Commodify Your Dissent

Not a rant but a recommendation this week, but it ties in nicely to last week's bit of froth. Run, don't walk, to your local bookstore (assuming you're lucky enough to have one) and buy a copy of Commodify Your Dissent (Number of the Beast: 0-393-31673-4). Maybe someday I'll be able to rant half as well as these people do. Their identification of the commodified "consumer as rebel" will be somewhat familiar to those who have read Barbara Ehrenreich, and their skewerings of the forces driving American culture right now are both bitingly accurate and at times hilarious.

This is a great book for those who, like me, despair over the fact that there's no more fun to be had in deconstructing commercial appeals because they don't even try to hide what they're doing any more—in fact they count on the fact that we understand them to create a sort of commiserative bond between consumer and producer, the idea that since we're in on the joke and collaborating in our own erasure, everything is somehow all right....

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