book: No Logo, Naomi Klein
No Logo was first published in 2000. The forces it describes have had two-and-a-half decades to gestate since.
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Klein discusses "brands", more specifically, the role, the self-conceptualization, and the surrounding-culture of brands. Brands used to be lumpy-object-makers, held down by assets like machines, factories, employees. Since the 90's, ish, many brands have shed their asset-loads. They no longer make things. They have become the brand only, adding value by slapping their logo onto things that someone else made. They have become concepts, cultural forces, trying to tap into something pseudo-spiritual. They represent things, they conjure up emotion, nostalgia. They become keystones of identity. They are symbols, celebrities. However, they refuse to have their brand "diluted" by participating in two-way cultural exchange ... while they impose themselves onto everything, don't you dare try and use their Intellectual Property to communicate. These are hieroglyphics reserved to a certain caste.
and yes, we are livid about this, we have been livid.
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No Logo is divided into four sections: No Space ; No Choice ; No Jobs ; No Logo ...
No Space — brands have worked to lay claim to public space. Cultural events feel like they require sponsorship to function. Ads dominate town squares, take over schools. Brands display their logos prominently on clothes, turning people into walking advertisements. Brands have their feelers out in the culture, taking legitimate subcultures and movements and turning them into trends.
( you can buy a "punk jacket" on Temu... )
No Choice — the strategy employed by brands is mass-deployment, takeover. Due to their size and wealth, they can do maneuvers like opening multiple outlets all over a town at once, or artificially lowball prices to outcompete smaller businesses (until they become the only option in that area, after which they price hike). This is something we see taking on a new form since 2000, as well. Companies like Uber gain massive Venture Capital funding, which they use to make their services so cheap they're haemorrhaging money. Their competitors can't possibly compete, so they go out of business, until Uber is all that's left — and that's when Uber makes prices go up, since they're the only option.
...and also, brands set standards, e.g. family-friendliness, refusing to stock movies or music that do not adhere to them. So artists, creators, they self-censor, especially if they're not famous enough to take the financial hit.
...and also, also, brands consolidate, hide behind different names when needed, removing a lack of meaningful choice.
( image source: The Independent )
No Jobs — to shed their asset-shackles and manufacturing to become ascended Brands-Only, brands have relegated most jobs to contractors, subcontractors, sub-subcontractors. Items are typically mass-produced in "Export Processing Zones" (EPZ), set up by governments to attract foreign investment, which are highly transient ... workers have no rights and abysmal pay, because any improvement for workers would cause the investors to find somewhere else. Since the suffering is under the name of a contractor, brands attempt to claim innocence. They were simply looking for the cheapest manufacturing, after all ... how that manufacturing got so cheap wasn't their problem.
Klein spends time in Cavite, location of an EPZ, talking to the workers there.
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No Logo — people aren't necessarily taking things laying down. Klein, in cooperation with the workers in Cavite, talks about the way that brands can serve as a useful target, and can form connections between problems like the lack of jobs in the Global North and the sweatshops in the Global South and pollution and planned obsolescence. Brands are celebrities, and our celebrity-obsessed culture loves to pry into scandals.
Klein does note some flaws in the strategy — the way non-consumer brands can get a free pass, because most people don't derive a personal connection from them — the way that the brand as a target can usurp the actual system being targeted, allowing capitalism to slip away criticized — the way that brands can envelop real-actual-ethics (e.g. plant-based, vegan, cruelty-free labels...) to be perceived as "ethical".
brands have become as powerful as, or more powerful than, the government, and are far less accountable. They occupy a quasi-government quasi-religious status, and laws around "Intellectual Property" and maintaining brand secrets allow them to simply not answer questions.
But the challenges aren't insurmountable. She describes hope for upcoming anticorporate activism, which maybe, maybe we see manifested nowadays. They have provided us with culturally significant and emotionally powerful symbols, after all, as much as they try to prevent us from using them.
so we get to work...
subvertising, e.g. Darren Cullen, who made the art below
and others!
and maybe you...?
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