“When you walk down the street, how can you feel happy if you’re constantly being reminded of what you don’t have? Advertising breaks your spirit, confuses you about what you really need and distracts you from real problems, like the climate emergency.”
“The French cities trying to ban public adverts“
Especially in cities in developing countries such as India, it’s often struck me just how much of our public space people and businesses have casually, illegally appropriated for advertising. Dozens of hoardings covering up building facades. Stands on footpaths. Banners tied to lamp-posts and signal-posts, often obscuring the traffic indicators themselves, on housing society gates, on fences and walls. All of this in addition to loosely sanctioned official hoardings by the roadside and atop residential buildings.
Technology has made this particularly invasive with neon/LED lighting and animation – motion to which you’re instinctively and helplessly drawn.
In most places, it is impossible for your gaze to not meet advertising – in any direction.