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Comment by ncr100 | Hacker News Reader

Graffiti is amazing. It is protest.

It's counter-culture and I'm here for it. I had a fun convo with my daughter about why rail cars are so frequently tagged. More fascinating are the hidden pieces in tunnels and the like, where only few people will ever see it.

I wish people would stop protesting in the elevator in my apartment building.

Ugh.

It could be worse, in the elevator, but bad is also bad.

Surveillance in the elevator may be legal depending on the locality and set-up.

Could I come and spray paint the front of your house? In protest of course.

As long as it's a mostly peaceful prostest, you're also allowed to set a few cars on fire and loot local businesses.

When I put the two sides on the scale - the things being protested and the damage done by protesters - typically it's very easy for me to write off a couple burned cars or broken windows, even if I'm not a fan of broken windows or burned cars. Because typically these protests in the US are over things like reckless killings.

All of the US protests in the last 10 years have been mild. Sure a couple of Waymos get burned up, but they are easy to capture :)

Get all those folks marching, you aren't going to get good decisions out of everyone.

But the expression of the people is hard for those in power to ignore.

As long as you say "I feared for my life", you're apparently also allowed to shoot random civilians if you're a cop.

Which is kinda why people are upset enough to set shit on fire.

I was merely hinting at protests being called peaceful by the media when they clearly weren't. Not saying they weren't justifiably so.

They were overwhelmingly so. Millions protested, across the country and even overseas; dozens committed felonies of the sort you describe.

Martin Luther King Jr. was subject to the same bullshit. https://www.reddit.com/r/agedlikemilk/comments/iia9lq/this_c...

They were super peaceful per a reasonable judgement.

Unreasonably people were digesting meat from innocent animals, slaughtered previously, which was violent. And their shoes... They trodded upon insects, and plants. Violence! Again, unreasonably labeling as violent.

Reasonableness matters in judgement, in my and the legal system's view.

If your name is banksy, because a new banksy appearing in front of my house would increase the value of the entire block.

I mean, if you get consent, it makes the argument irrelevant doesn’t it?

What are you protesting? Why are you targeting an individual's residence rather than a corporation's property? What is the artist merit of your graffiti? How does damaging someone's house help your cause? Is the gain from damaging someone's house sufficient to justify the cost to them?

In other words, you are trying to make things much more simplistic than they actually are.

Not just 'spray paint' or tag... I will power wash it off ... I do regularly already ..

But if it's protest, or better yet recognizably art, then maybe yes!

No, it's literally tagging territory. They literally call it tagging.

there's a good amount of nuance and a lot of variety so broad claims like this don't really hold up

"They" call tags tags, and graffiti, graffiti.

Not really, graffiti artists often think that taggers are annoying (they are low effort and frequently tag over murals). Those who see it as art try to distinguish graffiti from vandalism.

Artists often start as taggers so it’s not exactly a clean separation. It’s a similar relationship as the one between “real” hackers and skids.

Some of they do, others don't.

some of it. most is vandalism.

No way people think graffiti is still fresh and cool in 2026

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