MAAD: Muslims Against Advertising.

October 15, 2002 12:37 PM

MAAD: Muslims Against Advertising. In the spirit of Adbusters and other such organizations, a group of inner city Muslims living in the UK (Birmingham) have decided to fight back against "sleazy posters" that clutter their neighborhoods. MAAD will "improve" posters (advertising) with strategic attacks. Check out their comprehensive guide to the alteration of outdoor advertising.
posted by jacknose (27 comments total)

Bonus Link via MAAD.
posted by jacknose at 12:42 PM on October 15, 2002

As interesting as the theory is, it would be much more fun to see examples of their work, but I was unable to find any on the site.
posted by languagehat at 12:47 PM on October 15, 2002

Incriminating evidence. Without photos, they could simply deny that it was their doing. "Oh yes, we did something like that, but that wasn't it."
posted by jacknose at 12:51 PM on October 15, 2002

A beard
Thats rough
And overgrown
Is better than
A caperhone

Burma-Shave
posted by clavdivs at 12:55 PM on October 15, 2002

once you hit post
you cannot return
to correct bad spelling
and old whisker burn

Burma-Shave
posted by clavdivs at 12:57 PM on October 15, 2002

cache
cache
posted by andrew cooke at 1:18 PM on October 15, 2002

also, interesting new item cache and another cache

i think this raises an interesting question - i'm quite happy to see advertising trashed because i don't like the acquisition-based lifestyle they push. these people, however, seem to be objecting on religious or racial grounds. their objections might be quite different to mine.

so what happens if they start to paint over, say, public education posters (maybe an explicit aids awareness campaign, for example)? from my pov they stop being freedom fighters and turn into zealots... (that last link address similar issues and is quite interesting).
posted by andrew cooke at 1:31 PM on October 15, 2002

i think this raises an interesting question - i'm quite happy to see advertising trashed because i don't like the acquisition-based lifestyle they push. these people, however, seem to be objecting on religious or racial grounds. their objections might be quite different to mine.

Them defiling an advertisement because of a religious objection makes just as much sense as you defiling one because you oppose "acquisition-based lifestyles". It's all pushing one worldview over another.
posted by oissubke at 1:37 PM on October 15, 2002

A much more detailed version of the second link, from the billboard liberation front (linked from MADD).

oissubke's point is well-taken. The line between "freedom fighters" and "zealots" does not exist. We're just not used to thinking of fundamentalists in other than religious spheres. Fundamentalism is alive and well all over the place...even in the "safe" world of public education.
posted by footballrabi at 1:45 PM on October 15, 2002

ok, leading gently on, what chance do individuals have pushing their "worldview" against corporations? and are corporations fundamentalist too, or is it ok to put posters up, just not tear them down? and is the word fundamentalist being asked to do a little too much work here?
posted by andrew cooke at 1:57 PM on October 15, 2002

andrew...
If someone were to, for instance, tear down my Irish flag from the front yard, I would be justifiably upset. It doesn't matter WHY they did it - as a "valiant anti-IRA protest" or whatever rationalization. What matters is that the space is mine, not theirs.

The same situations exists with the adverts. The corporations own the space. Don't want posters? Organize a campaign to buy billboard space. Encourage developers not to allow posters on their buildings' walls.

What "MAAD" is doing is unethical, by any standard. The goal might be justifiable - it's the methods that ois mentioned that are the problem.
posted by Kevs at 2:43 PM on October 15, 2002

kevs, there are several holes (some larger than others) in your reasoning:

- first, a silly rhetorical point. what they are doing is not "unethical by any standard". it's ethical by their standards (presumably!) and, if the goal is justifiable, by any standard in which the ends justify the means.

- second, companies and people are not the same. different laws apply to them in many cases. your argument assumes that i have to give the same respect to companies that i give to people. since (most) companies have much more significant resources than (most) people it doesn't seem shocking to consider, for example, that a company violating a person's rights is more serious than a person violating a company's rights (if a company has "rights" at all - presumably they're not "human" rights).

- third, billboards are not people's homes. i think you would be much less annoyed if i took down a flag you had raised at the side of a motorway (say) than one in your garden.

- forth, although you don't make it explicit, you seem to be arguing that it's never ok to break the law. most of us break the law from time to time in various ways. it's not at all clear to me that defacing posters is more serious than, say, breaking the speed limit (the latter is much more likely to result in the death of someone, i would have thought). the action of the police (in one of the later links) supports this.
posted by andrew cooke at 3:33 PM on October 15, 2002

Heh...anyone else notice that, being on geocities, they actually have ads on their page?
sorry

andrew: is it ok to put posters up, just not tear them down?

I think putting posters up is a little different from taking them down. Putting something up is productive, it's adding something. Tearing posters down, or defacing them, is destructive. It's shutting down someone else's point of view, even if that point of view is as objectionable as "I should be able to sell my perfume with pictures of a naked lady."

On preview:

While I do sympathise with the group's goals, if it's okay to do that, their reason for breaking the law seems to be that they don't agree with it.

And, as for the actions of the police, if you're basing yourself on their "news report," you have to wonder about any news story that describes any participants as "our heroic brethren." It's not that I think they're lying, but you have to wonder about facts left out.
posted by SoftRain at 3:43 PM on October 15, 2002

Though the sudden urge to just climb right up a poster and start hacking can occasionally be overwhelming, in our experience this type of "impulse improvement" tends to deliver unsatisfactory results, at unnecessary personal risk.

I love the way they refer to defacing as improvement.
posted by Recockulous at 4:31 PM on October 15, 2002

andrew...

It's not about breaking the law. I agree that lawbreaking is common, and justified in many cases. The problem is that one is breaking a "moral contract", so to speak, with one's neighbors.

The concept of a corporation means nothing - a corporation is merely the legal term for a group of people selling a good or service. *Someone* owns the space where the billboad is - it's not a nameless, blackened face in a boardroom, but one of our neighbors who has, rather than consuming all of their income, chosen to save and invest their wealth toward the goal of the creation of a certain product.

it's not at all like a flag on the highway. I don't own the side of the highway. You have as much right to have your information there as I do. On private property, however, property that I (or X Corporation) has paid for, and that MAAD has not, the corporation has a right to use the property as they choose.

MAAd doesn't have to buy products from companies they find offensive. Indeed, this would be a completely justifiable strategy to attain the same goal.

Since most logicians agree that moral systems cannot be proven logically, I will merely repeat what SoftRain implied: It's not bad "by any standard", but certainly bad by the standards of the society that I want to live in, and the standards of any society that respects individual rights.
posted by Kevs at 6:06 PM on October 15, 2002

Though I dislike stick-it-in-your-face ads, it is leagal and as such it is breaking the law to deface property belong to some one else. Graffiti, for example, is at times pretty and it is not making any sort of statement but rather displaying "art" or the writer's feathers (Darwinian notion)...but if the writer is caught, he is in trouble.

You simply have no right to deface something legally put up because you object to it, dislike what it says, or think you are showing important values. It is a crime. Period.
posted by Postroad at 6:10 PM on October 15, 2002

Didn't Khaddafi ban advertising altogether in Libya for a while in the 70s? I believe it was done for a variety of reasons, but moral disdain and political awareness were among the reasons cited.
posted by infowar at 6:23 PM on October 15, 2002

Didn't Khaddafi ban advertising altogether in Libya

now theres a fine example.
posted by clavdivs at 6:26 PM on October 15, 2002

i call hoax on this one.
posted by trioperative at 7:40 PM on October 15, 2002

it's not a nameless, blackened face in a boardroom, but one of our neighbors

Good old Jim, he owns Viacom. Oh no wait, it's a publicly traded multinational invested in by thousands and thousand of people and financial institutions, possibly in other countries who vote by complex rules that are certainly not democratic. I'd say much more anonymous than a blackened face in a boardroom. Or were you confusing the ceo with some idea of an owner?
posted by rhyax at 7:57 PM on October 15, 2002

Oh no wait, it's a publicly traded multinational invested in by thousands and thousand of people and financial institutions, possibly in other countries who vote by complex rules that are certainly not democratic.

Great, then that makes it okay to vandalize their property, they're all just a bunch of creepy furriners who aren't like us at all!
posted by Slithy_Tove at 9:27 PM on October 15, 2002

That's not what I meant at all. I would hope that would be obvious, since it's not what I said, but I enjoy your attempts at misdirection all the same, I suppose.
posted by rhyax at 8:49 PM on October 16, 2002

It's not what you meant? But it's what you said. Want to try again telling us what you really meant?
posted by Slithy_Tove at 9:43 PM on October 16, 2002

That the people that run most media companies are fairly anonymous, and are probably not your neighbors. The problem comes when you try to tie that statement back to the question of whether the vandals are right or not, but I am not addressing that question. Sorry for being unclear.
posted by rhyax at 7:00 AM on October 17, 2002

But it's not the people who run media companies whose property is being injured by vandalism, it's the people who own media companies. Most of those companies are publicly traded, and the owners are indeed Good Old Jim, and Fred, and Suzy, and probably Hans and Mohammed and Akio, and everyone in the world who owns stock, or a mutual fund, or whose union has a pension fund. The 'company' is an abstract concept. The reality is a bunch of human individual owners and employees. It is these people whose property the vandals injure, not that of some faceless corporation.

I still don't understand why it matters that the company may be partly owned 'in other countries'. It's still not okay to trash the property of foreigners. And that was the basis of my snark.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 11:36 PM on October 17, 2002

This isn't a hoax site - but until now I didn't know it was organised.

I live in Birmingham and work in a 90% (approx) Muslim area where the ads are modified/improved/defaced on a regular basis.

Mainly they just rip out the bits that are offensive, although there have been a couple that the logo or the byline has been improved too.

There are still loads more ads that aren't touched though - their figures like 3-0 are rubbish.
posted by bregdan at 12:29 PM on October 18, 2002

Yes, culture jamming is a crime. So is marching in the streets without a permit. So was making salt without a license. The argument shouldn't be whether it's illegal or not - of course it's illegal. But just because it's illegal doesn't mean that it's morally wrong. Yes, in order to justify "billboard improvement", you can't hold private property to be absolutely sacred. There's something to be said for people having some control over their own public space, when they feel it's being invaded by large companies that could care less about them, their opinions, or their neighborhoods. This article linked from the MAAD site has some pretty cogent arguments for why the billboards (in Balsall Heath, at least) suck, and therefore ought to be gotten rid of. Sexual modesty arguments get aired only in the last paragraph; the rest could have been written by any friendly neighborhood activist. It's really all a matter of people who are sitting on very large piles of money vs. people who care about the places where they live their lives.

It's interesting how this earlier thread played out, as opposed to the current. Does the Muslim element change things? Or is it just a different time and place? This is a more interesting argument to me at least, and I'm glad that andrew cooke touched on it.
posted by skoosh at 5:03 PM on October 18, 2002