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The hot book on corporate clout: Are we all ready to stop shopping? I know I could get away with not shopping for a year -- I certainly have enough stuff. But you'd have to stop shopping too, because otherwise I'd feel competitive and deprived, which is not a good thing. Likely to make me feel depressed. Repressed. In fact if everyone stopped shopping but two or three hundred thousand outlaw rich people, well, there'd be a lot of depressed people around and that would be called a recession. I can't figure out whether Naomi Klein is way beyond the curve, or just ahead of it. In her titanic, exhaustive No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies," she diagnoses our collective illness, marshalling facts, incidents and statistics to show that, as a culture, we are sick unto death. Sick of being branded, massaged, manipulated and used by corporate marketers and advertising agencies, she charges that we, and our brains, are quite literally dying, losing the ability to make actual choices, or determine even the tiniest part of our lives. We are slaves to Nike, the Gap, and a thousand other corporations who create "lifestyle" brands we can't live without and by which we identify ourselves, in a roster of new tribes. Not content with that, the brand bullies have bigger plans, hoping to fill every centimetre of public and private space with their logos and products, projecting images on the moon, raking signs in the sand, wiping out small competitors and eradicating the last vestige of individualism and personal choice, except the choice of whether to buy Nike or Adidas, Gap or CK. Add to this that they use the images and meaning of the last great cultural upheavals: the rebels of the '60s, the punks of the '70s and the race and gender debaters of the '80s to sell this slavery to us. They tell us that you're only cool and revolutionary, and in a nice contradiction, that you only belong, if they own your sorry ass. In a final insult, Klein details with irrefutable evidence, horrible statistic piling upon horrible statistic, the appalling conditions in EPZs (export processing zones), tax- and labour-law sheltered factory areas in foreign countries where subcontractors produce all these fancy brands. In EPZs, developing-world children, teenagers and chronically poor men and women are virtually enslaved and in disgusting circumstances, without proper food, medical care or safe living conditions. If workplace activism occurs, the companies fold up, literally in the middle of the night, move on to the next disaster area and set up their machines and tin sheds. Not only analyst, Klein is prosecuting attorney. One of her battalion of charges is the accusation that brand managers (the true evildoers in her morality play) are fighting to make their brands the subject of education, not an elective but the core curriculum. The brands have already hijacked journalism, sports and music. But young consumers are the most valuable, so CK, Kelloggs, Disney and McDonald's wrap textbooks, cafeteria food, bicycle racks, libraries and bathroom stalls in glossy ads. And the brand managers are pushing to have their products used as teaching aids: how to build a Nike sneaker, a study guide for the Disney cartoon movie Fanastasia. Nor is this the most pernicious inroad that marketers and brand bullies are making into our intellectual life. At universities, corporations are funding research, and priceless academic credibility and research facilities are being used by the brands to design new Nike skates, develop more efficient oil extraction techniques for Shell or assess the Asian market's stability for Disney. Any research that diminishes the rights of citizens, and increases the profits of corporations is funded; any that doesn't, goes begging. In media companies, news arms can't properly report on their parent companies. The magazines at Time-Warner are encouraged to feature Warner movies and music and the AOL merger. Journalists and editors censor themselves, though sometimes head office weighs in with direct orders. "I would prefer that ABC not cover Disney," said Michael Eisner. And it doesn't. Klein is not alone in this attitude, viz. the Battle of Seattle. Kalle Lasn, of Adbusters magazine and the Media Foundation, and author of Culture Jam: The Uncooling Of America, works very much the same vein. We, the unwitting tools of exceedingly clever, manipulative and cruel marketing people are slaves to our lives as consumers. The only solution is a wholesale turning upside down of everything we think we currently value and putting in this place a new set of rules and societal norms that someone (who -- Klein? Lasn? underemployed twenty-somethings?) considers better for us. Both Klein and Lasn are wise to the fact that today's blandished readers can't absorb unremitting dirges and a good third of each book details the rising resistance to corporate rule, the agitprop, protests, culture jamming and civil actions that are attempting to turn this trend around. Linked by the Internet, coached by activists of the last generation, and committed to a slippery, jokey, new kind of protest, the 20 year olds of this generation, the activists in Seattle, are heroes to Klein and Lasn, and according to them, may yet save our sorry asses. Klein, a former columnist at the Toronto Star and editor of the left-wing This Magazine, is 29, and the daughter of an American draft-dodger who came to Canada, with his wife, during the Vietnam War. Some of the most seductive passages in this book are her memories of family drives into the Canadian wilderness, while she, in her mind, criticizes her unfashionable, uncool, unglossy parents and the barren, brandless, unglossy Canadian wilderness. She grew up as a Barbie addict, and turned into a gender-equity advocate at university, seemingly uninterested in her parents radical views except as how they applied to feminism. She has made up for that with No Logo. If anything, this book is a homage to '60s ideals and a generic, distinctionless hatred of capitalism. It is a rallying cry to civil disobedience, and primer for direct action against corporate rule. It is also, despite its exhaustive and convincing arguments, almost completely wrong- headed. First of all, are we really to consider ourselves that dumb and unconscious? The week after I read No Logo, I found myself in Wal- Mart and Zellers. Most of the shoppers were working poor or new immigrants, who wouldn't be shopping except for the prices offered by the big box stores. They were absolutely thrilled to be there. I saw an entire immigrant family -- mom, dad, five kids - - dressed head to toe in Nike and Adidas gear. They were beaming with pride, they were signifying their ambitions to be hard-working, team players, winners. Crude perhaps, but a better team to join than the racist, classist, religious tribes of even 30 years ago. The five billion people who live in developing countries desperately need globalization to haul them out of chronic poverty into any kind of working economy with education and health systems. Does Klein really believe that laws will improve EPZs? The factories, less viable, will move or close, pitching the workers back to starvation or prostitution. Without global trade, brands and shopping, and the faster growth it brings, none of these people will have a better life, education or health. It is not for nothing that economics has been called the grim science. Finally Klein completely ignores, as if it didn't exist, the human potential movement that almost completely dominates cultural life outside the intellectual elites in the first world. That movement is slowly (and, I admit, using a very bad vocabulary) teaching people to be more individual, to believe in themselves, to grow and evolve, to make educated decisions based on their own feelings and reasoning. Unfortunately for Klein and Lasn, who take the moral position of privileged rich kids who think everyone (right now) should have their sophistication and taste, we are all still evolving out of our racial tribes -- where we mostly believed in superstition and prejudice -- into modern citizens who shop in order to belong. Live with it, because in a couple of years, it'll mutate again. Klein, Lasn and the culture jammers are probably showing us our next step. We are going to want clean products that haven't polluted the environment, that have a "no sweat" label on them, whose advertisers aren't in our face all the time. No doubt we are growing into that. But we will have made those millions of decisions by ourselves, thanks, in part, to the work of people like Klein and Lasn but mostly because we have managed to inform ourselves, and made our own decisions -- not because a set of legal restraints have been placed on the producers of the world, and a new Ministry of Correct Advertising is controlling our public space, at our expense. Growing up, as a person or a culture, remains something you have to do yourself.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.