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Quote from Bansky:
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.
Quote from https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/libertarianism.xhtml
UPDATE August 2023: a few people over the years have reached out to me with concerns like “well, ads suck - but how does a business sell its products without them?“. This came up again a few days ago, so let me attempt a reply right now. First of all, if something is really needed, people will hunt it down regardless. No one has to advertise potatoes or raw milk; in fact, people will go to great lengths to grab the latter in a world of shitty processed milks, even when the legal system, etc. tries to put up hurdles. Continuing this train of logic, maybe the products that wouldn’t be able to get sold anymore, are those that people don’t care about in the first place? It seems to me that ads are a solution in search of a problem. After all, what exactly is wrong with people buying only what they actually require? What they actually had to sit and think about, instead of having it shoved in front of their faces over and over again?
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