Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.

> I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently

I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.

> Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.

Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared, what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and would those be "bad")?

I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments :-)

I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-scale experiment to determine the economic and psychological impact of removing public advertising, or at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level, whatever that may be. The Canadian government experimented a bit with universal basic income in the 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.

> I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.

Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is what companies will do to get their products out there; will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground fallacy.

Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.

I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.

> There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder

I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so a good first step [0].

[0]: https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-cigarett...

Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back control of our eyeballs.