Resident sparks outrage online after sharing photo of atrocity spotted flying over city: 'I'm horrified'

Ads are pretty much everywhere these days, and it seems nowhere is safe from their influence, not even the sky.

Redditors on the subreddit r/Superstonk expressed their disgust at a scannable QR code projected by drones in the skies of Shanghai. The picture's caption — "This is the future of advertising" — received some pushback on the thread.

"This is the future..." — Photo Credit: Reddit

"I'm horrified by the idea of the f****** SKY being cluttered up with ads, then there would truly be no escape from advertising … it's just so dystopian," said one commenter.

Another acknowledged it was an impressive feat from a technological perspective but expressed concern over the future of this type of intrusive advertising: "This is cool and all but please let's not make ads in the mother f****** sky a normal thing in the future. I need less ads...not more."

The near-universal revulsion people feel toward being inundated by advertisements raises an important point about the consumption habits of wealthy nations. Advertising drives overconsumption, which has dire ecological consequences. Every consumer good requires some combination of resource extraction, transport, and disposal. From 1970 to 2010, natural resource consumption increased threefold, EcoWatch reported.

To put it another way, if everyone adopted the consumption habits of the United States, we would need five Earths to meet those needs. China and Europe also have an outsized impact on the planet. The average European's annual material consumption is 22 tons compared to around 3.3 tons for the average African, says Friends of the Earth.

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Legislation is another route for curbing the excesses of advertising.

Four states — Alaska, Hawaiʻi, Maine, and Vermont — prohibit billboards, Scenic America revealed, and other metropolitan areas restrict new advertising. Distaste for billboards and advertising is a popular, non-partisan viewpoint among the American public. Additionally, there are other actions individuals and communities can take to restrict consumption and save money in the process, such as forming and supporting "buy-nothing" groups.

For one commenter, the tongue-in-cheek answer to curbing drone advertising is to fight fire with fire: "My a** would be mounting a flame thrower to a drone and name it uBlock."

Do you think our phones and devices have enough battery life?

No complaints here 👍