OMGWTFlyers

I kind of got carried away with the analysis on this one, pretty sure it's way longer than it needs to be.

I pass by this flyerboard in Sprowl Plaza almost every day, and it's usually covered in flyers -- which makes sense, it's a designed space specifically built to support this activity.  And there is a well-established set of practices around flyering: you don't take down someone else's flyers to put your own up, you just staple your new flyer over all the old flyers.  If you always want your flyers to be on top, you have to constantly re-flyer, putting new flyers over those who have done the same to you. This is the tacit sociotechnical agreement upon which flyering is founded: your flyers get be visible to the public for an indefinite period of time, resting upon whatever flyers came before, in exchange for agreeing to support those flyers which are to come after.  Not only does no one need to establish their own structure supporting the activity of flyer-posting, no one even needs to have a direct connection to that structure.  But recently, things have gotten out of control, with so many flyers being stapled to the board over and over to such an extent that most aren't even directly attached to the board anymore.  Flyers at the exterior layer are attached to a series of other flyers, which turn from content to structure as they become hidden from view.  

As a designed space, the flyer board permits agency in three dimensions: two-dimensional space and time.  Flyer posters may choose to place flyers higher or lower, or more to the left or the right, or at a given point in time, but they have no choice in terms of the depth other than to be the top layer.  This is because depth is implicitly mapped onto time, with the top layer being the most recent flyer posted.  However, depth is precisely where this shifting set of alliances between competing flyer posters breaks down and is made obscenely visible.  The fact that flyers were extruding as much as two feet from the board is what originally made me stop and stare at the flyerboard.  And in this understanding, spacetime curves matter, quite literally: as various middle layers begin to peel away and are no longer secured to a fixed position, both individual flyers and the entire paper apparatus curls and warps.

Of course, someone will eventually come along and rip every flyer off, leaving the board fresh and new, at least for the next few days.  But then the cycle would start over again, the system growing more and more unusable until it reaches the point where the unthinkable act of removing someone else’s flyers becomes a necessity. Would a digital system be better?  It would be able to permanently map time to depth, but physical paper has too many affordances (the least of which is affordability) that a digital board lacks.  One solution is to change the materials used such that they independently enforce the same kind of time-based transience that underlies the flyer board; in other words, mapping time not just onto just depth, but objects.  In other words, what if the flyer board’s backing was not made of wood, but some material that slowly pushed out an affixing apparatus (i.e. a staple or tack) over a certain period of time?  After 72 hours, your staple would be pushed out, your flyer would fall into a recycling mechanism below, and a new open space would be opened for another flyer.  This would also significantly reduce the need to put up new sheets of paper when re-flyering, while maintaining the crucial social significance of re-flyering as a mode of correlating the visibility of flyers to recent physical activity.  Instead of putting a new flyer up, you would just push a new staple into your flyer.