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Adfree Cities for Happier and Healthier Cities

- Adam Clare

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Billboards are a plight on the environment that also negatively impact our mental health – so why do let them exist? In Sao Paulo they banned billboards a long time ago and their local economy wasn’t negatively impacted while the wellbeing of the people in the city increased. It seems so obvious that we should ban billboards, and that’s what Adfree Cities is all about. The UK-based organization is trying to empower locals to get their politicians to agree with a billboard ban. Let’s do it!

Billboards promote large corporations over local businesses

The majority of adverts we see on billboards and bus shelters are for big brands. This kind of advertising is expensive, and means that local businesses are not able to compete. Local businesses return more money back into the local economy, supporting high streets and local employment. But the messages which dominate our streets are billboards ads telling us to buy from Tesco and McDonalds.

But the biggest spenders on outdoor advertising in 2022 included corporations like Amazon, KFC, McDonald’s, Coca Cola, Sky and Samsung. Hardly your local mom-and-pop business.

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The FBI Wants You To Block Ads

- Adam Clare
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The FBI finally agrees with culture jammers. Online advertising has gotten so bad that the FBI now suggests everyone should make use of tracking blocking software, also known as ad blockers. During the last big consumerism celebration in December, the FBI noticed malicious actors paying for ads to solicit unaware consumers to spend money on their products (many times the products were fake or didn’t exist). The easiest way to defend oneself against these malicious online attacks is simply to use an ad blocker like ublock origin.

Ad blockers are also tracker blockers which gives you further protection from profilers. Stay safe online and block people from following you around the web.

Ads are often placed at the top of search results but with “minimum distinction” between the ads and the search results, the feds say, which can look identical to the brands that the cybercriminals are impersonating. Malicious ads are also used to trick victims into installing malware disguised as genuine apps, which can steal passwords and deploy file-encrypting ransomware.

One of the FBI’s recommendations for consumers is to install an ad blocker.

As the name suggests, ad blockers are web browser extensions that broadly block online ads from loading in your browser, including in search results. By blocking ads, would-be victims are not shown any ads at all, making it easier to find and access the websites of legitimate brands.

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Given the IPCC Report, Let’s Ban Oil Propaganda

- Adam Clare

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Today the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released data that proves the world has rapidly warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels, and is now careening toward 1.5 degrees. They are calling it a red alert for the planet. Obviously this isn’t good news.

The oil industry along with the oil-consuming automobile companies spend billions every year telling us to spend more to kill the planet. This should stop. Over at the National Obseror they ask a very simple question: “are we letting fossil fuel companies sell us our own demise?” They propose an all out ban on adversting oil and gas consumption like we did with tabacco.

Advertising works. That’s why it’s a multibillion-dollar business, and it’s why oil, gas, car and airline companies spend as much as they do seeking our favour. According to one study, over a recent 30-year period, the world’s five biggest oil companies spent US$3.6 billion on ads specifically aimed at shoring up their reputation as green-friendly. Ads are one reason why gas-guzzling pickup trucks are so popular, even among those with no genuine need for them. As Quebec environmental group Équiterre found in a study released earlier this year, aggressive advertising helps to explain why light-duty vehicles — SUVs, pickups and vans — now account for 80 per cent of new vehicle sales in Canada, which in turn is a big reason greenhouse gas emissions from transportation are still rising. 

Because advertising matters so much to the fossil fuel corporations, it ought to matter to the rest of us, too

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Be Happier by Blocking Ads

- Adam Clare

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A debate has been going on for years about the effectiveness about advertising and how the exposure to ads makes us feel. We now have an answer. Advertising is effective and makes us wants things we otherwise wouldn’t and that makes us unhappy. This is good because it provides us with a simple solution: get rid of ads as much as possible.

To help reduce ads in your life you can use a tracker blocker while you’re on the internet, ProPublica has a good list of options.

So ads make us want what we don’t or can’t have?

The idea here is a very old one: Before I can decide how happy I am, I have to look over my shoulder, consciously or subconsciously, and see how other people are doing. Many of my feelings about my income, my car, and my house are molded by my next-door neighbor’s income, car, and house. That’s just part of being human: worrying about relative status. But we know from lots of research that making social comparisons can be harmful to us emotionally, and advertising prompts us to measure ourselves against others. If I see an ad for a fancy new car, it makes me think about my ordinary one, which might make me feel bad. If I see this $10,000 watch and then look at my watch, which I probably paid about $150 for, I might think, “Maybe there’s something wrong with me.” And of course nations are just agglomerations of individuals. Now, in this paper we don’t prove that the dissatisfaction is coming from relative comparisons, but we suspect that’s what happening.

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A Physician Wants to Spread Knowledge About Misleading Food Labels

- Adam Clare

A doctor has decided that he has had enough about misleading labels on food and wants to spread the word about how harmful bad labelling can be. Check out this video for exactly why this is a problem and what you can do about it.

I’d been asked by the food industry to give this talk at an industry breakfast, but 3 days prior to the event they got cold feet and dis-invited me. The good news is, the internet’s a much larger audience than a room full of food industry folks who likely wouldn’t have cared much about what I had to say in the first place. So here’s my take on what the food industry can do, why they’re not going to do it, and what we can do about it.

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