Ads as open space

If we're prefacing our ideas these days, lets call this one: ain't never gonna happen in this lifetime.

"Any advert in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and 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." - Banksy

Banksy, or Bansky as I like to call him, is right. I am an open opponent of ads, unless I can use them for my own meta-benefit during bouts of unemployment. I am especially an opponent of ads that confront you despite your attempts to avoid them.

I have a couple of ideas around this topic. Firstly, the early stage idea would be for someone to put together a Google Map or various routes and locations that exist without ads. I guess this could be done with a simple green highlight, red highlight system. Probably would mean that you'd have to avoid cites and freeways. But it would be, if nothing else, interesting to see how predominate ads really are. (Google Maps btw isn't really ad free itself, altho you have a little bit of control at least about how you encounter the ads.)

The bigger idea would be things like letting me control in some way the way they see these signs. I don't want to see them, but I can't not. And I'm not talking about making them more relevant for me. I don't want to see more relevant ads for my interests. I want not to see ads. Maybe they could have some thing that senses that you've chosen to opt out of ad seeing forever. And that could interact with your windshield to make the ad appear in black. Sort of like a hologram.

Maybe someone could even invent a car that could do this without the ad people even having to get involved. Tho I imagine that you'd need a pretty good technology to trust having your windshield black out portion of your view. But still.

Another idea would be to convince the ad people that having defaced ads is just as valuable as having non-defaced ads (and in reality that is probably true). And then let people just go hog wild on the ads in the full on Bansky way.