The ‘economy’ of billboards

The voluptuous women and their cleavages, the mesmerising products and their melodramatic messages, the skilful visuals and its dazzling delusion divert dangerously our dreams, desires, and destinies swallowing up the vacuum of our otherwise fatigued minds. In whichever direction we glance at, those enormous billboards and their luminous logos, create an impression of a terrific nation. The long glittering nails, the tempting bottles of fizzy drinks, the sensual pair of skinny jeans, the low cuts, the high heels, the skin whitening cream and the airbrushed faces — a mediocre middle-class like me cannot afford not to gaze, not to gasp. The billboards of our cities are too big to bypass, too triumphant to turn our back on, too celebratory to circumvent. It declares proudly, the country is finally 'progressing'.

And under those radiant billboards and their spectacular messages, exists a city of four million slum dwellers, with no access to piped water supply and no proper place even to defecate! Under that magical billboard bonanza, penniless starves, hookers hooked, sweat sold, children criminalised, ills die, and slums burn down. The issue of hygiene and health care, education and welfare, right to vote and right to information, in such dreadful living condition are merely a joke. But those billboards are no joke. They are big, bold, and blustering, requiring big bucks to put them on and expecting big bucks in return. They are the wondrous reality of today's metropolitan Dhaka city (The second most unliveable cities of the world, according to a 2009 report by Mercer Consulting).

Why not billboards? You may ask.

We live in a glossy world of advertisements, and after all it's a billion dollar global industry. It's a smart way of letting consumers know about the product and a suitable way of competing with the rest. And moreover, a city crammed with congestion and crowd, might actually look vertically bigger with its sky-footing billboards.

In any case, the hyper commercialisation of our metropolitan has transpired 'billboardism' as a sound and sensible advertising phenomenon, apparently the very symbol of a growing economy. Yet, its brazen promotion of mindless consumerism, of tricky lies, of shimmering shallowness, not only disposes our souls to a perilous path of materialism and manipulation, it also carefully sponsors a consumerism based hollow economic order and a local-economy-toppling free trade regime. The toothpastes, the detergents, the soaps, the aftershaves, the shoes, tirelessly projecting, 'you need what we sell', and  promising a 'better future', a 'better marriage', even a 'better skin colour', has no whatsoever connection with the reality of life, inequity of the system or the struggle of the existent economy. David Korten in his book, 'When corporations Rule the World', writes it rightly, "it constantly reassures us that consumerism is the only path to happiness".

In any case, let us not be in illusion that this coexistence of billboards and beggars, glitter and garbage, Mercedes and misery, Radisson and rooflessness, filthy rich and filthy poor, is a mere accident. The status quo of such an unequal arrangement is rather the only requisite, the only compulsion for such a bourgeoisie economy to continue to exist, recklessly.

So this is what happens in a 'billboardian' economy. In the very route of hyper profit persuasion, such economic order continuously hunts for disposable labour force, under the façade of a more gentle economic term 'cheap labour'. (Cheap labour means big profit indeed). And, such exploitable, disposable, gullible, vulnerable and endless convoy of cheap people are certainly the fabulous fuel that speeds up the very formation of the bourgeoisie-serving economic order itself. Most importantly, once wage of labour becomes locked (thanks to 'minimum' wage) and profit skyrockets (thanks to 'minimum' wage again), big bucks become available to spend madly on branding, advertising, and 'billboarding'.

It was only before the beginning of the era of corporate globalisation, people were buying products that were coming out of local factories or local firm houses directly, and were sold in the local shops, or community markets. As Journalist Naomi Klein, puts it beautifully, "You would be looking in the eye of the person who made it, who grew it, and a relationship of trust and dependency would grow out of it. Thereby, the original brands, the original logos, were based on a sense of belonging, sense of community, sense of stewardship, that played a vital role as a guarantor of the quality of the product itself."

Things changed in the '90s, when products began to be produced in half way across the world, and at a mass scale. Such corporatisation of production in order to continue to exist and grow required mass consumption of consumer goods, and it actually made us believe that 'hyper consumption' is the only pre-condition for economic success. It actually made us believe that growth comes without a cost.

However, there has always been a frightening flip side. Growth requires endless depletion of nature, in a finite system. This is why McDonalds and KFC require mass 'chemicalization' of meals and mass killing of animals, Nestle and Coca-cola require mass withdrawal of ground water, Starbucks requires mass exploitation of coffee farmers, and Uniliver requires mass plundering of rainforests (for its cosmetic palm oil). There are thousands of corporations around the world, who continue to do their part of 'mass messing up' of our ecology, our farmland, our air, and our water, in thousands of different ways.

Today, such mind-boggling billboards, mind you, continue to exist as the most powerful icon of a society of mass consumption. Such advertising industry, not only is spending millions to create merely the image, the identity, the brand of the product (rather spending on workers' welfare or paying for the environmental damage), but also in order to maintain a costly business of fantasy; it is freezing workers' wage, stagnating their welfare, disposing them quickly in case of availability of even cheaper humans, and constantly taking over marginalised community's land and resources at the lowest possible price. Beyond the industry of production and workers, it has created its own industry. A sensational industry of 'illusion' and 'manipulation'.

And as it is mentioned earlier, all this is happening in the name of growth and job creation. Yet, at the end of the day, in the name of 'cost-cutting efficiency', half of the workforce is fired anyway, (which leaves us with a hopeless situation called "jobless growth" and "investment-less profit", in which the CEO's receive billions a year, fires thousands a day, and the shareholders float in a trillion dollar bubble).

Never mind the rest of the world. In a country like ours, it is spreading an awfully wrong message of 'progress', and beeping a terribly wrong signal of 'modernisation'. The billboards, the advertisements, the glitters are quite smartly and confidently making sure that the very idea of modernisation and development get fantastically narrowed down to the cheesiness of our burgers, the fizzy-ness of our Coke, the cosiness of our malls and cafes. No wonder our billboard economy is bigger than its size, cleverer than its message, and lower than its 'low cuts'.

Yet they are up there, hanging, as the most innovative form of advertising, which is believed to be leading to creative competition and efficiency, resulting in a productive economy, according to conventional economics, of course.

Now hold on! Who's competition, whose efficiency, and whose productivity? The little producers and the little manufacturers we once had in our country are all gone long back. Since the '90s, since the fall of the bipolar system, free market carried out its task obediently, and thereby the rich and the 'foreign' only, made their way up to the very top. Bangladesh, in this process, has gradually turned out to be an import-obsessed economy in which foreign logos compete with foreign logos exclusively. A city with very little access to clean water, a cluttered structure of sewage management, and an awfully weak capacity for drainage, vividly and vigorously, entertainingly and enthusiastically, fight to establish the supremacy of Nokia over Samsung, Telenor over Airtel, KFC over Dominos, Fritos over Cheetos, Pantene over Sunsilk, Australian 'Red Cow' over Danish Dano. Our own cosmetics? Not up to the mark. Our own food? Doesn't taste so good. Our own technology? doesn't exist.

In any case, our billboard-frenzy metropolitan and product-obsessed lifestyle successfully and subtly diverted our attention from the cruel political and social reality of the nation. We are no more worried. After all, the billboards of our cities kindly offer us the solutions to all our problems. It offers us magical existence and musical days and nights. A fashionable way of living (never mind in a city that is almost incapable of providing electricity for a whole day), an ever glamorous appearance, (never mind in a city that 24/7 smells like raw sewage), and all the world's happiness/victory/heroism/glory/peace/bliss/fun/joy/ecstasy of buying a spectacular product (never mind, if the mass production of it requires vanishing of thousands of hectors of forests, contaminating water and air, burning fossil fuels, clogging rivers, displacing poor, exploiting labour, and ultimately corrupting our ecosystem and social balance).

In the name of economic growth, in the name of development, in the name of job creation, such bombardment of billboards, such fanatic culture of shopping and consumerism, such eyewash of modernity, such desire for a price-tagged lifestyle, transformed our young generation and the middle-class (the otherwise backbone of the political foundation of the nation), into a group of import-possessed wild consumers, not only aloof towards the melancholy of the fellow citizens and detached from the national reality, but also fragmented from the very world of social, environmental, and community values, and the mass struggle of the mainstream. It has systematically created a generation of guinea pigs, visionless, compassionless, wisdomless, serving obediently as the money-spinning market of the dazzling business world, worshipping fondly a bimbo economy and its fake progress.

What could have gone right if we never had those billboards, those super malls, those mega celebrations of consumption in the first place? It is not only that we would be exposed to less bold lies, less psychological manipulation, less commercialisation of souls, less commodification of women, and less humiliation of those who sleep at night (roofless, topless, penniless, and perhaps nameless) under those fake shines; it is also that we would be less tempted, less envious, less opportunist, more allied, more alarmed, more realistic and more equal. It is also that we would be prioritising communities over supermarkets, mills over malls, food over fast food, and life over lifestyle. It is also that we would be replacing mass consumption with sensible and local green consumption. It is also that we would be more democratically representative, politically participatory, socially responsible, and environmentally ethical. At the very least, we would not be in such dangerous delusion of 'progress'.

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Maha Mirza is a researcher and activist. She is a graduate in economics and international political economy