Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southerntofu | Hacker News Reader

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Ads are everywhere you go on the streets. They lure your attention span with bright colors and LEDs which may create accidents. They reinforce a sense of need to consume and/or a feeling of being inappropriate as a person. Supermarkets will try very hard to "give" you their customer card so they can collect more detailed info about you and profile your habits.

Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services.

Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc...

Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge.

[0] https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-mul...

[1] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-pi...

[2] https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denat...

[3] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-em...

Your opening reminded me of this piece attributed to Banksy:

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.

Telling "lure you attention" is just a way to frame it. There are plenty of evidence that visual monotony has negative effect on mind, and FWIW in most modern urban environments (blocky, and painfully uniform) ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance. I've been to places where street ads are heavily regulated to the point it's noticable that there are less billboards and they are more plain. Unless those are full of historical baroque, gothic/art nouveau buildings it absolutely doesn't make it more attractive (I support restricting ads in historical towns).

As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?

Well, not every roof over a busstop bench needs to look the same. With ads it does. Plant (different!) trees inplace of the billboards. Or (god forbid) just let your local graffiti-guy spray there...

Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..

Ads making a city more beautiful…?

How about some landscaping and art instead?

For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful. Second: ok, replace ads with landscaping. One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?

> For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful.

Fair, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I would argue that “less monotonous or plain” is not that different from “more beautiful”. I doubt you want random variety. People want variety that is interesting and nice-looking.

> One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?

I’m willing to enough taxes such that we can make the places where live nice. I think most people would agree. And we mostly already do this.

Parks, tree-lined streets, modest landscaping and art, all of these things make life better and more enjoyable. They also help people feel contentment, reduce anxiety, etc.

It may be economically beneficial as well, as people may be healthier and more productive by living in a city with these types of spaces. I remember seeing some research that supports this idea. One example was patients at hospitals having better outcomes when the hospital environment was more made pleasant and beautiful (I believe it was from a Kurzgesagt video on beauty).

> ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance

If your neighborhood needs ads to have variance, it says something really sad about it. You don't need gray concrete everywhere in order to build dwellings. Some cities like Cuba overflow with city gardens to feed the locals.

> As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?

Murals are not a problem: they're part of the environment, not something designed to stand out of the street (literally). As for flashing or strong lights, they are indeed a problem in my view.

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