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.

Joe Heath is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of two previous books: Communicative Action and Rational Choice, which won the Canadian Philosophical Association Book Prize for 2003, and The Efficient Society, a Maclean's and Globe and Mail bestseller selected by the Globe as one of the best books of 2001. He writes a monthly column for the journal Policy Options and is a frequent contributor to The Montreal Gazette.

Andrew Potter is a research fellow at the Centre de Recherche en Éthique de l'Université de Montréal (CREUM), where he studies philosophical issues regarding the Internet, technology, and consumer society. His work has appeared in the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen and The Wilson Quarterly, and he is on the editorial board of the alternative journal of politics and culture, This Magazine. Andrew Potter lives in Montreal.