As a fresh-faced university student, I remember digesting Naomi Klein's No Logo with the kind of voracity with which I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries at the age of 12; I felt like I already knew the story. It wasn't as if the information she presented was old news, it was just a new take on a familiar context.
Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s was really the only formal training needed to partake in the Naomi Klein clinic of anti-corporate brand diffusion. "Taking aim at the brand bullies," was effectively an exercise in self-deconstruction. Now, a busy decade and a 10th anniversary edition – just released in North America – later, No Logo's message is still applicable, even if the references to Microsoft now might feel outdated in our iPhone-toting Apple-verse.
Part of that self-deconstruction that Klein facilitated was the recognition that brands had convinced us all that they represented our lives – or, conversely, our lives ought to reflect our brand choices. Recently, writing on True/Slant, Kashmir Hill asked: "What does your email address say about you?" That seems to suggest that the relationship remains. And it does. But in some cases it's actually just a connection made out of necessity. In reality, the branded of the 2000s would rather be reached, let's say, @colin, because we are now our own brand.
For this we can probably thank the internet, the great democratic leveller, and where the idea of selling yourself is ubiquitous. Facebook introduced an interesting – if annoying – feature where the site recommends other people for you to "friend," usually based on a mutual acquaintance – similar to a human version of Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought..." tab. But it's perhaps an obvious symptom of social media sites like MySpace, which are really based on the idea that we are selling ourselves to each other.
In the introduction to Street: The Nylon Book of Global Style, released in 2006 by Nylon magazine (possibly the Gen-Y-ist of Gen-Y fashion publications), is this telling passage:
Style, ultimately, is as much about the wearer as what is worn. And the social and cultural mobility afforded by the internet means that people can, through the use of clothing, invent themselves.
In the 1990s, corporations and designers like Tommy Hilfiger used people as walking advertisements, slapping giant logos across clothing. Now, the focus is instead much more on the individual wearing the clothing, who won't be upstaged by a fashion designer. The relationship that No Logo examined is still there, but it's been altered for a generation of children raised to believe that each individual is unique. Taking part in a consumer "experience" isn't as rewarding as it used to be – we'd prefer to be the experience.
As Andrew Romano of Newsweek points out, there is no longer such a thing as "selling out." He approaches the concept from a musical standpoint, citing Pearl Jam as a prime example of a band that went from being synonymous with anti-corporate sloganeering to a shill band for the big box store, Target. Back in 2000, Klein wrote that the story of the "Seattle sound" subculture of which Pearl Jam was a part, was "a cautionary tale about why so little opposition to the theft of cultural space took place in the early to mid-nineties. Trapped in the headlights of irony and carrying too much pop-culture baggage, not one of its antiheroes could commit to a single, solid political position." It was co-opted by the "cool hunters," and ultimately destroyed and turned into a passing fad.
But if the 2000s showed us anything, it's that being a passing fad is often rewarded. Anyone from Paris Hilton to Katie Price are passing fads, but have successfully gone from being people who were sponsored by corporations, into sponsoring things themselves. In 2009, we're wrapped in a come-from-nowhere culture, whose biggest stars are those who were most successful at marketing themselves as fully established and developed brands. It's a world of Lilly Allen and Justin Bieber.
In other words, we've become our own "cool hunters," which has resulted in endless scenester nothingness, as cultural movements of the 2000 decade were immediately co-opted by their own participants. As Romano rightly points out, it is often the art produced by a subculture that proves a useful watermark in determining its message. If so, what does hip hop now stand for? What does the indie music scene actually mean?
In her new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition, Klein accurately describes how the Obama campaign used the corporate model to launch the President-as-brand campaign. She writes:
Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate….
Which was really no secret. The collective "So what?" that voters shrugged into the voting booths is perhaps more telling of where we've come since No Logo first went to print – that selling a mentally-constructed experience (in this case, "change") as political policy is neither an alien concept, nor is it that removed from what regular people do on a daily basis on their blogs. There is no such thing as selling out. There is only selling, and we are the product. It's just the way things are.
Early on in No Logo, Klein introduces the concept of "cannibalisation" strategy, where a corporation, "instead of opening a few stores in every city in the world … waits until it can blitz an entire area and spread," a tactic used effectively by Starbucks. As I sit now in a Starbucks at the corner of Thurlow and Robson streets in downtown Vancouver and stare diagonally across the intersection at another Starbucks, I'm tempted to wonder whether the Gen-Y self-branders are engaging in the same practice. Our various online incarnations – the Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blog personas – all compete for the same thing: consumption. Yet, while the model is initially successful, we haven't yet accepted that it is perhaps unsustainable. And if anything, it now defines us.
