Adam Smith, the well known 18th century author of The Wealth of Nations is today thought of as one of the core authors and proponents of free market capitalism. But while he did emphasise the commercial society, he was far from being the one sided zealot such as the current impressions suggest. I invite you to read the article Recovering Adam Smith’s ethical economics and gain a new appreciation for the work of Adam Smith. The topic is deeply connected with my recent article Freedom from freedom, on how the US is ideologically trapped in misinterpreted 18th century ideology.

First you need to be a member to even shop there, you can’t even enter without a membership card. The basic membership card costs $55/year or $110/year if you want some extra buyback offers. It’s a brilliant way on their part to make you come to their store over and over again. Plus you have to appreciate the idea of paying someone so you can shop there. Brilliant!

The model is built on quality goods discounted a great deal due to large quantities. Sadly that doesn’t mean that it’s only them that have to buy the large quantities, the packaging itself is larger then normal and the consumer is forced to buy packs much larger than they would normally. I guess that works if you have a 7 member family back home and buy in large monthly shopping rounds, but for more casual customers it’s a complete overkill.

For example, you can’t buy a single loaf of bread, 2 are necessary, all cereals are sold in packs at least 3 times the normal ones, you can only buy 6 red peppers in pack, never just one… You get the picture. For someone like me who likes to try a lot of new products without committing to buy a gallon of it, it’s horrible. It also entails a lot of waste of the products that perish because they were necessary to be bought in such large quantities.

Don’t even get me started on the aesthetic appearance of the stores. It’s quite literally a giant grey block of concrete blocks occupying an entire street without any thought at all to architecture and pleasantness to the people who use it. It’s worse in many respects even when compared to the socialist functionalist architecture. Inside is not much better, simply a giant warehouse with people with oversized shopping trolleys bumping into each other.

I’m the type of person who would rather pay 10% more for their products and have a pleasant user experience while shopping. I enjoy exploring new food I haven’t yet tried before and the nervousness and ugliness of places such as Costco insult my sense of aesthetics as well as create a bad experience for me. I’d rather be enjoying my time. The quality of the products may very well be on par, but that does not balance the fact that I’ve had to buy 4kg of it and had a horrible time buying it. I’m staying with Mercator back home and Trader Joe’s and Rainbow Grocery here.

In fact I think that it can be quite handy for large, price sensitive families. But if you don’t consume a small tribe’s worth of food and actually care about user experience, Costco is a horrible choice to make. I consider it one of the worst manifestations of rampant consumerism and precisely where I wouldn’t want the world to be heading.

The glorious entrance. Membership cards are checked at entry. Those gray blocks are used for the entire outside surface of the store. I dare not call it facade.

Welcome to the warehouse.

Ariel and Miha, brave shoppers undertaking the task in high spirits.

A degustation in progress. Coincidentally, "Bolani" is exactly how I'd describe this store.

If that's the chips packaging I'm afraid to think of the nacho cheese gallons.

Me doing some weight lifting with jars of mayonnaise. Certainly healthier than eating it.

I took a walk on the streets of San Francisco yesterday. It was Christmas day. I don’t hold much emotional attachment to the day, let alone religious one and I find the mandatory shopping sprees absurd. It would have been a day like any other had it not emptied the streets of the majority of it’s usual tenants, who were most likely celebrating Christmas at home somewhere in suburbia.

A society should be judged on how it treats its weakest members. These people on the streets hold a mirror to the American society. If its citizens see the real picture, not the one filled with empty rhetoric of “greatest nation on Earth”, the picture is deeply disturbing. I’m not saying we don’t have homeless people in Slovenia or Europe in general. Of course we do and we should all strive to do better, nut nowhere in my travels in Europe have I seen homeless and ill on the streets on a scale such as here. Mind you, United States are supposed to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They rank 7th in GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity. So the lack of means surely isn’t a problem, the ideology and the lack of will emanating from it are.

Freedom can be divided into negative and positive freedom. Negative and positive are not value judgments, but simply terms for different types of freedom. Negative freedom means freedom from something. Freedom from oppression, control, the freedom to do what you like, go wherever, speak whatever. It’s more focused on the individual.

How does that relate to the homeless people on the streets of San Francisco? Well there’s always a balance between negative and positive freedoms. Shift towards the extremes of negative freedoms and you get a Hobbesian world of “Homo homini lupus est“, meaning men being wolves to fellow men, a world of constant conflict among egotistic individuals. Shift towards the extremes of positive freedoms and you get a collectivist society where individual freedoms are trampled for the supposed benefits of the collective, sort of an Orwellian 1984 dystopian world.

The problem with American society is that it perceives freedom mostly according to the definition of negative freedom. The individualistic sense is very strong and that precludes the establishment of more community based mechanisms which would generate positive freedoms for its citizens. Positive freedoms emanating from solidarity and even long term self-interest, like guaranteeing people free education and healthcare. Picking up mentally ill people from the streets, curtailing some of their negative freedoms in exchange for the positive freedoms of care and being an active member of society.

On the other hand, American focus on negative freedoms has had some benefits in helping to produce a vibrant and dynamic economy. After all, I am here, raising funding for our enterprise, because there is a vibrant technology and investment ecosystem here. But that ecosystem exists as much as a result of negative freedoms of enterprise free from disruptions, as of the positive freedoms of establishing a legal framework of fair competition and society actively investing in its development (Silicon Valley can trace a lot of its roots to government military research).

My point in all of this is that the United States have missed the balance and lean too much towards the negative freedoms. The result are homeless people on the streets and a host of other issues who would not have to exist on such as scale had some more pragmatic reason been applied. The loss of some negative freedoms could be minimal compared to the positive freedoms gained. American people are being presented a false choice of freedom versus no freedom. Cling to outdated or misunderstood 18th century ideals at your own peril.

I have been using xGestures to enable system-wide mouse gestures for ages and I couldn’t live without it. Ok, ok, I could live without it technically, but what kind of life would that be?! :) If you’re on a Mac, go get it immediately.

Which brings me to my point, xGestures has built in iTunes commands for play/pause next song, etc., but no such thing exists for Spotify. Because it’s customizable you can set it to perform keystrokes in Spotify, but that way it would only work when the Spotify was already active. The need to click and activate the app is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

So I wrote a few short and extremely simple scripts in AppleScript that make Spotify the active app and tell it to switch to next song, previous song or play/pause. Then I set xGestures to execute the script based on the gesture I make. It works, sometimes with a bit of a lag, but good enough.

If you want to control Spotify with xGestures as well, here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the Spotify xGestures scripts.

2. In System Preferences, go to the xGestures panel and create a global gesture. I like to use right and down for next song for example, but you can use whatever you like.

3. For Gesture Action, choose Run AppleScript from the dropdown menu. Click Choose file and point to the script you downloaded. Do so for all three gestures.

4. Enjoy listening to music without the chore of having to actually click in Spotify. :)

Hope you find it useful. If you’re looking for some new music in Spotify, you can also check out my New Times playlist and hear if there’s something that suits your ears.

With the growing complexity of modern society also grows the need of people to organise outside of the existing, and sometimes too rigid, organisational structures. Due to the continuing expansion of global interdependence this need is being ever more fulfilled in a global framework, less bound by regional and national borders than ever. Thus, international civil society and the organisations that constitute it have been on a great rise in the past few decades. From the humble beginnings of only a few such organisations at the beginning of the 20th century, past about 5000 such organisations in the mid 1970s we have come to almost 25000 international organisations in the year 2000 (Anheier and Themudo, 2002). Yet most of these organisations, although international in scope, still think in terms of a sum of nations and not fully embracing the evermore global viewpoint from the start. As an example of such thinking let’s point out United Nations’ system of economic statistics called the System of National Accounts (SNA). As Anheier, Glasius and Kaldor (2001) point out: “Adding the gross national product of all national economies of the world’s 180 plus countries would yield the approximate monetary value of global economic activity. Yet this value would not be the same as the size of the globalised economy, nor would it be identical to the value of the total international economy.” While the United Nations are not the best example when we talk about civil (therefore non-governmental society), it illustrates the kind of thinking that is typical for the old type of international organisation.

Organisational development

My hypothesis is that the vast majority of international civil society organisations will not only have to switch to a more modern and global viewpoint to stay relevant, but also adapt a more flexible and decentralised organisation model. Organisations of all types (governments, companies, NGOs) have already went through an extensive evolution of their institutional forms. The first phase was identified by Max Weber in 1924 (Anheier and Themudo, 2002) as the full development of the modern bureaucracy with its hierarchical order, predictability, stability etc. The second phase in the industrial era morphed the organisational structure in a slightly more horizontal shape, with organisation along the lines of functional activities (e.g. accounting, research & development, production…). The third phase that we are witnessing in organisations now brought the network type of organisation. Network organisations are more fluid and decentralised, with greater autonomy of it’s constituent parts. Therefore there is also greater power equality among the parts of an organisation and the hierarchical structure is flatter. This type of organising can be even more pertinent to international organisations due to differing conditions on the ground locally and fast changing circumstances which call for greater autonomy. The more centralised manner of decision making also carries with it a large time penalty which can seriously affect the operational capability of a diverse international organisation.

Enhanced ways of international organisation with the internet

While many international organisations have adopted the network principle to their benefit, we’re beginning to see new types of global organisations take take the principles of network organising to the next level.

The key element that enables further decentralisation, flexibility and fluidity is the internet. It enables organisations to adapt to circumstances in real time, bypassing long procedures typical for centralised organisations. They are able to do that because communication is instant and can also be delivered to greater number of people simultaneously. While all civil society organisations of this type use the internet to their benefit, their scope as well as type of activities varies greatly. Some only use the internet as a communication tool in a local or regional scope to organise on the ground activities. Others utilise it in a more global scope, but again with the aim of organising activities that involve physical presence. Fine examples of such practice are the many revolts in the Arab world which were greatly aided by the tools of online organisation, but ultimately achieved with on-site protests of people who were in part organised and motivated using internet-based tools.

Online-based communities and the weakening of the nation state

But there is also a new type of civil society that takes this concept further. We are talking about purely internet-based communities where almost all the communication, as well as the actions of the community or organisation are carried out online.

As with the rest of civil society, internet communities are based on the shared interests of their members and the causes they wish to advance. While they occupy an entire spectre of organisational arrangements, it is safe to conclude that most are very decentralised, some to the point of seeming anarchic.

Since they are based online, the physical location of individual members is often of little importance. Never in human history has physical location carried so little weight as it is able to in this type of online-based civil society. This delocalisation will prove revolutionary in the long term as it turns on its head the basis of organising of our society. All human societies so far have been based on the principle of locality, or better said, territoriality. The State is founded on the principle of territorial sovereignty, the ability to establish a monopoly of violence on a certain territory, the ability to collect taxes, to impose legislation etc. Once every person has the ability to partake in civil organising that is not based on location, the state loses in its importance and has to surrender many legal monopolies it currently holds.

This is made possible by the decentralised nature of the internet which limits the State’s coercive power which is much more effective in the physical world. At the same time the state is so dependent upon the internet that it cannot throttle it in a meaningful way without drastically hurting it’s economy and everyone who depends on it, i.e. everyone. The internet is therefore truly a democratising force to be reckoned with, but its contribution to democratisation on a national level, like with the Arab revolutions or empowerment of national civil society groups, is only a short to mid-term effect. In the long term, save for some large catastrophic event, the internet will most likely lead to democratisation on a global level, with the weakening of nation states in the process. It is also very likely that various kinds of global communities and organisations which constitute the global civil society will gain in importance, as they will be the ones facilitating the changes. This may seem far fetched and it is important to keep in mind that these are long term processes.

Free software movement

Let us therefore take a look at some mostly internet-based civil society movements that reveal the trends that lead towards a more delocalised world. First, it’s important to point to the Free software movement, based on the hacker culture of the 1970s and philosophically and institutionally framed by Richard Stallman in 1983 with the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation in 1985. This movement helped cement the principles of sharing and community contribution in the software community. That is hugely important as that spirit still fuels the rapid communal development of software that is an important factor in the decentralisation of all types of public activity and is itself produced in a decentralised way. This type of approach to intellectual property ensures the preservation of civil liberties that would probably not have been possible had only proprietary software existed. Most of the internet infrastructure today relies on open source software in one form or another and it would probably be fair to say, that the nature of the internet would be quite different today had the Free software movement never existed.

Bitcoin – monetary democratisation or threat to sovereignty?

A second example of a civil society community, based on online collaboration and the principles of open source software is Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the first truly digital currency. It is a currency that is not based in any nation state, only exists on the internet and in no physical form. There is also no central bank, other than the open source algorithms that power it. It is freely interchangeable with other currencies and can be used as a method of payment on a growing number of e-commerce websites. Most importantly, it’s transaction network is peer-to-peer based, transactions are encrypted, cannot be traced and the open source code on which it is based ensures that anyone can verify that the encryption is valid and that backdoors for e.g. governmental agencies do not exist. The project was started by a Japanese man who contributed the idea and the first algorithms. His identity has never been completely verified since no one involved with the project has ever actually met him in person. The running of the project is now being continued by the community with programmers and users from all over the globe. The pattern for this type of online community project is abundantly clear: decentralised, community based, almost exclusive online presence, completely delocalised. Yet this is only one case, and numerous projects such as this exist and the numbers are growing each day.

Bitcoin is a great example because it clearly illustrates the results of work of an global civil society organisation of the new type which we discussed above. Best of all, it demonstrates the impotency of nation states when their territorial currency is being encroached upon. Bitcoin has not yet gained in popularity to really get on the radar of nation states (except for some recent CIA interest). But even when they do try to prohibit it in the future, there is no effective way for them to do it. They can of course make it harder for people to use it with some local regulations, but due to the decentralised nature of the internet, there will always exist a way around it, even-though it may mean jumping through a hoop or two more. Even in the hypothetical chance they would be able to block it, how will they be able to block all the new alternative digital currencies that would appear to take its place?

That is why the global civil society organisations of its kind are likely to increase in importance in the coming years and command an ever larger presence in global governance. Naturally, they will keep evolving and will have to somehow institutionalise to preserve stability, predictability and other Weberian positive qualities, but even so, they are unlikely to end up looking like the international organizations of yesterday.

Sources:

Bitcoin official site http://www.bitcoin.org/

Bitcoin Wiki https://fr.bitcoin.it/

Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, Mary Kaldor (2001) Introducing Global Civil Society.

Helmut Anheier, Nuno Themudo (2002) Organisational Forms of Global Civil Society: Implications of Going Global.

Jeroen Van Laer, Peter Van Aelst (2009) Cyber-protest and civil society: the Internet and action repertoires in social movements.

Richard M. Stallman (1985) The GNU Manifesto.

While an iPad won’t do all the tasks as well as your laptop, it will do most of those you would do “on the go” well enough and it will even beat your laptop in some respects. It is, dare I say it, much more enjoyable to use overall.

Why? First of all, as the photographer’s saying goes: “The best camera is the one you have with you.” Same goes with the iPad. Because it’s much lighter, smaller and there’s but one wire to plug in or out, I take it with me much more often than I would my laptop. Best of all, it’s on instantly. That matters a whole lot.

Let me give you an example. The other day at a French lecture we were talking about a film director from the country of Benin. While I knew approximately where it was, my memory was a lot more sketchy regarding its neighbours and size. Look it up then, I thought. With a laptop I wouldn’t have bothered, but the little tablet was out in a second, instantly woken up and in 3 seconds I was already checking out Benin in the incredibly smooth Google Maps app.

Smoothness, that’s the other thing. While my MacBook Pro (13″ 2010) is undobtedly faster by specifications and raw power, the iPad feels much faster and more responsive. Some of it’s probably due to the faster flash drive, some due to more optimised UI (no saving needed), APIs and let’s not forget about the much more limited ways processes can behave. While I’m sure that can be a pain in the ass for developers, it delivers a much nicer experience to the users. Ironically, it makes a typical user feel much more in control, while the more command line oriented users and open computing purists would argue the opposite.

While I’m not saying everyone should switch to this kind of approach, it will make the vast majority of people feel much more satisfied and empowered by their computing experiences.

Guess what this post was written on? Because I had it with me.

First the price. If you want a normal data plan with Orange that will enable you to, well, actually use your smartphone the way it was intended with all the apps and goodies it will cost you at least 40€/month. For that you also get quite a lot of included call minutes and SMS messages, but it’s not as if they give you a choice to not buy them. I would. Gladly not buy them. So if you want internet you will pay through your teeth. Sadly I only later discovered Virgin Mobile with mobile internet prices that were slightly less hallucinant. Oh well, the contract was already long signed by then.

Naturally, it gets even “better” when things go wrong. Then the incompetence can really shine. I received a monthly bill that was more than twice the normal amount. Received might be an overstatement though, as the normal way in France is for them to automatically take the money of your bank account and you can only really complain post factum. Naturally I complained, using the e-mail form on the Orange website. The website which by the way is a horrible, unnavigable “wants to be all to everyone” portal type of affair. I got an automatic reply they received my message. Then I waited for the real reply to my problem. For two weeks. It never came.

Then I dropped by at the Orange store to inquire about the solution to this, they have overcharged me quite a bit. I mentioned I sent a request online, as it said on the site. The representative calmly replied that they simply don’t reply most of the time. Excuse me?!! Indeed, a world class customer experience. Sigh. :/ Then I asked what can I do about it at the store, since I know I haven’t made that many calls to rack up all those charges. She told me there was nothing they could do at the store, since they don’t even have access to that kind of customer billing data and I have to call this and this number… Some technology company, can’t even put together a decent customer relationship system.

Called the number, got an automated reply system where I couldn’t get a live person on and not for the lack of trying. Finally I gave up and went battling with their online UI once more to recheck the charges for that month. After mastering the extremely odd filter system I finally found the problem. A bunch of expensive calls to Algeria. Now it made sense. My previous phone had been stolen more than a month ago and those calls were undoubtedly a consequence of that incident.

Now you must be thinking: “What are you, an idiot? Why didn’t you block the number?”. Aaaah, but I did. In fact I did so less than an hour after my phone got stolen. I remember even being surprised how easy the process was, I just needed to call an automated number, enter my customer code and they told me it was successfully blocked. Well obviously NOT! Tried the automated “customer relations” number again with no luck and then finally gave up in disgust. Even if I got to them, how will I prove it wasn’t me calling those numbers…

That is why, among many reasons, I hate Orange.

Alas, there was to be another chapter in this saga. While I had no wish to get further involved with that giant lump of corporate incompetence, they were the only ones to still have a few iPads 2 left, when they have ran out at all other places. So I bought it there along with a prepaid 3G card I was obligated to take. Charging the account was a slight pain in the ass, as I have discovered after some Googling, they have changed the number where to enter the charging code I bought. The problems don’t stop there as the 3G connection on the iPad sometimes simply refuses to load the page and wants to load an orange.fr error page, which incidentally also doesn’t exist anymore and all I get is a 404…

That also is why, among many reasons, I hate Orange.

Mobile operators are destined to become simple commoditised bitpipe providers much akin to your home ISP. What are voice  calls and SMS messages other than greatly overcharged data transfers anyway? With that transition come lower margins and less clout than they have now. I for one can’t wait for that to happen, I just wished they realised that sooner and focus on their core product which is efficient, fast and cheap data transfer. I’d much prefer that to these disgusting death throes of incompetence.

Honestly this post mostly exists to test how WordPress publishing works from the iPad. So far pleasantly surprised, although there are still some things to be ironed out.

Among the places we visited was the Wellcome Collection, where they are holding an exposition titled The High Society about the use of drugs throughout human history and cultures. Apart from the more common drugs like alcohol, cannabis, coffee, cocaine etc. you also get to hear about the more exotic ones like Ayahuasaca, Kava root, Fly agaric (ok, you’ve probably seen that one before), Betel nuts and so forth.

They also featured some very nice Infographics about drugs by David McCandless, explaining everything from the different effects of drugs to the economics of the drug trade.
Try to catch the exposition if your in London, it’s on display till 27th of February.

What really caught my attention were these posters from the era of alcohol prohibition in the United States.

Does this kind of discourse remind you of anything today? After that they legalized alcohol and the world somehow did not come to an end. Drugs need to be legalized, not for ideologic reasons, but for pragmatic ones.

Thus I was very pleased to take advantage of that fact when I received an invitation to a debate about European federalism organised by the Spinelli group in the European parliament in Brussels. The Spinelli group is an assembly, mostly consisting of European politicians and officials who believe that the solution to the global challenges facing us all is a more tightly integrated European Union, preferably along federalist lines.
While that alone might not have gotten me to come, the names of Joschka Fischer, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Jean-Marc Ferry on the debate panel provided the much needed motivation. Seeing the names of some friends on the registration e-mail list added much impetus too, as I was looking forward to seeing them again.

So lets take a look at some of the main issues that were discussed.

State sovereignty
The organisers wisely chose panelists with different views who wouldn’t blow in an entirely same horn. Jean Marc Ferry for example is quite opposed to a supranational state and fixed upon a return of autonomy to the people, state, the economy. He talked about a shared sovereignty, a co-sovereignty leading to co-responsibility in his words. To me it sounded as quite an empty term without a realistic basis in the background. He shared some ideas about the many national parliaments being originators of ideas, with the European parliament simply acting as a clearing house for them. Well, simply might be a poor choice of a word, as in reality such a system would be, in my view, anything but simple or effective. While I agree with a lot of his criticism of the European democratic deficit in terms of popular legitimacy, I see his view of the subject more as an attempt to regain some of nation state’s glory and autonomous powers without letting go of all the advantages supranationalism has brought us. Somehow. How French.
Joschka Fisher I think really got to the crux of the transfer of sovereignty debate. He started out by bringing attention to the fact that the transatlantic West is losing its global supremacy it held for so long. While that might be something that even the birds on the roof are already singing, as we say in Slovenia, understanding the effect of that process on national sovereignty is crucial. The core and substance of sovereignty is basically autonomous power. Can you take a decision and bring it to fruition in reality? With the economic and political rise of Asia, Europe is losing its clout in the world and its decisions matter less globally if they are even realised. National sovereignties are many times an illusion. Effectively sovereignty is being transferred to Asia with an economic process, whether we like it or not. Case in point being the Copenhagen climate summit where EU countries were left out of the room and USA and China were the ones really discussing things. Thus we should reach over our petty nationalisms that keep us from pooling sovereignty further in the European Union. Only so will we be able to regain the European influence in the world, by speaking in one voice.
This principle applies not only directly to foreign policy but to almost every other area, economy, research, anything with global implications really. As Jean-Marc Ferry wisely pointed out, that’s why globalisation is probably the main “selling point” of the European Union for the 21st century, much like keeping peace in Europe was after the second World War and most of the 20th century.

Debate panel with Joschka Fischer speaking

Democratic deficit
The question of the EU’s democratic deficit was constantly being brought up in one form or another. The problem probably lies less in the institutions (although they do account for their share of the problem), but more in the European mindset, emotional response to the EU. Or better put, the lack of those two.
We’ve got the European parliament, but voter participation in elections declines year after year. We’ve got the EP, but more power lies with the Council. We’ve got the EP, but we don’t have proper European parties, more groupings of national parties. Same with elections, it’s more of a sum of national elections, where people vote on national issues instead of the European ones, because they aren’t really the ones being brought forth.
Which brings me to the lack of a proper European public sphere, that Jean-Marc Ferry as a Habermas aficionado also pointed out. The lack of proper pan-European media, apart from the rare exceptions usually co-funded by the EU. This also means we’re not discussing the same European issues at the same time, which we should.
People feel disconnected, estranged from the EU project. While there are many reasons for this disconnect, some were pointed out more. The top-down principal of European integration for example, feeling of it being forced down by some elites (which is inevitable to a point in my view). Joschka Fischer talked a lot about the emotional dimension, how people need to relate more to the EU. In my opinion the complexity of the EU adds a lot in that detachment. The fact that I need to study this to understand the institutional framework of the EU says a lot. While I understand the need for checks and balances and political compromises, I still think the entire framework could be simplified a lot.
Every citizen should be able to understand the basics of how EU politics work without the need to spend a lot of time and energy on it. Aside from that, the achievements and goals of the EU should be clearly communicated. Not in some diplomatic jargon due to the fear of rustling someone’s feathers. Clearly.
The way citizens interact with the EU should also be improved. Make it a one stop shop. Why do we have different representations of the Parliament and the Commission? While the institutions are of course separate, the citizen interacting with the EU regarding some issue shouldn’t care. Deal with it internally, hide the complexity from the user, i.e. the citizen. The EU needs better usability on all levels is what I’m saying.

The debate was interesting, even-though I get the feeling the participants could have listened and actually interacted with each other more. Was it fruitful? Well, despite the completely full auditorium it seemed to me that they were preaching to the choir of already convinced. debates like this are only useful if they lead to some concrete action from the mindshare gained. While I have my doubts, I do hope the Spinelli group with its high placed members has some more of concrete action up their sleeves.

Oddaja Generator 9. 1. na Valu 202 (the interview part starts at 32:30)

Horseback over Mongolia with Joni and Tim

Update: The version with English subtitles got taken off due to a copyright violation complaint. I replaced it with the official one by SVT, but it doesn’t have a translation and thus sadly looses a lot of meaning for non-Swedish speaking people.

What is macrotypography anyway? Is there a microtypography?

The difference between microtypography and macrotypography is that the former deals primarly with the individual fonts or even characters, while the latter is focused on the broader page layout.

While it may not seems so to us intuitively, the layout of the pages has changed surprisingly little since the time of manuscripts written on skins of dead animals. The macro elements of columns, initials, titles and such are still there.

The invention of the printing press changed the form and technique but elements stayed the same in many ways.

After the first World War macrotypographic styles changed, we went from a more traditional, centered, symmetrical, calm, “bourgeouise” style to a much more dynamic style with different alignments, positioning of the text, use of less traditional, new types of fonts. In your mind just imagine the difference between a traditional 19th century Victor Hugo novel and a multi-column dynamic layout with sans-serif titles etc.

With the web, what changes most is the surface since we are not limited to pages anymore and we have a virtually limitless surface to work on. Scrolling replaced page turning.

It’s important to create grids for the placement of elements on a web page and stick to them (except when not). Grids, margins, gutters, baselines should all be in your daily vocabulary in this line of work. Grids come in many forms though and naturally depend on the type of the content on your site.

These conventions give the feeling of order and comfort on the site, most of all they make it easier for users to read and navigate the content on your site.

The text has to be able to “breathe” and we can achieve that with the proper use of margins, breaks, and – while she did not use the exact term – white space.

It’s important to give time for “pause” and logical separation of thoughts in the text, that is why paragraphs were created. On the web it’s more appropriate to leave blank lines between paragraphs. One has to be careful not to overemphasize the pauses and make them into breaks. :)

Some good web layout and typography examples: Second & Park, Jon Tan, BoingBoing features (each one has its own design & layout).

For the end: “Don’t forget: It’s good to understand the rules and even better to break them.” and because it simply sounds sooo much better in French “Et n’oubliez pas: comprendre le règles, c’est bien ; les enfreindre, c’est mieux.”

Anne-Sophie also mentioned a type-related website in the pipeline Typographisme.fr. It’s not ready yet, but follow them at @typographisme to know when it will be.

I found the lecture wonderfully informative and enjoyable. Thanks to the many enlightening debates with designers at 3fs much about grids and such was already very familiar to me, but more than welcome in the lecture nonetheless. I also loved Anne’s on stage attitude and a healthy dose of humor in the lecture. Sadly I didn’t get all of it, the jokes were good I’m sure, but my  knowledge of French sometimes doesn’t yet suffice for such advanced functions as humor. :)

I also started blushing when thinking about this very blog. While the theme I, with much care and thought, clicked “Apply” on has served me fine I would like to design something custom and much nicer typography and layout wise. Perhaps this lecture will give me the impetus to persevere and desgin & CSS-away.

This talk was just full of HTML5 demo candy. First demo were the presentation slides themselves. They were running in a web browser and he gave us the IP so we could connect to the web socket server. That enabled us all to see the presentation on our own computers and while I’m sure there are many other uses, take screenshots.

What followed was a plethora of other cool demos, all courtesy of HTML5.

1. Drag & dropping multiple images in the browser. It then read the photo’s metadata and loaded up a Google Map of where the picture was taken. It wasn’t shown but he hinted at pretty advanced image editing, all that even before the image was actually uploaded from the client browser.

2. Webcam communication in the browser. No flash. Praised be his Steveness. Well actually the guys who put the support for that into HTML5, but hey, when you need an anti-Flash icon…

3. Audio APIs. Playing audio in a browser. Since this isn’t 1993, that wasn’t the amazing part. He then made pretty cool different audio visualizations on the audio stream, then he added sound modification (filters etc.) to the audio stream, all in real time. Neat.

Audio visualizer demo. Just one of the possible visualizer styles.

4. WebGL. 3D in a browser. Paul showed off a 3D environment with nicely modeled buildings, space ships, a bunch of camera movement and effects. Buildings even had live tweets displayed on their walls and billboards playing video. While the graphics weren’t something out of the newest Medal of Honor it was pretty amazing, especially once you remember that that’s all rendered by the web browser and even GPU accelerated.

Shaky photo of the Web GL demo. I really should have sat more in the front.

I’m sure I forgot some examples, but these are the ones that stuck in my mind the most. This stuff is still experimental, not that stable and usually working properly in only in one or two of the most modern browsers but it’s still inspiring to see where we’re heading and what will be possible on a mass scale in only a few years.

During question time we stumbled upon the ever-present debate during the conference about how to get the designers used to Photoshop to design for a new, more dynamic web reality. After the comic reply: “I don’t know.” by Paul a guy working for Adobe stood up and – probably correctly – assessed that we’re just on the brink of it all and that Adobe tools will adapt to the new realities. In the end the lecturer gave him a book on HTML5 and with the “quality” of many of Adobe apps, I hope they read it. :)