Maine, Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii all prohibit billboards.
It must be wonderful.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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VT native here, every time I visit another state I'm painfully reminded of how good I have it here.
And in Washington they're relatively rare. Driving from Washington to Idaho it's painfully obvious when you hit the border.
It is, I get clear, unobstructed, views of some gorgeous mountains on my drive into work everyday.
I'm being sold an idea, though.
Next, we need to get behind the joy of not being sold. I feel like in this day and age, so much money is behind just selling our data, yet we get very little in return.
Wait... the billboard is gone? but... Which hemmorrhoid cream shall I use to ride horses more happily?! MAGIC WALL! TELL ME!
As soon as you cross the border from Georgia to Florida the billboards kinda stop. A few trickle in here or there. But mostly it's just the beautiful forest. Definitely makes driving more peaceful.
And at least the billboards in Florida are just some random bs instead of soulless corporate advertising.
I'm being sold an idea, though.
Honestly I disagree. Being "sold" an idea is just a metaphor we get from the same place as the "marketplace of ideas", and it's not accurate. There's no transaction here, it's a copy operation. You're being offered an idea and you can adopt it or not. You don't have to give anything up for it.
Personally I'm adopting this idea because it gave me a new feeling of how mentally peaceful a post capitalist world would be. You can already get a taste of the difference no advertising makes by going online with an adblocker. The last time youtube broke through my adblocker it was such an intrusive feeling and I put a lot of effort into making sure it wouldn't happen again.
I was being a bit facetious, to be honest. But the author could have let the space be blanco and truly inobtrusive. In a sense buying a can of spray paint and illegally (I assume) defacing a surface is an investment in your message being read by multiple people.
I mean I agree with the general sentiment of it, but to follow your adblocker methaphor your ads would be replaced by the opinion of a random dude, which is obtrusive too, imho.
My mental adblock is so aggressive I had to search for photos from my city to see if there are any billboards or other sorts of ads. It turns out there are strict regulations in place, and only a few ads are allowed on the streets.
The average American spends 4 years of their lives watching ads