Last weekend I drove out past town limits, just so I could get some distance from which to think. Twenty minutes west of the city and the sprawl is replaced by something slower, rows of corn extend out towards a horizon that says, "no apology.” And then there is a billboard in the middle of all that stillness- A phone number that you have to remember and a smiling family next to some insurance company. I burst out laughing not at it being funny but because it seemed so silly. The reason we went out to drive and I was just trying to get away from the noise and the noise was right there. That moment is exactly why the conversation around Des Moines billboards matters more than most people realizes.

The Argument Nobody Asked For

Here's the thing about rural advertising that always gets me. Nobody drove past that cornfield and thought "You know what this needs?” The field was doing fine on its own. It didn't need a message. It didn't need a brand. It was just there being a field doing what fields do. The billboard wasn't filling a void. It was creating one then offering to fill it.

That's the trick of outdoor advertising in places that never asked for it. It doesn't respond to demand. It manufactures it. First, it convinces you that the landscape is incomplete without a message. Then it sells you the message and somewhere in that process the landscape itself becomes secondary. The corn becomes a backdrop. The sky becomes negative space. The horizon becomes a frame for somebody's quarterly earnings.

What We Actually Lose

I want to be careful here because it's easy to sound like someone shaking a fist at modernity. I'm neither against business nor against advertising existing. I understand that companies need to reach people and I understand that billboards are one way to do that but there's a difference between advertising in a place and advertising that colonizes a place. One respects context. The other erases it.

When you put a flashing screen in the middle of farmland you're not just adding something. You're subtracting something. You're subtracting silence. You're subtracting the feeling of being somewhere that isn't trying to sell you anything. You're subtracting the possibility of a drive where your mind can wander without being interrupted every thirty seconds. Those things have value even if they don't show up on a balance sheet.

Here's what bothers me most. The people who benefit from that billboard—the insurance company or the ad agency or the billboard owner they don't live with the consequences. They don't drive past it every day. They do not need to explain to their children why the sky has a brand on it. They extract the cost and circulate on. The community is left holding the visual clutter.

The Des Moines Context

This isn't hypothetical. Des Moines has been wrestling with billboard regulations for years and the debate keeps circling the same points. How many signs are too many? How bright is too bright? Should digital boards be allowed near residential areas? These are fair questions but they're surface level. They assume the billboards are already here and we're just haggling over the terms. Nobody's asking whether the terms themselves were ever fair to begin with.

When people talk about Des Moines billboards they usually frame it as a balance between economic development and quality of life but that framing is misleading. It indicates that billboards are inherently good for the financial system and terrible for quality of existence and we simply need to locate the proper ratio. In fact the monetary blessings are concentrated among a small organization of owners and advertisers while the charges are spread across absolutely everyone who has to take a look at them. That's not a balance but an extraction.

The Attention Economy Goes Rural

There's something almost poetic about how far the attention economy has reached. It used to be that cities were the battleground. Times Square or Sunset Boulevard and the Vegas Strip. Those places made sense for advertising because they were already loud plus crowded and full of messages. Adding more was just adding to the pile.

Now the frontier is the empty road the quiet stretch between towns. The place you go when you want to think and that's not an accident. Advertisers know that attention is scarcest where it's least contested. If you can own the only message in a fifty mile radius you own something powerful. You own the silence and then you fill it.

The problem is that silence wasn't ours to sell. It belonged to everyone who drove that road everyone who lived nearby or everyone who valued the feeling of being somewhere that wasn't trying to get something from them. Selling it required taking it first and nobody remembers being asked.

A Different Way to Think About It

I'm not a gullible boy that I am but I believe we can change the questions we ask just like that! We don't need to ask how many billboards are OK, we could ask who does. Rather than talk about brightness levels, we might talk about whether or not the chat ought to have begun with consent. Rather than optimizing the landscape to be used, we could use the landscape as a resource that we are borrowing from those who follow.

That last part matters more than it might seem. Every billboard we approve is a decision we're making on behalf of people who haven't been born yet. They'll inherit the skyline we leave them. They'll drive the roads we've lined with messages. They'll wonder why nobody stopped to ask whether this was the world we wanted to build and the honest answer will be that we didn't ask either. We just let it happen, one permit at a time.

The Cornfield Doesn't Need Us

Here's the thing I keep coming back to. The cornfield was fine. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It didn't need a caption. It didn't need a brand. It didn't need a phone number plastered across its sky. The only thing it needed was to be left alone or to be what it was or to exist without being turned into a vehicle for somebody else's message.

I know that's a hard thing to argue in a world that measures everything in impressions and conversions. I know it sounds sentimental maybe even naïve but I don't think it is. I think it's the most practical thing in the world because if we can't leave a cornfield alone, what can we leave alone? If every quiet place has to become a loud place eventually where do we go when we need quiet? Where do we go when we need to remember what it felt like before everything was for sale?

I don't have a clean answer to that but I know the billboard didn't have one either. It just had a phone number and a smile and it turned into counting on me no longer to think too difficult approximately why it became there. I thought approximately it besides and I'm nonetheless thinking about it.