Bangkok’s Billboard Battle Exposes Capitalism’s Relentless Seizure of Our Senses
It’s tempting to dismiss the Bangkok Metropolitan Council’s decision to regulate billboard brightness as a local nuisance, a battle over lumens. But to do so is to miss the forest for the flickering LED tree. What begins as a debate about acceptable candelas quickly unveils a far more profound struggle: the colonization of our consciousness, a slow-motion takeover of our very senses by the relentless logic of the market. When the ambient glow of the urban landscape becomes a policy question, what does it say about the boundaries of capitalism itself?
Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt proposed capping illuminated billboard intensity at 5,000 candelas per square meter during the day and 500 at night. As reported by the Bangkok Post, he believes this will protect the public and encourage businesses to invest in more “eye-friendly outdoor advertising.”
The stated concern is glare, discomfort, and road safety. But the unstated truth is about power. Who decides the tolerable threshold of sensory overload? Who profits from this visual arms race? And what are the long-term cognitive consequences of this constant barrage on our attentional capacities?
“Some overly bright billboards seriously bothered people, and potentially represented a hazard to drivers.”
This seemingly minor regulatory skirmish reveals a much larger, and unsettling, dynamic. Advertising’s relentless expansion has been a story of incremental encroachment on public and private life. From the town criers of centuries past to the jingles that wormed their way into our grandparents' brains via radio in the 1930s and 40s, to the personalized onslaught of today’s algorithmic feeds, the boundary between experience and advertisement has all but dissolved. This isn’t just aesthetic blight; it’s the monetization of perception itself.
Consider the trajectory of advertising. Early advertising appealed to emotion, to aspiration. Think of the subtle art of early magazine ads, crafting desire through suggestion. Now, driven by the brutal competition for attention, advertisers have embraced sensory overload as a core strategy. LED technology allows for displays brighter and more intrusive than ever imagined a generation ago, creating a visual din that is increasingly inescapable. As media theorist Jonathan Beller argues, this isn’t just about selling products; it’s about “the extraction of value from attention itself.” The brighter the billboard, the more ruthlessly our focus is harvested and sold.
Zooming out, it’s worth remembering that it took decades of legal battles and public health campaigns to curb cigarette advertising, a direct assault on our bodies. The billboards of Bangkok might seem less directly harmful than nicotine, but they represent a similar principle: the prioritization of profit over well-being. What prevents these displays from incrementally increasing in intensity as technology advances? And what happens when corporations develop the technology to directly manipulate our senses through augmented reality, or holographic projections targeted specifically to our individual biometric responses?
The fight for sensorial space is not just about billboards; it’s about reclaiming agency, regaining control over our own minds, and preserving the ability to experience the world unfiltered. The Bangkok council’s decision may appear a minor victory, a local ordinance in a globalized world. But it serves as a crucial reminder: even in the face of seemingly insurmountable commercial forces, we retain the capacity to shape, and perhaps even save, the environment that shapes us. The question is whether we choose to exercise it, or passively accept the encroaching darkness.
