Young people respond positively to mystery and intrigue, not to mention hype, and advertising execs take advantage of their excitability. The older crowd tends to favor comfort and familiarity. Marketers exploit this through the repetition of images (namely, their logo) until they become as familiar as the faces of friends and family.

This method is also utilized by the hired studio geeks who write rehashed pop songs, and a similar tactic is employed by those who write screenplays, television scripts, late night talk show dialogues, etc. When someone sees the face of Andre the Giant all over the place for a long enough time, it becomes a source of ease and empowerment, no matter how incomprehensible its meaning is. Our reaction types are set in place at an early age, and that makes us easy to predict in the eyes of advertisers.

When vacuous advertisements start to pile up in your surroundings, it can bear down on your soul. Put another way- when your senses are bombarded by (ultimately) meaningless images and vacant jingles, you may begin to believe that your existence is meaningless. That's yet another reason for the OTG campaign: to help reclaim public spaces for self-expression. Of course, in this sense, OTG is in no way unique. Urban guerrilla art comes in many forms: graffiti, street theater, parody ads, and Billboard Liberation movements all have the common goal of making a statement and breaking the law at the same time. The urban landscape has become both warzone and wasteland, devoid of any vestige of humanity or humor. Guerrilla art splashes some much-needed color to these dirty, polluted, and ugly social centers. OTG stickers in particular can be found in almost every densely populated city on the globe, from San Francisco to New York to Atlanta.

Urban hellholes like these are getting a much-needed makeover, despite their legal code. Fairey has been arrested 5 times himself, all over the country. When he and his friends go on a sticker-slapping escapade (which OTGers call "bombing"), they typically do so in the dead of the night, and they are often forced to end these midnight raids in a footrace with the local po-lice. All in all, Shepard says it's worth the risk, and he doesn't mind laying low from the cops in his hometown of San Diego, where the friendly law enforcement agents have sent him threats via email.

Concerning the corporate takeover of public spaces, Shepard asks "Why should it be OK to shove billboards and other types of advertising in public spaces where people have no choice but to look at them, just because you have money?" Why shouldn't the general public have the freedom to express themselves alongside the billionaire monoliths? It seems the only way to reclaim our naturally inherited freedom to speak and be heard is to break the law, unless you're wealthy.

Advertisements express our ideas for us, and those ideas usually have something to do with eating or wearing clothes, which must be all anyone thinks about since that is the only thing being expressed. In a way, Shepard (and every other OTGer) is a criminal with a social conscious, though those terms are by nature mutually exclusive. With consumerism comes the commodification of art, philosophy, music, and everything else that makes us human. And though commodification may not kill these cultural hallmarks outright, it does nullify their impact and stagnate cultural evolution.

Street art and other intelligent criminal activities may be our only chance at a cultural renaissance amid the dead heap of McDonalds, MTV, and the Super Bowl. We could call this paradox "criminal culture"- the defiance of laws and conformity for the sake of art, literature, and philosophy (see: Hakim Bey).

Corporate powerhouses have often been compared to fascist regimes, and this may not be much of a stretch. If the analogy is valid, then advertising is the American equivalent of fascist propaganda. Fairey has made a joke of modern society's hypocrisy by juxtaposing the OTG design with famous images of communists and fascists like Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, and Vladimir Lenin.

He's emblazoned these new, more daring pieces with intimidating slogans like "You Are Under Surveillance", "Big Brother Andre" and "Always Remember to Obey Law Enforcement Officials, Giant." The Orwellian parallels have been apparent from the beginning.

The Andre image is reminiscent of Orwell's omnipresent icon Big Brother, who was a visual metaphor for the totalitarian state. Shepard has adapted OTG to represent the global marketplace, which doesn't literally watch our every move, but might as well. The hidden message behind corporate advertising is this: "Be like the rest of them or else!" The world is huge and imposing, and only those with a really serious death wish would dare to defy it, or so they'd like us to think. Corporate advertising isn't as obvious as fascist propaganda, and in a world full of people who are only capable of making surface judgments, advertisers can get away with their manipulations scotch-free. Make 'em feel pretty and they'll drop to their knees at your feet . . .

Now, if you've been paying attention, by now you probably believe Shepard Fairey is a Herculean torchbearer of the "underground ethic", but don't be fooled. As always, there's more to the story than you might have imagined. Shepard is one of the co-founders of a visual communications firm called Blk/Mrkt (Black Market). Blk/Mrkt is progressive, youthful, and edgy, and because of this they have the crusty baby-boomer CEOs frothing at the mouth. Blk/Mrkt has been contracted for projects from such colossal clients as PepsiCo, Virgin Records, Sony Music, DreamWorks, and Universal Pictures. Shepard helped mastermind the pre-release ad campaign for the 1999 Universal Studios blockbuster Man on the Moon, which featured full page spreads of Jim Carey as Andy Kauffman and Kauffman's alter-ego Tony Clifton. Blk/Mrkt has even lended the Andre icon to Listen.com for one of its ads. Of course this has raised the ever-present chorus of bitter counterculturalists shouting "Sellout!" But everyone has to make a living, and it would be foolish to pass up an opportunity to be rich and successful.

Shepard explains: "I'm tired of being poor." Fair enough. Whether he's a hypocrite or a sellout or whatever is a matter of personal judgment, but I think you should ask yourself two questions: "Is it wrong for someone to seemingly betray their philosophy, even if their message was part of a joke to begin with?" and "Does this represent mainstream culture exerting influence on the underground? Or is it the underground that's starting to change the mainstream? Who is bowing down to whom?"

OTG pokes fun at just about everything, including itself. It exposes a problem but does nothing to solve it. Indeed, its creator has used his attention-grabbing talents to carve a niche in the world of corporate propaganda that he so adamantly opposes. So where does this leave us? Probably, like me, you're just as dumbfounded now as you were the first time you saw an OTG sticker.

All irrelevant controversies aside, OTG is a compelling and forward-thinking movement. Culture is dead, we're going nowhere in particular, and no one is doing anything about it. OTG is about making people wonder. The face of Andre the Giant makes no direct statement or in-your-face social criticisms, it's there to open your eyes to a process we're entangled in everyday… by taking that process to its extreme. How else are people going to know they're being "victimized" (by choice, mind you) by repetitious stimuli that de-sensitizes the nervous system and ultimately leads to dullness? Some might think that these stimuli are there to make them happy, but they're really designed to make docile sheep of us all.

If pop culture seems to you like a virile blob oozing into every nook and cranny on the planet, then that probably means you are alive and aware. History needs you. Without progressive campaigns and attention-grabbing gimmicks like OTG, we may just end up ravenously gorging ourselves on all our available resources, waking up to nothing but the pool of vomit we passed out in. 'They' call it "conspicuous consumption" because that's exactly what it is: an open field orgy of gluttonous lust and greed.