maozedongisnotcool:

andrewfm:

Here are three maps depicting the “Advertising and Street Trade Restrictions venue restriction zone” to be set up in London during the 2012 Olympic Games. From Kosmograd:

Within this area… no advertising for brands designated as competing with those of the official Olympic sponsors will be allowed. This will be supported by preventing spectators from wearing clothing prominently displaying competing brands, or from entering the exclusion zone with unofficial snack and beverage choices. Within the Zone, the world’s biggest McDonald’s will be the only branded food outlet, and Visa will be the only payment card accepted.

The increased presence of the security state in England here dovetails with business influence to carve out a new corporate geography for the purposes of marketing. This spatial strategy is a neoliberal twist on the historic creation of colonial states administrated by businesses (consider the historic case of Rhodesia). Of course, police measures designed to restrict one form of personal expression can also just as easily restrict others, so it would hardly be surprising to see anti-corporate clothing forbidden in a similar manner to wearing the wrong brand’s clothing. Nevertheless, it seems to be an ironic twist that wearing corporate, rather than political, imagery and messaging is the expressly forbidden and subversive act within these exclusion zones.

It is through this neocolonialism at the urban scale that we see, utterly exposed, the political nature of economic practice. Corporations compete for spatial monopolies through reconfigured property arrangements, both with and without the help of the state, with purportedly fundamental liberal rights trampled on in the process.

This is some deranged shit.