¾ From the Foreword by Lewis Latham
The 1980s and 1990s have seen an enormous increase in the power of business over the American mind. Not since the Gilded Age have the robber barons of business accumulated more wealth or won more popular attention. But where the tycoons of yore built railroads or banks, today culture stands at the heart of American enterprise and mass entertainment has become its economic dynamo.
For a decade, The Baffler magazine has been an invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the tradition of the muckrakers and H.L. Mencken's The American Mercury. Now, Commodify Your Dissent gathers together the best of its excoriating criticism of the new American cultural order, exploring such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel consumer as hero in the pages of Wired and Details; the dramatic rise of "alternative" culture in the post-Nirvana era; the appearance of new business gurus such as Tom Peters and corporate fads such as Hobbesian "reengineering"; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; and the encroachment
of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life.
Salvos include:
- The New Gilded Age by Thomas Frank
- Why Johnny Can't Dissent by Thomas Frank
- The Killer App from Wired Magazine
- Voice of the Corporate Revolution by Keith White
- Back in Black: Here Come the Beatniks! by Maura Mahoney
- Burn Down the House of Commons in Your Brand New Shoes by Keith White
- Consolidated Deviance, Inc. by Thomas Frank and Dave Mulcahey
- Apostles of the New Entrepreneur: Business Books and the Management Crisis by Bill Boisvert
- I've Seen the Future ¾
and It's a Sony! by Stephen Duncombe
- The Time-Management Gospel by Jennifer Brostrom
- Leadership and You by Dave Mulcahey
- The Advertised Life by Tom Vanderbilt
- Alternative to What? by Thomas Frank
- What Is Alternative? by Chris Holmes
- The Problem with Music by Steve Albini
- The Packaging of a Literary Persona by Maura
Mahoney
- A Dream of Perfect Reception: The Movies of Quentin Tarantino
by Gary Groth
- Twenty-Nothing by Thomas Frank and Keith White
- Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger by Thomas Frank
- Twentieth-Century Lite by Thomas Frank
- Post-Urban, Post-Industrial but Never Post-Elite by Edward
Castleton
- Revolt of the Nice: Edge City, Capital of the Twentieth-First Century by Tom Vanderbilt
- Lotteryville, USA by Kim Phillips
- The Gaudy and Damned by Tom Vanderbilt
- Dark Age by Thomas Frank
With its liberating attitude and cant-free intelligence, Commodify Your Dissent is a powerful polemic against the designs of the culture that does its business on us all.
"You'd have to look back at the fights between New York intellectuals in the fifties to find
the sort of verbal firepower unleashed here."
¾ The Nation
1997, 5½ x 8¼, 287 pp, illustrated, indexed, soft cover.
COMMODIFY YOUR DISSENT: $15.00
(ORDER NUMBER 99154)
