Bidding Concludes for Lunar Billboard Space
The Free Market Astronomical Union presided this week over the first-ever interplanetary property auction, awarding contracts for advertisement slots on the surface of Earth’s moon to various international conglomerates.
For those hiding under those freshly minted pet moon rocks, the FMAU was created in the wake of a unanimous UN resolution last summer which unilaterally threw open the doors to the commercialization of extraterrestrial resources. The only proviso was submission of business plans by interested parties to ad hoc review committees, recently dubbed “the egregiousness police” on social media.
Immediately following the FMAU’s inception, countries around the world joined forces in pushing their fervor for laissez-faire class violence into the depths of space, a love affair played out in newly spectacular scenes such as the installation of absurdly decadent company headquarters in orbit, a concept our species once had the dignity to laugh at. The US federal government hasn’t yet made the decision whether to formally join this not-so-ragtag club of filthy rich astronauts (psyc your congressbots), but that doesn’t mean good old American enterprise is being left behind. No sirree.
Louisiana firm Lamar Advertising Company, purveyors of fine highway driving distractions, submitted its inventive proposal for advertisements on the fucken moon to the UN General Assembly at the end of last year. Deeming the plan “an innocuous extension of present-day terrestrial psychosocial influences”, the egregiousness police ruled the undertaking to be in line with the spirit of 1967’s Outer Space Treaty, the foundation for much of the world’s space law over the last fifty years.
Ever the shrewd opportunists, traditional advertising companies did not miss the chance to turn the auction into a spectacle, with YouTube, Twitch, and Third Life flying popular personalities to Lamar’s HQ in Baton Rouge and raking in millions as the world turned to watch its cosmic heritage sliced into assets like so much cheese.
Bidding concluded fairly quickly, with AI-driven automated trading systems assessing ROI and calculating bid limits for the wealthiest companies. The rest played out like an excessively flashy county fair, and the leases for all the moon’s surface were signed for up to a year hence. (Editor’s note: We were unable to include photos of the event because of laughably prohibitive licensing costs. Please, for the love of irony, disable your adblocker.)
The new medium will be powered by NASA’s former Deep Space Network, a worldwide series of stations designed to allow telecommunication with space missions no matter where they floated over the planet. With NASA’s shrinking budget and the death of hope and scientific ideals, the agency has turned to unconventional funding sources, and has begun retrofitting the DSN locations with hyper-powerful laser projectors atop video masts that will project in concert with each other 24/7.
Concerned members of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have begun efforts to fight moon-based advertisements in the courts and in the hearts of the people, but have reported difficulty retaining anyone’s attention.
Broadcasts on the moon begin in earnest June first. For synchronized audio, tune to 109FM anywhere in the world.