The No Logo Decade

The Revenge of the Brands reviews the 10th anniversary edition of the extraordinary book No Logo by Naomi Klein. The tone of this article is smarmy and awful, but its main point is near spot-on:

For all its faith in a transformative grassroots political movement, the principal legacy of No Logo was that it served as a research manual for corporations looking to sell their products to consumers looking for meaning, integrity, and purpose in their shopping cart.

This is surely the most wild and exaggerated instantiation of the motif “The street finds its own uses for things.” In this case, it’s High Street or Madison Avenue.

Not wholly unsurprising, but still jarring. The way that capitalism absorbs and transforms critiques of its structure into marketable commodities never ceases to fascinate and amaze me.