Posts tagged public space

Banksy on Advertising

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.

Recently, city officials from London to Manchester to Amsterdam and Melbourne have been wrestling with the appearance of Singaporean oBike and similar bike-sharing schemes in their streets. These dockless variants of the public, pay-by-use bike models being launched in major cities around the world allow users to pick up, pay for, then leave a bike anywhere within an operating city, with no organized storage system per se, just free range. As seamless as this might sound in theory, in practice it’s causing headaches that may be yet another signal of a complicated mobility future that’s emerging as societies transition to new mobility models. New public two-wheeled platforms, like many complex systems, carry cultural values, and those carried in some of the latest bike systems speak to what we may experience in an autonomous four-wheeled future.

via https://medium.com/@changeist/new-transport-horizons-or-mobility-spam-b1d16807b128