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that prevents any criticism of the corporate benefactor.
The tale of the student expelled for wearing a Pepsi
t-shirt to his college’s Coca-Cola day is amusing, but
Klein quickly follows this by describing how corporatesponsored
drug trials uncovered potentially fatal side
effects in the sponsor’s products. When the researchers
attempted to publish their findings in scientific journals,
the universities were threatened with the termination of
their lucrative sponsorship contracts, and the researchers
were promptly sacked.
On the face of it, sponsorship seems the ideal solution
to the growing problem of funding for educational
institutions, but many campaigners are worried about
the growing presence of commercially funded learning
materials in schools and colleges: as the Centre
for Commercial-Free Schools notes, “when [the]
Consumers Union collected and evaluated examples
of these materials, it found that 80 percent contained
biased or incomplete information, and promoted a
viewpoint that favoured consumption of the sponsor’s
product or service or otherwise favoured the company
and its economic agenda”. In an article aimed
at schoolchildren, activist magazine Adbusters argues
that “companies profit by changing the way you think.
Representatives of the drug Prozac will come to your
school to ‘teach’ you about depression. Exxon has
[an] ecology curriculum that shows how clean the
environment of Alaska is”.
BUY Naomi Klein books online from and
“Let’s remember November 30 and the days that
followed as the launch of the Seattle Rebellion, the
anti-corporate resistance that will reshape society in
the next 10 years. It wasn’t a skirmish or an opening
salvo, but a manifesto etched in the streets by tens of
thousands of people.” – Adbusters
The closing chapters of No Logo investigate the growing
number of protests against globalisation, of which
the Seattle Riots of late 1999 and the current anti-GM
food campaigns have been the most visible. Although
both events occurred after the book’s completion, they
help to reinforce Klein’s conclusion that the rise of
global brands and increasing consumer awareness is
leading to a growing backlash.
One of the most visible forms of anti-corporatism
is ‘culture jamming’, espoused by groups such as
Adbusters and the band Negativland. Culture jamming
attempts to subvert the ubiquitous advertising
messages by spoofing them or altering their meaning
in Situationist-style pranks, and the Adbusters site in
particular offers a ‘culture jammer’s toolkit’ together
with a gallery of spoof adverts.
Klein rightly questions the effectiveness of these
tactics. While the proponents talk of their activities
with missionary zeal, the corporations are hardly
changing their policies as the result of a few spoof adverts.
As Klein points out, culture jamming has been
co-opted by the very advertisers it aims to subvert –
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