H ip is how business understands itself today. And if we're ever going to challenge the power of the corporate culture, the first thing we're going to have to do is to understand that capitalism is different now, especially in the media and advertising industries. If you think that the problem with capitalism is that it forces people to conform or to march in lockstep, then I've got news for you: You don't have a problem with capitalism. You're going to do just fine in the corporate revolution.

If you talk about culture in this Republic of Business, sooner or later you have to talk about advertising, which remains the central ideological apparatus of the new capitalism. Advertising is the market's subsidizing mechanism, the free-enterprise version of the National Endowment for the Arts, the device through which creative talent is rewarded and cultural enterprises succeed or fail. Advertising is also the public face of capitalism, the device through which what Rutgers University history professor Jackson Lears calls the "fables of abundance" are transmitted and elaborated. The people who make advertising are, in a very real sense, the ideologues of the corporate revolution: They are architects of dissatisfaction and of perpetual obsolescence.

And though it's fun, and even vaguely empowering (to use the catchall adjective of our time ) to talk about how oppressive and conformist consumer society is, if you look closely, you'll find advertising nodding in agreement. To be sure, here and there you will come across an ad depicting families whose happiness is consummated by products, but by and large, the work of the cutting-edge agencies is much hipper than that. Advertising, at least on its surface, does not regard the new world of total corporate control as a happy thing.

In fact, a lot of advertising today is full-on critical. It speaks directly to the problems of media, power, and culture. It makes exemplary use of all those images of people in the workplace as robots, in uniform gray, trapped in boxlike elevators and cubicles, driven by sadistic bosses. Advertising recognizes that consumer society hasn't given us the things it promised or solved the problems it was supposed to solve: that consumerism is in fact a gigantic sham. It's lots of hard work for no reason. The rat race. The treadmill. The office as hell.

Call this species of advertising "liberation marketing," to adapt a phrase from business guru Tom Peters. It knows that the culture trust exists, and it knows that business has conquered the world. And in response it offers not just soaps that get your whites whiter, but soaps that liberate you, soda pops that are emblems of individualism, and counter-hegemonic hamburgers. Liberation marketing takes the old critique of mass culture -- consumerism as conformity -- fully into account, acknowledges it, examines it, and resolves it. Liberation marketing imagines consumers breaking free from the old enforcers of order, tearing loose from the shackles with which capitalism bound us, escaping the routine of bureaucracy and hierarchy, getting in touch with our true selves, and, finally, finding authenticity, that holiest of consumer grails.