What’s with all the graffiti?

What’s with all the graffiti, man?  Everywhere I go I see it.  On the side of the road, on walls in subway stations, plastered on the sides and backs of buses and trains.  I see it on the walls of buildings in the Central Business Districts.  I even see it spray painted on sports fields.

It is not as if we don’t know who is doing this either.  Their taglines are prominently displayed.  Some just leave their initials; the most prolific seem to be KFC, BP, IBM and so forth.  Others give us their full names; McDonald, Ford, Nestle and others.  Still others come up with trendy, made-up names such as Coca-Cola or Nescafe. Many have quite distinctive tags that don’t use letters.  There’s a swoosh, something that looks like a three-spoked steering wheel and even an apple with a bite out of it.

Oh!  I see.  It’s not graffiti at all.  Graffiti is illegal – but this isn’t.  It isn’t?  Why not?

Every day we are bombarded with advertising.  Not just of the visual kind, but also audial.  Nowadays enterprising advertising agencies are getting at us via our olfactory organs too.  Very clever.  Apparently our smell is the sense that is most associated with emotional recollection.


Each and every one of those adverts has a message: buy, buy, consume.  The messages tell us that unless and until we have this product or experience then we will not be fulfilled, we will not be happy, we will not even be human.

Advertising is big business.  Over $500 billion is spent every year persuading us to buy.  Furthermore, the amount is increasing.

The biggest ten advertisers in the World spend each year the equivalent of the GDP of the worlds eight poorest nations (home to roughly 75 million people).

What is all this advertising doing?  It is getting us to buy more and more, thus consuming more and more of the planet’s resources and contributing to carbon emissions and so helping to stimulate climate change.  At a personal and community level advertising insinuates that our happiness and sense of well-being lie in buying and owning things, stuff, material goods – all of which are extrinsic to us.  Happiness say the advertisers is not found in our intrinsic values and motivations.  Advertisers point in exactly the opposite direction.

Advertising damages.  It damages the Earth and it damages us.  It should be illegal.
But it isn’t.  Meanwhile, we haul young people before the Courts and we spend millions of dollars cleaning graffiti off walls.  We are looking in the wrong direction again.