Democratically artistic billboards? I was on a long road trip recently, passed through Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, then into Georgia. I saw a lot of billboards. I guess people normally tune them out but I don't tune things out easily even when I want to. The billboards of OH, KY, and TN were particularly cringy to me. A lot of "YOU'RE GOING TO HELL BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE JESUS" stuff. GA was cringy but in a different way. Judging by those billboards one would think that if you had a fender bender then thousands of zombie-like personal injury attorneys would come out of the woods, toward the accident scene. I couldn't help but think how ugly the soul of our country is based on these billboards: Dark age superstition and fear coupled with greed and the promise of fat cash if you are only willing to fake a neck injury and ruin someone else's life. But I wondered how representative these billboards were to the culture of these regions. Obviously, just going off of billboard ads, the look is pretty skewed. So, I had an idea. Not one I'm going to do because I can't be bothered but feel free to run with it if you think you can make it work. What if you could separate the content of the billboard from the financial interests? How about this: Have a web site. On this site any person no matter how rich or poor can submit an ad that they would want put on a billboard. Also users (possibly that same user, possibly not) can vote for what ad they'd like to see next. They vote by donating $1 toward the cost. Each person can only vote once. So rich people can't just donate the $n (n = whatever it costs to take out a billboard ad for a month). This is where it gets tricky because it can be very difficult to prevent people from voting more than once. However, since this is (right now) mearly a thought experiment, who cares. Let's just say somehow no one person, entity, company, organization, etc... can vote more than $1 for the next month's ad. I wonder what would end up winning. Would it be just a nice mural? A welcoming message? Of course anyone can suggest and design any ad they want. They can take a screenshot of their latest vitriolic tweet and submit that, but would the majority vote for that? I posed this as a question on the BBS (mutinybbs.com:2300) in the message bases (Bulletin Boards). I'd love for you to log in and respond because I'd love to hear what you would like to see. Personally, I would probably just vote for some peice of artwork that appealed to me. Something nice to look at while zooming by at 70mph. .