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have just recently happened, which aggravates the feeling of datedness – already enforced by constant references to outdated brands and culture.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).

God, this was such a fantastic book. I'm sure you've heard of it - it's about sweatshop labour, globalisation, branding, the way in which companies produce and how that's changed over the years.

I picked this up because it was on the reading list in the back of Scarlett Thomas's PopCo, and I can see why - the sort of realisations that Alice in PopCo has about branding are all in here, as are the seeds of the movements against branding.

This is a depressing book, of course. I'm certain that so many of the products I own are produced in sweatshops, and that I'm influenced by branding in all sorts of ways. I can see why this encourages so many peope to become activists - because it's affecting your life in such an everyday way. Even if I don't go out and start altering advertising, I think I'll still think about it in a different way in the future, and try and source products that aren't produced by global brands utilising sweatshop labour.

This book furnishes the "other side" of globalism and neoliberalism, this time grounded on consumer experience, and worker experience. Klein draws a depressing but well documented picture in her thick book, explaining how cheap labor and cheap goods are crafted through market domination in order to enslave workers while giving consumers little to no choices.

This book is interesting but fairly dated as it does not address the food (GMO) wars, nor does it cover the housing bubble of 2007 and the debacle of baby boomer's 401ks and how that degrades worker experience throughout the world. What is missing here, I feel, is the financial angle of neoliberalism. What I mean isn't that greed or multinational corporations that farm work out to factories -- what I mean is the high finance drama of derivatives and how that also contributes to the degradation of our lifeworld.

All in all this is a fairly good book. It provides a kind of "companion" angle to Robert Reich's work by going further in depth to worker degradation, product/logo nonsense, producer malfeasance and consumer blinding. Klein is particularly good at getting at the logo/social aspect at the beginning of the internet age. The only thing I found kind of annoying is that she ends the book with a positive note on how consumers are trying to stop all these problems. Obviously that has not worked, did not work and she is right -- 9/11 changed the game so that as consumers we care less about the world and its other people and more about our access to cheap stuff. Today our desires for cheaper stuff and more wonderous tech is leading us into a world of degraded wages, lower standards of living (there is more stuff, we just can't afford most of it anymore) and uncertain financial futures as our jobs are slowly becoming less relevant in an increasingly automated world.

My advice is, if you are not familiar with this topic at all or heavily interested in it, then read this book as there are plenty of interesting hooks/stories/angles to digest. If you are kind of familiar and not that interested then you should read something you find more interesting.

Yea but no but...

It was a nice try, and while I could probably agree on many levels with the author, I still call Klein a hippie.

I have always thought it to be wholly unreasonable to demand and to sincerely expect anyone and everyone to offer their own plan as to how things should be done as opposed to how we do things now. This is preposterous. Anyone who can come up with valid arguments why things currently are amiss and why they should be remedied, must be allowed to voice their opinion despite not necessarily being able to personally formulate (then and there, or even at all) an alternative, better, way of doing things.

It's cool if you can, but it shouldn't be a qualification for even being allowed to enter the debate. There isn't a single person on this planet who could come up with a perfect plan because there are no perfect plans! Almost no one will admit that capitalism is without glitches, but many will assert with gusto that capitalism just requires a little bit of tweaking and some tender loving care.

This is absolute nonsense.

Of course we could always have better democracy. People could easily be given more and better options to vote for changes, for example. We could have "local governments" with localized budgets within different parts of cities to enable those people living there to make concrete decisions and plans that will affect their everyday lives directly. We could do loads to improve democracy, trust me.

We could also find ways to actually sustain businesses and private individuals to operate in a free market reality - not just in free market make-believe. This would most likely mean that players who began to dominate markets need to be split in one way or the other to enable other and especially up-and-coming individuals and companies to compete against them in much more fairer conditions. Unlike now, no one could really rest on their laurels and/or just buy off competition. Everyone wanting to play the game would have to be innovating and reinventing themselves constantly. Not now and then, or once in a blue moon, but every single day.


Stuff that I personally can't accept is:

a) corporations aiming to change schools' curriculums and subtly trying to greenwash their own history and business practices - in a word their public image.

b) corporations cornering smaller competitors by dumping prices until local/regional competition is snuffed for good.

c) corporations gaining even bigger share of the markets simply because they can buy other competitors out if they can afford it. This is the exact opposite of what Adam Smith called free market economy. This is rule of the few and finally rule of one.

And if and when corporations reach a status where they can effectively sensor what people can and can not buy, should be called totalitarianism because that's what it is when you can't buy a book or some other product from anywhere else simply because those few corporations still left will refuse to take them up for sell.

d) allowing corporations to grow so big and powerful that they can effectively land in places where they are not taxed, where they can disregard local laws and regulations at will, where they can effectively treat their labor force and the environment any way they want.

Even if some poor, underprivileged, schmuck wouldn't mind how the company does business, I abso-f*cking-lutely do, and I'm not the only one! If you pollute the environment (or treat your employees like dirt), you clean up the mess, pay hefty fines, and take some time off from doing business for the time being because you clearly are not a responsible and trustworthy player and the society as a whole can and will not tolerate such behavior. Simple and fair, and not complex or mean at all.

If this what we have today is free market economy, we might as well reintroduce chains and just revert to calling workforce as slaves again. I mean why not? We already love to call unemployed people - I'm sorry, "job seekers" - as cancer, vermins, and so on. I don't know about you but to me it echos 1930's Germany.

I think it's pretty vile view on life if and when (read In Defense of Global Capitalism) people in effect say that it's still miles better to be working in a sweatshop somewhere and get paid at least something than having to resort to selling one's own ass to anyone keen on buying or just starving to death.

This line of thinking not only legitimizes wretchedness and indecency. It guarantees that nothing will ever change for the better.

Now, I may think that hippies are moronic bunch of people, but folks who try to reason the above scenario disgust me to no end. Especially coming from a guy who got all the chances in the world provided by the society in a socialist paradise called Sweden. I wonder if he would have had the same tolerance for pain, strength of character and general will power to take it up his small boy's ass from some anonymous older, charming Swedish gentlemen, had he been born in the slums of India, Brazil or Vietnam and be asked to help his family and relatives by all means necessary - and there either not being any sweatshops around or all just refusing to let him work?

I'm sure he would have.

A classic. I should have read this ages ago.

(If you want the most bang for your buck, I suggest the “No Jobs” section in the middle.)

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.

”I wake up every morning, jump in the shower, look down at the symbol [the Nike swoosh], and that pumps me up for the day. It's to remind me every day what I have to do, which is, 'Just Do It'.” (Internet entrepreneur Carmine Collettion, on a near-navel tattoo, 1997)

(further reading ideas towards the end)
This is the first time in years that I've been reminded of the 'Battle Of Seattle', the protest that was in 1999. I guess this shows one of the flaws that this kind of book might have when read years after it's writing point (2001, written in 4 years). This was the first time I heard about this author, before her other books. Still, most of the stuff in here is readable, though the last part, 'No Logo', was hard to get through, not because of what was being talked about, but perhaps because it wasn't quite so gripping as the other parts.

These are the parts:
Part 1 – the surrender of culture and education to marketing
Part 2 – mergers, franchising, synergies, corruption, censorship
Part 3 – employment issues (temporary and part-time jobs, movement of work to third world countries and what happens there)
Part 4 – anticorporate activism (in the late 1990s)

The cost of brand domination:
* ruling through sponsoring (incl. what the sponsored can say about the sponsor): music, sports, places of education and so on.
* selling things to kids/youth (false promises, getting killed for your clothes, invading your spaces with ads, snatching your cool-nows, having a say in what the school gives you at mealtimes…)
* anti-diversity (local brands, shops, tastes pushed out), anti-protest (in their 'spaces')
* censorship ('family values', bowing to China, lawsuits, removal of articles from papers)
* moving jobs to third world countries, keeping others part-time/temporary with a few hours here and there etc. work issues. CEOs moving around, getting paid big.
* the third world labor problem (working conditions, very low pay, short-term jobs, tax-free for the labels...)
* enviromental damage (incl. oil companies), some of them on lands of native people. Food sources spoiling.

”Struggle General's Warning: Blacks and Latinos are the prime scapegoats for illegal drugs, and the prime targets for legal ones.” (culture-jammed (changed) cigarette ad)

Some label examples are written about more widely, including Nike, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Pepsi, and Shell. This book gave me further reasons to dislike Ronald Reagan (some of his law-changes have caused some of the issues above). With brands one shouldn't forget things like less-visible brands (container makers, university brands). The brands were in general American, but some Canadian, British, and other non-American brands appeared also.

The dated:
In general, the Internet has become more important (though how free it is now can be pondered). The only online 'brands' mentioned (yes, I made a list) are Amazon, AOL, and Yahoo! And this rise of Internet meaning the emptying of a lot of malls.
Spice Girls are sort of around (though with less bang). There seems to be less city- or country-based music scenes being popular (like grunge, Britpop…)
What's happened to: Netscape. CD-Roms. Sears (shrunk). Borders (its WTC store is mentioned in the book). Blockbuster. HMV & Virgin Megastores. Discovery stores. Body Shop (takeover from L'Oreal in 2006). The Ogoni people (still no justice). Portable CD players.
There's no Facebook (founded 2004); Livejournal is still quite new. No hipsters mentioned. No Netfrix, Viaplay, Hulu. No sight of Napster, Pirate Bay.
Guerrilla Girls, Critical Mass, and Reclaim the Streets are still around. Adbusters still has some questionable issues, but is active.

We meet some familiar people: Daniel H. Pink, whose ”When” book I've read. Bernie Sanders doing the anti-Nike thing. And Aung San Suu Kyi, whose still declared as activist-saint – she's not such a person these days. Not so charitable here, Bill Gates!

I wonder if activism etc. changes to the situation that was at the time of this book came out have changed also because of fake news, the rise of far right, misdirected anger when jobs were taken out to the poorer countries, and anti-brand thing not necessarily being the 'fashionable' thing of right now? (I may be wrong with some guesses.) And then there's the current 'trade war' stuff with China, Mexico…
The author certainly feel (still) optimistic here, with some of a revolution.

[Further reading ideas here:
Schlosser – Fast Food Nation (less dated; talking more about issues in this corner, incl. Human costs)
Mitchell – Cloud Atlas (the Sonmi-451 parts)
Boorman – Bonfire Of The Brands (choosing a more brand-free life
L.Chang – Factory Girls (factory life in China)]

This book is about brands, and the issues that rise over their spreading, ruling, and domination. Although this book is clearly US-centric (and some of the problems are stronger there than elsewhere), it's still relevant. I made a list of brands mentioned. I have been checking my 'made in [country]' labels, and weighing my use of brand products, my choices of buying, and my label loyalities. How much your purchases 'uniform' you? What sort of actions I might make because of what I know from here (like use brands from my own country)? Time to ask yourself and change if you want to change, keep what you keep.
This book may have its dated bits, but the important bits stay important.

Today, more and more campaigners are treating multinationals, and the policies that give them free rein, as the root cause of political injustices around the globe.

The impact this book had was slightly overshadowed by the events of September 11th 2001, when everyone's focus and concerns seemed to suddenly turn elsewhere. But that's not to say it has lost any of its power.

Reading it now, having read Klein's latest work (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism), it's just as concerning, if not more so. It's within these pages that you can see her thoughts on Milton Friedman's economic policies building up, and it's fascinating to see how far she's come since she wrote No Logo.

The downside is that, nearly ten years on, it's so difficult to know where we stand with our big corporations today. Nike are on the receiving end of a heck of a lot of criticism in the book, but are the conditions in their sweatshops still causing misery to people today? www.nikeresponsibility.com would suggest otherwise. Have other, more onerous examples come to light that aren't mentioned by Klein?

It's difficult to say. Ultimately, we have to remind ourselves that No Logo was never intended as a manifesto, but as a documentation of both corporate activity and the growing worldwide opposition to it. One shouldn't read it in order to find out which particular brand of clothing is ethically acceptable - indeed, to do so would be to miss the point - but to learn and understand how and why brands became more important than products, and the effects this has had on the world.

Reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein was a moment where I felt my worldview shift and tilt, hence I’ve been on a mission to read the rest of her works, no matter how dense and complex the subject matter.

The experience of reading No Logo was different to that of The Shock Doctrine - with No Logo I felt as if I knew (at least on some level) a lot of what Naomi wrote about, and unfortunately not much of what I read came as a huge shock. What I loved about this book compared to The Shock Doctrine was the level of personality and anecdotes from Naomi herself. This book was more enjoyable and personal to read, especially given the subject matter of consumerism and corporate culture is so personal.

[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 won't deny that this book was preaching to the choir with me, but still, a really fascinating look at the way mega-brands have shaped the world we live in. Kinda depressing to read a book like this from the 90s that presents the internet as a tool to be used against the brands, when to my mind it has served almost the exact opposite function.

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.