________________________________________________________________________________ See also: Interview with Activist Naomi Klein on her new book No Logo http://infoculture.cbc.ca/archives/bookswr/ bookswr_01182000_naomikleininterview.phtml Branding is taking up more and more of our public space. Logos are on billboards, televisions and computers. Even our bodies have become the backdrop for corporate advertising. Naomi Klein sees a backlash brewing to all this branding and she's written about it in her new book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. No Logo: Solutions for a Sold Planet Book by Naomi Klein (Review in the Village Voice December 1999 by Danielle Truscott) If any notions of a warm and fuzzy global economy dishing out equality and prosperity for all are still standing, Naomi Klein's No Logo: Solutions for a Sold Planet deftly pulls the rug out from under them and sends them sprawling. The 1990s have seen widespread media coverage of the fallout from what Klein calls the ''global logo web'': multinational corporations' sweatshop scandals and environmental mayhem, Silicon Valley's overwhelmingly temp- laden labor force, the perverse economy of style in which ghetto kids create cool-hunted images for brands they can't afford to own (and sometimes kill to). Evidence is abundant and the public has been alerted: The information age's global economy of groovy Gaps, Starbucks, and Microsofts isn't as cool as it pledged to be. Klein gathers all the evidence in No Logo, which is nothing short of a complete, user-friendly handbook on the negative effects that '90s überbrand marketing has had on culture, work, and consumer choice. Likewise, she offers an encyclopedic compilation of the decade's fringe and mainstream anticorporate actions and mind- sets, proposing that they signal the approach of ''a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition.'' Culture- jamming adbusters turn Joe Camel into Joe Chemo on billboards and Web sites, while an expanding network of labor, environmental, and human rights organizations stages protests at Niketowns, Shell stations, and McDonald's outlets with campaigns that bring ''a brand's production secrets crashing into its marketing image.'' A high-tech savvy, Internet- armed youth culture has shifted its politics away from identity issues and toward anticorporate concerns, says Klein, creating a generation of potential rabble- rousers poised to take on the multinational corporations' monolith using its own technologies and marketing strategies. Klein leaves no doubt that the public, and most notably the younger public, is increasingly questioning whether the new world order brings global village or global pillage. But her faith in a coming tsunami of anticorporate sentiment and activism seems painfully optimistic: If nothing else convinces you that tendrils of a tyrannical logo-based economy have wound themselves nearly irretrievably into every nook and cranny of our lives and consciousness, this book certainly will. Still, by delivering its news in a voice and style rich with language, references, and humor sure to reach a generation of Most Likely to Be Future Activists, No Logo may itself be one of the anticorporate movement's best hopes yet. No Logo: Solutions for a Sold Planet By Naomi Klein Picador, 334 pp., $25 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org