Billboard Liberation Front

"Picture this: you're driving, it's 8 A.M.. coffee is clutched to your chest as you amble toward work in a stupor. You look up, and a billboard for a radio station that used to read 'HITS HAPPEN—NEW X 100' now reads 'SHIT HAPPENS—NEW EXXON.' Whoa! That snaps you out of your trance."

That's one example of the work of the Billboard Liberation Front, who have been modifying, mocking, and manipulating public-facing media since 1977. My favorite:

Laughing Squid has a copy of the BLF's press release, celebrating AT&T's collaboration with NSA in 2008. In 2015, the truly vast scale of that collaboration came to light, a few years after the BLF had retired.

The good news is that the BLF's website is still up, hosting the guide "The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement" (PDF), so you don't have to write away to Processed World magazine and hope they have a copy (they stopped making new zines in 2005).

And despite the fact that the BLF is all for modifying corporate messages, they also realize that there's some schmuck whose job is to maintain those billboards, so they never paint or damage the billboard. Instead, to make it easy and safe, the BLF leaves instructions for the workers to restore the billboard to its original, boring state.