Not for Commercial Use – More movement memes

Let’s call ‘movement memes’ internet-based attempts to create a socio-political movement. At first glance, ‘Not for Commercial Use’ appears to be an outgrowth of the anti-corporate control sentiments in the Creative Commons system created by Lawrence Lessig that that helped shape wikipedia, internet music, and repositioned archive.org as a free media depository. But maybe it’s just a snarky group of London Designers? Here’s the poster.
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Here’s some details about the project from Stellasuru.

Location// London, England
Interests// Blatant self-promotion, Helvetica, and Subversive print and interactive campaign
Aesthetic// Irreverent, cheeky abstraction outlines cryptic messages in grid-driven layouts and London-inspired color palettes
Quotable// “Designers are wankers”
Notable// Flyposters, stationary and digital video Paste (October 2007) for NFCU’s guerilla print and interactive campaign targeting London’s top design firms and creative agencies.
Pro// NFCU postcard set gives London’s top design firms an intelligent and playful trail of evidence.
Con// The print campaign lacks a strong, cohesive metaphor and might lose its audience of “wankers” in the process.

Something about misleading quasi-political designers getting together to blanket a city with their ‘look at me’ posters in bold Helvetica rubs me the wrong way. The designers behind this movement meme bank on its mysteriousness, hoping that its ambiguity will carry it to viral status. Anyone who puts a ‘viral’ button (that links to a zip file of video files to distribute) doesn’t know why things go viral.

Watch the film here if you want to see pretentious black and white videography, artificially sneaky, wind-buffeted running-from-nothing-down-dark-London-back-streets.