I enjoyed this book substantially less than I did Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine.” The writing itself is less compelling and less mature – which makes sense given that this is Klein’s first major work. The book gives a good coverage of the rise of the anti-globalization movement from the ashes of the PC movement in the early 1990s. The book is written in a journalistic style – as if the events have just recently happened, which aggravates the feeling of datedness – already enforced by constant references to outdated brands and culture. In the afterword Klein mentions “recent events,” – namely the WTO riots in Seattle and 9/11 – and briefly discusses how they affect the ideas discussed in the book – ideas she expands upon in Shock Doctrine. This only somewhat alleviates the issue of datedness – particularly as the book was written at the height of the 90’s bubble and we now sit in midst of the Great Recession. One of my biggest qualms is that she lends tacit approval to anti-corporation forces opposing corporate actions more on the basis of appearance than on scientific fact – first with the Brent Spar incident and then with GMO labeling (but I am biased on that score).

No Logo appealed to me because as a kid in the nineties, I was aware of an anti-corporate sentiment that the Gen X-ers were bandying around along with high tops and grunge. I didn’t really get it all at the time, eventually there were aspects which I grew to agree with and some I disagreed with. Ironically, most of this ‘Fight The Power’ was brought to me by MTV – a definite front-runner in corporate branding back then.

Without sounding like a lecture or a tree- hugger rant, No Logo briefs on how big brands are built (smoke, mirrors and adverts) and more interestingly, focuses is on who is exploited for these brands to succeed. Throughout, Klein highlights how the whole process has bred public resistance and protest. From some angles it’s a clear attack on capitalism as a whole but indirectly, it does make you think about the role we play in all this personally- mostly enabling by forking over cash. Every day.

full review: https://charoflondon.com/2016/08/08/b...

This is a book about the consequences of companies creating brands rather than products. Brands being something beyond just the shoe or the burger and rather a lifestyle, an essence of something more. According to Klein this has created , as two examples "no space" - it is saturated by commercials - and "no jobs" - they have all been moved abroad.



This book is great in explaining the underlying factors of the anti-globalization movement. However, for someone like me who has always been anti-brand conscious, this isn't really an eyeopener. I knew all of this before. This may also be the result of this book being 10 years old. It is an important book, despite the lack of new relevations. It is also breathless and the tone annoyingly nagging at times. It's one of the books that went it to the " will as I should, but do not want to read" category.

[Update a few months after reading: I quit my job in marketing and am now going to study something entirely different because of this.]

I don't know what's more shocking: That this is from 2000 and feels like it could have been written today, or that we're basically still fighting the same battles as in the 90s when it feels like we've made so much progress in awareness of anti-capitalist issues.

I've certainly heard that "identity politics" were a thing in the 90s (at least in the US), but I didn't realize how big of an issue they were on campuses - and how much they stole the spotlight from other pressing issues on the anti-capitalist front.

The 90s are often called post-political, but apparently they were not necessarily that. It's just that anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist issues were put on the back burner for a while, while intellectuals dealt with softer, more local issues in a rather inefficient, academicized way. (As opposed to the #MeToo movement or Fridays for the Future, for example).

But can you blame them? No Logo opens up one can of worms after another about how clever big corporations have become at brainwashing the world through marketing. They've been so successful, in fact, that today we rarely think about how a world without big brands must have once existed.

No Logo shows the many strategies and business tactics global corporations have used to turn the world into a forest of brands, and how individual companies have become bigger and more powerful than many countries.

Written in 2000, the book is dated in some places, but never outdated. You cannot blame the author for not being able to predict how much worse things would get in the future.

I did really, truly find this book interesting and its topic important. There really isn't another way to discuss such matters as these than Klein's sometimes on on ongoing rant. I do agree with a variety of her points and find her a fascinating person in general, I mean, to go all the way deep into where it all lies in the gutter and tell it to us who just sit on our couches at home going "Learn me!"
Well, the only thing is just a tiny little thing that I just didn't find her style of writing and the way she told things too appealing. That's it. I liked all of the book except for how it was told, so I'm a bad reader now? Well, let's save some face and end with I liked Shockdoctrine better.

Santa pace!

Sembra un'altra epoca quella in cui ho letto questo libro!
Altra pubblicità, altra vita. Ante G8 di Genova, ante black block, ante tutto e anti tutto.
Illuminante per certi versi, noioso per certi altri.
Da consultazione più che da lettura.
Ricordo ancora di essere rimasta affascinata dal capitolo sulla culture jamming e di aver cercato di saperne molto di più di quanto descritto nel libro.

I'll admit I was a little afraid of starting this book, fearing that it would trigger feelings of wanting to move to the woods Walden-style to escape this odious corporate culture.

So far no escape feelings and I'm on Chapter 2. I like Naomi Klein's very accessible study of brand expansion in the 90s. She isn't opposed to all advertising, which she says is simply about selling products. Branding instead sells a lifestyle or even further a "philosophy".

Thanks for loaning this book to me Steve.

I thought I knew enough insidious information on logos, branding and multinational corporations, but this book definitely pushed back the curtain even wider on this pervasive element in society.

It's true that what we purchase is no longer about substance, but about the idea that is being sold. It's made me rethink every single purchase that I make. Do I really need it? Or is it just that I want it? But why do I want it?

Hopefully this book will leave you posing the same questions in your daily purchaes long after you've finished the book.

Aan het einde van mijn studententijd stond No Logo - vreemd genoeg - heel lang hoog in de top van managementboeken. Het boek kwam al snel bekend te staan als het nieuwe standaardwerk voor antiglobalisten. Hoewel ik me niet tot deze groep aangetrokken voel, was een zekere interesse gewekt. Inmiddels 15 jaar na het verschijnen heb ik het boek dan gelezen. Wat een spijt heb ik dat ik dat niet veel eerder heb gedaan. No Logo geeft een zeer objectieve weergave van de uitwassen van de macht van de wereldmerken, maar is ook kritisch ten aanzien van de slecht georganiseerde tegenbeweging. Er spreekt ook hoop uit het verhaal. Niet een idealistisch dromen, maar gestaafd met voorbeelden waarin machtige bedrijven hun koers hebben moeten wijzigen als gevolg van protesten tegen het sociale of milieubeleid van de betreffende multinationals. Door de neutrale weergave krijg je een uitstekend en overtuigend beeld van de moeizame verhoudingen tussen natiestaten, multinationals en actiegroepen. Hoe dan ook is No Logo een must-read voor iedereen die geïnteresseerd is in internationale (politieke) economie. Ook vandaag is het boek nog zeer actueel.

I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and have only now gotten around to it. Her Shock Doctrine was one of the most important books I’ve read in years, so there really has been no excuse for leaving this one quite so long. A while ago I read Marx’s Capital and one of the things I thought while reading the horror stories of Victorian labour practices was just how lucky we are today that trade unions have made sure capitalism couldn’t get away with such disgusting practices – because I’ve always known that capitalism can only maintain a human face when it is forced to. Well, this book makes it all too clear that the monstrous face of capitalism has never really disappeared. All of the standard stories/lies about how gross exploitation is the price poor nations have to pay for economic development are exploded here. The countries that receive factories as a kind of gift from multinational corporations are not ‘developing’ in any sense that we might like to imagine that might make us feel a little better about the horror they experience. The factories are kept isolated from local and international labour laws, the conditions the workers live under provide wages that are below subsistence and if they try to do anything about it they are killed.

The whole thing is an exercise in ‘plausible deniability’ – corporations in the ‘liquid modern world’ don’t produce anything any longer. Everything is subcontracted out, so that brands today only put their names on products, rather than actually produce them. That means that they can pretend they are not responsible for the gross violations of basic human rights done to produce the products they name and sell.

In part this book was somewhat disheartening. It is about 15 years since this book was written and if anything things today are infinitely worse. The anti-slavery campaigns around sweatshop conditions too often seem to be only about sating the consciences of western consumers who still define themselves by the brand names they wear on bodies. Meanwhile, the system is rotten to the core. It isn’t at all clear how it can be ‘fixed’ since these issues are global and there is no global democracy that allows ‘citizens’ to have a voice though regulation. Campaigns invariably are about reducing us to ‘customers’ who should use their ‘buying power’ to bring about change – but this is totally ineffective and a huge step back. If you get to choose, be a citizen rather than a customer every day.

Given that it isn’t clear how we will be allowed to be global citizens and that the global is dominated by pirates and thieves, the only alternative seems to be to tear the entire edifice down. The idea that we should believe in the ‘self-regulation’ by global corporations, that this is going to suddenly become a reasonable option would be almost funny, except of course it is not – you know, we are talking about corporations like Coke that have been proven to kill union organisers across the world – and we are expected to believe they are going to suddenly self-regulate to protect the rights of their employees. If you drink any of their products you are endorsing murder – simple as that.

We live in a dystopia worse than the worst of those imagined by our most creative writers. Where corporations are destroying the basis upon which we can sustain human life on this planet while apologists like Hans Roslin puts everything on a logarithmic scale to lie that things are getting all so much better.

Perhaps one day we will awaken and force our societies to be more humane, focus on protecting the planet instead of turning it to ashes and operate under the simplest of moral maxims – that a harm to one is a harm to all – but then again, perhaps we will just go on buying Nikes, Apple, McDonald’s hamburgers and other poisons that kill us and our planet.

I thought this book would be outdated, but it holds up. I picked it up when another book (it came from something awful) that connected modern troll culture to the overplaying of the culture of branding. The most fascinating portions of the book are the places where the branding wins create a backlash--for example, Nike using Black youth to sell sneakers and then that same group brings the fight to Nike. I don't really think it worked though--I think Nike just got better at branding (see the Kaepernick ads).

Swego czasu był to dla mnie kluczowy tzw. eyeopener.