Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture [Paperback]

With the style and irreverence ofVicemagazine and the critique of the corporatocracy that made Naomi Klein'sNo Logoa global hit, the cult magazineStay Free!long considered theAdbustersof the United Statesis finally offering a compendium of new and previously published material on the impact of consumer culture on our lives. The book questions, in the broadest sense, what happens to human beings when their brains are constantly assaulted by advertising and corporate messages. Most people assert that advertising is easily ignored and doesn't have any effect on them or their decision making, butAd Nauseamshows that consumer pop culture does take its toll.

In an engaging, accessible, and graphically appealing style, Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky (as well as contributors such as David Cross,The Onion's Joe Garden,The New York Times's Julie Scelfo, and others) discuss everything from why the TV programCSIaffects jury selection, to the methods by which market researchers stalk shoppers, to how advertising strategy is like dog training. The result is an entertaining and eye-opening account of the many ways consumer culture continues to pervade and transform American life.

Carrie McLarenfoundedStay Free!in 1993. A longtime blogger, she speaks regularly on the topic of advertising and media.Jason Torchinskyis a writer and illustrator based in Los Angeles, who currently writes for the Onion News Network.

In his opening salvo in the mental war against the paradoxes of late capitalism, George W. S. Trow proposed a motto: Wounded by the Million; Healed--One by One.' What the editors ofStay Free!set up inside the brilliant framework of their magazine is an arena where writers can roll up their sleeves and get cheerfully to work at shrugging off the succubus of commercial culture--for their own sakes, and for all our sakes. This book is a treasury of Trow's kind of hel“Ù