Today, we live in a world where on one hand potentially everybody with a computer can create great-looking prints and websites and on the other hand we have more complex problems than ever that cannot be solved by looking at them in isolation but are really properties of globally interconnected systems or emergent systems. So the thinking goes, and I tend to agree, that designers should not stand in the way of the democratization of poster-making but instead focus on tackling these interconnected and interdisciplinary problems. Because it seems that designers are in a unique position to look at these systems in a holistic way and are able to get to grasp with them using a mix of different methodologies.

That is, of course, unless you believe that the market is going to figure it all out by itself. Then we don’t need as many designers but are well served with continuing to hire economists in all possible positions…

Buying or using products that engage our emotions strongly will inevitably alienate those who don’t share those emotions – and just as strongly.

This may well be true. But the article doesn’t go on to ask why this is the case.

Many (but not all) people having used an Apple product for some amount of time fall in love with it one way or another. There is something catchy about those beautifully designed products. While touching and interacting with them they connect with something deep within us. And the longer you use your iPhone, carrying it with you every day wherever you go, the more personal your relation with the device becomes.

So why is it that people not using and not owning such a product react almost equally as strong in the opposite way? Why do some people hate Apple and all their products? Are they simply jealous? I don’t think it’s that simple. I think that when you buy a new Apple product your non-Apple-using friends feel similar to when they would see you falling in love with somebody they think is not good for you. That new flame who is only after your money, for example. They see you acting irrationally and falling prey to an evil force that persuades you of buying expensive products that aren’t any better than all the others. What they don’t see is all the joy you are having with your new love.

On a more rational note, do I think it makes sense to buy Apple products? An often voiced criticism is that they are expensive toys that actually can do less than their mundane counterparts. It is probably true that you can think of a few things that you cannot do or at least cannot do as easily with an Apple product as with that of another manufacturer (like moving your music files to your iPhone without using iTunes). But the things you want it to do 99.95% percent of the time it does splendidly on the other hand. By not incorporating some exotic features Apple is able to offer a very streamlined design with few distractions. It is intuitive and efficient to use, letting the user easily accomplish his goal without forcing him to think about all the technology that enables his experience.

But of course there are also those restrictions that do not only serve the simplicity of the product but are mostly there to increase Apple’s profit. And I hate those just as much as everybody else. But the sad truth is that at the moment there are no other computers or phones that are designed as well as Apple’s. And by design I don’t just mean that they look beautiful and stylish. By design I mean the process of the people creating the product pushing themselves to improve it again and again and again. Thinking carefully about the best solution, questioning every tiny detail – is it really necessary? – making the device from hardware to software as simple and enjoyable to use as humanly possible thus saving millions of people countless hours of frustration.

I think design is important. But so is open source and freedom. Right now, there is this trade-off and everybody has to choose for himself where to draw the line.

Déjà vu, as they say…

The first question to ask, I think, is whether bin Laden (and international terrorists in general) are to be considered criminals or enemy-combatants as defined in international law.

If they are to be considered criminals, they have to be dealt with in a court of law. But it is questionable at best that the US military or police do have the authority to capture someone in a foreign country without cooperating with local police. On the other hand, if international terrorists are to be considered enemy-combatants and bin Laden indeed didn’t make his surrender clear, then the killing was lawful.

Unfortunately, there isn’t even an internationally binding definition of terrorism. And for a person to be considered an enemy combatant under classical international law, there needs to be a war between two or more states or a civil war.

What I’m calling for is an extension of international law and a strengthening of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which prosecutes individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. A first step must be for all states of the world to recognize the ICC and ratify its convention. A second step would be to provide the ICC with its own police force to get hold of the individuals that are under warrant. Possibly existing military forces of member countries (e.g. US) could be used if they were to get permission from the ICC.

That way, the prosecution of bin Laden could have taken place as follows:

1. The ICC opens an investigation

2. The ICC issues a warrant for bin Laden

3. Forces with a clear mandate under international law try to capture him

4. If he resists arrest and is killed that’s handled similar to when a national police officer kills someone upon resisting arrest. If bin Laden is successfully arrested he’s put on trial by the ICC.

Violent dictators such as Muammar Gaddafi could be handled similarly if they are committing crimes against humanity or equally grave crimes under international law. I see no reason to wage war against a whole country if the problem lies in the leadership.

In English one can use the term academic discipline to refer to the old, broader meaning of science. Here is a classification of academic disciplines.

• Natural sciences apply the scientific method to the study of nature. Examples are physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy.
• Social sciences study society. Examples are sociology, anthropology, political science, religious studies, linguistics.

Natural sciences and most of the social sciences are empirical sciences, that is to say that their primary methods rely on data to support or falsify their theories.

• Humanities study the human condition while not relying on data but rather on analytical, critical or speculative methods. Examples are philosophy and literature. Usually visual and performing arts such as music and theatre are included in the humanities although they do not rely on logic or rationality and as such even Aristotle probably wouldn’t have considered them part of science.
• Formal sciences, that is mathematics and related fields, use a priori methods. They are concerned with formal systems based on abstract definitions and rules. As such, the formal sciences themselves are detached from the physical, observable world. However, empirical sciences often rely on mathematics to analyse data gathered from observations.
• Applied sciences use scientific knowledge for practical means. They are very close and sometimes overlap with engineering and R&D.

Depending on their methodology and focus, the fields of history, law, economics and psychology among others are sometimes assigned to the social sciences, the humanities or even the applied sciences. Computer science also consists of natural science, formal science and applied science.

If we consider all these academic disciplines and exclude the arts, following Aristotle’s understanding of science that is still widespread in continental Europe, what do these sciences then have in common? What makes them scientific? Here is my personal working definition:

‘Science’ (in the general sense) is the systematic and methodical acquisition of knowledge that follows these steps:

1. Formulation of a question or problem concerning the world or a general state of affairs (German: “allgemeiner Sachverhalt”).
2. Formulation of a theory that is objectively (or intersubjectively) reviewable.
3. Publication of the work done in the previous two steps. The publication should document the work as accurately and consistently as possible with the aim of making it rationally or logically comprehensible, reproducible and verifiable (or rather falsifiable, see critical rationalism).

Within the academic disciplines, there has historically been a debate between empiricism and rationalism.  The former holding that valid knowledge can only be obtained by sensory experiences while the latter holds that also reasoning is a valid source of knowledge.

I think it would be great if the other sciences, in the old meaning of the word, would reclaim some ground from the empirical, especially natural sciences. Because not everything that matters can be measured (cf. TED Talk by David Brooks).

This attitude seems related to the scientific method where a theory can never be proved. A scientific or philosophical theory is just a useful working concept until proven wrong. Then a better theory has to be developed. In this method there is no right, no absolute truth, only a constant struggle to improve.

From this concept of embracing and working with uncertainty, indeed never accepting that some theory might be the absolute truth, comes a great deal of self-confidence because you haven’t that much to lose anymore, because you always knew you couldn’t have had discovered the absolute truth anyway. And while there might be a few so-called scientist that have forgotten this, I think that the great majority take this way of thinking for granted. Indeed, they take it so much for granted that they often fail to mention it explicitly to the public.

The result of all this, I think, is that many people that don’t take uncertainty for granted but are looking for some kind of genuine truth will think that scientists are overconfident and they might feel that scientists think they can explain everything while actually the exact opposite is the case.

All in all a quite unfortunate situation. So what is there to do? Scientists on one hand should get better at communicating with the general public, the public on the other hand needs to get a better understanding of science and the scientific method.

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

This indeed seems still very true to me today. And it seems like Apple is mastering just about all of them. Maybe except environmentally friendly (non-replaceable batteries) and long-lasting (the new version of the product always makes the old one look dated, but the old one on its own is long-lasting nonetheless). More companies should invest more energy and time in “good design” instead of simply producing a lot of trash.

If the networked TV of 2013 has as much CPU and GPU horsepower as, say, the iMac of 2010, and if the software environment is suitably flexible and extensible (via app stores or hacking), then why would you need an HTPC, AppleTV, media extender, or DVR? Indeed, such a TV would have much more gaming horsepower than the current generation of consoles, so you might be able to skip those, too. And if 2TB or so of storage is good enough for you, why would you need separate NAS or fileserver.

Given where things are headed, I can easily imagine the enthusiast home theater of 2013 consisting of a TV and maybe a game console, and that’s it. At some point, talking about home theater may once again amount to talking about TVs, receivers, speakers, and not much else. We’ll look at the vast tracts of empty space beneath our TVs and think back on the array of service- and task-specific boxes that we once used. If that’s the future of TV, then I, for one, am definitely looking forward to it.

Ars Technica, January 2011

That’s what I’ve been thinking for ages! Here a note of mine from October 2006:

a computer that looks and behaves like a TV

what-in-one:

• TV, Video, Audio
• Computer: dual-boot (GNU/Linux, Windows)
• game console

Hardware:

• HD Display
• CPU, GPU (HD-Video)
• Big Harddisk
• DVD-drive
• Infraredport, Remote
• 5.1 Soundcard
• cable TV-card
• USB (iPod, optional Mouse&Keyboard)
• Bluetooth (Gamepad, optional Mouse&Keyboard)

I think that’s the only reasonable way to build a video-home-entertainment device in the age of the Internet. Granted, you might not need the cable TV-card when you have Netflix and BitTorrent and you won’t need dual-boot if your main OS is such a strong platform that you have enough apps and games to run on that, but the rest pretty much still stands. That’s the way to do to TV what the iPod did to music, the iPhone did to phones and the Kindle and iPad are doing to reading and light mobile computing. It seems odd that Apple is so far off this time with their Apple TV, which is nothing more but yet another set-top box and it doesn’t even run apps or games.

The key is of course, again, a simple and nice user interface which is the thing that Google TV is so far away from (a full-scale keyboard! wtf?) and that’s what might prevent Sony and the likes from producing that dream-TV of mine for yet another few years. Even now that the idea has hit mainstream.

I think he’s certainly on to something – otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered reading his book. But I conclude that he overdid it. Carr isn’t a luddite and he acknowledges that through all intellectual technologies such as books, maps and the compass we have gained some things while at the same time lost others. Indeed, his historical and cultural digressions and accounts of neurological and psychological research that take up a good part of the book are very interesting, sometimes I felt almost like reading National Geographic. But even as he acknowledges that the internet is here to stay, he offers no cues on how to fix it but paints a bleak picture of a medium that is inherently broken and that make its users shallower.

Carr also criticizes the view that a brain works like a complicated computer. While I’ll save the philosophical debate about that for another post, I certainly agree that in everyday life the metaphor isn’t all that helpful. Right now, computers are good (and even better than humans) at some task while they fail spectacularly at others. Humans think and feel massively parallel while computers still work mostly sequentially. Humans can get a grasp at a complicated problem even though it might be impossible to rigorously proof step by step that the intuitive solution is right. So I agree that for now we have to be careful when looking towards computers to help us at certain tasks and problems. Or more precisely, we should think carefully about what way we expect them to help us.

Towards the end of the book Carr argues that user interfaces and web sites shouldn’t be designed in a user friendly way but instead should be hard on the user in order to make him or her think. That way they will have to focus more and remember the contents better.

I think the exact opposite is true. The key to fixing computers and the internet and lessening their effect as a medium of distractions is better user interface design. The user interface should hide the complexity of problems that the computer is good at solving for us. Like when you are writing an email and enter the recipients name in the receiver-field it’s great that his email address gets filled in and you don’t have to look it up yourself. But on the other hand, the user interface shouldn’t try to hide the complexity of the problem we want to solve ourselves, as humans. When we only ask the computer to give us a word processor we don’t want it to write the text for us. Similarly, the computer or website shouldn’t flood us with notifications and other offers to be distracted as is often the case today. That’s why some people actually prefer the iPad’s approach to applications. You can work with only one app at a time and while you’re reading an ebook you haven’t any Facebook notifications popping in.

Another interesting note in The Shallows is that hyperlinks don’t necessarily improve the understanding of a text, indeed Carr cites a study that shows the opposite. The reader is preoccupied making the decision to either follow the link or not which distracts him of following the argument from beginning to end. This is a again a point where I tend to agree with him. More than just a few links in a text are too distracting. Better list them as references at the end of the text.

In conclusion I can say that I don’t think all hope is lost for the internet. But we certainly need to rethink the way we design websites and user interfaces. And as users we have to pay a lot more attention to the way we follow links mindlessly and are easily distracted. We need to make more conscious decisions on what we actually want to do right now and then focus on that and not stop until we’re done with it. And then we can take a conscious break instead of drifting off to Youtube or Facebook which doesn’t help us to really relax and tank energy.

Apple said gestures on the Magic Mouse or a MacBook’s Trackpad could be used to switch between apps and do things within the app. But I cannot help but feel that gesturing around on top of a mouse isn’t the way this is supposed to work. My own experience with three-finger-gestures on a Magic Mouse as well as what we saw during the demo shows that those just don’t always work as expected or are triggered by accident. So what I’m hoping for is that with the release of Lion in the summer, Apple will ship multi-touch enabled Macs as shown in this recent patent filing (see picture). Then the software shown off now will really start to shine.

Of course, it seems there is still a lot of work to do, both for Apple and third-party developers. But the conventional window and mouse metaphor is still prominently integrated into Lion, and the Mission Control feature helps switching between the two experiences seamlessly. With the Mac App Store and the iPad gaining traction, apps should be upgraded for the touchscreen reasonably fast. A further cue that all this might be true is that Lion seems to hide scrollbars when not in use which makes perfect sense for a touchscreen environment. Also, this might explain what Apple is working on with iOS 4 for iPad which is still only available for iPhones.

I’m convinced that if it’s not coming with Lion, it’s coming with the next release after that (but what cat-name is there left for a next release?). As I’ve argued in an earlier post about the iPad as a post-PC platform, Apple still needs to figure out how to easily sync data between apps and between iOS-devices as well as PCs. They seem determined to abandon the long-serving file metaphor – which I think is a good thing – but they need to come up with something better that is accessible to third-party apps and the cloud.

No, this image isn’t a mockup but an official Apple picture of Mac OS X Lion. What’s also interesting is that the file name on Apple’s server is lion_springboard (it’s called Springboard on the iPhone) and not Launchpad which is the official name mentioned on the website and by Steve Jobs.

You can say what you want, but humans are at least very different from other animals. Maybe the difference between humans and other mammals is less than the difference between bacteria and mammals. But there is one thing humans have developed which no other animal has to such an extent: culture, an extensive set of knowledge, know-how, tools and artifacts that are relayed from generation to generation not through the genetic code but by language and observation. It is hard to argue against the fact that this is currently unique to humans.

Where opinions differ, however, is whether this development is mainly positive or mainly negative. If you focus on the environmental impact humans have made on the rest of the planet you might reach the conclusion that they are a plague destroying nature. And if they make the planet uninhabitable and go extinct that’s the just punishment and maybe after a while there will be room for other living beings on the planet again. Or if you don’t want to go that far you might say that at least the number of humans should be drastically reduced to lower their impact on the biosphere. But what if you were an alien, looking down on planet earth from your spaceship, what would you deem appropriate then? Would you add sterilizer to human drinking water supply to reduce their spreading if you had the power? Would an alien have the right to do that to safe the rest of the planet from human influence? Probably not. You might still argue however that we as humans have the responsibility to suppress our growing numbers. But what right do you as an individual have to ask another individual, a young woman maybe, not to have a child? What does have more value, a human being or a tree? Or what about a child and a blade of grass?

If you really stay true to the egalitarian argument that humans and the rest of nature have equal value and take the holistic stance that they all are simply part of a greater whole, then humans must be protected, too. Because it would be a real shame if all that culture (and even the raw capability to produce culture) just went the way of the dodo. And yes, of course it’s a shame too that the dodo went its way.

So to make my position clear, I neither subscribe to a radical ecocentrism that is in favour of killing all of humanity in order to save the rest of nature nor an anthropocentric view that proclaims that humans have more intrinsic value than other animals and plants. Instead, I feel that we humans are a part of nature and therefore need to be part of the solution. To make that work, I agree with Paul Kingsnorth, it is not enough to change our technologies to more efficient ones. Our values need to change, too. But it is unrealistic to believe that people will single-handedly descent back into caves to safe the planet. That’s why efficient technologies are still needed. This is not to say that any human being on the planet has a right to such an ultra-mobile and consumerist lifestyle as the majority of the people in industrialized nations are indulging in right now – we need to do away with cars, planes and a new smartphone and laptop every half a year – but I do think it’s possible with efficient technologies and a new, reasonable social-economic system for the human population to live a decent life without destroying nature in the process. And yes, for that to work we need a radical change of values and a radical change of the system. And you cannot change one without changing the other. So what we need to do is to work on both of them simultaneously.

I’m slightly above 20 years old now and either in my lifetime or in the lifetime of my children cheap oil is simply going to run out. We’ve known that since the 1970s but our global system has been unable to change trajectory at all. And while talk about green and climate change has accelerated significantly between 2000 and 2010 (note, that’s 30 years after mainstream society had realized that we are destroying our planet and with it our livelihood), it seems to me that this is rather another trick to get consumers to buy new (greener) stuff and keep the economy on its exponential-growth-track. What has actually been happening in the last half a century is that our global society has slowly but steadily been taken hostage by the global economic system. All of us, politicians, middle-class workers as well as CEOs of huge companies, seem unable to change course under the dictate of the so-called laws of the free market. The difference is that a tiny minority is profiting astonishing amounts at the cost of the rest of the population and at the cost of whole generations centuries into the future. While the sales volume of some multi-nationals have risen above the GDP of small countries, nation states around the world have continuously been losing power. The states of the developing world have long known to be corrupt and serve only as an empty hull for an established elite that draws its power from global business. But the financial crises has shown us clearly that also the states of the industrialized world are mere henchmen and have no choice but to risk everything and go into deep debt themselves to rescue the global banking system if they don’t want to destroy their national economy and go down themselves. Virtually all states around the world are hollow states, and are becoming more and more so every day.

In the words of John Robb:

… the nation-states of the West will join those of the global south as hollow states: mere shells of states that serve only to enforce the interests of the global economic system.  These new states, more market-states than nation-states, will offer citizens a mere vestige of the public goods they offered historically.

Our current global economic, social and political system is totally dependent on an economy of infinite growth which is fueled by cheap oil. This is coupled with a highly speculative financial system and food stocks in our cities that last only a few days after being cut off from resupply-trucks. Whether it’s going to be quick and noisy or slow and painful, one way or another, this global system will eventually break down. The question is, will we have something to replace it with?

I, as quite a few others, believe the answer are resilient local communities, connected through the internet, that work through the principles of peer-to-peer and open source. The next question is of course when this transformation will start taking place, and much more importantly how much time it will take to accomplish the transition: more like 15 years or more like the 300 years of the decline of the Roman Empire? That is, of course, assuming such a transition will be successful. While I think it is inevitable that a few such communities will form, I do not wish to examine the bleak possibility that such a transformation will fail to reach large parts of our global society.

So I ask you, is it not the responsibility, indeed the duty, of every capable human being on earth to work towards such a transition? May it be swift and peaceful.

The Independent – Meet the global scenester

link, 14. August 2008

“There always used to be a particular city that was the centre of cool at a particular point in time. But now there’s no longer a place where it’s ‘at’; there’s no longer any centre of the world’s popular cultural universe. … The further [American Apparel's] global reach stretches, the more easily the company can study and copy street style, before repackaging it and selling it back to the originators of that style, with an American Apparel label attached. … It’s no coincidence that American Apparel’s often controversial advertising campaigns imitate the Vice look [example], … His style has countless amateur copycats worldwide, whose photos have found a home on fast-growing photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and MySpace. … Making fun of the global scenesters is futile, for they love nothing more than to mock themselves. Everything a scenester does is rendered in air quotes: ironic moustaches, ironic trucker caps, faux-offensive Urban Outfitters T-shirts, white guys with afros, or musical acts with names like Does It Offend You, Yeah?… the internet has been a key factor in the globalisation of hip. … You once had a series of gatekeepers in the adoption of a trend: the innovator, the early adopter, the late adopter, the early mainstream, the late mainstream, and finally the conservative. But now it goes straight from the innovator to the mainstream. … the only prevailing trend is that there are no prevailing trends … the result is that same brand of individuality is sold, worn and celebrated the world over, simultaneously. … ‘What’s the next big thing?’ but there will never again be a next big thing. The future of fashion is that all of these places will participate. There will never ever again be one ‘the place’.”

Time Out New York – Why the hipster must die

link, Juni 2007 by Christian Lorentzen

– funny text, but almost as quote < oxymoronic as the “mainstream hipster” > end quote, i.e. self-contradictory.

“Yes, the assassins of cool still walk our streets: Any night of the week finds the East Village, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg teeming with youth—a pageant of the bohemian undead. These hipster zombies—now more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts—are the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real-estate agents. And they must be buried for cool to be reborn. … Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity. Those 18-to-34-year-olds called hipsters have defanged, skinned and consumed the fringe movements of the postwar era—Beat, hippie, punk, even grunge. … I propose that the only hope for a reanimated bohemia, if not a dezombified hipsterdom, is civil war. … We know that there are Sweet hipsters, who practice the sort of irony you can take home to meet the parents, and there are those Vicious hipsters, who practice the form of not-quite-passive aggression called snark. … On the Sweet end of the spectrum, The Believer lavishes its literary and pop-culture idols with a uniform layer of affection that renders it near impossible to distinguish the great from the mediocre. … Meanwhile, among those who adopt the Vicious pose, a lighthearted scorn perfected by Gawker is roundly applied to the objects of pop celebrity, both talented and (mostly) otherwise.”

– So what he’s saying is that Sweet hipsters and Vicious hipsters are supposed to kill each other and make way for a dezombified hipsterdom? Guess how long after that hipsterdom would become zombified once more…

Adbusters – Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

link, 29. Juli 2008 by Douglas Haddow

‘Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” … initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians, the keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory. … of a class of individuals that seek to escape their own wealth and privilege by immersing themselves in the aesthetic of the working class. … With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles. … it is rare, if not impossible, to find an individual who will proclaim themself a proud hipster. It’s an odd dance of self-identity – adamantly denying your existence while wearing clearly defined symbols that proclaims it. … “cool-hunters” will also be skulking the same [web]sites, taking note of how they dress and what they consume. … get paid to co-opt youth culture and then re-sell it back at a profit. … Hipsterdom is the first “counterculture” to be born under the advertising industry’s microscope, leaving it open to constant manipulation but also forcing its participants to continually shift their interests and affiliations. Less a subculture, the hipster is a consumer group – using their capital to purchase empty authenticity and rebellion. But the moment a trend, band, sound, style or feeling gains too much exposure, it is suddenly looked upon with disdain. Hipsters cannot afford to maintain any cultural loyalties or affiliations for fear they will lose relevance.

The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. … We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.’

Defining the modern-day San Francisco hipster

link, 20. March 2010 by Andrew Leonard

‘a group of individuals who want to be different, but in the end form cliques because so many others strive to do the same. … redefining style by taking vintage clothes and embellishing them to their own tastes. … if someone asks you if you’re a hipster, and someone says [you say] ‘no, I’m not a hipster!,’ it kinda means you’re a hipster.”… That circle has been described as “exclusive” and even elusive. … the level of acceptance she’s seen hipsters project “depends on the club or group of hipsters.”’

– Hipsters, so it seems, don’t form a group of people that identify with each other and have a common goal. They are just everybody that doesn’t want to be mainstream (that’s practically everyone today) and tries to take refuge in irony.

Concluding

Since the beginning of the 19th century there has been a word for people that were (perceived to be) different: bohemian. What is changed today is that through the total victory of capitalism and consumerism the commercialization of everything is a reality now. We can trust nothing and nobody to be what it/(s)he claims to be. In fact, we know that ads are fake and that most music advertised is less a product of musicians and more a product of deliberately calculating marketers. Thus we crave for authenticity and that’s why today more people want to be non-mainstream, independent or hip than ever before.

But because there are so many people trying to be different they inevitable end up forming a huge group or a demographic themselves. To their resentment, they discover soon that they are not different any more. So they need to change again. At the same time, they want to change into what’s the new hip, clinching to everything that is not mainstream. Through globalization, the internet and cheap digital cameras this has become a cat-and-mouse game with amazing speed. What’s even worse, not only will other hipsters quickly catch up on a new thing to do, but all the marketers will constantly analyse the internet and the streets of the world for the latest trends, update their products and sell the hipsters their own ideas back at a healthy profit. And when a successful marketing campaign has at last pushed something into mainstream it’s definitely not hip any more.

In this perspective the phenomenon and especially its causes are quite tragic. I’m not against a global umbrella culture, I’m even for a certain kind of global identity, but there needs to be space for smaller groups of people to come together and define themselves as a community, which always includes defining who is different. I applaud hipsters all over the world for their attempts to make past and present mainstream cultures their own, by mashing them together, dragging symbols out of context and into irony and thus changing their meaning. But sadly, more often than not there is no new meaning created, no new idea proposed, that is, besides the omnipresent one: “mainstream is dead”. Sure, as everything gaining momentum, also a critique of hipsters is dragged into irony by them, but that doesn’t change facts. So maybe the articles cited above and blogs like Look at this Fucking Hipster and Unhappy Hipsters are signs of the imminent death of hipsterdom as we know it. But as long as corporate- and profit-driven globalisation is a reality the idea will live on. People always wanted and always will want to be different than most, while at the same time be similar to a few they know and value.

P.S. Wikipedia quotes from Jazz by Frank Tirro where the 1940s (jazz-) hipster was described with: “an underground man. He is to the Second World War what the dadaist was to the first.” From a historical perspective, Dadaism was a protest-movement against WWI and the 1940s hipsters denounced the white establishment of post-WWII America. Both movements explicitly refused to formulate a reasoning for their respective philosophies, instead they focused on art or a certain lifestyle to demonstrate the absurdity of the then-current orthodoxy. One could argue that the 1990s-2000s hipster does exactly the same, this time rebelling against mainstream consumerism with absurdity and irony. But while both Dadaism and the 40s hipsters were conscious of solutions (pacifism and a more relaxed lifestyle resp.) to the respectitive grievances, the contemporary hipsters don’t seem to have any perspective on alternatives. If they had, they wouldn’t be hipsters but hippies. Then hipsterism is the manifestation of the widespread hatred of mainstream consumerism, coupled with the realization that the ideas of 1968 failed to realize and the perception that no new or viable alternatives are in sight. This is the real tragedy of which hipsters are only a symtom. All hipster (can) do is touch on that sore spot of our society and that’s probably why hipsters are so often despised.

• multi-tasking user interface (fast application switching)
• usb port (and support for more external devices like printers etc.)
• and what’s going be by far the biggest challenge for apple: it shouldn’t be an external device to plug in your computer to sync, but it should be a computer on its own, equal to and not subordinated to your main computer. and all your data should be able to sync over the cloud with whatever there is

I sincerely hope (and believe) that Apple is thinking of replacing the mouse/keyboard computers with this platform. Not trying to move the PC forward step by step, but instead starting with the current iPad (which is solely a giant iPhone) and then slowly pushing its capabilities to gradually replace PCs while consumer adoption and the third-party ecosystem of applications is growing with the iPad hardware and software platform. Because Apple want this to happen as quickly as possible they priced the iPad rather low and are willing to take a smaller profit margin.

For this, bigger models (more like a 24” iMac) and probably a virtualized legacy mode with support for a mouse to run old mac/windows applications are eventually needed. Although most private consumers might not care, to get this really going I think it is inevitable for Apple to open up the platform a bit and remove that nasty DRM and let people install their own apps not bought on the appstore.

Here is hoping.

1. Five Basic Misconceptions About Money

and the truth:

• Three kinds of growth: A: natural (logarithmic, flattening out), B: linear and C: exponential. Our current economy grows exponentially, that is the GDP and on pair the money supply increase exponentially. Because of interest, and more importantly interest on interest, a loan of 10’000$ at an interest rate of 6% increases within 50 years exponentially to 184’000$. If the money supply wouldn’t keep growing, not all the loans plus interest could be payed back, the extra money needs to come from somewhere. So indeed, our current economy must grow exponentially to sustain itself.
• We don’t only pay interest when we take up a loan. Because in every product we buy, 30-50% of the price goes actually into paying back the loans the producer took up for production. If he didn’t have to take out a loan, his products would be that much cheaper.
• Through the system of loans and debt, quite obviously there is a reallocation of money happening. The rich lending out money get even richer as the poor repay their dept plus interest.
• Inflation, the fact that our money is loosing value all the time, doesn’t need to be taken for granted. If there were no need to keep the money supply growing, there would be no risk of overgrowing it and thus no inflation.
• The current monetary system is prone to volatilities and repeating crisis, fixed towards growth no matter what, in favour of the already rich and because every sustainable long-term investment needs to measure itself against short-term gainings and interest favours short-term thinking.

Creating Interest and Inflation Free Money

When interest is replaced by a parking fee for money.

Already towards the end of the 19. century the German/Argentinian economist Silvio Gesell observed economic cycles, fluctuations in prices although there were no fluctuations in actual demand. One explanation is that when interest rates are low, people with money withhold it (no incentive to lend) and thus less will be bought (because people cannot take up loans) and therefore less produced, leading the economy into a down turn. Because money becomes scarce then, interest rates go up again, the people with money are more willing to lend it, spending goes up and everything goes smooth again, until there is too much money (little demand for more) and interest rates start dropping again.

Gesell realized that money, as opposed to all other goods, can be withheld at no cost (no storage costs) and proposed to fight these economic cycles by introducing such an inventory cost. Instead of giving a reward to those lending money (through interest), those hoarding it should be punished by a small fee (one to five percent) on money. With this parking or holding fee (also called Demurrage) people are encouraged to spend their cash quickly or invest it in long-term deposits where the fee would be lower or zero. Instead of demanding interest they would be glad to invest it. Demurrage makes sure that the money remains in circulation and that its core function as a medium of exchange is conserved.

In 1932, during the Great Depression, the Austrian town of Wörgl gave this neutral money (or Freigeld) a try. For banknotes to remain valid, people had to pay to get a stamp applied to the money at the end of each month (this could obviously be done electronically today). Therefore everybody spent their money as quickly as possible, unemployment dropped by 25% within a year, and with the fee that the town government collected more projects were financed. Although a full success, the experiment was terminated only one year later by the Austrian National Bank because it saw its monopoly on printing money in danger. Similar experiments in other countries were (and often still are) prohibited on the same grounds.

The less money can be made from lending money the more attractive it obviously becomes to buy land and lend that. Thus the price of land increases. Therefore we do not only need a money reform but also a land reform. All land is seen to belong to everybody, the community then grants usage rights to those who are willing to pay most and this money is then distributed equally to every member of the community/citizen. This way, if somebody uses just as much land as the average, he doesn’t have to pay anything because what he pays for usage rights is equal to what he gets back from the community. If someone needs more land, he simply needs to pay more. But land wouldn’t be hoarded as property and couldn’t be used for speculation any more.

Furthermore, a tax reform could help save the environment: Stop taxes on income and put taxes only on products, based on how much harm they do to the environment (in production and usage). This way, human labour gets cheaper while new production of goods gets more expensive. It suddenly pays off to repair products instead of buying new ones, fewer employees get replaced by machines, illegal unreported employment disappears because nobody has to pay income tax anyway.

3. Who Would Profit from a New Monetary System?

Such a monetary reform would abolish inflation and the flow of money as interest from the poor to the rich, reduce unemployment, lower prices, get rid of the infinite growth imperative and boost long-term investments.

• Politicians and Banks: are struggling to keep the current system running, infinite growth cannot be sustained forever. National debt has been rising for several years, a lot in industrialized but even more in developing nations.
• The Rich: would be able to keep their current savings and have already enough, so most would choose a stable system over the current one.
• The Poor: In 2001, half of the German population owned only 5% of all monetary assets, the other half 95%. While the already poor pay interest to the rich (people in a country as well as from developing to industrialized countries), the welfare state and development aid try to get some of that money back to the poor in a very inefficient way.
• Churches and Spiritual Groups: Moses, Aristoteles, Jesus, Mohammed, Luther, Zwingli and Gandhi all condemned the payment of interest. Communities must have instinctively known some of the problems interest would introduce (like social inequality).
• Trade and Industry: The free market economy would continue to run as now, simply without the distortion of interest. Small and medium enterprises wouldn’t have to pay more interest than global giants.
• Agriculture: more sustainable and ecological farming
• Artists: works of art would be a save storage of value (as opposed to money with a holding fee), so the demand for art would rise.
• Women and children: equal chances.
• The Ecology of Our Planet: When the economy isn’t growing, the discrepancies between poor and rich, loaning and lending, become even more apparent. But through the infinite growth imperative, we are depleting our natural ressources. And as long as every financial investment has to measure up against the profit from interest, many long-term ecological investments won’t cut a deal. If you had 10’000$ and had to choose between taking the money to the bank and getting 5% interest, or buying solar panels and earn only, say, 3% of your investment by selling that energy, what would you choose?. With neutral money there is no interest and the pressure to generate a high return on an investment would go away, too. When loaning money, you only have to pay back the amount you loaned instead of paying the interest on the interest on the debt which increases exponentionally the longer you wait.

6. Three Models of the Future

• Infinite growth: To keep the economy growing, the state has to loan ever more money into existance and fall in debt ever more. Infinite growth cannot be sustained forever. The model will reach its limits either when natural ressources get too scarce or when the trust in the state gurarantee on its money fails.
• No growth at all: While many people talk about stopping growth while ignoring the current monetary system as the root cause (this is only fighting symptoms), others see monetary reform as the cure to solve all problems (which isn’t true neither, we need to change our lifestyle, too).
• Qualified growth: What we really want is a limited, flattening out growth in the material, physical domain while having an exponential growth in the immaterial, informational, social, ethical and cultural domain.

7. Practical Cases Today: Embryos of a New Economy

Three examples:

• LET-System: Local Exchange Trading Systems are initiatives, all over the world, to foster the local economy. There is no physical money, instead the system is based on central bookkeeping. Each participant has an account and when he pays another participant, the amount is simply subtracted from his account and added to the other’s. This concept can also be thought of interest-free loans and connects supplies and demands that the ordinary market doesn’t serve.
• WIR: Founded in 1934, WIR is a complementary currency in Switzerland supporting small and medium-sized businesses.
• JAK: is a Swedish member-owned bank that in order to give interest-free loans, demands interest free savings from its members. So while you pay back your loan, at the same time you also save. These savings can then be used to give interest-free loans to other members.

What most of these initiatives have in common is a central bookkeeping account (electronically or with pen and paper), an alternative currency (points, local Dollars, etc.), the account is allowed to go into debt up to a limited amount (people with positive balances then act as debitors), no or low interest and legal tender can usually be exchanged for the alternative currency but not the other way around. These systems currently constitue the best experiments we have on what kind of monetary systems work in what size.

8. Complementary Currencies

The goal of complementary currencies is to fill the nieches that the current system doesn’t serve and are usually tailored towards a specific need. Examples include small businesses, care of the elderly, education or to serve economically underdeveloped regions. They are meant to solve specific problems without pressuring the national budget and often create or strengthen communities at the same time.

9. What Can I Do to Help in the Transition Period?

• Inform yourself and spread the knowledge
• Invest your money in ethical projects or give interest-free loans.
• Stimulate modell experiments like complementary currencies or LETS
• Political lobbying to introduce neutral money on a larger scale

This is very similar to the software and hardware of a computer. You can explain 100% of what is on your screen and what calculations are done when you click a button by looking at the hardware and what state it is in what moment of time. But it’s just way more convenient to talk about files and windows instead of a bunch of zeros or ones in a particular order. Analogous, I believe, it would be theoretically possible to explain any state of mind or thought by looking at the state of the brain and maybe some additional physical properties of the world around. But it’s totally not convenient to think about our minds in such terms. Thus, it is a question of at which level you look. The body (including brain) is a conceptual level below the mind and provides a kind of shell for the ghost. Like software couldn’t exist without a physical CD or harddisk to hold it (but it can be moved, and so might also a soul or mind – maybe). So the world is made of only one substance or physicality, but you can talk about it and study it on different conceptual levels.

partial tree of one possible reality

You can extend this rationale by thinking of the film The Matrix. If it is indeed the case that we all live in some kind of matrix or virtual reality, then this matrix is clearly a level below what we have been calling physical before. So now we have three levels: 1) the computers/machines running the matrix, 2) all the objects and bodies in the matrix, and on top of the bodies 3) the minds of the people. Or also hardware like your cellphone in the matrix (on level 2) that are running software (level 3). So because there are lots of people carrying lots of mind and lots of computers running lots of software, the structure kind of unfolds into a tree structure which you can expand arbitrarily on either side. Either on the root: you can imagine that the real world of the machines running the matrix might not be that real at all, but rather is some sort of simulation on its own. Or in the other direction, at the leaves: you can for example run an application (like Firefox) on top of an Operating System (like Windows), or you can even run a whole Operating System like Windows on top of another Operating System like Mac OS X through making it think it actually runs directly on a physical PC (this technique is called Virtualization).

So we have an ever-expanding tree structure with a host of different ways to create sub-layers. Some examples include a brain providing for a mind, a computer running software or an author writing a book in which there live characters in a world of their own. Obviously, all these worlds on several layers have radically different properties and laws, but it seems possible to order them all in this tree.

The ultimate question is of course: “Does the tree have a root?” i.e. “Is there a lowest layer, under which there is no further layer?”. In many religions, this lowest layer would sort of correspond to a god or a similar being. I might also add, that now you can choose from two different definitions of physical: 1) absolutely physical: in which physical is only that which is on this lowest layer of all, or 2) relatively physical: where physical is simply that which is one layer below another layer (which you might call virtual).

Anyway. I have no idea whether there is indeed one lowest layer, and if so, whether there is a way to prove of a layer that it is actually the lowest. It seems rather difficult indeed. Nonetheless I think it is in human nature to always look for deeper meaning and lower layers. But as the journey is the reward, I guess this is not so grave after all.

1.

- individual vs. community -> tension: good, healthy, creative
- community is important to a good and meaningful life

2.

community (as opposed to ‘just’ association): asks for loyalty, commitment, identity
-> not easy to opt out. leaving the community must come at a cost, otherwise it is vulnerable to centrifugal forces that often are irresistible.
-> diametrically opposed to the idea of market agents with set preferences that are free to choose

- communities of necessity (the poor have to band together) are endangered by prosperity
- communities of affinity (family, religious communities)

examples of community:
- Amish barn raising. insurances undermines mutual dependence of the villagers and thus community
- care for the elderly and sick. now nurses/professional health care

markets undermine community
- markets push for expansion/competition/rivalry -> efficiency is the only measurement
- impersonal market relations replace personal ties, undermine reciprocity, altruism, mutual obligations

3.

- ideology of modernity:

four assumptions in economic theory:
- individuals: have given/fixed/unchanging preferences, are rational, calculating, self-interested
- privileging algorithmic over experimental knowledge
- nation-state: only legitimate social grouping.
- unlimited wants

-> Marglin challenges those ‘myths’: foundational critique

4.

individualism in economics is a very different kind of individualism than in other fields:
- given preferences: individual doesn’t get influenced by its environment. idea is also opposed to self-realization
- universal agency: act without coercion
- radical subjectivism: there is no judge beyond the individual of his preferences
- self-interest: it is a circular argument that everything an individual does is by self-interest, otherwise it wouldn’t do it. so it makes sense to define ‘self-interest’ in narrow terms (non-altruistic etc.)

- holism as a different way to look at the world

5.

what gave rise to modernity?
- loss of community is an unavoidable byproduct of a growing economy/increasing standard of living, or isn’t it?or is it about distribution (landlords pushing enclosure to save their fading power)

6.

- the rise of the idea that if all individuals act in their self-interest, this is best for society as a whole

7. / 8.

- algorithmic knowledge: can be written down, logically calculated
- experimental knowledge: rooted in one’s own experience as well as trust in the accounts of others (parents-child, master-apprentice), therefore rooted in community

9.

(- bosses get their share of the pie only for knowing how to assemble all the parts and keeping this knowledge to themselves)
- economic theory doesn’t take experimental knowledge seriously: cannot model real people
-> economics as a mathematical science (algorithmic knowledge) heaves it above politics and withdraws it from political debate/democracy.

10.

- economists are responsible for growing the pie (whatever the cost), politicians for (re-)distributing it.
- nation-state legitimizes this

11.

modernity:

• possibility of abundance as close as never before because of increased efficiency/productivity
• impossibility of abundance because of unlimited wants
  • relative wants:
    • economic rivalry (having more stuff than the Joneses). wealth is now the dominating factor in defining people
    • believe in infinite growth as a non-zero-sum game (everybody wins as the pie keeps growing) makes it a common goal
  • absolute needs:
    • in an individualistic world-view new goods and stuff substitute for personal relations
    • as long as good health is a commodity, and med-tech keeps improving, it will remain scarce

-> we cannot rethink society when we have reached ‘enough’. rather, we shall have enough when we rethink society.

12.

fair trade as an imagined community between producers and consumers

13.

dominant views:
- culture doesn’t exist, everybody thinks like a homo economics (a ‘modern’ individual)
- western culture is superior, ‘developing countries’ need to catch up and become ‘modern’

- but people can keep (and further develop) their cultures while modern technology is being introduced
- individualism vs. holism: rights of individuals (liberty, autonomous and algorithmic decision-making) vs. rights of communities (experimental knowledge: tradition, spirituality)
- nation vs. other communities

If we humans see or hear something that is too simple, too obvious to us we find it boring and blunt – an insult to our intellect and not worth thinking about, because we always crave for new experiences, to explore and discover. But if we experience something way too complex to comprehend and it is beyond our ability to recognize a pattern or a logic in it, we get frustrated and frame it with the simple concept of randomness to hide its inner complexity from our interest in order to not waste more of our energy on it. So either way, if something is too simple or too complex we turn our back on it and move on.

But what really interest us are those things that seem new, exciting and strange but that at the same time we feel have an intrinsic logic, patter or familiarity – something to hang on and work with, to study the phenomenon and bring meaning and understanding to it. And the utter reward is when we succeed in comprehending it. Then we feel gratitude, contempt and happiness. Not long after that, we might feel bored by the same phenomenon, because now it seems trivial and too simple for us.

But there are things in nature and elsewhere that we clearly can see a pattern in, but at the same time we cannot fully comprehend or understand it. The most beautiful works of art are often those that take something well-known, like the shape of a human body or face, or geometrical shapes, and take it one step further, transform it somehow to imply some additional meaning and thus slightly elevate its level of complexity. Or we see beauty in nature, because it is clearly organized; every organism strives purposefully to grow and reproduce, everything strictly bound by the laws of physics and biology, yet the resulting complexity in colors, shapes and movements is just overwhelming and astonishing. Just look at the clouds, reflections on the water or the movement of shadows on different surfaces, leaves dancing in the wind.

But the example that got me thinking today (thx Annina!) (and made me remember this TED talk) was actually music: when you recognize a song as good, but still don’t like it. My theory now is that you realize that there is an interesting, well crafted and well executed pattern to the sound or the lyrics, but you just can’t get the hang on it, cannot decipher it, so you get kind of frustrated and start disliking the song. Maybe, when you hear it again and again, or somewhen later in life, you’ll understand it better and feel differently about it, but now it just doesn’t feel right. On the other hand, we get bored by songs that we find just too simplistic or have heard too many times, over and over again.

The EU has become so undemocratic because right after the two world wars, the politicians didn’t trust the people to do the right thing, to start building a new Europe based on mutual interests instead of confrontation. And probably they were right, the people wouldn’t have dared to trust their former enemies. But now this time is long over and the political elite has to learn to let go and give more power over Europe back to its people.

But this can only happen if the people start acting like European citizens, not nay-sayers. For this, the first step is to vote in the election of the European parliament. We have to show the politicians that we are ready to take on us more responsibility, to think not only as national citizens but also as European citizens. Yes, there are lots of things that each nation state has to solve on its own, but there are an equal number of things that need to be solved on a European level, in cooperation and coordination with each other.

After having proved we care about our European parliament by participating in the elections of our representatives, we should also demand to have pan-European votes on proposals by the European council and parliament (referendum) as well as to have the ability to make such proposal ourselves (initiatives that simply need enough collected signatures). Only when we can have a direct impact on European politics most people will start to care about them. But for this to happen, we need to demand the right to do so first.

1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity

Liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

This explains why conservatives emphasize stability and order (and thus promote tradition and institutions like the state, family, and church) while liberals are usually more progressive and promote individual freedom even if this means radical change and may threaten society as we know it.