So although the media often describe campaigns like the one against Nike as “consumer boycotts,” that tells only part of the story. It is more accurate to describe them as political campaigns that use consumer goods as readily accessible targets, as public-relations levers and as popular-education tools. In contrast to the consumer boycotts of the seventies, there is a more diffuse relationship between lifestyle choices (what to eat, what to smoke, what to wear) and the larger questions of how the global corporation—its size, political clout and lack of transparency—is reorganizing the world economy. Behind the protests outside Nike Town, behind the pie in Bill Gates’s face and the bottle shattering the McDonald’s window in Prague, there is something too visceral for most conventional measures to track—a kind of bad mood rising. And the corporate hijacking of political power is as responsible for this mood as the brands’ cultural looting of public and mental space. I also like to think it has to do with the arrogance of branding itself: the seeds of discontent are part of its very DNA.