No Logo.
by Naomi Klein.
No Logo at Ten at Ten
As I write this introduction, thinking about how much branding has changed in ten years, a couple of developments seem worth mentioning off the top. In May of 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited-edition line called "Absolut No Label." The company"s global public relations manager Kristina Hagbard explains that, "for the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what"s on the outside, it"s the inside that really matters.... We encourage people to think twice about their prejudice, because in an Absolut world, there are no labels."
A few months later, Starbucks tried to avoid being judged by its own label by opening its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This "stealth Starbucks" (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with "one-of-a-kind" fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes-all to help develop what the company called "a community personality." Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: "inspired by Starbucks." Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the very same piece of retail s.p.a.ce, "This one is definitely a little neighborhood coffee shop." After spending two decades blasting its logo onto 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.
Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo No Logo. But in the past ten years I have written very little about developments like these. I realized why while reading William Gibson"s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition Pattern Recognition. The book"s protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man. So strong is this "morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace" that she has the b.u.t.tons on her Levi"s jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realized that I had a similar affliction. It was not one of those conditions that you are born with but one that develops, over time, due to prolonged overexposure. I didn"t used to be allergic to brands. As I confess in the pages of this book, as a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to them. But writing No Logo No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad culture-four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring required four years of total immersion in ad culture-four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, attending corporate seminars on brand management, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns. And watching some of the worst movies ever made while taking notes in the dark on product placement. for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, attending corporate seminars on brand management, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns. And watching some of the worst movies ever made while taking notes in the dark on product placement.
Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had pa.s.sed some kind of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand allergy. Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because once No Logo No Logo was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet c.o.ke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper. was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet c.o.ke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.
The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created: No Logo. From studying brands like Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with the basic tenet of brand management: find your message, trademark and protect it and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergized platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature film, TV series, clothing line...) were rejected. So were the ones from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me to give them seminars on why they were so hated (there was a career to be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anticorporate dominatrix, making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were). And against all sensible advice, I stuck by the decision not to trademark the t.i.tle (that means no royalties from a line of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely olive oil).
Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject. Less than a year after No Logo No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada"s new superstore and toward the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. "But aren"t you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. "Probably," I would respond. "But I try to be a really c.r.a.p one." came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada"s new superstore and toward the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. "But aren"t you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. "Probably," I would respond. "But I try to be a really c.r.a.p one."
Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place. The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited job options available to me and my peers-the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labor to produce the branded gear sold to us. As a token "youth columnist," I also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching onto previously protected non-corporate s.p.a.ces-schools, museums, parks-while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.
I decided to write No Logo No Logo when I realized these seemingly disparate trends were connected by a single idea-that corporations should produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn"t a running shoe company, it is about when I realized these seemingly disparate trends were connected by a single idea-that corporations should produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn"t a running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports the idea of transcendence through sports, Starbucks isn"t a coffee shop chain, it"s about the idea of community the idea of community. Down on earth these epiphanies meant that many companies that had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike model: close your factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors and pour your resources into the design and marketing required to fully project your big idea. Or they went for the Microsoft model: maintain a tight control center of shareholder/employees who perform the company"s "core competency" and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called these restructured companies "hollow corporations" because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of things so they could be an utterly unenc.u.mbered brand. As corporate guru Tom Peters, quoted in this book, put it: "You"re a d.a.m.n fool if you own it!"
The frantic corporate quest to get out of the product business and into the ideas business explained several trends at once. Companies were constantly on the lookout for new meaningful ideas, as well as pristine s.p.a.ces on which to project them, because creating meaning was their new act of production. And of course jobs were getting crummier: these companies no longer saw producing things as their "core" business.
For me, the appeal of x-raying brands like Nike or Starbucks was that pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing-from how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain to industrial agriculture and commodity prices. Next thing you knew you were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in these wild-west rules through free-trade deals and at the World Trade Organization, and made following them the precondition of receiving much-needed loans from the International Monetary Fund. In short, you were talking about how the world works.
By the time No Logo No Logo came out, the movement the book doc.u.ments in its nascent form was already at the gates of the powerful inst.i.tutions that were spreading corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New Delhi, in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What the corporate media insisted on calling the "antiglobalization movement" was nothing of the sort. At the reformist end it was anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anti-capitalist. But, as I doc.u.ment in this book, what made it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments meant that when I was on book tour, there were many more interesting things to talk about than logos-like where this movement came from, what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym of "globalization." It was a thrilling period and on a personal level, I was deeply relieved not to have to read came out, the movement the book doc.u.ments in its nascent form was already at the gates of the powerful inst.i.tutions that were spreading corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New Delhi, in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What the corporate media insisted on calling the "antiglobalization movement" was nothing of the sort. At the reformist end it was anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anti-capitalist. But, as I doc.u.ment in this book, what made it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments meant that when I was on book tour, there were many more interesting things to talk about than logos-like where this movement came from, what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym of "globalization." It was a thrilling period and on a personal level, I was deeply relieved not to have to read Advertising Age Advertising Age anymore. anymore.
In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had finished with: re-reading the branding gurus quoted in this book. Guys like Peters ("Brand! Brand!! Brand!!! That"s the message...for the late "90s and beyond.") and Scott Bedbury ("a great brand raises the bar-it adds a greater sense of purpose to the experience"). This time, however, it wasn"t to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House-first under the presidency of George W. Bush and now under Barack Obama, the first U.S. president who is also a superbrand.
There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled-the illegal invasions, the defiant defenses of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration"s most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the U.S. government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a sh.e.l.l-or a brand-was approached with tremendous focus and precision. They were good at this. Explaining his administration"s mission, Bush"s budget director Mitch Daniels said, "The general idea-that the business of government is not to provide services, but to make sure that they are provided-seems self-evident to me."
One company that took over many of those services was Lockheed Martin, the world"s largest defense contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn"t run the United States," observed a 2004 New York Times New York Times expose. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it.... It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs s.p.a.ce flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft." expose. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it.... It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs s.p.a.ce flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."
No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush"s much-maligned defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent twenty-odd years in the private sector, heading pharmaceutical and technology companies and sitting on the boards of such blue-chip firms as Sears and Kellogg"s, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. He entered the Defense Department not with the posture of a public servant but channeling a celebrity CEO-the guy with the guts to downsize and offsh.o.r.e and, most of all, rebrand. For Rumsfeld, his department"s brand ident.i.ty was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said, sounding very much like Bill Gates, "we should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and effectively." And channeling Tom Peters, he argued, it"s time "to stop thinking about things, numbers of things and ma.s.s." Addressing the Department of Defense in September 2001, Rumsfeld wanted to know, "Why is DoD one of the last organizations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry exists to run warehouses efficiently, why do we own and operate so many of our own? At bases around the world, why do we pick up our own garbage and mop our own floors, rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?" Rumsfeld even went after the sacred cow of the military establishment: health care for soldiers. Why were there so many doctors? Rumsfeld wanted to know. "Some of those needs, especially where they may involve general practice or specialties unrelated to combat, might be more efficiently delivered by the private sector."
The laboratory for this radical vision was Iraq under U.S. occupation. From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart vice president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed-a just-in-time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiraled out of U.S. control, an ever more elaborate privatized war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army. Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for U.S. envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi Army in 2004. And as the war moved into the jails, with tens of thousands of Iraqis rounded up by U.S. soldiers, private contractors even performed prisoner interrogations, with some facing accusations of torture. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate city-state, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled by Halliburton. Just as companies like Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war. And when one of the contractors screwed up-Blackwater operatives opening fire in Baghdad"s Nisour Square in 2007, for instance, leaving seventeen people dead, or Halliburton allegedly supplying contaminated water to soldiers-the Bush administration, like so many hollow brands before, was free to deny responsibility: these were independent contractors, they could argue, there was nothing the government could do but review the contract. Blackwater, which had prided itself on being the Disney of mercenary companies, complete with a line of branded clothing and Blackwater teddy bears, responded to the scandals by-what else?-rebranding. Its new name is Xe Services.
The dream of a hollow state was realized in its purest form at the Department of Homeland Security, a branch of government that, because it was brand new, could be built as an empty sh.e.l.l from the start. Jane Alexander, deputy director of the research wing of the DHS, explained, "We don"t make things. If it doesn"t come from industry, we are not going to be able to get it." She sounded like former Nike CEO Phil Knight when he explained back in the nineties that, "There is no value in making things anymore." Unlike Nike, however, which tells its contractors what kind of products to make, the Department of Homeland Security didn"t even do that. When it decided it needed to build "virtual fences" on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, for instance, Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the department, sent the word out to contractors: "This is an unusual invitation.... We"re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business." The department"s inspector general explained that Homeland Security "does not have the capacity needed to effectively plan, oversee and execute the [Secure Border Initiative] program."
That same kind of can"t-do att.i.tude applied even when the financial system imploded in the fall of 2008 and the U.S. Treasury stepped in with a $700-billion bank bailout. Not only did it fail to attach meaningful strings to the money, but it announced that it did not have the capacity to administer the program. It needed to outsource the rescue of the banks to the very banks that created the disaster and were receiving the bailout funds. A case in point was The Bank of New York Mellon, which received $3 billion. The bank was also awarded the juiciest "master custodian" contract, worth an estimated $20 million, to administer the bailout. As Bank of New York Mellon President Gerald Ha.s.sell explained, "It"s the ultimate outsourcing-because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not have the mechanics to run the entire program, and we"re essentially the general contractor across the entire program."
It was a striking admission. By the end of eight years of self-immolation under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government-the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles-but it no more did the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike"s Beaverton campus actually st.i.tched running shoes. Governing, it seemed, was not its core competency.
The Bush administration"s determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. First came Charlotte Beers, hired as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite the seniority of the post, Beers had no previous diplomatic experience. She had, however, held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, where she built brands for everything from dog food to power drills. When Secretary of State Colin Powell came under criticism for the appointment, he shrugged it off: "There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We are selling a product. We need someone who can rebrand American foreign policy, rebrand diplomacy." Besides, he said, "She got me to buy Uncle Ben"s rice."
Only a few months in, the experiment was in disarray. Beers"s propaganda materials were greeted with derision. And when she went on a mission to Egypt to improve the perception of the United States among Arab opinion makers, Beers ended up getting lectured on U.S. military bases, blanket support for Israel and wars with unacceptably high levels of civilian casualties. After Beers quietly returned to the private sector, the same thing happened to her successor, Karen Hughes, when she went on several "listening tours," focusing in particular on forging a bond as a "working mother" with Muslim women. In Ankara, she was informed by a group of Turkish women"s rights activists that the idea that the United States was an advocate for women"s freedoms would remain laughable so long as the occupation of Iraq continued. "This war is really, really bringing your positive efforts to the level of zero," Hidayet Sefkatli Tuksal, an activist with the Capital City Women"s Forum, told Hughes. Fatma Nevin Vargun, a Kurdish feminist, added that, "War makes the rights of women completely erased, and poverty comes after war-and women pay the price." Hughes kept a low profile for the remainder of her tenure.
Watching these cringeful attempts to rebrand American during the Bush years, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. "I"d be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate Slate magazine. "They"d say, "We need to get our people out there on more media." I"d say, "It"s not so much the packaging, it"s the substance that"s giving us trouble."" Exactly. A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. You can"t get the whole world to change its opinion of it just by getting "out there [to] tell our story," as Charlotte Beers put it. America didn"t have a branding problem; surely it had a product problem. magazine. "They"d say, "We need to get our people out there on more media." I"d say, "It"s not so much the packaging, it"s the substance that"s giving us trouble."" Exactly. A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. You can"t get the whole world to change its opinion of it just by getting "out there [to] tell our story," as Charlotte Beers put it. America didn"t have a branding problem; surely it had a product problem.
I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more battered-Bush was to his country what New c.o.ke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. "The election and nomination process is the brand relaunch of the year," declared David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe, Middle East and Africa, a global public relations giant. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine Paper Magazine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.
So, it seemed that the United States government could could solve its reputation problems with branding-it"s just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today"s tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desiree Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama"s top advisor, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to solve its reputation problems with branding-it"s just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today"s tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desiree Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama"s top advisor, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to Business Week Business Week "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from Cablevision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshaled every tool in the modern marketing a.r.s.enal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); user-generated content (Obama Girl? Genius!); a thirty-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred). "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from Cablevision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshaled every tool in the modern marketing a.r.s.enal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); user-generated content (Obama Girl? Genius!); a thirty-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).
The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas front man will. i. am, featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther King-esque Obama speech, I thought-finally, a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat out Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the a.s.sociation of National Advertisers" top annual award, Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the nineties, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama"s cache (to wit: Pepsi-Cola"s "Choose Change" campaign, Ikea"s "Embrace Change "09" and Southwest Airlines" offer of "Yes You Can" tickets).
Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J. Crew saw its stock price increase 200 percent in the first six months of Obama"s presidency, thanks in part to Mich.e.l.le"s well known fondness for the brand. Obama"s much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama economy"-the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires-at $2.5 billion. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Desiree Rogers, the White House"s social secretary, got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with magazine put the size of "the Obama economy"-the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires-at $2.5 billion. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Desiree Rogers, the White House"s social secretary, got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she said. "Our possibilities are endless."
The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro Man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-nineties branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional "experiences"-branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favorite brands. Desiree Rogers sounds just like those branding gurus when she speaks about the White House as the "crown jewel" of the Obama brand, a physical s.p.a.ce where the administration can embody the values of transparency, change and diversity that drew so many voters out on Election Day.
That means much talk of the importance of healthy eating ("Let"s hear it for vegetables!" Mich.e.l.le and a gaggle of school children cheered at the unveiling of the South Lawn garden. "Let"s hear it for fruit!")-but also field trips to Five Guys Burgers so no one thinks the Obamas are too preachy. It means corralling A-list celebrities to perform random acts of mentorship-but also staying down-to-earth enough to redecorate the girls" bedrooms at Pottery Barn. And most of all it has meant, in addition to the usual state dinners, an endless procession of multicultural celebrations: the fountain dyed green on Saint Patrick"s Day, a seder on Pa.s.sover, a special gathering for the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo. As a brand, the Obama White House"s ident.i.ty is probably closest to Starbucks: hip, progressive, approachable-a small luxury you can feel good about even during tough economic times.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with this. Why shouldn"t a president who wants to change the country benefit from marketing as good as Starbucks and Nike? Every transformative movement in history has used strong graphic design, catchy slogans and, yes, fashion to build its base. Fifteen years ago, Nike appropriated the imagery of the civil rights movement and the icons of sixties counterculture to inspire cult-like devotion to running shoes. Obama has used our faded memories of those same movements to revive interest in actual politics; surely that"s a step up. So the problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.
Though it"s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favors the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison-while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorized torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Similarly, he will slam the unacceptable greed of banking executives, even as he hands the reins of the economy to consummate Wall Street insiders Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, who have predictably rewarded the speculators and failed to break up the banks. And most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase-even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (his pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers" Si Se Puede Si Se Puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programs. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents like FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, const.i.tute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy." And then their highest compliment: "Mr. Obama somehow managed to be both c.o.ke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player." had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy." And then their highest compliment: "Mr. Obama somehow managed to be both c.o.ke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."
Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his gra.s.sroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-Party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic Party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in the White House.
Does Obama"s failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? It didn"t at first. An international study by Pew"s Global Att.i.tudes Project, conducted five months after he took office, asked people whether they were confident Obama would "do the right thing in world affairs." Despite the fact that there was already plenty of evidence that Obama was continuing many of Bush"s core international policies (albeit with a far less arrogant style), the vast majority said they approved of Obama-in Jordan and Egypt, a fourfold increase from the Bush era. In Europe the change in att.i.tude could give you whiplash: Obama had the confidence of 91 percent of French respondents and 86 percent of Britons-compared with 13 percent and 16 percent respectively under Bush. The poll was proof that "Obama"s presidency essentially erased the battering the USA"s image took during eight years of the Bush administration," according to USA Today USA Today. David Axelrod puts it like this: "What has happened is that anti-Americanism isn"t cool anymore."
That was certainly true, and had very real consequences. Obama"s election and the world"s corresponding love affair with his rebranded America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election, the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not just on the contagion of Wall Street"s bad bets but on the entire economic model of deregulation and privatization (called "neoliberalism" in most parts of the world) that had been preached from U.S.-dominated inst.i.tutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. If the United States were led by someone who didn"t happen to be a global superstar, U.S. prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously tax) speculative finance.
Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009. Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama couple, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing International Monetary Fund-a chief culprit in this mess-with up to a trillion dollars in new financing. In short, Obama didn"t just rebrand America, he resuscitated the neoliberal economic project when it was at death"s door. No one but Obama, wrongly perceived as a new FDR, could have pulled it off.
Yet re-reading No Logo No Logo after ten years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. Some overstretched. For others, their actual products began to feel rather disappointing next to the thrill of their marketing (a black woman breastfeeding a white child to sell...Benetton sweater sets? Really?). And sometimes it was precisely their claims of political enlightenment that tempted activists to contrast their marketing image with their labor practices, with disastrous results for the brands. after ten years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. Some overstretched. For others, their actual products began to feel rather disappointing next to the thrill of their marketing (a black woman breastfeeding a white child to sell...Benetton sweater sets? Really?). And sometimes it was precisely their claims of political enlightenment that tempted activists to contrast their marketing image with their labor practices, with disastrous results for the brands.
The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realize that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street"s addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?
The risk-and it is real-is that the response will be waves of bitter cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics. Most won"t switch parties, they"ll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay home, tune out. Another, more hopeful possibility is that Obamamania will end up being what the U.S. president"s advisors like to call "a teachable moment." Obama is a gifted politician with a deep intelligence and a greater inclination toward social justice than any leader of his party in recent memory. If he cannot change the system in order to keep his election promises, it"s because the system itself is utterly broken.
That was the conversation many of us were having in that brief period between the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 and the beginning of the so-called War on Terror. Perhaps it was a limitation, but for the movement the media insisted on calling "anti-globalization," it mattered little which political party happened to be in power in our respective countries. We were focused squarely on the rules of game, and how they had been distorted to serve the narrow interests of corporations at every level of governance-from international free-trade agreements to local water privatization deals.
Looking back on this period, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all. In the two years after No Logo No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I had never witnessed in any university cla.s.s. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols. came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people (tens of thousands in the case of the World Social Forum), that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. No topic was too arcane: the science of genetically modified foods, trade-related intellectual property rights, the fine print of bilateral trade deals, the patenting of seeds, the truth about carbon sinks. I sensed in these rooms a hunger for knowledge that I had never witnessed in any university cla.s.s. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.
In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, that wave of resistance only spread and strengthened. In some countries, social movements grew strong enough to join with political parties, winning national elections and beginning to forge a new regional fair-trade regime. But elsewhere, September 11 pretty much blasted the movement out of existence. In the United States, progressive politics rallied around a single cause: "taking back" the White House (as if "we" ever had it in the first place), while outside the United States, the coalitions that had been focused on a global economic model now trained their attention on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a resurgent "U.S. empire" and on resisting increasingly aggressive attacks on immigrants. What we knew about the sophistication of global corporatism-that all the world"s injustice could not be blamed on one right-wing political party, or on one nation, no matter how powerful-seemed to disappear.
If there was ever a time to remember the lessons we learned at the turn of the millennium, it is now. One benefit of the international failure to regulate the financial sector even after its catastrophic collapse is that the economic model that dominates around the world has revealed itself not as "free market" but "crony capitalist"-politicians handing over public wealth to private players in exchange for political support. What used to be politely hidden is all out in the open now. Correspondingly, public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point not just in my lifetime but in my parents" lifetime as well. Many of the points supposedly marginal activists were making in the streets ten years ago are now the accepted wisdom of cable news talk shows and mainstream op-ed pages.
And yet missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to emerge a decade ago: a movement that did not just respond to individual outrages but had a set of proactive demands for a more just and sustainable economic model. In the United States and many parts of Europe, it is far-right parties and even neofascism that are giving the loudest voice to anti-corporatist rage.
Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. Sure it was annoying, but after the apolitical eighties, when there was, according to Margaret Thatcher, "no such thing as society," it also seemed like a good sign that these brands believed otherwise. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping-for social change, for public s.p.a.ce, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of grat.i.tude for all this: our ideas weren"t as pa.s.se as we had been told. And since the brands couldn"t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.
Perhaps Obama should be viewed in much the same way. Once again, the market research has been done for us. What the election and the global embrace of Obama"s brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appet.i.te for progressive change-that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe pa.s.sionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.
Those kinds of transformative goals are only ever achieved when independent social movements build the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by capitalizing on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build movements that are-to borrow an old c.o.ke slogan-the real thing. As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."
Introduction.
A Web of Brands.
If I squint, tilt my head, and shut my left eye, all I can see out the window is 1932, straight down to the lake. Brown warehouses, oatmeal-colored smokestacks, faded signs painted on brick walls advertising long-discontinued brands: "Lovely," "Gaywear." This is the old industrial Toronto of garment factories, furriers and wholesale wedding dresses. So far, no one has come up with a way to make a profit out of taking a wrecking ball to these boxes of brick, and in this little eight- or nine-block radius, the modern city has been layered haphazardly on top of the old.
I wrote this book while living in Toronto"s ghost of a garment district in a ten-story warehouse. Many other buildings like it have long since been boarded up, gla.s.s panes shattered, smokestacks holding their breath; their only remaining capitalist function is to hoist large blinking billboards on their tar-coated roofs, reminding the gridlocked drivers on the lakesh.o.r.e expressway of the existence of Molson"s beer, Hyundai cars and EZ Rock FM.
In the twenties and thirties, Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the International Ladies" Garment Workers" Union. These days, old Portuguese men still push racks of dresses and coats down the sidewalk, and next door you can still buy a rhinestone bridal tiara if the need for such an item happens to arise (a Hallowe"en costume, or perhaps a school play...). The real action, however, is down the block amid the stacks of edible jewelry at Sugar Mountain, the retro candy mecca, open until 2 a.m. to service the late-night ironic cravings of the club kids. And a store downstairs continues to do a modest trade in bald naked mannequins, though more often than not it"s rented out as the surreal set for a film school project or the tragically hip backdrop of a television interview.
The layering of decades on Spadina Avenue, like so many urban neighborhoods in a similar state of postindustrial limbo, has a wonderful accidental charm to it. The lofts and studios are full of people who know they are playing their part in a piece of urban performance art, but for the most part, they do their best not to draw attention to that fact. If anyone claims too much ownership over "the real Spadina," then everyone else starts feeling like a two-bit prop, and the whole edifice crumbles.
Which is why it was so unfortunate that City Hall saw fit to commission a series of public art installations to "celebrate" the history of Spadina Avenue. First came the steel figures perched atop the lampposts: women hunched over sewing machines and crowds of striking workers waving placards with indecipherable slogans. Then the worst happened: the giant bra.s.s thimble arrived-right at the corner of my block. There it was: eleven and a half feet high and eleven feet across. Two giant pastel b.u.t.tons were plopped on the sidewalk next to it, with wimpy little saplings growing out of the holes. Thank goodness Emma Goldman, the famed anarchist and labor organizer who lived on this street in the late 1930s, wasn"t around to witness the transformation of the garment workers" struggle into sweatshop kitsch.
The thimble is only the most overt manifestation of a painful new self-consciousness on the grid. All around me, the old factory buildings are being rezoned and converted into "loft-living" complexes with names like "The Candy Factory." The hand-me-downs of industrialization have already been mined for witty fashion ideas-discarded factory workers" uniforms, Diesel"s Labor brand jeans and Caterpillar boots. So of course there is also a booming market for condos in secondhand sweatshops, luxuriously reno-ed, with soaking tubs, slate-lined showers, underground parking, skylit gymnasiums and twenty-four-hour concierges.
So far my landlord, who made his fortune manufacturing and selling London Fog overcoats, has stubbornly refused to sell off our building as condominiums with exceptionally high ceilings. He"ll relent eventually, but for now he still has a handful of garment tenants left, whose businesses are too small to move to Asia or Central America and who for whatever reason are unwilling to follow the industry trend toward homeworkers paid by the piece. The rest of the building is rented out to yoga instructors, doc.u.mentary film producers, graphic designers and writers and artists with live/work s.p.a.ces. The shmata guys still selling coats in the office next door look terribly dismayed when they see the Marilyn Manson clones stomping down the hall in chains and thigh-high leather boots to the communal washroom, clutching tubes of toothpaste, but what can they do? We are all stuck together here for now, caught between the harsh realities of economic globalization and the all-enduring rock-video aesthetic.
JAKARTA-"Ask her what she makes-what it says on the label. You know-label?" I said, reaching behind my head and twisting up the collar of my shirt. By now these Indonesian workers were used to people like me: foreigners who come to talk to them about the abysmal conditions in the factories where they cut, sew and glue for multinational companies like Nike, the Gap and Liz Claiborne. But these seamstresses looked nothing like the elderly garment workers I meet in the elevator back home. Here they were all young, some of them as young as fifteen; only a few were over twenty-one.
On this particular day in August 1997, the abysmal conditions in question had led to a strike at the Kaho Indah Citra garment factory on the outskirts of Jakarta in the Kawasan Berikat Nusantar industrial zone. The issue for the Kaho workers, who earn the equivalent of US$2 per day, was that they were being forced to work long hours of overtime but weren"t being paid at the legal rate for their trouble. After a three-day walkout, management offered a compromise typical of a region with a markedly relaxed relationship to labor legislation: overtime would no longer be compulsory but the compensation would remain illegally low. The 2,000 workers returned to their sewing machines; all except 101 young women who-management decided-were the troublemakers behind the strike. "Until now our case is still not settled," one of these workers told me, bursting with frustration and with no recourse in sight.
I was sympathetic, of course, but, being the Western foreigner, I wanted to know what brand brand of garments they produced at the Kaho factory-if I was to bring their story home, I would have to have my journalistic hook. So here we were, ten of us, crowded into a concrete bunker only slightly bigger than a telephone booth, playing an enthusiastic round of labor charades. of garments they produced at the Kaho factory-if I was to bring their story home, I would have to have my journalistic hook. So here we were, ten of us, crowded into a concrete bunker only slightly bigger than a telephone booth, playing an enthusiastic round of labor charades.
"This company produces long sleeves for cold seasons," one worker offered.
I guessed: "Sweaters?"
"I think not sweaters. If you prepare to go out and you have a cold season you have a..."
I got it: "Coat!"
"But not heavy. Light."
"Jackets!"
"Yes, like jackets, but not jackets-long."
You can understand the confusion: there isn"t much need for overcoats on the equator, not in the closet and not in the vocabulary. And yet increasingly, Canadians get through their cold winters not with clothing manufactured by the tenacious seamstresses still on Spadina Avenue but by young Asian women working in hot climates like this one. In 1997, Canada imported $11.7 million of anoraks and ski jackets from Indonesia, up from $4.7 million in 1993.1 That much I knew already. But I still didn"t know what brand of long coats the Kaho workers sewed before they lost their jobs. That much I knew already. But I still didn"t know what brand of long coats the Kaho workers sewed before they lost their jobs.
"Long, yes. And what"s on the label?" I asked again.
There was a bit of hushed consultation, and then, finally, an answer: "London Fog."
A global coincidence, I suppose. I started to tell the Kaho workers that my apartment in Toronto used to be a London Fog coat factory but stopped abruptly when it became clear from their facial expressions that the idea of anyone choosing to live in a garment building was nothing but alarming. In this part of the world, hundreds of workers every year burn to death because their dormitories are located upstairs from firetrap sweatshops.
Sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the tiny dorm room, I thought of my neighbors back home: the Ashtanga yoga instructor on two, the commercial animators on four, the aromatherapy candle distributors on eight. It seems the young women in the export processing zone are our roommates of sorts, connected, as is so often the case, by a web of fabrics, shoelaces, franchises, teddy bears and brand names wrapped around the planet. Another logo we had in common was Esprit, also one of the brands manufactured in the zone. As a teenager I worked as a clerk in a store that sold Esprit clothes. And of course, McDonald"s: an outlet had just opened near Kaho, frustrating workers, because this so-called bargain food was squarely out of their price range.
Usually, reports about this global web of logos and products are couched in the euphoric marketing rhetoric of the global village, an incredible place where tribespeople in remotest rain forests tap away on laptop computers, Sicilian grandmothers conduct E-business, and "global teens" share, to borrow a phrase from a Levi"s Web site, "a world-wide style culture."2 Everyone from c.o.ke to McDonald"s to Motorola has tailored their marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM"s long-running "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign that most eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe. Everyone from c.o.ke to McDonald"s to Motorola has tailored their marketing strategy around this post-national vision, but it is IBM"s long-running "Solutions for a Small Planet" campaign that most eloquently captures the equalizing promise of the logo-linked globe.
It hasn"t taken long for the excitement inspired by these manic renditions of globalization to wear thin, revealing the cracks and fissures beneath its high-gloss facade. More and more over the past four years, we in the West have been catching glimpses of another kind of global village, where the economic divide is widening and cultural choices narrowing.
This is a village where some multinationals, far from leveling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet"s poorest back country for unimaginable profits. This is the village where Bill Gates lives, ama.s.sing a fortune of $55 billion while a third of his workforce is cla.s.sified as temporary workers, and where compet.i.tors are either incorporated into the Microsoft monolith or made obsolete by the latest feat in software bundling. This is the village where we are indeed connected to one another through a web of brands, but the underside of that web reveals designer slums like the one I visited outside Jakarta. IBM claims that its technology spans the globe, and so it does, but often its international presence takes the form of cheap Third World labor producing the computer chips and power sources that drive our machines. On the outskirts of Manila, for instance, I met a seventeen-year-old girl who a.s.sembles CD-ROM drives for IBM. I told her I was impressed that someone so young could do such high-tech work. "We make computers," she told me, "but we don"t know how to operate computers." Ours, it would seem, is not such a small planet after all.
It would be naive to believe that Western consumers haven"t profited from these global divisions since the earliest days of colonialism. The Third World, as they say, has always existed for the comfort of the First. What is a relatively new development, however, is the amount of investigative interest there seems to be in the unbranded points of origin of brand-name goods. The travels of Nike sneakers have been traced back to the abusive sweatshops of Vietnam, Barbie"s little outfits back to the child laborers of Sumatra, Starbucks" lattes to the sun-scorched coffee fields of Guatemala, and Sh.e.l.l"s oil back to the polluted and impoverished villages of the Niger Delta.
The t.i.tle No Logo No Logo is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I"m told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an anticorporate att.i.tude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition. is not meant to be read as a literal slogan (as in No More Logos!), or a post-logo logo (there is already a No Logo clothing line, or so I"m told). Rather, it is an attempt to capture an anticorporate att.i.tude I see emerging among many young activists. This book is hinged on a simple hypothesis: that as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage will fuel the next big political movement, a vast wave of opposition squarely targeting transnational corporations, particularly those with very high name-brand recognition.
I must stress, however, that this is not a book of predictions, but of firsthand observation. It is an examination of a largely underground system of information, protest and planning, a system already coursing with activity and ideas crossing many national borders and several generations.
Four years ago, when I started to write this book, my hypothesis was mostly based on a hunch. I had been doing some research on university campuses and had begun to notice that many of the students I was meeting were preoccupied with the inroads private corporations were making into their public schools. They were angry that ads were creeping into cafeterias, common rooms, even washrooms; that their schools were diving into exclusive distribution deals with soft-drink companies and computer manufacturers, and that academic studies were starting to look more and more like market research.
They worried that their education was suffering, as inst.i.tutional priority shifted to those programs most conducive to private-sector partnership. They also had serious ethical concerns about the practices of some of the corporations that their schools were becoming entangled with-not so much their on-campus activities, but their practices far away, in countries like Burma, Indonesia and Nigeria.
It had only been a few years since I left university myself, so I knew this was a rather sudden change in political focus; five years earlier, campus politics was all about issues of discrimination and ident.i.ty-race, gender and s.e.xuality, "the political correctness wars." Now they were broadening out to include corporate power, labor rights, and a fairly developed a.n.a.lysis of the workings of the global economy. It"s true that these students do not make up the majority of their demographic group-in fact, this movement is coming, as all such movements do, from a minority, but it is an increasingly powerful minority. Simply put, anticorporatism is the brand of politics capturing the imagination of the next generation of troublemakers and s.h.i.t-disturbers, and we need only look to the student radicals of the 1960s and the ID warriors of the eighties and nineties to see the transformative impact such a shift can have.
At around the same time, in my reporting for magazines and newspapers, I also started noticing similar ideas at the center of a wave of recent social and environmental campaigns. Like the campus activists I was meeting, the people leading these campaigns were focused on the effects of aggressive corporate sponsorships and retailing on public s.p.a.ce and cultural life, both globally and locally. There were small-town wars being waged all over North America to keep out the "big-box" retailers like Wal-Mart. There was the McLibel Trial in London, a case of two British environmentalists who turned a libel suit McDonald"s launched against them into a global cyberplatform that put the ubiquitous food franchise on trial. There was an explosion of protest and activity targeting Sh.e.l.l Oil after the shocking hanging of Nigerian author and anti-Sh.e.l.l activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.
There was also the morning when I woke up and every billboard on my street had been "jammed" with anticorporate slogans by midnight bandits. And the fact that the squeegee kids who slept in the lobby of my building all seemed to be wearing homemade patches on their clothing with a Nike "swoosh" logo and the word "Riot."
There was a common element shared by all these scattered issues and campaigns: in each case, the focus of the attack was a brand-name corporation-Nike, Sh.e.l.l, Wal-Mart, McDonald"s (and others: Microsoft, Disney, Starbucks, Monsanto and so on). Before I began writing this book, I didn"t know if these pockets of anticorporate resistance had anything in common besides their name-brand focus, but I wanted to find out. This personal quest has taken me to a London