Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

"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."

For those who are wondering, the source of this quote is Banksy, the famous graffiti artist.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461383-people-are-taking-th...

Public advertising certainly has a coercive feel to it. If ads were food then advertisers would be running around shoving food into people's mouths (mostly junk food, too). And yet we think nothing of feeding people information without their consent.

It's interesting to imagine a world where you have to explicitly agree to be exposed to information. I think I would rather like that world.

> They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

Correct, Banksy never asked permission before shoving his advertising in my face.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45894000/jpg/_45894102_un...

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/img/music2/BV_Screening_Invite....

Happy enough to use the system when it makes him money.

Banksy's quote is quite ironic, coming from a guy that's well known as a master of publicizing his own work... even more, doing that by creating/exposing his work in "public space", using the walls of private and public buildings as a canvas without asking anyone for authorization.

But when the cool kids do it, it's disruptive

http://antiadvertisingagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/...

Anyways, property can still be argued about, and cities will make laws to make sure nothing gooes out of control. I prefer seeing graffitis than large ads.

Yep, cities may have regulations for that, and they usually do these days.

And I don't necessarily agree with your preference. My family used to own a large, historical house that had a huge front wall because the terrain was very elevated from street level. And I can tell you from experience, most "graffiti" is worthless crap scrabbled by drunk teenagers without ANY artistic talent or ANY worthwhile message to the world. If you give graffiti a pass because there's the one-in-a-million Banksy, you should also tolerate ads everywhere because a few of them happen to be awesome.

No, I still prefer graffiti.

"Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours."

That's an interesting conception of one's natural rights in a public space, given that basically nothing in a public space "gives you choice whether you see it or not" by the definition of "public space." The following does not sound different in principle from the quote:

"Any member of the opposite sex (who with their looks implies you're not sexy enough and all the fun is elsewhere blah blah BLAH) who gives you no choice whether you see them or not is yours. They're yours to take, 're-arrange and re-use'."

I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time I'd prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes, roughly 15 days and 15 years, respectively.)

There's a big difference between blocking ads on my machine and spraying ads in a public space. The latter is a small-time prank of course and nothing close to a serious crime, but the philosophical basis for it cited above couldn't be more off IMO.

> I honestly don't see a difference except in degree (and hence in jail time I'd prefer to see resulting from actions based on each of the attitudes, roughly 15 days and 15 years, respectively.)

Except for that thing about human rights and dignity, the violation of which is fundamental to the reason why there's jail time for transgressing upon it.

Whereas ads are... really just ads, as long as we don't have anything equivalent for them.

What if I wear something terribly ugly according to a street artist and he throws a pie at me?

What if I paint the walls of my house and a street artist decides my taste is intolerably poor and sprays the walls?

What if I own a shop and advertise something in that painting and it gets sprayed?

What if it's a corporation who puts up the ad?

What if a guy (say Bill G) runs a corporation that someone dislikes and throws a pie at them (as someone in fact did?)

What if someone doesn't like seeing women or people of color on ads and sprays them? (a real-life situation)

Where's the line - when are you free to act in public disregarding others? I for one would imaginably prefer a pie thrown into my face to having something I painted on a wall sprayed over. Why is the former a question of "dignity" while the latter isn't? Is it because corporations have no dignity? What about a model whose image is altered by misogynists - is she entitled to "dignity"?

I think that being too particular about rights ("ads are just ads" hence not covered by rights etc.) is the way to lose all the rights.

(By the same token - not being too particular - all the cases above should cost the perpetrator the same IMO, 15 days of detention, tops I'd guess, although the guy throwing the pie at Bill Gates is much less scary to me than the ad-spraying misogynists; unless you manage to prove the latter constitutes hate speech or such.)

I see the difference between the set of human rights assigned to "publicly distributed information" and "human beings" very much a question of principle and not just a question of degree.

How about:

* "publicly distributed information" is a shop's name and a perpetrator adds racist slurs to that name (the shop is operated by a member of a race disliked by the racist in question.)

* the act of "rearrangement" performed by a "street artist" to a human being is having a pie thrown at them. the human being in question ran a Ponzi scheme and just got out of the courtroom, having proven plausible deniability.

Which one feels subjectively worse? Is this example consistent with "rights assigned to information" and "rights assigned to human beings" residing on entirely different planes?

>I honestly don't see a difference except in degree

Well, that's pretty concerning.

Are you really comparing blocking ads and remix culture to rape?

OK, that's it. You're done. You've passed the point of no return in this discussion, and are no longer participating honestly. You're just going for shock value.

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