No Logo

by Naomi Klein

  Of course it’s a classic symptom of teenage narcissism to believe that the end of history coincides exactly with your arrival on earth. Almost every angst-ridden, Camus-reading seventeen-year-old girl finds her own groove eventually. Still, there is a part of my high-school globo-claustrophobia that has never left me, and in some ways only seems to intensify as time creeps along. What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

  All my parents wanted was the open road and a VW camper. That was enough escape for them. The ocean, the night sky, some acoustic guitar … what more could you ask? Well, actually, you could ask to go soaring off the side of a mountain on a snowboard, feeling as if, for one moment, you are riding the clouds instead of the snow. You could scour Southeast Asia, like the world-weary twenty-somethings in Alex Garland’s novel The Beach, looking for the one corner of the globe uncharted by the Lonely Planet to start your own private utopia. You could, for that matter, join a New Age cult and dream of alien abduction. From the occult to raves to riots to extreme sports, it seems that the eternal urge for escape has never enjoyed such niche marketing.

  In the absence of space travel and confined by the laws of gravity, however, most of us take our open space where we can get it, sneaking it like cigarettes, outside hulking enclosures. The streets may be lined with billboards and franchise signs, but kids still make do, throwing up a couple of nets and passing the puck or soccer ball between the cars. There is release, too, at England’s free music festivals, and in conversions of untended private property into collective space: abandoned factories turned into squats by street kids or ramped entrances to office towers transformed into skateboarding courses on Sunday afternoons.

  But as privatization slithers into every crevice of public life, even these intervals of freedom and back alleys of unsponsored space are slipping away. The indie skateboarders and snowboarders all have Vans sneaker contracts, road hockey is fodder for beer commercials, inner-city redevelopment projects are sponsored by Wells Fargo, and the free festivals have all been banned, replaced with the annual Tribal Gathering, an electronic music festival that bills itself as a “strike back against the establishment and club-land’s evil empire of mediocrity, commercialism, and the creeping corporate capitalism of our cosmic counterculture”1 and where the organizers regularly confiscate bottled water that has not been purchased on the premises, despite the fact that the number-one cause of death at raves is dehydration.

  I remember the moment when it hit me that my frustrated craving for space wasn’t simply a result of the inevitable march of history, but of the fact that commercial co-optation was proceeding at a speed that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. I was watching the television coverage of the controversy surrounding Woodstock ’94, the twenty-fifth-anniversary festival of the original Woodstock event. The baby-boomer pundits and aging rock stars postured about how the $2 cans of Woodstock Memorial Pepsi, festival key chains and on-site cash machines betrayed the anticommercial spirit of the original event and, incredibly, whined that the $3 commemorative condoms marked the end of “free love” (as if AIDS had been cooked up as a malicious affront to their nostalgia).

  What struck me most was that the debate revolved entirely around the sanctity of the past, with no recognition of present-tense cultural challenges. Despite the fact that the anniversary festival was primarily marketed to teenagers and college students and showcased then-up-and-coming bands like Green Day, not a single commentator explored what this youth-culture “commodification” might mean to the young people who would actually be attending the event. Never mind about the offense to hippies decades after the fact; how does it feel to have your culture “sold out” now, as you are living it? The only mention that a new generation of young people even existed came when the organizers, confronted with charges from ex-hippies that they had engineered Greedstock or Woodshlock, explained that if the event wasn’t shrink-wrapped and synergized, the kids today would mutiny. Woodstock promoter John Roberts explained that today’s youth are “used to sponsorship. If a kid went to a concert and there wasn’t merchandise to buy, he’d probably go out of his mind.”2

  Roberts isn’t the only one who holds this view. Advertising Age reporter Jeff Jensen goes so far as to make the claim that for today’s young people, “Selling out is not only accepted, it’s considered hip.”3 To object would be, well, unhip. There is no need to further romanticize the original Woodstock. Among (many) other things, it was also a big-label-backed rock festival, designed to turn a profit. Still, the myth of Woodstock as a sovereign youth-culture state was part of a vast project of generational self-definition —a concept that would have been wholly foreign to those in attendance at Woodstock ’94, for whom generational identity had largely been a prepackaged good and for whom the search for self had always been shaped by marketing hype, whether or not they believed it or defined themselves against it. This is a side effect of brand expansion that is far more difficult to track and quantify than the branding of culture and city spaces. This loss of space happens inside the individual; it is a colonization not of physical space but of mental space.

  In a climate of youth-marketing feeding frenzy, all culture begins to be created with the frenzy in mind. Much of youth culture becomes suspended in what sociologists Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson call “arrested development,” noting that “we have, after all, no idea of what punk or grunge or hip hop as social and cultural movements might look like if they were not mined for their gold …”4 This “mining” has not gone unnoticed or unopposed. Both the anticorporate cultural journal The Baffler and the now-defunct Might magazine brilliantly lampooned the desperation and striving of the youth-culture industry in the mid-nineties. Dozens, if not hundreds, of zines and Web sites have been launched and have played no small part in setting the mood for the kind of brand-based attacks that I chronicle in Part IV of this book. For the most part, however, branding’s insatiable cultural thirst just creates more marketing. Marketing that thinks it is culture.

  To understand how youth culture became such a sought-after market in the early nineties, it helps to go back briefly to the recession era “brand crisis” that took root immediately preceding this frenzy — a crisis that, with so many consumers failing to live up to corporate expectations, created a clear and pressing need for a new class of shoppers to step in and take over.

  During the two decades before the brand crisis, the major cultural industries were still drinking deeply from the river of baby-boomer buying power, and the youth demographic found itself on the periphery, upstaged by the awesome power of classic rock and reunion tours. Of course actual young consumers remained a concern for the industries that narrowly market to teens, but youth culture itself was regarded as a rather shallow and tepid well of inspiration by the entertainment and advertising industries. Sure, there were plenty of young people who considered their culture “alternative” or “underground” in the seventies and eighties. Every urban center maintained its bohemian pockets, where the faithful wrapped themselves in black, listened to the Grateful Dead or punk (or the more digestible New Wave), and shopped at secondhand clothing stores and in dank record stores. If they lived outside urban centers, tapes and accessories of the cool lifestyle could be ordered from the backs of magazines like Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, or swapped through networks of friends or purchased at concerts.

  Where I’m from there wasn’t no scene I got my information reading Highlights magazine

  —Princess Superstar, “I’m White,” Strictly Platinum

  While this is a gross caricature of the youth subcultures that rose and fell during these decades, the relevant distinction is that these scenes were only halfheartedly sought after as markets. In part this was because seventies punk was at its peak at the same time as the infinitely more mass-marketable disco and heavy metal, and the gold mine of high-end preppy style. And while rap mus
ic was topping the charts by the mid-to late eighties, arriving complete with a fully articulated style and code, white America was not about to declare the arrival of a new youth culture. That day would have to wait a few years until the styles and sounds of urban black youth were fully co-opted by white suburbia.

  So there was no mass-marketing machine behind these subcultures: there was no Internet, no traveling alternative-culture shopping malls like Lollapalooza or Lilith Fair, and there certainly weren’t slick catalogs like Delia and Airshop, which now deliver body glitter, plastic pants and big-city attitude like pizzas to kids stuck in the suburbs. The industries that drove Western consumerism were still catering to the citizens of Woodstock Nation, now morphed into consumption-crazed yuppies. Most of their kids, too, could be counted on as yuppies-in-training, so keeping track of the trends and tastes favored by style-setting youth wasn’t worth the effort.

  The Youth Market Saves the Day

  All that changed in the early nineties when the baby boomers dropped their end of the consumer chain and the brands underwent their identity crisis. At about the time of Marlboro Friday, Wall Street took a closer look at the brands that had flourished through the recession, and noticed something interesting. Among the industries that were holding steady or taking off were beer, soft drinks, fast food and sneakers —not to mention chewing gum and Barbie dolls. There was something else: 1992 was the first year since 1975 that the number of teenagers in America increased. Gradually, an idea began to dawn on many in the manufacturing sector and entertainment industries: maybe their sales were slumping not because consumers were “brand-blind,” but because these companies had their eyes fixed on the wrong demographic prize. This was not a time for selling Tide and Snuggle to housewives —it was a time for beaming MTV, Nike, Hilfiger, Microsoft, Netscape and Wired to global teens and their overgrown imitators. Their parents might have gone bargain basement, but kids, it turned out, were still willing to pay up to fit in. Through this process, peer pressure emerged as a powerful market force, making the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism of their suburban parents pale by comparison. As clothing retailer Elise Decoteau said of her teen shoppers, “They run in packs. If you sell to one, you sell to everyone in their class and everyone in their school.”5

  There was just one catch. As the success of branding superstars like Nike had shown, it was not going to be sufficient for companies simply to market their same products to a younger demographic; they needed to fashion brand identities that would resonate with this new culture. If they were going to turn their lackluster products into transcendent meaning machines —as the dictates of branding demanded — they would need to remake themselves in the image of nineties cool: its music, styles and politics.

  Cool Envy: The Brands Go Back to School

  Fueled by the dual promises of branding and the youth market, the corporate sector experienced a burst of creative energy. Cool, alternative, young, hip —whatever you want to call it —was the perfect identity for product-driven companies looking to become transcendent image-based brands. Advertisers, brand managers, music, film and television producers raced back to high school, sucking up to the in-crowd in a frantic effort to isolate and reproduce in TV commercials the precise “attitude” teens and twenty-somethings were driven to consume with their snack foods and pop tunes. And as in high schools everywhere, “Am I cool?” became the deeply dull and all-consuming question of every moment, echoing not only through class and locker rooms, but through the high-powered meetings and conference calls of Corporate High.

  The quest for cool is by nature riddled with self-doubt (“Is this cool?” one can hear the legions of teen shoppers nervously quizzing each other. “Do you think this is lame?”) Except now the harrowing doubts of adolescence are the billion-dollar questions of our age. The insecurities go round and round the boardroom table, turning ad writers, art directors and CEOs into turbo-powered teenagers, circling in front of their bedroom mirrors trying to look blasé. Do the kids think we’re cool? they want to know. Are we trying too hard to be cool, or are we really cool? Do we have attitude? The right attitude?

  The Wall Street Journal regularly runs serious articles about how the trend toward wide-legged jeans or miniature backpacks is affecting the stock market. IBM, out-cooled in the eighties by Apple, Microsoft and pretty well everybody, has become fixated on trying to impress the cool kids, or, in the company’s lingo, the “People in Black.” “We used to call them the ponytail brigade, the black turtleneck brigade,” says IBM’s David Gee, whose job it is to make Big Blue cool. “Now they’re the PIBs — People in Black. We have to be relevant to the PIBs.”6 For Pepe Jeans, the goal, articulated by marketing director Phil Spur, is this: “They [the cool kids] have to look at your jeans, look at your brand image and say ‘that’s cool …’ At the moment we’re ensuring that Pepe is seen in the right places and on the right people.”7

  The companies that are left out of the crowd of successfully hip brands —their sneakers too small, their pant-legs too tapered, their edgy ads insufficiently ironic —now skulk on the margins of society: the corporate nerds. “Coolness is still elusive for us,” says Bill Benford, president of L.A. Gear athletic wear,8 and one half expects him to slash his wrists like some anxious fifteen-year-old unable to face schoolyard exile for another term. No one is safe from this brutal ostracism, as Levi Strauss learned in 1998. The verdict was merciless: Levi’s didn’t have superstores like Disney, it didn’t have cool ads like the Gap, it didn’t have hip-hop credibility like Hilfiger and no one wanted to tattoo its logo on their navel, like Nike. In short, it wasn’t cool. It had failed to understand, as its new brand developer Sean Dee diagnosed, that “loose jeans is not a fad, it’s a paradigm shift.”9

  Cool, it seems, is the make-or-break quality in 1990s branding. It is the ironic sneer-track of ABC sitcoms and late-night talk shows; it is what sells psychedelic Internet servers, extreme sports gear, ironic watches, mind-blowing fruit juices, kitsch-laden jeans, postmodern sneakers and post-gender colognes. Our “aspirational age,” as they say in marketing studies, is about seventeen. This applies equally to the forty-seven-year-old baby boomers scared of losing their cool and the seven-year-olds kick-boxing to the Backstreet Boys.

  As the mission of corporate executives becomes to imbue their companies with deep coolness, one can even foresee a time when the mandate of our elected leaders will be “Make the Country Cool.” In many ways, that time is already here. Since his election in 1997, England’s young prime minister, Tony Blair, has been committed to changing Britain’s somewhat dowdy image to “Cool Britannia.” After attending a summit with Blair in an art-directed conference room in Canary Wharf, French president Jacques Chirac said, “I’m impressed. It all gives Britain the image of a young, dynamic and modern country.” At the G-8 summit in Birmingham, Blair turned the august gathering into a basement rec room get-together, where the leaders watched All Saints music videos and then were led in a round of “All You Need Is Love;” no Nintendo games were reported. Blair is a world leader as nation stylist —but will his attempt to “rebrand Britain” really work, or will he be stuck with the old, outdated Brit brand? If anyone can do it, it’s Blair, who took a page from the marketers of Revolution Soda and successfully changed the name of his party from an actual description of its loyalties and policy proclivities (that would be “labour”) to the brand-asset descriptor “New Labour.” His is not the Labour Party but a labor-scented party.

  The Change Agents: Cooling the Water Cooler

  The journey to our current state of world cool almost ended, however, before it really began. Even though by 1993 there was scarcely a fashion, food, beverage or entertainment company that didn’t pine for what the youth market promised, many were at a loss as to how to get it. At the time that cool-envy hit, many corporations were in the midst of a hiring freeze, recovering from rounds of layoffs, most of which were executed according to the last-hired-first-fired policies of the late-eighties r
ecession. With far fewer young workers on the payroll and no new ones coming up through the ranks, many corporate executives found themselves in the odd position of barely knowing anyone under thirty years old. In this stunted context, youth itself looked oddly exotic —and information about Xers, Generation Y and twenty-somethings was suddenly a most precious commodity.

  Fortunately, a backlog of hungry twenty-somethings were already in the job market. Like good capitalists, many of these young workers saw a market niche: being professionally young. In so many words, they assured would-be bosses that if they were hired, hip, young countercultures would be hand-delivered at the rate of one per week; companies would be so cool, they would get respect in the scenes. They promised the youth demographic, the digital revolution, a beeline into convergence.

  And as we now know, when they got the job, these conduits of cool saw no need to transform themselves into clone-ish Company Men. Many can be seen now, roaming the hallways of Fortune 500 corporations dressed like club kids, skateboard in tow. They drop references to all-night raves at the office water cooler (“Memo to the boss: why not fill this thing with ginseng-laced herbal iced tea?”). The CEOs of tomorrow aren’t employees, they are, to use a term favored at IBM, “change agents.” But are they impostors —scheming “suits” hiding underneath hip-hop snowboarding gear? Not at all. Many of these young workers are the real deal; the true and committed product of the scenes they serve up, and utterly devoted to the transformation of their brands. Like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, they stay up late into the night penning manifestos, revolutionary tracts about the need to embrace the new, to flout bureaucracy, to get on the Web or be left behind, to redo the ad campaign with a groovier, grittier feel, to change quicker, be hipper.