The Flyer Manifesto

When humans are long gone from this planet, what do you think will be left behind? Will it be our plastic bottles, plastic bags, or used toilet seats that populate the earth? The fact is, it will be none of these things. Billions of paper flyers will be our planet’s demise, riddling the earth with useless information that is quickly forgotten and disposed of. We will never learn unless we take action against this infringement on humanity’s liberties.

The paper flyer is an abomination to man’s struggle to spread information among his people. The useful content that it claims to give people is less like peace of mind and more like piece of shit. Since when have we backtracked from our digital capabilities to the lows of papyrus? Do they not hear the screams of trees being felled for their blissful ignorance? In truth, they do not care about the consequences of their wasteful pursuits.

People who hand out this rubbish are under the false assumption that their flyers are able to reach people with special information that they couldn’t get to them otherwise. They couldn’t be more wrong! No one wants to even glance at a flyer in this digital age. Do you really think that this random guy you just made eye contact on this street is going to want to donate food to your food drive? There’s absolutely no one in their right mind that would think of flyers as a fitting alternative for digital messages such as email, Facebook posts, or online message boards.

As your fellow man, I implore you to stop this madness. With each flyer you hand out, you are tearing the very fabric of society. Seek other opportunities to spread your message without scarring our lovely planet with your scraps of paper. If you see some sorry soul handing out flyers, confront them. Give them an ultimatum. Use force if necessary – because there is no consequence greater than those we will face if we don’t strangle this virus of a tactic at once.

The Flyer Report

For our project, we decided that we were going to address the problem of flyers on campus. It’s hard to walk through the quad without someone handing you an unwanted flyer about something you don’t really care about. Knowing this was an issue, we came to the conclusion that we needed to stop this activity. Our main goal was to try and change people’s attitudes about flyers, convincing them to refuse to take them, ultimately decreasing the value of the activity and forcing people to stop making them.

We came up with three different strategies to combat this disruption. One of these was to actively deny flyers that were being handed out on the quad. This could be done by either theft, distraction, or verbally challenging people who were handing out flyers. Our other strategy was to create an online video that informed the people on campus of the dangers of flyer activity, including harm to the environment and annoyance to the general public. Our final strategy used the power of hypocrisy and irony. We would hand out our own flowers to inform people of the dangers of flyers. This strategy was the one that we ultimately decided would prove the most effective, so we decided to go through with the execution and documentation of this method. Our flyers read: “Flyers – they’re the worst, am I right? Now you have a totally useless piece of paper that you didn’t need.”

Allie and Brian served as the photographers/documenters of the activity and Peter and I were the ones that were selected to hand out the flyers to people on the quad. We chose the corner right outside the Illini Union on the quad as our primary location. With two people serving as documenters and two as flyer people, we were able to get various perspectives on the activity. It was challenging to get some people to take the flyers, and sometimes it proved difficult to capture all the action on camera. We were successful in bringing a smile to many people’s faces, which wasn’t really an outcome we expected. I really believe we were able to bring awareness to the issue for most people through this method.

Out of all the strategies available to us, I think this method was most fitting because it was a comical twist to our viewpoint, and it was able to put a positive spin on what seemed like an issue that could’ve been opposed with more aggression. If we were to do things differently, I think we would’ve printed out more flyers and tried to capture more instances around campuses. We were thinking pretty small-scale when planning for this because we didn’t realize the impact it would have.

This project has taught me that protests are hard to push from one stage to the next. It has also taught me that things tend to always look different on paper. It is a totally different world when you are our executing your plans. Personally, I enjoyed being out in the world and interacting with my fellow peers. I especially loved putting a smile on people’s faces as they realized the flyer they were just handed was not what they were expecting.

DIY Video

Use different strategies that we originally planned

• Deny flyers
  • Distraction
  • Theft
  • Just say ‘NO’
• Make an online video
  • Showcase a ‘meta’ reference using footage of me making the video
• Hand out your own flyers
  • Show footage of us doing that
• Talk about dangers of flyers using dramatic storytelling (apocalyptic, manifesto viewpoints)
• (1-2 minutes)

 News Segment

• News intro (Illini News, something corny like that)
• Reporter/News Anchor reciting general outline of story
  • “Four students gathered in protest on the quad on Friday using an unlikely strategy”
  • “We have now one of the protestors…”
• Interview me, talking about the dangers of flyers, what we were doing on the quad, what we hope to accomplish
• Outro
• (1-2 minutes)

Picture Essay

(4-5 images)

Use DIY elements

Reactions of people, handing them out, picture of flyer, piles of them in a trash can