Klein is aware that not everyone agrees with her ideas -- and that there are other people who agree with her ideas but who, rather guiltily, do not always make choices that reflect their values. "I make a distinction between citizenship and consumerism," Klein says. "We are capable of wanting different things at the same time. As a consumer, you can shop at Wal-Mart because it's more convenient and also feel just awful that the downtown of your city has been hurt. Or you can buy an SUV to protect your family without wanting to speed up global warming. The whole argument that we vote with our dollars is a caricature of the way that we actually interact with the world. We're complicated people, and sometimes our individual consumer desires are to the detriment of the greater good."

But just as people shouldn't feel bad for going to Wal-Mart, Klein also warns against feeling too self-congratulatory for going to the Body Shop and doing nothing more. "I reject the idea that there is a whole class of people who are just too busy to be involved with their communities as citizens, instead of just as shoppers," she says. "We have other powers besides the powers of our wallets." Those powers include getting involved in local politics, writing letters to the editors of newspapers, participating in rallies, or simply asking questions. "At Starbucks, you can ask, 'Why are you buying coffee from Indonesia when Indonesia is a dictatorship?' " Klein says. (Indonesia held a free election in 1999, thereby ending 32 years of one-man rule). "You shouldn't do it in a rude way to make a salesperson feel uncomfortable, but every time you ask a question in the store that somebody can't answer, it's reported to a higher-up."

Klein believes that real change -- the kind of change that reaches from marketing in the schools to labor conditions in Third World factories -- will come about through the decidedly unfashionable forces of government regulation. But before that can happen, individuals must make their opinions heard. "Right now, companies are trying to sort out the activism around these issues," Klein says. "They're asking themselves, 'Is this a fringe thing, or do these people screaming in the streets represent a changing ethos in American society? Can we count on indifference, or can we not count on it?' My hope is that this activism represents a broader feeling that we are losing control of our communities, that we do want to hold companies to a higher ethical standard, and that we are more than our economic relationships. I think that the best way for the average person who is concerned about these issues to react is to figure out a way to add to the cacophony of voices."

Curtis Sittenfeld (curtis-sittenfeld@uiowa.edu), a former Fast Company staff writer, is a graduate student in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Learn more about Naomi Klein and No Logo on the Web (www.nologo.org).

Sidebar: The Brand Called Naomi?

On a recent episode of a prime-time Canadian talk show, Naomi Klein found herself receiving what was, to her, a rather dubious honor: Michael Budman, cofounder of the popular clothing company Roots, presented her with a sweatshirt that he'd had specially printed with Klein's name and with the title of her new book, No Logo. Because of the success of the book, which rails against the increasingly aggressive ways that brands infiltrate society, Budman told Klein that she had become her own brand. "It was funny," Klein says. "But I reject the idea."

In fact, the existence of the Brand Called Naomi is a horrifying prospect to Klein. "If everyone is a corporation of one, the implications for the idea of citizenship fill me with total despair," she says. Yet Klein is not unsympathetic to the thinking behind the Brand Called You. "A lot of companies have made the very profitable decision to no longer offer job security to their employees," Klein says. "Companies aren't invested in particular communities or even in particular countries. They have sent a clear message that they are there only as long as the conditions are good. That lack of security is making people -- in different ways, in different sectors -- divest their interests from those of corporations."

And the long-term implication of that divestiture, Klein says, is that businesspeople and young anticorporate activists have more in common with each other than they might think. "Both groups are saying that they have accepted the idea that they're not going to get security from companies, so now they're free to do their own thing. For executives, their own thing means saying, 'I will be my own corporation.' For anarchist kids, their own thing means going after corporations. But it's all part of the same divestment process."

Still, Klein argues, that delicious irony doesn't make the phenomenon any more palatable. "The Brand Called You is the ultimate triumph of space being privatized through branding -- even that space in our own minds," Klein says. "Being a brand teaches you to turn every part of yourself into a marketable product: You're looking for your 'braggables' and for what people can do for you. But ultimately, that's isolating. In point of fact, you're not a company -- you're a member of society."