It took a few days for me to put my finger on it, but lack of advertising was something that stood out to me when I visited Cuba almost a decade ago. Your visua

It took a few days for me to put my finger on it, but lack of advertising was something that stood out to me when I visited Cuba almost a decade ago. Your visual environment has space to breathe. Although, another difference in Cuba was the presence of regime propaganda in some of that visual space. Growing up in Chicago's suburbs, the highways are awash in billboards. I never noticed it until living elsewhere. But in the town I grew up in, public ads were much less common. It's interesting the ways in which the commercial exploitation of the visual environment plays out differently in different societies. But I'm a fan of far less advertising in public spaces, where you can't really consent. And I think it's interesting that the ways in which the internet attention economy lays bare the commodification of attention might bring more awareness of that mm dynamic in contexts where it has been underexamined.