Look around your house. Sneakers, computers, movies, household items. How many of those things are made by massive, multinational corporations? Probab...moreLook around your house. Sneakers, computers, movies, household items. How many of those things are made by massive, multinational corporations? Probably all of them. And how many of these companies are from America? Lots, I'll bet.
In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein takes a trip through the history of branding - the association of a particular company with a particular product. Given that most products with similar function - sneakers, for example - are fairly similar in their makeup and function, the companies that make them use brand marketing to distinguish themselves from their competitors.
Thus, Nike, Reebok and Adidas, whose sneakers are, by and large, as good as each other, use brand marketing to make you believe that, if you buy their product, you are somehow superior to those who buy the product of the other guy. If you buy Nike, you're part the the Nike family - the uber-atheletes, the people who Just Do It and don't go in for all the fripperies of life. If you buy Reebok, you're more down to earth, more involved in the gestalt of life, and not quite as intense as the Nike people. If you have Adidas, you're probably more fun, a little irreverent, and you dream about sex all day. Or something like that.
We use brands to define ourselves. When my father worked for GE, we only had GE appliances in the house, even if that meant paying a little more for the new washer. I had a student who wore nothing but Jean-Paul Gaultier clothes. Hell, Generation X has been divided into the Pepsi Generation and the Coke kids, a terrible schism that may never be repaired in my lifetime, unless the Mountain Dew Freedom Fighters intervene. And we won't even start in with the Windows-Mac Civil War.
I don't pretend to be immune, either. I drink Diet Coke and used to smoke Marlboros, and would never have chosen another brand if those were available. Of course, this probably has something to do with scary chemical additives than anything else, but the point is the same. I was loyal to my brands, one way or another, without even thinking about why.
Like it or not, our brands define us, and we allow them to do so. Mainly because they use their commercials to terrify us - buy Preparation H or lose that valuable sale, wash your husband's clothes in Wisk, or all the other wives will laugh at you, that sort of thing. And the moment you start to wonder if perhaps there isn't any real difference between cars made by Honda and those made by Toyota, they hit you with a barrage of special offers, incentives and tie-ins to remind you that they love you. Really, they do.
Max Barry takes this kind of brand identification one step further.
This is a world where, economically speaking, most of the world is the United States. All of the Western Hemisphere (except Cuba), the UK, Southeast Asia and Australia, Russia, India and South Africa belong to the US, for all intents and purposes. The US government operates in all those places, if you have the money for it. Europe, Africa, China and the Middle East stand alone against the US economic juggernaut.
Corporations are king here. There are no taxes, as the US Government is simply another corporate organization, responsible for enforcing such laws as they have the budget to enforce. Every service - police, medical, fire - has been privatized. And while the concept of the political nation has pretty much vanished, there are economic nations emerging - the US Alliance and Team Advantage, both economic alliances that have their roots in airline mileage campaigns. Each of these groups controls dozens of markets, and cross-promotes all their goods. So if you wear Nike shoes, then you had better not eat at Burger King - that's Team Advantage territory. And if you work for McDonald's, then you'll want the NRA to protect you, rather than the Police, because you get a membership discount. Schools are run by "kid-friendly" companies such as McDonald's and Mattel, and are basically corporate propaganda mills. Not like now, of course. As if all that wasn't bad enough, your surname is the name of whatever company you work for.
Thus, a young man named Hack Nike is given a pivotal role in the marketing of a new Nike sneaker, the Mercury. As part of their marketing strategy, they'll limit production and distribution to five pairs per store. As Beanie Babies, among other products, have shown, the more limited the availability, the higher the demand, and the higher the price. Thus, charging $2,000 for a pair of shoes that an Indonesian laborer made for $0.85 is perfectly reasonable.
The second part of their marketing strategy is to increase the public's awareness of the sneakers, as well as to give them some street credibility. That's where Hack Nike comes in. His new marketing job is to shoot and kill ten purchasers of Nike Mercury sneakers.
Can Nike get away with this? They seem to think so, and they probably could have, were it not for Hack's distaste for murder. Suffice to say, the plot becomes complicated, and the Government's best and most dedicated officer, Jennifer, is on the case.
The story is a lot of fun, and well written. The world that Barry has created is a logical extension of our own, if hopefully improbable, and his characters are pretty easy to identify with, with only a few who don't shine as brightly as the others. Being a native of Melbourne, Barry also takes a few nice stabs at Americans, but they're good-natured and accurate, so I didn't mind. It was a tale of massive corporate malfeasance based on the solid marketing and corporate ethics of today. And since 2003, when the book was published, we've seen plenty of examples of how much large corporations are able to get away with and how unethical they're willing to be in order to make a quick buck.
Barry's book is, fundamentally, about the problems that arise when you allow the free market absolute control. The adage about the corruptive influences of power does not only apply to individual people, it most definitely applies to corporate entities as well. The excesses of the early 2000s showed that not even the law - to say nothing of basic ethics - could make some of the biggest corporations in the world behave honestly. The recent housing/financial services collapse is another example - when pursuing the almighty dollar, considerations for what is right and wrong fall by the wayside, and the law might only be a temporary stumbling block.
Read this book. It's a lot of fun, and then watch the papers and see how true it really could be.... (less)
In the introduction to this book, the author states that he truly admires William Shatner - he states that Shatner is a man who has made a career out...moreIn the introduction to this book, the author states that he truly admires William Shatner - he states that Shatner is a man who has made a career out of caricaturing himself, remaking himself over and over again with no looking back, no shame and - as far as we know - no regrets. He finishes by kindly asking William Shatner not to sue him.
I don't think he has too much to worry about, really. This book is a quick, fun read that, while not necessarily painting William Shatner in the best of lights, certainly pays homage to his long and varied career.
The story goes as follows: William Shatner is on his way to the very first ShatnerCon, a convention celebrating his life and works. It is a convention mobbed with fans, devotees who are there to see their idol, whether he caught their hearts as T.J. Hooker, Captain Kirk, or the host of Rescue 911. In the new Cathode-La convention center, tribute can be paid in full to William Shatner, a man who has changed so many lives.
But there are those who do not adore Shatner. They don't like him or even tolerate him. They are the Campbellians, known by the bloody stumps where their right hands used to be and each known only as Bruce. They hate William Shatner with a passion that borders on madness, and seeing him dead is not nearly enough for them - they want his entire body of work to never have existed. Their weapon is a Fiction Bomb, a metaphysical WMD that can erase stories from existence. No one remembers them, no one knows they ever existed. Should the Fiction Bomb succeed, William Shatner's entire body of work would cease to be. And so, in short order, would he.
But what if a Fiction Bomb should go wrong? What if that interface between fiction and reality should be breached, spilling its contents into what we commonly call the Real World? In that case, dozens of William Shatners - every character the man had played - would emerge in our world, with only one thought on their minds: Destroy the real William Shatner!
This book is a very quick read - only eighty-three pages - but it certainly packs in a lot of action, and as works of fan-fiction go, it isn't too bad. Because that is most assuredly what this book is - fanfic. Burk has a very basic concept here - get all of Shatner's characters out to kill him. Simple. Add lots of blood and gore and guts, because that's always fun, and you have some entertaining reading. This is the very best kind of fanfic, really - you know it's just a send-up, never intended to be a serious work of literature. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
It suffers from some serious editing problems, though, and Mr. Burk would have done well to have hired a good proofreader. There are some very basic grammatical mistakes, dropped plurals and a few sentences that just don't make sense. To a regular reader, it might not be important, but to someone whose bread and butter is the proper use of English, it's kind of glaring. But then my expectations weren't all that high - I went into this expecting a rollicking adventure and that's what I got. Complaining about the grammar in a book like this is like complaining about the quality of the vegetables in your Big Mac.
Still, there are some redeeming points to it, above and beyond the weirdness of the whole thing. The beginning of the book does a very good job at setting up a real dreamlike atmosphere – a building that covers a hundred city blocks and has a parking lot that stretches out as far as the eye can see. Upon reaching the convention center, Shatner finds out that he is already late, and is led through a maze of hallways that result in almost instant disorientation. He has to sign hundreds of photographs for hours on end, and ultimately faces off with his own doppelgangers. Burk has reached into the bag of common nightmares and put together a scenario that is both familiar and disarming, which propels you through the rest of the book. After all, if you're struggling to keep up with events, think about how Shatner must be feeling?
And of course, one can't help but wonder if this is a commentary on the very nature of the actor/fan dynamic. Who is William Shatner, after all? Depending on who's looking at him, he could be Kirk or T.J. Hooker, Denny Crane or Buck Murdock, the guy who saw gremlins on his plane or the guy trying to sell you cheap airplane tickets. On top of that, Shatner has another character to maintain – Shatner as a public figure, the guy who goes to conventions and book signings and does guest spots on TV shows.
Who is the real William Shatner? Who are any of us, really? In this age of online presences, there could are electronic doppelgangers of ourselves all over the internet. The person that your Twitter followers believe is you is not necessarily the same person that the people on your Mad Men slash fic forum know. You present a different face to your Facebook friends than the people you know in your World of Warcraft game, and like Shatner in this story, you ultimately have no control over the different renditions of you that other people see.
The good news, of course, is that those different Yous are unlikely to rise up and try to kill you.
Ultimately, this book has no over-arching message about the nature of identity in a world where different versions walk around without our knowledge or consent. I don't think that it was ever Burk's purpose to write a treatise on the modern concept of identity, but rather to write a quick, bloody thriller about William Shatner. So, it has no real lessons to teach us other than that if you see a deranged Captain Kirk approaching with a lightsaber (and how that got in there, I'll never know - a little artistic license for the sake of awesomeness) you run away. Very fast.
-------------------------------------------------- "I'm a... professional. I can deal... with anything." - William Shatner, Shatnerquake --------------------------------------------------(less)
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