No Logo: 10 years on

At Failure Magazine:

What are we to make of “No Logo” a decade on? It remains a stunningly passionate and ambitious snapshot of the newly-globalized youth and consumer culture at the end of the twentieth century. It’s also an often infuriating work of agitprop that marries old Marxist prejudices about the market economy to a paranoid and conspiratorial account of the business of advertising.

If that was all there was to the book, it would be enough to dismiss it as a period piece, the journalistic equivalent of a box of old Polaroid’s. But in its quest to undermine the branded economy and expose the capitalist-consumer propaganda that motivates all advertising, “No Logo” inadvertently became the most influential marketing manual of the decade.