THE REBEL SELL

In September 2003, Adbusters magazine started selling its own signature brand of "subversive" running shoes.
With the flagship of the culture-jamming movement marketing its own label, a seismic shift had taken place in the popular anti-consumer movement. As cultural critics Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter point out, no one could possibly believe there was still any difference between "mainstream" and "alternative" culture. The only possible conclusion: the counterculture is not a threat to the "system," it is the system.
Guaranteed to incense both the followers of Naomi Klein's No Logo, as well as their right-wing counterparts, The Rebel Sell argues that decades of countercultural rebellion have not only been unhelpful, but counterproductive. Heath and Potter offer a startling blend of pop culture and political manifesto as they consider the birth of the rebel consumer, the enforcement of norms within the counterculture, the need to untangle questions of social justice from the countercultural critique, and what it will really take to turn consumers into citizens.