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So like any good reporter, he has an emotional stake in the story he's telling. Late in the book, while attending 2002 World Youth Day activities in Toronto, he meets a group of devout young Catholics from Arizona who are fervently patriotic and fiercely antiabortion. They represent almost everything he has hated and feared his entire life, and he doesn't share their nationalism, their politics or their religious faith. But he writes about them with a kind of awe, describing their shimmering blond hair and glowing tans. Indeed, his primary reaction is not revulsion but envy: "They believe in something. It's more than many of us can say."

What most of us believe, Niedzviecki thinks, is not just a lie but a cheap and secondhand lie. He begins his narrative by exploring the world of backyard wrestling, a tiny corner of pop culture beloved of journalists in recent years. Countless short-lived backyard wrestling "federations" have staged tournaments in which bored young men somewhere in suburbia beat the bejesus out of each other, often using outrageous props, in front of a camcorder and then post the results on the Internet for the enjoyment of like-minded souls. As Niedzviecki observes, the whole enterprise is "an imitation of a TV spectacle (a spectacle that is, itself, an imitation of a sport)."

But the meta-ness of backyard wrestling isn't what engages him. Most accounts focus on how dangerous it is for untrained teenagers to leap off the garage or bash each other into the cement birdbath (which is arguably the point), or they tell us, with postmodern hopefulness, that these young fans are inscribing their own meanings onto an established cultural practice. For Niedzviecki, backyard wrestlers embody "the kind of specialness that characterizes the new conformity ... a genuine desire to articulate genuine individuality that is nonetheless mired in cliché and convention."

That's his argument in a nutshell: Those of us who grew up in the post-industrial, pop-culture-saturated West (and a whole lot of people who didn't) have been raised to believe that we are unique individuals with special destinies. When it comes to imagining that destiny, however, all we have are the mass-produced images of fame and success that everyone shares: Donald Trump in his corner office with its vulgar but expensive furniture, Howard Stern partying joylessly amid pneumatic boobs, pop stars and movie actors trying vainly to imitate the more real-seeming pop stars and movie actors of the past.

Stuffed with half-baked philosophies of self-actualization and self-fulfillment, we also believe that we are ourselves primarily or even solely responsible for reaching that destiny. We have all embraced that e-mail from the cosmos assuring us that we're VIPs -- the Guaranteed Celebrity in the Building can only be us! -- even though that requires pretending not to notice that everybody else got the same message.

We didn't need Niedzviecki to tell us that the Toronto cattle-call auditions for the debut season of "Canadian Idol" -- in which 10,000 potential pop stars packed into a gravel parking lot -- made for a pathetic spectacle. (Let's not even ask whether "Canadian Idol" is an unintentionally amusing title in the first place.) Almost everyone he talks to among the "thousands of young people planning on singing interchangeable pop songs" expresses the same New Age-flavored confidence. "Anyone can become what they want to be," says 16-year-old Brooke. "If you really want to make it there's always a way," says Billy, a 20-year-old house painter.

Even the 7,000 or so aspirants who don't make the first cut refuse to act daunted. "This isn't the last of me," one rejected girl tells Niedzviecki. "I know I'm going to be a star. The only person who can make your dreams not come true is yourself." To stop believing in your own specialness, no matter what the evidence, would be to violate the creed of the new conformism. Furthermore, if you fail to realize your dreams -- the same "shared, colonized, implanted" dreams millions of other people are chasing -- the fault must be yours.

One of Niedzviecki's sharper moments arrives in his chapter about the teen self-esteem industry, where he points out that this unstable conundrum -- we're all special, but almost none of us actually become superstars, and that's supposed to be our own fault -- creates its own solution. The end product of the "new-conformist society steeped in pop," he writes, is a solitary "citizen consumer" who is "passive, focused on the self, willing to work hard to buy the stuff that will make him stand out." If his specialness continues to elude the rest of the world, he "blames himself and turns inward to therapy, image adjustment, altar consultation, yoga" and so on.

There's a flash of genuine illumination here; Niedzviecki has captured one of the principal personality types of our time (one likely to seem uncomfortably familiar to most of us) in straightforward and commonsensical prose. Still, like a lot of his book, this is overstated and a bit simplistic. So far as I know, no one has previously identified yoga as a modality of social control, and that seems a bit harsh.

It also isn't half as original as he may believe. The idea that the individual, as a social category, was essentially invented by consumer capitalism is a central observation of 20th century Marxist and post-Marxist philosophy. Individual human beings have existed as long as the species has, and of course no two possess exactly the same attributes. But the idea of the individual as a hermetic entity surrounding a self, a mystical inner well of needs and desires capable of fulfillment, realization, repression and so on, could not have existed before the combination of capitalism, Protestantism and the beginnings of psychology called it into existence. Medieval Christian society had no time for the self; neither of course did communism or fascism.

Liberal humanism, at least in its popular incarnation, has always insisted that while the human body is imprisoned by circumstance, the soul always remains free. Niedzviecki draws heavily on Foucault's famous assertion that the reverse is actually true: Every human being possesses at least some physical freedom to do what he will with his body, but the soul is an "instrument of a political anatomy," impressed upon us by the institutions and ideologies around us. We are free, in other words, to become Pilates enthusiasts, drag queens or debauched junkies. We are not free, Niedzviecki writes, "to evoke an individuality that has not already been implanted in us by a combination of state-sponsored regulation and the wish-fulfillment fantasies of our pop culture."

Next page: No individual can be so strange, no artist so confrontational, as to escape the New Conformity