| Notes |
Klein dropped out of college again and started writing a book about the insidious new branding culture. She thought about how much she had loved shiny, plastic brand-name stuff when she was a kid—everyone had—and she concluded that a movement was doomed to hippies-only irrelevance if it condemned the longing and the pleasure that brands could create. “Soft drink and computer brands play the roles of deities in our culture,” she wrote later. “They are creating our most powerful iconography, they are the ones building our most utopian monuments.” She discovered that an anti-corporatist movement was brewing all over the world, in response to sweatshops abroad and brand encroachment at home. By 1999, she had finished “No Logo,” a book about brands and the new movement they had inspired. Then, in an extraordinary stroke of publishing luck, while “No Logo” was at the printer’s, enormous crowds of protesters suddenly materialized outside a meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. The protest seemed to come out of nowhere—or, at least, that was how it appeared to the bewildered old left—and there was “No Logo” and Klein herself to explain it. |