Not a hot take but I’m driving across the county rn and there’s so much natural beauty I can’t fully appreciate bc every time I see a god damn fucking billboard I am so enraged. Especially the ones that are just advertising the billboard itself, “if you’re looking at this it means it works! Rent today!” SHUT THE FUCK UP!! I wanna pull over and torch them so much
It creates ridiculous arms-races, too. Coke and Pepsi have no reason to advertise anymore. None. Not even new products, if they just put them out there regular folk will do 99% of the work for them. They are as ubiquitous as it gets. But neither company thinks they can afford to stop, or at least significantly reduce, their advertising because then the other company would spend tenfold in an attempt to dominate. Both could just agree with one another to stop altogether and pocket the savings to pad their quarterly reports and it will never, ever happen.
If aliens landed tomorrow and spent five minutes studying this single aspect of human culture, they would conclude we were all lunatics and collectively incapable of progress.