On Respectful Space — Online and in the Street

Try, for a moment, to close your eyes and picture an ordinary walk through the centre of a larger Czech city. Billboards above crossroads, advertising banners stretched across entire building facades, flashing LED screens in shopping arcades, posters pasted over posters. Now open your phone — endless scrolling, notifications designed to pull you back again, videos that start playing before you can say no.

These are two different environments, physical and digital, yet they share the same underlying principle: both were designed to claim our attention, not to serve us.

Attention as a Mined Resource

In the digital world, this is commonly known as the "attention economy". The longer you look, the more someone earns. This principle underpins the design of infinite scrolling, autoplay videos, and notifications built around reward psychology — mechanisms that are no accident, but the result of careful testing to discover what keeps us staring at a screen a few minutes longer, even when it does us no good.

A similar principle, just in physical form, operates in public space as well. Advertising surfaces in cities generate real money — for landlords, advertising agencies, and partly for municipal budgets too. The question, however, is whether the balance between what a handful of entities earn this way and what the quality and calm of public space loses for everyone else is genuinely fair. In many cities today, the density and aggressiveness of advertising feels less like a carefully considered equilibrium and more like the result of maximising profit from every available square metre.

This Is Not "the Natural Course of the Market"

It is easy to say: this is simply how things work today, that's the market, nothing to be done about it. But it is worth pausing to recognise that none of these environments fell from the sky as some immutable law of nature. They are the result of a series of deliberate decisions — someone who designed an algorithm to maximise time spent on a platform, someone who decided to rent out every available facade they could reach. Decisions can be made differently.

And in fact, that is already starting to happen, at least in part. Some cities now regulate the density and size of advertising surfaces in their historic centres. Some technology companies are beginning — slowly, and often more under regulatory pressure than out of their own initiative — to offer settings that give users back control over what disturbs them and how often. This shows that it is more a question of priorities than some irreversible law of nature.

Not Extremes, but Balance

There is no need to fall into either extreme — neither the naive notion that advertising or commercial space should disappear entirely, nor the resigned acceptance that anything which makes money is therefore acceptable regardless of what it costs others. A healthy answer lies somewhere in the middle — in the approach sometimes described today as compassionate capitalism: yes to business and profit, but with an awareness of responsibility towards the people and environment in which that business takes place. A company and a web developer can make a living without having to resort to infinite scrolling or aggressive visual noise.

What This Means for Web Developers

This way of thinking has a practical impact on how websites can be built today. A website does not need dozens of pop-up windows, artificial "last chance" countdowns, or notifications designed to trigger anxiety about missing out. It can be fast, clear, get straight to the point, and respect the time of the person who came to it — and still fulfil its commercial purpose entirely.

Perhaps it is time, more than ever, to ask whether "successful" necessarily has to mean the same thing as "aggressive". A calm, honest, and uncluttered presentation increasingly feels like a relief — and relief is something people are willing to come back for.

What a Business That Doesn't Need to Shout Could Look Like

Let us push this idea further. What if it were possible to run a successful business without having to claim every available square metre of attention — whether on a screen or on a building facade? This is not a naive wish. There are companies today that prove it in practice, and it is worth pausing to consider them.

A good example is the Czech company Prusa Research, led by Josef Průša. The company never built its growth on billboards or aggressive advertising campaigns. Instead, it became known through what it actually does: openly shared technical know-how, honest products, talks at events such as Maker Faire, technical discussions and contributions shared with the community on LinkedIn, and a visible willingness to help when needed — the company was among those that quietly, and without any great media fanfare, sent printers and medical supplies to Ukraine at a time when it was genuinely about help, not publicity. For his contribution, Josef Průša received a state honour from the President of the Republic — not for an advertising campaign, but for a real impact on the field and on the country.

This is precisely the model worth developing: a company that is so useful and so transparent that people seek it out of their own accord, rather than having it pushed into their attention by someone else. It is not about doing no marketing at all — it is about the strongest marketing being a consequence of genuine value, not a substitute for it.

Three Pillars of a Business That Could Work Differently

If we were to imagine what such an economy might look like on a broader scale — not just among individual exceptional companies — three pillars emerge:

Honesty as a starting point, not a competitive advantage. Today, companies that do not lie in their advertising and do not manipulate the design of their products present themselves as exceptions, something extra. In a healthier version of the market, this would simply be the standard — and companies that fall short would pay for it in lost trust and customers, rather than getting away with it as "just the way business works".

Consent rather than unilateral pressure. Instead of a model where a company unilaterally decides how aggressively it will "compete for a customer's attention", it would make far more sense to give people greater control over how much and what kind of communication they want to receive from whom — and companies would learn to be persuasive through the quality of their offering, not the frequency of their interruptions.

Broad public benefit as part of the profit calculation, not as a PR add-on. Profit and meaningful contribution to society do not have to be conflicting goals. A company can be profitable while not burdening public space, not using psychological tricks against its own customers, and contributing to something greater than a quarterly earnings statement — without having to make an ostentatious advertising campaign out of any of it.

What Society Would Gain

Were this approach to spread more widely, the benefits go beyond prettier streets or a calmer phone in your pocket. The chronic overload of advertising and attention-seeking design has a real impact on mental wellbeing — on the ability to concentrate, on levels of anxiety, and on the degree to which people (and increasingly children) come to treat constant stimulation as a normal state of affairs. An environment that does not shout for attention from every corner gives the brain room to rest — and that is something that will affect not only the current generation, but the next one too.

This is not about waiting for some great revolution from above. It is about the fact that every company, every web developer, every owner of an advertising surface makes small decisions that accumulate. And the more companies choose the path of honesty and service over the noisy competition for attention, the more real the idea of a market becomes where prosperity and calm are not opposites — but two sides of the same coin.