kidmercury

I've been reading the book No Logo by Naomi Klein, which I really like. Best book I've read in a while. It's about marketing, branding, culture....that type of stuff. It was written a decade ago, but still very relevant.

Below is an excerpt from the book that I think are related to what we discuss here (i.e. the demise of the nation-state and the world power structure, and the rise of virtual communities as the econoimc and cultural replacement).

So while cultural homogenization -- the idea of everyone eating at Burger King, wearing Nike shoes and watching Backstreet Boys videos -- may inspire global claustrophobia, it has also provided a basis for meaningful global communication. Thanks to the branded web, McDonald's workers around the world are able to swap stories on the Internet about working under the arches; club kids in London, Berlin, and Tel Aviv can commiserate about the corporate co-optation of the rave scene; and North American journalists can talk with poor rural factory workers in Indonesia about how much Michael Jordan gets paid to do Nike commercials. This logo web has the unprecedented power to connect students who face ad bombardment in their university washrooms with sweatshop workers who make the goods in the ads and frustrated McWorkers who sell them. They may not all speak the same language, but they now have enough common ground to begin a discussion.....

.....A world united by Benetton slogans, Nike sweatshops, and McDonald's jobs might not be anyone's utopian global village, but its fiber-optic cables and shared cultural references are nonetheless laying the foundations for the first truly international people's movement.

Culture is collapsing, and a new culture is being born. Too bad the images in that culture 2.0 series I did are broken, man it was a lot better with the images. Oh well.

And of course, disdain for global corporate dominance should not be mistaken with a dislike for capitalism/free market modes of production. Klein disregards what most non-conspiracists do, which is that control of global money supply is what enables excessive wealth consolidation -- not the inherent nature of free market production. If the market for money supply was free market (i.e. if competing currencies were a realistic option) then we would not see the rise of a handful of global corporations that run everything.

In conclusion, I would like to take the plunge off the kook deep end and note that the concept of new communities originating from the evil corporations they are destined to defeat is an example of out of darkness comes light, which we have discussed as a way to transform the global economic crisis into a global renaissance. At least that's one interpretation of the prophecies surrounding 2012.