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By talking to their neighbors? By walking past it?

What are you talking about??

The cafe putting up a sign, hours, and a menu in the window are forms of advertising. Based on your other comment, I suspect you are painting with a brush of "all" when you mean digital advertising or targeted digital advertising.

I think if you extend it to be that broad, then sure, those specific examples are fine and exempt from my above statement.

But offline advertising generally isn't exempt. Screw billboards cluttering up cities. Screw flyers cluttering up my mailbox. Screw print ads cluttering up magazines.

It's all an assault on the senses in service of extraction. It's a non-consensual invasion of the mind.

While we are approaching this with different modes, we broadly agree that advertising is cognitive pollution.

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