no logo

@colin reads like he's trying to become the 'real life' carles of the hipster runoff 'brand'

xpost

Yes, No Logo is closer to CAMRA than the SWP in spirit.

who can we turn to now that all our truths are corporatised -_-

the brand of truthgivers with whom you've had the most positive previous experience

Climate Camp™ it is then

I'm going with Indus Kebabs™ personally.

Inspired to rebrand by that article

i like it, but am worried about negative connotations due to work in the developing south american nations

don't really give two shits about what my mobile "says about me."

I'm absolutely enraged by mobile phone branding and advertising, as I've long said, and the plain fact is that it really does matter to quite a lot of people, at least in the pre-buy phase, which is the one that matters to the advertiser. The same applies to other products! It's not so much about the logo as about the technology, I will admit. To be accessorised is increasingly important, perhaps more so than ever.

looooooooooooool NV

To be accessorised is increasingly important, perhaps more so than ever.

circular argument

Well, I haven't read No Logo so tbh I don't know what I'm talking about. If I had read it, I'd be a fount of anti-corporate wisdom obv

You should probably read it, very prescient bits about the "internship" phenomenon - among many other things.

I just realised last night that if I had free texts for life I could round up every vicious criminal and gunslinger in the west, rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists, and then go round to that superband twat's house and kick him to death.

No Logo is a good logo. think bill hicks had a good spiel about the anti-marketing dollar being good dollar.

that's an epic post, NV, but i'm completely lost by it tbh.

But when you do go to the phone store to get your free texts there is small print saying 'unlimited' is 500 texts a month.

xpost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lj056ao6GE

NV, superband twat has already been given his dues here: The advertising of mobile telecommunications companies

I don't make any dollar from anti-marketing, nor do I plan to. This may make me slightly pious and smug but it doesn't make me a hypocrite.

yeah but which superband twat?

i'd rather be a rich hypocrite.

maybe everyone who joins the superband automatically becomes a twat on the slim to nonexistent chance they weren't one already -_-

So would you download No Logo to stop Rage Against the Machine being number 1 next Christmas?

I think there's a copy downstairs tbh

Looking forward to Lego No Logo coming out for the Wii next month.

No Logo My Ego

anyway I've found it. it looks long. the cover is one big logo lol

Domo Arigato, Lego No Logo

http://apecmx.com/deadduck/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/goldie.jpg

Go-Go No Logo

there's quite a lot of logos amirite

http://kodiakak.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/fugu.jpg

http://capitalistliontamer.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/goo_goo_dolls.jpg

that's the fish which is deadly poisonous unless one of like 5 cooks in the world who knows how to cook it cooks it? xpost

Yes, it's Fugu. No Logo.

The Japanese poet Yosa Buson (1716–1783) expressed some of this feeling in a famous senryū:

I cannot see her tonight.
I have to give her up
So I will eat fugu.

I cannot see her tonight.
I have to give her up
So I read No Logo.

Does she make any insightful points that aren't raised in the dozens of other books on the same subject that came out before it?

strengthening her brand iirc

don't think she's actually made any insightful points thus far though.

It just seemed like she took a lot of ideas from critical theory and more academic writers and presented them for a popular audience.

http://shanghaiflow.canalblog.com/images/Pogo_Dance.jpg

^ No Pogo

are they doing some punk vn. of the argentine tango there?

I'm absolutely enraged by mobile phone branding and advertising, as I've long said, and the plain fact is that it really does matter to quite a lot of people, at least in the pre-buy phase, which is the one that matters to the advertiser. The same applies to other products! It's not so much about the logo as about the technology, I will admit. To be accessorised is increasingly important, perhaps more so than ever.

no, i mean, i don't care about my mobile OR about if other people do. i don't know if they do or not. adverts are annoying, bfd, there are bigger things to worry about.

It just seemed like she took a lot of ideas from critical theory and more academic writers and presented them for a popular audience.

― sarahel, Tuesday, December 22, 2009 4:49 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think this is another way of saying academics can't write.

O™ (Noodle Vague)

^^^this is amazing

^yes this is awes, NV hits jackpot!

LOL Henry I was going to point out that nonfiction authors are often tasked with the translation of the theoretical into the practical.

agree, that was generally the point of her writing the book.

That and really hating gassy keg beer.

don't really give two shits about what my mobile "says about me."

― Dean Gaffney's December (history mayne), Tuesday, December 22, 2009 1:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Note the term "technical solution": rational problems have technical solutions. (Again, a blatantly erroneous claim: confronting ecological problems requires making choices and decisions -- about what to produce, what to consume, on what energy to rely -- which ultimately concern the very way of life of a people; as such, they are not only not technical, but are eminently political in the most radical sense of involving fundamental social choices.) No wonder, then, that capitalism itself is presented in technical terms, not even as a science but simply as something that works: it needs no ideological justification, because its success is itself sufficient justification. In this regard, capitalism is "the opposite of socialism, which has a manual": "Capitalism is a system which has no philosophical pretensions, which is not in search of happiness. The only thing it says is: 'Well, this functions.' And if people want to live better, it is preferable to use this mechanism, because it functions. The only criterion is efficiency."

This anti-ideological description is, of course, patently false: the very notion of capitalism as a neutral social mechanism is ideology (even utopian ideology) at its purest. [...] If there was ever a system which enchanted its subjects with dreams (of freedom, of how your success depends on yourself, of the run of luck which is just around the corner, of unconstrained pleasures...), then it is capitalism. The true problem lies elsewhere: namely, how to keep people's faith in capitalism alive when the inexorable reality of a crisis has brutally crushed such dreams? Here enters the need for a "mature" realistic pragmatism: one should heroically resist dreams of perfection and happiness and accept bitter capitalist reality as the best (or the least bad) of all possible worlds.

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/l/lo-fidelity-allstars/album-how-to-operate-with-a-blown-mind.jpg

man I ain't tryin' to blow any minds here; just that, when the revolution comes, I wanna put as few people up against the wall as possible

I've got a 6th hand mobile that my wife gave me because I work on 3 or 4 different sites and my boss needs to get hold of me sometimes btw

good job fighting the Marketing Man noodle

I'm just sayin lots of grown ups have phones for entirely functional reasons and the idea that we're all slaves to the omniscient and totally effective machine is a bit bollocksy really

what condiment would you put on your question marks

it would tell me a lot about you

what if you didn't have time to prepare your own question marks, so busy working for the man that you order take out

I hope you remember the ones living off government question marks

maybe they're the really free ones

have you ever tried exclamation points

"work or starve" is kind of an easy decision from the individual's perspective, but the choice to work ends up expressing more than simply a desire not to starve; intentionally or not, it lends legitimacy to the ruling order.

Work or starve is pretty much a human imperative. I mean it's work, starve, or make others do work for you, whether by force or by some kind of social contract. You could quibble with the AMOUNT of work required by capitalism and whether it's really way beyond what's necessary and a means for the ruling class to skim, but work itself can't be quibbled with.

Unless you're using "work" as a shorthand for selling your labor to someone else. In which case I'd probably bring up some arguments about efficiency.

But I'd also add that capitalism does give you a pretty wide range of options in terms of selling your labor - I mean you can work 20 hours a week in a Starbucks and then spend the rest of your time growing food, knitting clothes and building furniture if you really want.

I mean underneath it all I know how I'm complicit in capitalism by my default "pragmatic" attitude, but the thing is when you're not a chaired academic with a platform it's pretty hard to oppose capitalism in a non-futile way, especially when you're being presented with the choice of an imperfect system that feeds you versus a big question mark.

― Bay-L.A. Bar Talk (Hurting 2), Wednesday, December 23, 2009 6:50 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark

just one more thing to add, and then I gotta run: I don't think of 'ideology criticism' (or whatever you wanna call it) as a way to separate myself from and denounce the unenlightened, false-consciousness-having herds; my motivation is more along the lines of "god DAMN it, why is it so hard to change this system when everyone knows that it's constantly fucking people over, again and again, in the same predictable ways?" but as long as people acknowledge that we have now is a seriously flawed system, and they aren't actively stanning for the World Bank or something, I'm fine with them doing whatever.

ut the thing is when you're not a chaired academic with a platform it's pretty hard to oppose capitalism in a non-futile way

I'd say most chaired academics with platforms are deluding themselves that they're opposing capitalism in any way whatsoever

especially if they have blackberries or iPhones, right?

haha

why is it so hard to change this system when everyone knows that it's constantly fucking people over, again and again, in the same predictable ways?

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/quiz/266000/266151_1248794026596_350_349.jpg

I just, in general, find the idea that you can stand OUTSIDE a system and criticize it ridiculous. you will always be inside the system. man is a social animal and is bound by social constructs. even the most ascetic drop-out unabomber type, living in the woods wearing handmade clothes and burning his shit for fuel or whatever, is still living in relation to some external system - the thoughts he has are ordered by a language, his actions are defined by their opposition to the existing system, etc. there is no outside. we're all in it.

criticizing a system you are inside of often makes for a more informed, nuanced critique.

have you ever read an sb thread

Read an sb thread? I've gotten multiple sb threads locked by mods as a result of my posts to them!

I just, in general, find the idea that you can stand OUTSIDE a system and criticize it ridiculous. you will always be inside the system.

frankly I don't even know what this means

like how ridiculous was black folks' criticism of the racist power structure in the american south

or are you just calling the unabomber on his shit

but regardless of questions about Althusser's philosophical persuasion (given that his most famous essay about ideology includes a detailed discussion of his thesis that "Ideology has a material existence", I'm going with "materialist"), that seems to be the view most people here are working with

yeah, maybe read some of the lit on althusser? it's fairly well established (by marxists!) that his basic outlook was idealist. been saying this on ilx for years so excuse lack of patience, but basically althusser was so comprehensively "done" in the 1970s that it is ludicrous to me that people continue to talk about him.

I think Zizek's original quote, taken in full, says exactly what it says: Weimar Germany was a nation with a lot of problems, and Hitler's solution (unifying the population around the exclusion and extermination of an ethnic minority) was an easy way to make people feel better without changing anything. whether or not you think it's legitimate to define the term "violence" broadly enough that it encompasses both genocide and social change is irrelevant; it's pretty clear that that Zizek does think it's legitimate, and the only way to arrive at the "ZOMG HE SAID HITERL SHOULD BE MORE VIOLENT!!1!" criticism is to ignore the author's intent (or to have it obscured for you by a charlatan like Adam Kirsch).

"without changing anything"? yeah, you're going with that? ok.

i think the violence he meant was probably more than "social change", wasn't it? more like violent leninist revolution? under third period comintern that would have been just lovely. probably not as bad as nazism, but "social change" -- no. i think he means rather more. why is kirsch a "charlatan"? more than zizek, the guy who extols "emancipatory violence" from various well-protected lectures halls to the children of the rich west.

"the last line about the "precise sense" of violence is just fatuous rubbish. is that what you're really offering as an argument?"

the idea that a philosopher will sometimes use a word in ways that are different from its everyday use? yes, that would be my argument. this is why e.g. the Kantian "transcendental subject" is not "maths"

well, he said "precise" didn't he? how would you "precisely" define violence to include the most-famous advocate of non-violence? (his world is altogether lacking in precision. history is messy. even the collapse of the raj.)

or are you just calling the unabomber on his shit

^^^this. but not just the unabomber basically all ivory tower academicians

lol at blanket condemnation of betrand rusell, jacques derrida, unabomber

?

stop it you are making me hungry

nah I like Derrida, he's a riot

xp question mark con carne?

Russell seems like a stand-up guy too.

Dropping my slave-name as a challenge to global capitalism btw

i thought this thread would be revived for naomi klein's in-praise-of-sex-and-the-city article in G2 this week

wasn't that naomi wolf? (a little unexpected as well but ok)

haha oops! i am actually more disappointed in naomi wolf than i was when i was skimming it and thought it was naomi klein for some reason

http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/2610/1uyunibig6st.jpg

world looks pretty good from up here tbh

klein and climate reparations.