Brands, big business, and bad behavior

I was pleased to hear that the political book club had selected for its next book Naomi Klein’s No Logo, which has been sitting on my TBR shelf waiting to go join its friend This Changes Everything on my read shelf for a few years.

While I generally like Klein, I had a few apprehensions going into this. The book is more than 20 years old; would it be so dated as to be useless? Would it uncritically endorse trends in activism that have since become so played out they’re ineffective (or worse, counterproductive), like parodying stuff or adjusting your personal consumption habits?

In retrospect I probably should have given Klein more credit; she’s not stupid, even if a lot of other loud online voices on the “left” are. I had my critiques of this book (mostly to do with finger-wagging about property destruction at protests), and certainly some of it is a bit of a time capsule (how long has it been since MTV was culturally relevant?), but overall it is, unfortunately, still very educational reading. We are still living in in the world of brands and megabrands and their endless colonization of public space–even the internet, which was basically the frontier of anti-corporate activism when this book was written because anybody could set up a website or listserv, has devolved into like four social media sites and seven streaming services that are all chock-full of ads and can nuke whatever content they want whenever they want to.

The book is split up into four sections: “No Space,” about the aggressive intrusion of branding into every nook and cranny of our lives and the megabrands’ attempts to become art, culture, spirituality, education, and the public square; “No Choice,” about corporate consolidation and the effects of monopoly power; “No Jobs,” about offshoring, “McJobs,” union-busting, and the other labor issues in both the global North and South associated with the megabrand model; and “No Logo,” about anti-corporate activism. In each section Klein does a pretty good job of taking us through the various recursions, co-optations, ironies, and contradictions of both brand behavior and the various attempts to fight back against it.

Klein discusses some things about brand co-optation of social justice that I think should be required reading for anyone trying to do cultural activism, especially around issues of media and representation. I also appreciated very much that in the section of “culture jamming,” she discussed the critiques and pitfalls of it as well as its successes (although, since the book came out 20 years ago, it doesn’t include one of my main critiques of it, which is that these days everyone thinks they’re terribly clever and good at it and most of them aren’t). She also has some not particularly original but nonetheless very important things to say about dressing up modest demands in radical language; the efficacy of lawfare (high) versus making people feel guilty about buying clothes and food (low); the uses and limitations of boycotts and selective purchasing agreements; and the commodification of rebellion (“Extreme sports are not political movements and rock, despite its historic claims to the contrary, is not revolution”).

There’s some solid reporting on how evil Disney is that is, distressingly, even more important now than it was when it was written, as Disney has made great strides in the past 20 years in acquiring every single fucking piece of video media ever produced and wiping the insufficiently “family-friendly” ones off the face of the earth (RIP Nimona) while dicking queer audiences around with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, easily-editable-out-for-China “first gay characters” every six months or so to keep audiences so hyperfocused on representation issues that we’ll never get around to noticing that special effects, practical effects, costuming, set design, lighting, and sound mixing have all gone completely down the toilet in the movie industry over the past several years, making most movies fucking unwatchable regardless of how diverse the cast is. I’m not going to judge anyone for being entertained by entertaining things (I have been entertained by many Disney products over the years), but all the same: Fuck Disney, fuck Marvel, fuck Netflix, fuck Warner Brothers, fuck every streaming site, fuck every TV station, fuck every major movie studio that buys up smaller movie studios just to fuck them over, fuck big retailers like Wal-Mart that can pressure studios out of making stuff by refusing to carry it, fuck Amazon, and while we’re at it, fuck everything that’s going on in the book industry too.

*ahem* Sorry, where were we?

Anyway, how to take on extremely large brands is always going to be difficult, because extremely large brands are… well, extremely large, and generally very deep-pocketed. But I think despite its age this book has some good strategic thinking on display that can help inform readers not only about what they’re dealing with, but what factors contribute to resistance being effective or ineffective. And for that, it’s still well worth reading, even if it does talk about MTV and Blockbuster a lot.

Currently, if you want to do something material to push back on at least one megabrand, Starbucks stores all over the U.S. are unionizing–you could go find the one nearest you and sign up for a picket shift or donate to the strike fund. And don’t cross any picket lines!

Ancient fears and urges that have plagued us since the dawn of time

Lord knows how many years ago I acquired two books, titled simply Witches and Werewolves, that were about exactly what they sound like and were part of the same little series of slim black hardbacks that also contained a third book, Vampires. Though the third of these was obviously the most relevant to my interests, it nonetheless sat on my Amazon wish list for several years without my actually buying it. This is largely because, while the books are incredibly cute and fun and look great sitting on my occult shelf, they are not particularly good.

Well, having recently moved into my tiny little witch cottage here in Spookytown, I decided it was well past time to shell out the five dollars or whatever to fill out the series so that it would look nice and complete on my now-much-fancier occult shelf.

Much like Witches and Werewolves, Nigel Suckling’s Vampires is fun and cute but not particularly good. It contains a scattershot bunch of Vampire Facts divvied up roughly into old myths/folklore, historical figures around whom vampire legends have grown, and literary vampires. By this point in my life, I already know most of the stories and persons referenced in here, often in greater depth from some other, less shoddy publication (the exception here is Countess Bathory; I’ve never read a real book on her). However, it’s still quite an enjoyable little read, with black-and-white illustrations and lots of nice red accents on the page (the paragraphs are separated by tiny little red bat icons. Darling!). I can’t get mad about the shallowness of the research since I don’t think the book is meant to be taken too seriously in the first place; the verso across from the title page contains the epigraph “Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it” (from the publisher Sir William Collins, founder of what would eventually become HarperCollins).

Probably the most useful thing about the book, as with so many other gifty little primer type books, is the recommendation list of movies and books. I’ve read almost all of the classic literary books mentioned but I still have some to catch up on in terms of vampire scholarship (I will read In Search of Dracula one day, I swear…), and I’ve seen fewer of the movies than I realized. Maybe I’ll fix that this spooky season.