Unlike teenage Naomi Klein, as she herself recounts on her book, I don’t recall ever having cared for the logos appearing on my clothes. Much to the contrary, whenever one logo was showing, I would bend over backwards to remove it, cover it, or I would simply not wear it. The young me was striving for uniqueness in a world too homogenised, in which the visibility of a logo made the person wearing it invisible.

It was my mother who introduced in my mind the idea that unbranded products were the same as branded ones, only cheaper, and in fact, if you’d look at where two similar products —one branded one and one “unbranded”— had been manufactured, it would prove her right: same distribution factory, “Made in China” most often than not. For this reason, we were never about brands in my family; from tomato sauce to shoes to smartphones, it would be the equation between quality and price that would convince us of which item to buy, never the name printed on it. But even then I was aware that this did not hold true for every family, and that almost everyone in my class did care for which firm was behind the things they owned. It was never about the brand per se, as this book makes clear, but about the values it represents: the status, the power, the “coolness”… because brands do not sell products, they sell “ideas”, a world of meanings and identities so carefully built around the social trends of the moment that everyone feels drawn to it to a greater or lesser degree.

And indeed, more than 20 years after the publication of No Logo, we still see how every major brand strives to be associated with the latest social movements, embracing the feminist, LGBTQ+, black lives matter and ecologic values in the greatest purple-rainbow-black-green-washing ever concocted by the marketing magicians. Likewise, almost every multinational boasts a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) department, in an effort to publicly advertise their brand as a do-gooder through glossy actions —such as awards, donations and tree planting (which their community managers make sure we all know about)—, while privately they continue to engage in the same harmful practices uncovered and denounced by Klein in her book: destruction of nature and indigenous communities, exploitation and abuse of a vulnerable, impoverished workforce, undermining of national and individual authority and self-determination. The difference between now and 20 years ago is that we don’t have an excuse to believe them anymore; we should know better.

Naomi Klein has provided us with a thoroughly-researched and powerfully-presented analysis on how the super brands 1) occupy all the public spaces with their ads, products and shops, reducing our chances to reunite and discuss free from their influence 2) sponsor all sort of events, thus deciding what and how can be shown and limiting the freedom of expression of the participants, and 3) reduce the number and quality of jobs in their countries and abroad, with the resulting precariousness and insecurity of which my very generation is well aware and suffers from.

But she is far from being the only voice. Then and now, many social movements and educators have seen to it that we are aware of how, as consumers, we have the power as well as the responsibility to challenge corporations whenever they put their profit before people. A recent example of it can be found in the speech Congolese Nobel Peace Prize awardee Denis Mukwege gave to an impassive white audience¹: how, in order for us to keep enjoying newer and better smartphones, a big portion of the DRC population —mostly women and children— is systematically subjected to rape, violence and abuse.

Unfortunately, Klein’s hypothesis from 20 years ago—that the outrage of people as they discovered the modus operandi behind the global logos would fuel an anticorporate attitude that would in turn give way to a great political shift— never quite materialised. The tone in her final chapter was more optimistic and hopeful than reality has turned out to be, as she herself recognised². To the big brands she investigates in her book (Nike, Shell, McDonalds, Starbucks, Disney, Coca-Cola…), many others have been added (Amazon, Tesla, Google, Apple, Facebook… to name a tiny fraction of the pie) that continue the path of human rights violations and overexploitation of natural resources.

The question remains, when, as consumers and victims of this corporate system, are we going to stand up to it once and for all? When are we going to start thinking globally and acting locally, i.e. consuming at the small shop in the corner, the nearby market or the artisan shoemaker, so that we might take the power away from the corporations to give it back to the community? Our spaces, our choices, our jobs depend entirely on that.

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1. Watch acceptance speech by Denis Mukwege
2. Naomi Klein interview by The Guardian: No Logo at 20