Get the stickers out and the posters up...

With the advent of the internet, we found a relatively inexpensive way to get our message across without having to go through the hassle of writing, producing and distributing a paper. Granted, the advent of desktop publishing did make it a lot easier to produce a paper but, the process still involved a lot of hassle. It also involved having to find the money to pay for the printing of the papers. Having a blog on the internet turned us all into self publishers. The advent of social media gave us the opportunity to publicise what we’d written and helped to rack up the number of views we got on our blogs. That’s until the shady bastards in charge of the more popular social media platforms turned the algorithms against us, throttling our reach out of existence.

The thing is, it could be argued that we have gone too far and that we rely way too much on the internet to get our message across. It’s important to bear in mind that it’s controlled by interests that have every interest in keeping the system going, and who only pay lip service to the concept of free speech. The number of people getting visits from the cops for things they’ve written and posted online is becoming worrying to say the least. Okay, being here on Substack, it does feel like we have a bit of space to openly express what we think and feel. However, in these weird and increasingly dystopian times, we can’t take anything for granted - it would be naive to to so.

I’m old enough to remember the pre-internet days of flogging papers. It was a slog, trust me on that one! I’m also old enough to remember going out with a crew of people on dark evenings to slap up political posters everywhere. I also remember teams of us going out stickering as well. In the pre-internet era, this was the only way of building for demonstrations, actions and meetings. Yes, there was always the risk that a rival political group would come along to slap their posters over ours. There was also the slight risk that some of our rivals would physically threaten us to stop us postering - the delights of sectarianism, not! On top of this, there was the risk of getting nicked by the cops if the look outs weren’t doing their jobs properly. The point is that the posters and stickers on the streets probably got seen by a lot more eyeballs than many of our social media posts do now.

You just don’t see anything like as many political posters and stickers up on the walls as you used to. That in part is down to local authorities cracking down on flyposting to the point where many people feel that it’s simply not worth the risk. As for political stickers, there are still some going up on various bits of street furniture. Obviously, where you see them very much depends on where you are. There are areas of nearby Bristol where you would be highly unlikely to see any. On the other hand, in Bristol neighbourhoods such as Easton, given the demographics of the area, you will certainly see a few. As the whether I agree with the sentiments they express, well, that’s a bit of a moot point...

The last time I really saw stickers getting plastered everywhere was during some of the anti-lockdown/anti-vaccine mandate protests in London in 2021 going into early 2022. I was on a number of those protests handing out specially produced copies of The Stirrer. Once I’d shifted the papers, I happily joined in with slapping up the stickers I’d designed that were challenging the narrative we were being fed. Like the protests themselves, the use of the stickers was intentionally provocative. The aim was to give people a jolt and get them to start questioning the narrative we were being fed at the time.

The point about stickers (and posters if you can get away with it) is that unlike being online where your audience will be very much a self selecting one, what you put up on street furniture or a wall will be seen by every passer by. By putting up stickers and posters in public, you have widened your audience to one that will be a heck of a lot bigger and diverse than anything you will get online. In an age where many people online will curate what they do and don’t see, physical propaganda on the streets gives you the opportunity to get into people’s faces. Some may think that getting in people’s faces using stickers and posters may be pushy. However, when you think of the sheer number of advertising messages we get bombarded with in the course of a day, sticking up a few stickers and posters aimed at getting people to start rethinking their perceptions has to be seen as a legitimate counterpoint. That’s before we start on the mainstream ‘news’ media pushing the dominant narrative from those who presume to rule over us...

With the stickers we produce, the aim is not to promote a blog or a specific event. They’re all non-branded and are designed and worded in such a way as to prompt people into thinking a bit more deeply about things and also, to start asking awkward questions. Some are intentionally ambiguous, others are straight to the point. The thing about a sticker or a poster is that you have to get the attention of passers by pretty damn quick. That means economy with the use of words and some creativity in producing a striking, eye catching visual.

Part of the motivation for me in writing this post is to give myself a proverbial kick up the backside to start putting up the stickers I have that are currently sitting in a box. It’s all very well me producing Memes to go up on this blog but, this page doesn’t get many views. What will get a heck of a lot more views are the stickers we put up when we’re in either Bristol or Bath. Another part of the motivation is the realisation that in a world where pretty much all of the communication channels are controlled by corporate interests and the states that do their bidding, we’re effectively relying upon the enemy’s infrastructure. We cannot afford to assume that we’re always going to be able to have access to these channels. When we use the street furniture and the walls, we’re appropriating physical infrastructure for our own ends. While, depending on the area, the local authorities will eventually remove what we’ve put up, it will have been up for long enough to have made an impact. To conclude, we need to return to harder to trace and censor, analogue methods to get our message across. Stickers and posters are a part of that…