No Logo

No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein, 446 pages

No Logo is an anti-consumerist tract railing against the impact of brands on our public space and consciousness.  Klein clearly describes the increasing ubiquity of advertising, the consumerist values it tacitly advances, and the manner in which multinational corporations have become increasingly "brand-centered" and distanced from the actual manufacturing of their products, as well as the negative consequences this shift has had on individuals and communities in both developed and underdeveloped countries.  Further, she shows how the very power of the brand can be used to force corporate accountability in environmental and labor practices.  Visibility, it seems, also means vulnerability.

 

Klein is a journalist by profession, and this book carries the endemic sin of journalism - by exceeding the author's competence it undercuts itself.  So Klein calls Macy Gray "Mary Gray", imagines cross-country skiers being dropped off at the top of a mountain, and claims Disney's Mulan "flopped at the box office".  Such mistakes, while perhaps minor in themselves, contribute to a lack of confidence as to whether she understands that the Internet is not, in fact, public property, or whether she knows that Brave New World is not about the dangers of shopping malls.  Despite this, Klein is clearly no fool.  She appreciates the dangers of brandless invisibility in a world of brand-name protests, and of a protest against one brand benefiting its equally reprobate competition.  She recognizes the possibility of the appropriation by the brands themselves of a responsible image without actually implementing the reality.  Nor is she afraid to criticize fashionable alternative brands like Diesel alongside obvious targets like Walmart. 

 

Unfortunately, although the book is only fifteen years old, it already feels outdated, not only in the description of invincible mega-brands like AOL, Borders, and Blockbuster as tools of creeping fascism, but also because so much has changed in the world of mass media in general in the last decade.  Still, many of the problems Klein calls attention to have only gotten worse in the interim.  The book does not present a clear alternative, however.  Klein's anti-brand coalition includes anarchists and labor unions, Filipino Marxists and Canadian Catholic schoolkids, a big tent too fragile to bear much in the way of positive prescriptions.  Her underlying preference seems to be for maximization of available choices, but that just leads back to consumerism.

Overall, a mediocre work that would have been much better if it was half as long and twice as radical.