Review: Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity

Steal as Much as You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity by Nathalie Olah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Enjoyable, if muddled and slightly over-confident in some of its claims. There's a lot of generalisation and anecdotal evidence although I agree with many of Olah's core points. Some of the (albeit largely justified) chips on her shoulder can make for tiring reading too.

The title is somewhat misleading and this is less of a manual on how to reclaim culture and more of a critique of neo-liberalism and it's impact on the media industry which is controlled by out of touch, privately educated white people. The final chapter touches upon ways to fight back (essentially create art on company time and don't water down your individualism) which is fair advice, although more could have been said about the general atomisation of media due to the internet - although there are still gatekeepers, they are nowhere near as powerful as they once were.

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