It is so hard to take your eyes away in everyday city life from advertising.
Not just ads but so many signs and man made objects try to or tend to take away your attention to them. There seems to be no order but a forcefull one that steers attention in our highly cultivated landscapes around us.
The most boring sights in the city are the ones nature gives. Trees, bushes or even the sky fills us with calm and the purity of being, but on the first glance they are everything but interesting.
Interest, derived from latin interesse and roughly translated as “I am, in between”, is something we often do not decide at all, but in the cityscape get decided for all the time. Space becomes commodified not just in property but interest. Advertising is an ever present medium to tackle our mind and motivation.
I constantly observe myself in any given moment to glance around in checking billboards, posters, trucks and trains, and they all aggressively try to catch my attention, just for a second, but at that time they also seem to deliver what they are intended to. A friend of mine commented this transaction laconically, while youtube interrupted his wish to stream something, with: “Do not fuck with my brain”.
Ad-pollution is a very real thing, because all these messages have a direct and real approach on us, and their underlying logic is the base of the world dominating economical system of capitalism. This transaction-concept was depicted in John Carpenters movie “They Live” [1988]. In the picture the protagonist obtains some special sunglasses which make him see the world behind the propaganda, discovering the rulers of earth.
Advertisement steals us away from the present moment of being.
Advertisement makes us willing to buy in an aggressive and destructive system of dominance, driven by ruthless profiteering of a living planet, which is something the western world cultivated for centuries, maybe even millennia. Nonetheless the former is abundantly more decisive. Our ability to be present is the starting point to comprehensively interact with the world around us. Being permanently interrupted with evolutionary unprecedented media which are psychologically designed to steer our attention to a goal which brings nothing to a human being but profit for a few people of our capitalist world, is a desertification of the human potential for self-development and the ability to engage in the communal sphere, which is the basis of everyday life.

Ad-pollution has to be tracked and monitored, so that every city dweller can partly root out their psychological unrest and inability to distinguish meaningful activities from consumptive ones!