Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler

Culture has been colonized by enterprise. Mass entertainment has become the economic dynamo that brings the public to the consuming fold and consolidates the power of business over the mind. Telecommunications and entertainment giants have erected a powerful "Culture Trust" and business has taken over the popular imagination. For the last decade "The Baffler" magazine has been hailed as the most perceptive critic of these developments. This work features "The Baffler"'s best essays on the business of culture and culture business.

In this thought-provoking collection of essays, editor Thomas Frank and other contributors to the contrarian journal the Baffler examine the unprecedented ascendancy of business as the dominating force in American life. If the closest historical parallel is with the Gilded Age and its all-powerful robber barons, Frank and his ilk clearly see themselves as the muckrakers out to expose the absurdities and abuses of big business. Today, however, advertising has come to permeate every aspect of our society, and corporations are in the business of manufacturing culture--what Frank calls the "Culture Trust." These essays analyze the ways in which this Culture Trust has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of nonconformist youth culture, from hippie slang to grunge fashion; in other words, when the media markets rebellion, it becomes just another consumer choice. As evidence, the essayists explore the image of consumer as rebel pioneered by publications such as Details and Wired, as well as the preeminence of "revolutionary" business gurus such as Tom Peters. The result is a highly original book, a satirical and savage indictment of '90s consumerist culture.