The first step to confronting advertising is to stop seeing it as a form of commercialized communication and start considering it to be a kind of pollution. Think about the long-term mental consequences of seeing a Nike swoosh dozens of times a day from birth until death, for example, or whether repetitive exposure to American Apparel’s patriarchal imagery might damage our psyches. Questions like these get at the heart of advertising and lead us to mental environmentalism.

After surveying the near victory of 1848, Mikhail Bakunin wrote that to achieve a global revolution we must first convince the populace “that an invincible force lives in the people, which nothing and no one can withstand, and that if it has not yet liberated the people it is because it is powerful only when it is concentrated and acts simultaneously, everywhere, jointly, in concert, and until now it has not done so.”

Today, we are closer than ever to unleashing our invincible power.