In ye old Paris, the street poster is an enormously powerful communication medium and a hotly contested one as well. Ad Buster or “anti-pub” groups there do amazing work, constantly remaking, removing and defacing existing ads and putting up their own “anti-ads” all over the place, even occasionally organizing full-on manifestation days, where crowds of anti-artists stream into the underground and engage in large-scale defacing and graffiti operations. Here are some examples of the kind of stuff you see all the time and that have corporations suing anti-pub groups for thousands of euros in damages.

Given the beauty choice of smooth or crackly, the antipub artist checks a homemade box that answers “paid to smile.” At the bottom he/she changes the sentence from “Keep the conversation going online at [the Dove website]” to “Keep the conversation going on the walls.”

Sometimes the artists get into the ad boxes and place their own pieces. This one: “Work, Consume, Explode”

“Sleep! The media is deceiving and watching you.”

In ad-space, asking you to fill in your own words is radical communication!

“Material things separate you from others.”

Over the last few months, Paris has been bombarded with political posters, which cram willy-nilly onto designated poster boards but also guerilla-style all over construction fencing and utility poles, etc. Jayson Harsin writes this from Paris: “It’s all pure branding, where [the candidates as products] of course have little or no direct relation to the campaign slogans that run under their faces, most of them vague appeals to patriotism, human values, class inequities… Posters are supposed to be short and sweet as a genre… Isn’t that now true of the campaign ad more generally, no matter the medium—TV, newspapers, websites, etc?”

Leading candidate Sarkozy’s posters, for example, have nothing of the “law and order” bit he has repeated incessantly for the past five years. The main slogan is the intentionally bland “Together everything becomes possible,” which is exactly what his detractors are afraid of— that once in power, Sarko and his cronies will pull France into a hell of ruinous free trade and anti-minority discrimination. In Paris, many of Sarkozy’s posters have been de-faced, literally, with Hitler mustaches, the slogan left as is.

Segolene Royal’s posters offer a different but equally vague approach to saving the country from its woes: “More justice equals greater strength” would be one translation, or more literally: “A more just France is a stronger France.”

Posters: they’re the new old YouTube.