The anti-capitalist bestseller No Logo! The Tyranny of Brands (1999), by Naomi Klein, is now about the same age as my pin collection. The opportunity to ask ourselves about its heritage and its real impact on the transformation of mentalities.
What if the brand effect had never been so powerful?
Despite the awareness work carried out in recent years on the subject of junk food, is the imagination associated with McDonald’s so damaged? Another example: despite everything that we now know about atrocious management conditions in the Disneyland parks, I could see this weekend, in view of the screaming crowds of toddlers welcoming the parade celebrating the brand’s 30th anniversary, that its ability to capitalize on its image was infinite. That day I was accompanying a ten-year-old girl who left with a collection of stuffed animals and charms bearing the image of Mickey, glitter in her eyes. And I can assure you that the kingdom of fakewho spun hives to Naomi Klein two decades ago, still has a very bright future ahead of him.
In 2012, in the pages ofUzbekistan & Rica, Oscar-winning graphic designer Ludovic Houplaindirector of the short film Logorama, even prophesied that the invasion of brands in the public space – and in our imagination – had only just begun. ” tomorrowhe dared to say, each will even have its own logo (….) We will all be branded “. The only question that deserved to be asked, according to him, was this: while the brands had already completely reconfigured the public space, they were already penetrating with beating drums into the virtual space by surfing on all the innovations of tip – and now on the blockchain – “ what else can be sold? What is left available since the floor space and virtual space are already sold? ».
—
It was ten years ago. Ludovic Houplain hoped then that some sacred areas could still resist this steamroller. But now the Vatican is self-branded, the state is self-sufficientwe brand ourselves on dating apps to find love…
To get out of there, maybe you have to go back to childhood. Perhaps it is the would-be little collectors who are currently growing up in a world in full transition, and who – we hope – are still totally removed from the universe of NFTs – who have the key, or rather who “are ” the key. For the philosopher Walter Benjamin, the collector thus appears as the last bulwark against the extension of the fetishism of commodities. In Paris, capital of the 19th century (1934), he writes that ” the collector delights in creating a world that is not only distant and dead but also better; a world where man is actually as little provided with what he needs as in the real world, but where things are freed from the bondage of being useful “. And to complete, in other writings: In the eyes of the collector, in each of his objects the world is present. And ordered. But ordered through surprising connections, even incomprehensible to the layman. The real passion of the collector, very little known, is always anarchist, destructive. Because his dialectic wants the following: to link fidelity to the thing, to the detail and to what is sheltered in it, with the obstinate, subversive protest against the typical, against the classifiable. »
The little collector that I was as a child was not content to accumulate pins bearing the image of her favorite brands. I like to believe that the childish imagination is still new, innocent: it also goes towards the bizarre, the incongruous, the non-standard, the non-standardized, the non-marketed, attaching itself to aspects of reality that the adult does not even see anymore. Children create fabulous breaches – passages » – in the standardized universe that is ours. They must be taught to cultivate, to cherish and to maintain this state of astonishment and wonder in front of the world, before the possession of a Big Mac in NFT becomes for them, in a few years, a desirable horizon.
–
