Love Goggles' in their advertising and promotional materials. In May 2007, when RIM unveiled its newly branded BlackBerry devices, the company introduced a marketing campaign that focused heavily on how the devices had changed the lives of users. One of the campaign's advertisements features a woman in bed in her apartment, surrounded by three men. The woman is shown wearing various 'blackberry' products. The man closest to her is holding what looks like a mobile phone – actually a BlackBerry, which he has been using surreptitiously to spy on the woman. The ad concludes with the man's response: 'This phone makes me horny', suggesting that spying on women is not only acceptable but expected. Viewers are invited to consider what he is doing as an act of romantic courtship. I am an avid user of BlackBerry email and have always made a point of carrying a device. I can remember sitting in my home office, playing computer games, and having the conversation on my BlackBerry interrupted by someone at the front door, asking for me. Now they have taken the concept of the 'horny BlackBerry' and applied it to something I have always held as a deeply personal and intimate expression of myself. It reminded me of the story that comedian Louis C.K. told of going to the doctor, where he was told that he needed to cut back on dairy and meat. 'But I'm on a diet', said Louis C.K., 'so I would have to cut out sex as well!' That's the problem with the BlackBerry, and its ilk: it doesn't discriminate. Its ubiquity – its massification – means it can be used as a sexual object and an object of surveillance at the same time. At home with my husband, I might be wearing a little red bikini top and a low-cut red blouse. Meanwhile, my husband might be holding a BlackBerry, watching a feed of me from afar, and 'making me horny'. Like a 'horny BlackBerry', one of the key cultural shifts that has occurred over the past few decades has been the increasing privatisation of public space. This is a process that is perhaps most easily represented in the decline of public baths and outdoor swimming pools as communal spaces, which were replaced by 'private' indoor swimming pools. The transition from outdoor to indoor bathing represents a symbolic loss of _public_ space, and with it, a loss of community. Baths were a place to engage with the community and the larger city, where community mattered in ways that were both private and political. While many public spaces have been privatised, commercial spaces (like restaurants and cafés) and public spaces in city centres have become increasingly commercialised. The decline of 'public' spaces – like libraries and city museums – has also meant the disappearance of many community spaces. Yet, in spite of its commercialisation, public space remains important in terms of the ways that it provides spaces of engagement and engagement in public discourse. Just as the privatisation of public space is about controlling private individuals' use of space, so the privatisation of public discourse – in particular its commercialisation – is about controlling public discourse and controlling the public's role in determining public issues and debate. We can't speak of any public or private space without considering the role of advertising and marketing. As a result, many of the most significant public debates about marketing and advertising today occur in public spaces, including the places where we gather and congregate: shopping malls, food courts, coffee shops and restaurants, museums and galleries. When we are in these public spaces, it is easy to forget that advertisers seek to control and manipulate our experience of the space. While not all advertising in public spaces is a pernicious attempt to exploit our humanity for commercial gain, it is worth acknowledging that there are times when public spaces are no longer places for a community to engage with each other; when these spaces have become 'playgrounds' for advertisers to manipulate our experience. This has happened because of the privatisation of public space and the control over public space that commercial activity has had in recent decades. The changing nature of public space and commercial space can be glimpsed in the case of the city of Amsterdam, which has been at the forefront of debates about the role of advertising in public spaces. In the 1980s, Amsterdam realised it needed to revitalise its core public spaces, in particular in the city centre. Many of these spaces – which included public squares, parks and shopping malls – had become commercial and corporate spaces. The city responded by banning billboards and other commercial signs, and by introducing new public space regulations. The goal was to make public space a place for everyone, rather than a place for the corporate elite. As a result, many corporations had already moved to the outskirts of the city, leaving the city centre relatively barren, or at least that's what the residents thought they would be. However, not everyone welcomed this new arrangement. City authorities found themselves in the unenviable position of allowing public space, which had once been open to all, to become even more exclusive to the private sector. By 2012, a study by the Dutch city's environmental protection agency, Milieu Brabant, revealed that the city was not achieving its aim of making public space for everyone. City officials were forced to admit that a lot of areas had become commercialised spaces. Rather than welcoming a more inclusive public, most people were finding themselves unwelcome in these public spaces, and were increasingly turning to public space in nearby neighbourhoods. The changes to the city's public space regulations (which had originally been designed to improve public space for all citizens) meant that the city could no longer control what was happening in the public realm. As a result of these new regulations, the city's public spaces are being increasingly commercialised – and the commercial space is not only being commercialised, but also privatised. The same logic applies to more private spaces – in particular the home. The way in which we live our lives has also changed dramatically, as most of us retreat indoors at the end of the day to the safety and comfort of our homes. In many ways, the city has become the new home. Yet, while this retreat to the home is ostensibly about safety, we also increasingly see the home as an investment opportunity and a source of value. We also see the home as a place for consumption and for our families to consume. For this reason, the home increasingly resembles a marketplace or shopping mall. Home is no longer a place where we gather and support one another. In many ways, the home has become little more than a space where we are consumed. While home was once seen as a site of refuge, a place where we could go to withdraw from the concerns of the wider world, now the home has become the very centre of our being. The home has become a place where we consume and consume and consume some more. As the home is increasingly colonised by an excess of advertising, so the home is also increasingly inhabited by products. These products – which can be both 'stuff' and 'intangible' – have become extensions of our bodies. These products – the stuff of our lives – now constitute an extension of ourselves, and even a new kind of body. The home has become the site of production, of consumption, of creation and, increasingly, of consumption. The home is being refashioned as a commodity, and we are increasingly invited to enter into a new kind of relationship with this commodity. To maintain the home, we too are required to consume. The commodities we produce to maintain our homes – like food, cars and entertainment – all require resources in order to function. These resources are not provided by our employer, or by a wealthy employer, they are provided by the market. When these resources are provided by the market, they are made available to us through our workplaces and communities. These resources are not only made available to us as consumers, but are also increasingly provided for free. In my opinion, this process is one of the primary reasons that wealth inequality is growing, and it shows no sign of abating. If we think about our homes as commodities, then the growth of the global market is ultimately about the commoditisation of home space. The commoditisation of the home is important because it is occurring at a time when our traditional sources of support have all been removed, leaving us increasingly dependent on our own resources. And there's the rub: it's not that we are less able to access the resources we need. It's that these resources are not being made available to us as they once were, and we no longer have the social networks to provide us with what we need. As we've seen, it's the 'commercialisation' of public space and private space that is important to the ways in which we see ourselves and how we value ourselves. As public spaces are increasingly commercialised and private space is increasingly privatised, it has had a profound impact on the way we relate to others. We often no longer have the opportunity to engage in the kinds of social and emotional exchanges that make us who we are. Our lives have become increasingly isolated. And yet, as we've seen, this has never been the case. There has always been a separation of public from private, and it is our understanding of this separation that is the cause of our increasing alienation from each other. Our increasing alienation, both in terms of public space and in terms of private space, is being driven by the commercialisation of our worlds. If we take up this idea of 'capitalist dualism', what we can say is that while capitalism is about the commodification of human