'The problem with all these romantic ideas about the kids at street level creating their own culture, a culture of resistance, is that nowadays those ad agencies, those marketing companies, have their cool hunters out there looking at what the kids are doing, recording it, interviewing them, infiltrating them, and incorporating those ideas into mass-market global communication, within months sometimes of them flaring into life on the streets. So if you do want to resist this, if you want to find a way of insulating yourself against this manipulation through communication, which ultimately is just out to get the money out of your wallet, then you've got a really tough problem. That actually in the end, only a kind of refusal, saying no to it, really just trying to ignore it, trying to leave it out of your life, is the only way to go. There's nothing else you can do. Maybe you have to worry less about being a cool, fashionable person who's just like all the other cool, fashionable people, sharing the same kind of dreams, aspirations, taste in trendy new products, but it's really difficult. Because the whole system, in particular the technology we're using and the way we're using it, actually disposes us to look toward the corporate realm for guidance. We need the stuff they're selling us. It's all part of being a modern person. And there's no escape from it. You know, once upon a time, you could be a starving artist in a garret, or a poet with your notebook just writing those poems and getting loaded on absinthe in the evenings. Actually, an amazing simple life, more about survival than consumer indulgence. But now it seems like every aspect of our pleasure, every aspect of our identity, what we think makes us a contemporary person is tied up in brands, products, services which we must consume at a considerable price.'