Ads find places to root that aren’t even places. They sprout on the backs of travelcards, the surfaces of the ticket machines that sell them. The fronts of every step out of the Tube, so, rising from the earth, you’re faced with strips of meaningless enthusiasm for product. ‘All about me the red weed clambered among the ruins’. Marketing chokes London as vigorously as Wells’ end-of-the-world Martian flora. Outside Waterloo station, at a bus stop, LoveFilm projects an endless loop of bait-drivel onto a building across the road, so its visions lurch into anamorphic frights on the sides of every bus that passes. And this commercial has a soundtrack. Now, close your eyes, you still can’t opt out.

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china mieville



A shorter version of this essay was published in the New York Times Magazine, on 4 March 2012.