cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1977881
Excerpt:
Banksy isn’t happy with Guess’ latest collaboration.
The legendary anonymous graffiti artist had a directive for his followers on Friday, encouraging them—possibly tongue in cheek, possibly not—to visit the Regent Street Guess store in London and steal the brand’s new collection that features his artwork.
“Attention all shoplifters. Please go to Guess on Regents Street. They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”
Nov 18, 2022
Thanks. I was wondering if this was old news or had happened again.
There must be top-post bots working through old Reddit posts.
This community needs quality control.
Nice, stealing from multinational conglomerates is never morally wrong and should always be encouraged.
But think of the shareholders!
You. I like you.
Remember! If you see someone shoplifting, you didn’t.
If it’s someone stealing food and basics then yeah, but if it’s bored kids stealing fashion then they can fuck off. Don’t use the excuse of “sticking it to the man” to justify bring a bellend.
What, some kids stealing those clothes, of which half that aren’t sold will be shipped directly to a landfill?
Yeah, we gotta step up our game protecting that shit
You’d call cops on children lol
I’d probably just tell them to fuck off home if I was feeding particularly ballsy. Where do you live where the police are well-funded enough that they’d have time to deal with something as small-time and irrelevant as this?
IT IS MY DUTY AS A CITIZEN TO PROTECT TARGETS BOTTOM LINE
What so worst case scenario Walmart family is 0.0001% less rich?
Literally harming no one, get off your high horse if you got enough money to afford shit (yes even cosmetics some people value)
Companies look at shrink and if the margins are too high, they will close the store. It hurts communities if the store they need to purchase food from closes. This is especially problematic in poor communities where not everybody has easy transportation.
That’d be like a LOT of stealing tho. Avg Walmart pulls in $1mil A WEEK.
This is even more so in small towns where they were easily able to secure a monopoly, so for operating one store they’re able to be the only option for a whole town - and they’d have to choose to throw away a perfectly functional source of revenue.
There’s a reason many internet companies are expanding rural, its a larger more spread out market
People are stealing a lot. Saying it harms nobody isn’t correct. In the twin cities we’ve had a Aldi, Walmart and Walgreens all close within the last year. All of them were located in areas with a majority of people being on the poorer side of things. If people bought their groceries at Walmart, now the closest place is Cub which is about 6 miles away. That can be a 30-35 minute difference if you don’t have a car and Cub is much more expensive. I’m not defending corporations but they aren’t going to stay if people are stealing too much. Look at all the companies leaving in San Francisco and Portland.
I think you’re missing my point. If you have so little money that you need to steal just to get by then society has failed you and fuck the corpos trying to keep you down. On the other hand, if you’re well off enough that you can spend your time posting online from your smartphone about how cool it is to nick designer fashion and cosmetics then you’re probably a poser who believes in nothing but getting stuff for free. I imagine there are a few people upvoting the original comment who take their beliefs quite seriously and spend their time doing real activism for social change, however I reckon most of them are edgelords who need to grow up and realise they’re not Robin Hood.
Nah but I do believe there is a gray area. Sure most people have a probably pretty modern phone and computer, but like is living large??
I couldn’t get a job today without a PDF formatted resume and attached phone number, I could have to decide between paying my phone bill and spending money on something I actually care about instead of just handing it off to a super company .
I don’t believe it is even slightly morally wrong to steal just for ones own mental peace of mind, we can probably forgoe a superyacht so some of us to not solely exist for labor
Does he have an agent or somebody who can be contacted? Not justifying the shop from doing this but how would somebody seek his permission?
Who Banksy? because he has clearly given his permission in the form of a press release
So Banksy has gven his moral ascent to anyone stealing from that shop although obviously Banksy doesn’t have the legal right to do that and you will still get in trouble if the police catch you but the police in the UK don’t investigate shoplifting less than £200. Although they recently have been told to crack down on all shoplifting so that might change.
But the shop doesn’t have the legal right to have banksy’s stuff either… is it really stealing if the owner of the art says ‘take it, it’s free’?
Well maybe in an equal system here, but guess has more money so they’re our royalty apparently
Now that’s just silly. You should be stealing from any store that has a “collection” regardless of whether they used his art.
Fastest conversion from downvote to upvote record holder
Don’t need encouragement, but the thoughts appreciated.
I definitely wouldn’t get a Flipper Zero for the purposes of theft. Allegedly it is a legal device that can be re-programmed to disable security tags and open charging ports on Tesla vehicles, which is wrong.
Definitely do not purchase a Flipper Zero and utilize it for theft or disruption. Its purposes are to open garage doors.
You don’t need to reprogram the Flipper Zero for Tesla charging ports. Just get the Sub-Ghz signal from the internet and store it on the Flipper.
I definitely never done it myself, of course.
Will he pay their legal fees if someone gets arrested?
No, but Elon Musk will promise to pay your legal fees then double back on it.
Elon Musk will give your info to the Saudi government
I’m from the UK and I have no idea who Guess even are, so they can’t be that big of a deal. I won’t support them anyway… if I ever see them haha.
Doesn’t Banksy’s entire schtick hang on “helping himself” to a “canvas?”
There’s a legitimate discussion to be had about whether not he should be doing that, but to compare it to a multinational corporation profiting off of clothes depicting his work without his permission is pretty disingenuous.
This is not me saying people should go shoplift nor is it me saying that Banksy isn’t a whiner.
My brother in christ the art sells for millions…
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What are you talking about? Are you triggered?
From zero to bad faith accusations in one comment, bravo c/unitedkingdom.
I’m not sure where the bad faith accusation is. You’re saying that because of the way he operates, they get to use his work without his permission on physical products they sell for profit. If this is incorrect feel free to explain what you meant.
You made no bad faith argument here. Your response for further discussion was a great prompt and right in line with this thread but clearly they don’t want to engage.
I really dislike this trend of responding to comments with the red badge of “bad faith argument”. It is awfully dismissive, particularly without saying why, like in this case here. Best case, they may expect that you know exactly why you are being accused of that and want to shut down bad faith arguing, but if you have no idea why, it’s really just meant to insult or harm. Ironically, accusing someone of a bad faith argument without explaining why may be considered bad faith arguing.
Sorry you got a response like that. I thought your response was good, thoughtful and good attempt at more discussion. I agree and don’t have much to add, unfortunately, but just wanted to support your post.
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nahhhh. we know who he is, and he collaborates with local authorities to put up his art. and retains all rights to it of course.
so he is actually very justified in feeling this way because he unironically greatly benefits from the commercial side of things.
of course, he still wants us to think this is some counterculture shit.
I don’t know that this is strictly true, he has had works painted over before and notably had a rivalry with that Manchester King fella and they re did each others works regularly.
Yeah and the rappers that make diss tracks about each other totally hate each other too, it’s not for publicity at all, they’d really kill each other if only they had a chance. Too bad they’re too busy making millions.
That’s not what I’m saying, I think you’re being intentionally negative and obtuse. Yes there is a commercial aspect, no it not a given that everything he does is with the approval of local governments.
He didn’t stand to gain anything by feuding with the other street artist.
Also there are lots of hiphop feuds that do famously bleed into real life and too many have died. Are there people who use this narrative to further their careers, yes but it doesn’t make everything fake.
He stands to gain attention and notoriety, which is why he does everything he does. As does the other street artist. If you don’t think it was a publicity stunt fine, I certainly can’t prove it was, but that’s what I believe.
Yeah but different rules for him, right?
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But why not the opposite! /s
Also visit other stores as well 🫡
Banksy believing in intellectual property 🏴☠️
Is it not copyright infringement?
Also I don’t believe in either but will happily use both to fuck over rich corpo pigs from commercialising my work without permission or compensation.
Copyright infringement is the jaywalking of ideas
That’s a pretty great analogy.
No since Banksy doesn’t have any copyrights. Being anonymous has it downysides…
So as far as I know he has neither copyright nor trademark to use. Not a fan of big companies either but Banksy is far away from impoverished.
Did he ever say anything else about it? You can get banksy prints and other stuff featuring his artwork everywhere and they never seemed much bothered about it, maybe he just dislikes Guess
I don’t know, I was just making a joke
Based. Shoplift everywhere else too, especially the supermarkets.
This is like being in a time capsule from 2022
A time capsule from one year ago? Mate, if you’re gonna use the time capsule meme, you gotta go further back then one year.
It’s to signify this is old news m8. The article was from last year… Why are you so slow ?
Why is there a shoplifting community on here 😂
Something to do during the school holidays, I guess
Fair
Because there are shops out there.
Because it existed as a community with 200k+ users on reddit until reddit banned it. Everything that gets pushed off reddit will find a home elsewhere, and as long as it’s not hate it should be embraced for the growth of the platform, much like Piracy.