No Logo

No Logo by Naomi Klein is a detailed critique of our branded world and the corporations behind it. Klein examines the takeover of public culture by private companies, their suppression of variety, and their destruction of stable employment conditions. Finally, she explores what people are doing to try and reclaim what has been lost. For anyone wondering what the anti-globilisation protests are about, this is the book that will explain it to you.

No Space.
No space covers the rise of the brand as a new form of marketing. Rather than making anything useful, corporations have moved towards leveraging consumers' perceptions of their brand to sell products with large mark-ups. To achieve this goal, banded corporations have taken over public space, public culture, and public style. Advertisements have become ubiquitous from the TV commercial, to billboards, to product placements. Corporations have even resorted to planting people on the street to drum up hype about new products (called bro-ing, "hey, bro, check out these new shoes"). In a modern city you can't see the forest for the ads. Cultural movements are also being co-opted by brands. The company 'Body Shop' sells itself as part of the environmental movement taking over the language and approach associated with this social cause. Clothing corporation are even managing to adopt the cultural styles associated with various groups. This process ends in the absurd situation of Nike selling black lower-class style to white upper-class teens and Tommy Hilfiger selling white-upper class style to black lower-class teens. The rapacious appetite of corporations for new public space to exploit has left very little free of their influence. Even school and universities are being squeezed by the mindless expansion of these hollow corporations.

No Choice.
No choice deals with the tendency of large corporations to merge and expand. The quintessential business model in this case is 'Wal-mart'. The idea is to move to the outskirts of a town buy up a large parcel of land at a relatively cheap price and build a huge mega-store. This store is filled with inventory bought at bulk rates and the management then proceeds to undercut all the local stores. These smaller stores have to close down as they can't compete and the previously vibrant town centre becomes a shadow of its former self. People are then left with no option but to shop at the large chain-stores like Blockbuster, Starbucks, or McDonalds. The other way corporations curtail choice is by mergers and acquisitions. When all the content is being provided by a few large media conglomerates it's hard to find sources outside the mainstream and dissenting information becomes suppressed.

No Jobs.
No Jobs is a look at the way corporations are hurting their employees by trying to pretend they don't have any workers! Since corporations sell brands and not products, they don't need to make anything - which requires less workers. By outsourcing all of their activities, corporations empty themselves out and start to focus on their core competency of brand management. Unfortunately this has resulted in a marked decrease in job security and a stagnation of wage levels for the average worker. Corporations are taking advantage of this, offering increasingly worse jobs with less benefits, fewer hours, and lower pay. In one example, Microsoft hires around half its employees as temp workers making sure to fire them before reaching the full-time threshold, only to re-hire them again for the next temporary period. In another example, hours worked by employees at Starbucks have become so random it's impossible to fit scheduled class time or a second job around it. Finally Klein takes a look at the desperate situation in third-world countries where corporations are taking advantage of sub-standard labour laws and minuscule rates of pay to make their products even more cheaply. These employees face long hours of repetitive work to produce items that retail for hundreds if not thousands of dollars more than cost when sold in branded stores. And when confronted with the facts about their indirect employees in third-world countries, most of the corporations don't even care.

No Logo.
No logo tells the story of what anti-corporate protesters are doing to show their opposition to the take-over of public space, the lack of consumer choice, and the worsening conditions of employment. Actions range from ad-busting the latest marketing campaign to a world-wide co-ordinated protest on Shell's (and others) support for brutal dictatorial regimes. Klein's thesis is that the corporations have done this to themselves. By co-opting activist movements they radicalised them, by suppressing dissent they brought a spot-light to bear on their own role in the problem, and by destroying jobs they destroyed employee loyalty. No Logo tells stories of limited success, protesters have made a small amount of difference to the way corporations run their operations. The book ends on a hopeful tone. The more activists around the world connect and co-ordinate, the more they become like the sprawling multinationals they oppose, and the better able they are to resist their protean growth.

Overall 7/10, the first three chapters are great but the last is much too long and repetitive.

The Nazis were wrong! (Part II)

Back at Well That Was Daft Nasher has a response to my take on the nature of morality. In his original post he took the position that morality was subjective stating that even the rightness or wrongness of the Holocaust is just a matter of opinion. I took a different approach explaining while I don't think moral truths are determined the same way as scientific truths, they are not on the same level as matters of taste and are actually epistemologically objective. Now Nasher has a follow up where he clarifies his position.

Nasher agrees that my example "apricots taste better than strawberries" is an example of a subjective truth. Something that is true for me but not necessarily true for anyone else. However, he goes further saying "sugar tastes better than elephant dung" is also an example of a subjective truth. I would disagree, if there was someone who maintained they found elephant dung more tasty than sugar I would assume they either haven't tasted each one or they are confused about which is which. If someone told me "sugar tastes better than elephant dung" my response would be 'well, of course' and not 'that's just your opinion'.

Nasher seems to partially agree with me but also wants to broaden the area of concern to other species, even hypothetical ones. I am suspicious of the value of this move. Perhaps dung beetle larva do find elephant dung more tasty than sugar (although, do they even taste?) but what if I change the original statement to "sugar tastes better than elephant dung to humans"? Does this make the question suddenly objective rather than subjective? I think Nasher would still insist this statement is subjective even though other species are now excluded. A further issue I have is that I don't really think dung beetle larva have anything to add to discussions on morality. As far as we know, humans are the only species capable of engaging in advanced moral reasoning. Perhaps this will change in the future but it seems fairly pointless to speculate.

Nasher then brings it back to a realistic example saying that people raised in different environments can be more or less prone to bigotry and homophobia without considering themselves immoral. But my response to these people is to explain why they are wrong. Often it is a case of correcting facts like demonstrating the folk concept of race does not match up to the modern biological understanding of the human species or showing studies refuting the idea that homosexuals are bad parents. To dig a little further into the homophobia example, these people already agree with the basic moral principle that raising children in a stable household with loving parents is a good thing. Often the objections revolve around concerns that homosexual parents can't provide the same nurturing environment as heterosexual parents. If the homophobes still insist on their point of view after being shown studies on child performance outcomes that dispute their claim, then they are like the flat-earther, simply denying reality. Importantly what I am not saying is that everyone will agree with every moral judgement. There is scope for reasonable disagreement, especially around the fringes where new arguments appear frequently. A good example of this is animal rights. Perhaps in the future we will look back and see eating animals as immoral similar to the way we look back and realise how wrong scientists were to believe in the ether theory of light. Our morality, like our science, can update itself - but this doesn't make either source of knowledge any less objective.

To be honest I don't fully understand Nasher's last paragraph. He says we must have a "clear, immovable frame of reference to which we can compare and contrast the viewpoint". There is a broad inter-cultural agreement about what constitutes a good person and what sort of activities are prohibited. Surely we can compare the results of our moral reasoning to that? This doesn't rule out the possibility of being wrong about a moral judgement nor updating as new information comes in. But it does give us a frame of reference from which to start our (objective) moral reasoning.