just to keep myself on my intellectual toes. But this time was different: I was struck by the polemic and it bothered me. What I think is the magazine has dogs it just keeps whipping over and over. Read it, and understand that I have no great love for Israel, global corporations, pharmaculture, pollution, or neoconservatives. But I also understand that there are things in the world that do not involve any of those thing, and that when bad things happen I don’t immediately take one of those words, paint it on a voodoo doll and start with the pins.

Adbusters has lost its mission, really. It was once a counterculture rag, but it’s become part of the culture it seeks to jam, because the culture is capable of absorbing the jammers. Notice how Adbusters sells a shoe and a media kit now. They’re not redefining cool or getting away from cool: they’re inventing their own cool which will be – like every other kind of cool – co-opted by the very corporations they so hate simply by virtue of it being made from the same material. Adbusters and Nike are cut from the same rebellious cloth, and thus are on the same side of the fence, though Adbuster would rather die than ever admit that.

Combine that nearsightedness with an almost compulsive bile-ridden propensity to reguritate the same old tired anti-everything crap they have been for the longest time, and you have a recipe for disaster.

You have, essentially, the anti-corporation: a regular corporation, just with more cool.