No LogoBy Naomi Klein
After finishing this book I feel like I need a shower. Klein chronicles the modern world of branding and the resistance it engenders. Her work is comprehensive and profoundly disturbing, as it should be.
Klein goes everywhere in this one book. From export processing zones in The Philippines (if you don't know what those are you should read the book and then go cry in a corner for a while) to street protests in England to NikeTown in New York. She does an incredible job linking diverse problems with the root cause of neoliberal global capitalism.
But she does more than just decry sweatshops, Klein analyzes the way corporations create meaning for us. At its heart No Logo is a book about branding and the declining freedom from it. She writes about how we got to where we are and the process of corporations renouncing "things" in order to produce mostly semiotic signs. She then describes what this means in terms of our present reality - temp jobs and advertisements everywhere with CEOs cashing multi-million dollar bonuses while workers try to find full-time employment.
Yet despite all the problems Klein describes, she doesn't leave the reader without some hopes. She does not cave in to the simple lesson of the story which would be that we can all do better by purchasing responsibly blah blah blah Thomas Friedman bullshit. Instead she makes clear that the only solution to an institutional problems is institutional. The stories of resistance that accompany every problem are heartening and a necessary component of the book so it doesn't turn into a misery-fest.
No Logo is compulsively readable, which isn't the case with all books about the evils of branding and global capitalism. Klein doesn't fall into the trap of feeling sorry for herself or the rest of us, but rather is genuinely looking toward future solutions. The world is fucked up, but we're gonna have something to say about it. The most important thing readers can gather from No Logo is awareness, and with such a wide-ranging comprehensive book, it's a perfect resource for any commodity-obsessed young person in your life.
1 comment:
Found it at the goodwill and have gotten 50 pages in. I completely agree about the fact that Kein writes it with the intention of showing the larger impact that it has had on our lives, and it gives the book a much more powerful effect.
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