Countercultcha

Rob Walker has a long piece in the Times Magazine about the recent explosion in underground brands that are ideas before they are products, brands that consciously (and oxymoronically) market themselves as being countercultural. The article reads like Commodify Your Dissent, but from a business-journalist's perspective, not a scholar/muckraker's. Reading it, I was simultaneously saying to myself, "God, these guys are cool for making such neat stuff!" and "God, these guys are idiots for thinking they're somehow outmaneuvering capitalism." Read it and see where you fall.