People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I wonder what Banksy thinks of online advertising, which goes far beyond "taking the piss".
At its best, your personal data is harvested and traded behind your back to tailor ads specifically for your demographic—and increasingly for you personally—and deliver them when you're most vulnerable.
At its worst, it is all of the above, plus used by anyone who wants to influence how you think about political and social issues, ultimately corrupting democratic processes and destabilizing governments. It is the perfect medium for propaganda.
In either case it is the most insidious form of psychological manipulation we've ever invented. I hope that we eventually collectively sober up about the ways this is harming our societies, and heavily regulate, if not outright ban it. The advertising industry has gone far beyond just promoting a product, and it needs to stop.
I would hope all advertising (including online) isn't completely banned. It is useful at times for learning about products. But that's all it should really do: promote products (or services), and stop using psychological manipulation techniques and being such a cancer on society.
50+ years ago, the idea of advertisers harvesting your personal data and trading it behind your back to tailor ads for you was completely alien.
50+ years ago we were being marketed cigarettes as "Torches of Freedom", promoted by doctors and cartoon characters. We rightfully banned these practices in most of the world because of the product they were advertising, but the deception and manipulation have been an industry staple, pioneered by Edward Bernays a century ago. The internet is simply a new tool they can use to make their work more sophisticated than ever before.
It has also made a lot of people very rich, so I doubt that the advertising industry will accept devolving to a state before psychological manipulation became the norm, and sacrifice billions of dollars worth of revenue. Governments are unlikely to regulate it to that point either, given their symbiotic relationship.
This banning of billboards is a good step, but the real problems are online.
There's really no easy black-and-white answer to this problem I think. While advertising cigarettes with cartoon characters to get kids interested is obviously disgusting, or having doctors promote them, advertising has its place. Remember "Computer Shopper", the huge magazine back in the 80s/90s where the ads were really the main reason to buy it? Those ads were how people back then bought computer components, because there was no other way of learning what was for sale from where, and how much it cost. Of course, the internet (which Computer Shopper helped make popular and accessible) put the magazine out of business eventually, but before the internet revolutionized communications (including advertising), ads like those were essential if you wanted to find products that weren't available in your local retail stores, or were only available at inflated prices.
It'd be nice if there was some kind of advertising industry code of ethics, but I can't imagine how this would develop, since the people in today's ad industry are obviously a bunch of con artists and sociopaths who lack any ethical standards at all.
I think consent is key. With "Computer Shopper", we gave our consent by picking-up the magazine and reading it. With Google/Bing/etc, we give it by choosing their search. With streaming, we give it by logging-in and watching whatever garbage they have on offer. But with billboards, subway placards, radios and televisions running in public spaces, etc... there is no consent, so those are more like rape.
I disagree that ads bundled with other services imply consent. The EU got it right with the GDPR that consent is meaningless if it is not freely given, meaning not giving consent must have zero negative consequences. It is too easy to manipulate people to act against their own interest by just dangling a carrot in front of them.
I can learn about products I am interested in by enthusiasts of certain areas, comparison tests, searching the web, friends recommendations, entities that collect news of a specific area, Hackernews and other forums, conferences, events (physical or digital) that are just for companies presenting their products in a certain area.
So I don't need to have unasked ads shoved into my face to get to know products I "need" or desire.
When you touch these ads, this will be vandalism and marketing company will dispatch security company on you. Everyone in the ad food chain feels very entitled to litter public space and to violate your attention.
For some wild reason it's basically only permitted for large companies to deface the public space like this. You go try putting some street art out there while the cops are watching, see what happens.
In addition to that by far most things people would want to put in public spaces isn't explicitly designed to upset you like ads are. Why do we allow companies to plaster public spaces with veiled insults?
Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t. Graffiti sprayers usually don’t ask for permission — and that’s where the difference comes from.
In Europe you don’t usually have huge bill board on buildings. Rather you have lots of advertising columns on the side walks (here in Berlin we call them „Litfaßsäule“ named after the local inventor Paul Litfaß in 1854). You could argue they being a nuisance for sure but before the internet and even before radio and tv it was an important place of public communication. Actually they were an improvement because prior to advertising columns advertisers were wildly plastering anything with posters.
Property ownership does not entitle you to do absolutely anything you want. We live in a society of common spaces, and we need not allow people to own property if they do not agree to our social contract.
"The social contract" is a very well defined and explored concept[0]. It's not a literal contract. Being intentionally obtuse about word definitions isn't going to convince anyone of anything.
I'm sure if you commit a crime the Judge will also let you go if you point out that technically you never agreed to the laws of the country you live in.
> Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they don’t.
And yet if I agree to have someone stand on my property shouting insults at passers-by I'll get a visit from the police soon enough. This issue isn't as black and white as you make it out to be. Just because the owner of the building the billboard is attached to agrees to have it there doesn't mean no one else is affected.
There's already limits to what you can put on a billboard. Banning billboards isn't some radical new category of thing. it's simply moving that threshold down to "you can put nothing on billboards"
Sure it's perhaps not companies having special privilege, but I think it's equally awful to give "entities with lots of money" special privileges in the public space. Entities with lots of money are the minority, why should they get to dictate what public space looks like for the majority?
If it came to a honest vote on whether people would like billboards or no billboards I think the result is obvious.
It’s not lots of money. Regular people can afford billboards.
A vote of people liking billboards is completely independent of the “oh, the powerful corporations use them” pearl clutching. I would hate billboards if they were just dominated by individuals using them to promote religious and political ideologies.
The only reason their usage is dominated by businesses is because businesses generate returns off of advertising. They don’t have special privilege and they certainly aren’t out of reach of individuals, clubs, non-profits, etc.
Because my street art, my clothes, my face, and my car aren't trying to psychologically manipulate you into opening your wallet, merely by the fact of their presence.
I would hope that you aren't arguing in such bad faith that you can't see that advertising is another thing entirely.
Banksy's answer to this would be so simple, I'm baffled you bothered asking.
You wouldn't attack another person for their clothes. Because it's on and belongs to a person.
Banksy wouldn't give a damned if you painted over his art. Because it's not on person and belongs to no person. Same as the ad space and the abandoned building he painted over.
He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that, and if they were, kids would just scribble "Wash Me!" over it and you would be there clapping, oblivious to this conversation until pointed out.
> He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to public spaces. No one's car is doing that
Are you kidding? Cars are well known for their negative contributions to public spaces, in the forms of (1) exhaust, and (2) noise.
This is part of why I'm baffled that the solution to electric cars not constantly generating terrible noise pollution is to mandate that they all include and operate noisemakers.
I'm sure you can understand that, while incidental, the noise cars make is important for their use in public spaces not being even more of an unacceptable danger and that simply taking the noise away means the car should not be allowed on public roads. If you can make the electric car at least as safe as existing cars for everyone around it then go right ahead and propose it.
Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse. Not so for ads.
> Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much much worse.
No, it isn't. When you solve a problem, the answer is not to panic and legislate that the problem must never be solved. If you have other problems, work on those.
We already have plenty of technology for dealing with roads that are dangerous. In general, we handle them by preventing pedestrians from using or crossing them, and providing over- or underpasses. This is superior in every way to adding noisemakers to cars. But it's not necessarily the best solution! It's just one that (a) we already have, and (b) is better than what you're calling a superior alternative.
The only reason anyone even considers noisemakers is that they're used to cars that make noise. But a history of doing something the wrong way is a terrible reason to avoid doing it the right way.
The alternative to noisemakers is to completely ban electric cars until there are alternatives to improve bystander safety to equivalent levels. In that scenario you will still have the same noise pollution from cars with real non-simulated miniature explosions so electric carse with noise makers are not worse in that respect. If we did not already have noisy cars then yes perhaps electric cars with noise makers would not be allowed but they would also not be allowed without them.
Because other things in public don't manipulate me into thinking a certain way in order to take money from me. People that attempt to do that are labeled as grifters and scammers, and the legal system deals with them. Why should it be different for ads?
Yes? This is why we have or at least used to have obscenity laws. To prevent real-life equivalents of internet trolls from shitting up the public space.
Unlike billboards, a lot of people enjoy Banksy's "products", and consider them art. Also, they are much smaller and less obnoxious, not placed over a highway or on top of a large building.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy