For several years now, there has been a campaign against litter and to promote recycling in many parts of Europe by imposing a deposit on beverage bottles, from a few cents to a significant portion of the cost—like with bottled water when the empty bottles can be worth more than their contents. This is called Pfand in the German Sprachraum.
Speaking of masking with bar-codes, as those QR-codes, able to tag one’s phones, are becoming more and more prevalent on billboards and signage, I began to wonder whether such inscrutable things are for one always connected with what they appear to be, could guerilla marketing be appropriating advertising space and redirecting people to a competitor or something completely different, and whether such codes could be made invisible and less voluntary, forcing one to like something just for glancing at it, tricking someone with crypto-sponsorship into buying one product over another for snapping a photo of some scenic view, in reality brought to you by corporate and not just nature or history. It’s a scary thought—to sway ones gadgets with subliminal messages and what is seen that cannot be unseen