Web design is sort of like trying to steer a surfbike against the tide, while the riverside, melting, industrial chocolate sculptures make for the slowest syruppy pedalling, your thighs have had for a long time. As recently presented at Electrofringe, Adam Bramwells site ( octapod.org/adam ), has some great guides for those wanting to wade through interface design and information architecture issues. He speaks now.

What webdesignery surprises emerged in your electrofringe workshop?
I was surprised there were no on-stage fistfights between flash designers and the standards-obsessed HTML-only code jockeys. I did my best Ricky Lake shitstirring beforehand but in the end nobody jumped forward with anything contentious enough to spark it off.

Html VS. Web design software : who wins 4u and why?
Anyone who’s jumped into blogging software has enjoyed the ride from needing to know code to create web pages, to just needing to have something to say. It’s the single biggest development in websites in the last few years, allowing everyone easy maintenance of sites. On the design side, for people who can get their heads around Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) either thru hand-coding or through software like TopStyle, enjoy a high level of visual control of their websites. CSS is fantastically accessible and scalable, and is part of web standards so is only going to be more integral in web design in the future.

Near a decade into it, what are some of the biggest challenges with web design?
Maintainability is critical in developing any web project, one way to achieve this is the separation of presentation from content, through some form of templating. This prepares the work for repurposing to other mediums, including to handhelds, WAP phones, and literally anything digital.

People who make the transition from print or other mediums are used to having pixel-precise control over their layouts, and they sometimes find it a frustrating medium to design in. You don’t know what browser, what screen resolution or how many colours your site is going to be viewed in. So the approach that needs to be taken is rules-based, setting limits and allowing your designs to be fluid and gracefully degrade for lower-end users.

Some of your favourite advances in web design?
I’m still waiting for it, but the widespread adoption of web standards will really be something when browsers act predictably in rendering designs.

New web design features you’d love to see?
Preloading of elements to prevent the wait! And links that provide some indication of where you’re going. The Semantic web promises to provide the infrastructure for this to happen, embedding some meaning and context with the content. It’s an exciting development.

Good and bad things about using Flash within webpages?
The emotion flash invokes through the use of motion graphics is particularly compelling but unfortunately it’s often an all-or-nothing affair. I like seeing flash used with restraint, for highlights and interactive elements such as navigation and promos. Certain interfaces just wouldn’t be possible without the scalability vector graphics afford. For example the visual representations of the relationships between search results using Teoma can really add insight to the content presented. ‘We Work for Them’ is another great example of database content rendered in a visual way through Flash.
On the downside, some basic aspects of HTML browsing such as being able to bookmark individual pages, select text, printing, searching etc. all have to be added in by the flash designer, rather than already being established from the start. Often these elements get left out of the design and this can really hinder functionality.

Beginner’s advice 4 webpage design?
Design for the sake of itself is self-flagellating, don’t waste your time surfing through other designers portfolios. Instead grab your sketchpad, open up a blank canvas and work out a design from the content you have. And to gain experience I thoroughly recommend volunteering your skills for a cause or organisation you believe in, the doors will open up for you.

URLS of the designer apocalypse?
Well there’s already been one designers apocalypse – the dot com bomb of the late 90’s, so people who are still working the medium are doing so because they’re passionate about it’s possibilities, and accept the challenge of working within it’s limits. There was unbelievable amounts of money thrown at web development in the past but it’s settled down now and the element of realism is more prevalent. For inspiration, HalfProject.com is a local fave for its arresting interface, crisp illustrations and in its latest redesign adds some great flash accentuations. For the thinking designer wanting to maintain a broad outlook, you just can’t go past the grandaddy Zeldman.com.

Light painting is of course, the process of shining a torch over a dark object such as a night tree, and superimposing filmed images so the tree’s shape is gradually illuminated. While you might find Kath & Etienne of Lalila light painting in a Tasmanian forest, the audiovisual duo are equally at home choreographing crazed multi-camera shoots for later cut-up, collage and live manipulation. Do say hi: www.lalila.net

What inspired the multicam project, and how many motion sickness pills did u need?
e: We’ve often thought it’d be a hell of a lot of fun playing around with a Matrix type freeze frame shot thingy in a live context. We can’t afford 100 cameras, but we could probably get lots of people together with their own cameras to shoot the thing for us. Electrofringe was perfect for this…. so many people walking around with their toys. Kath had to take several motion sickness pills. But really only because one volunteer had the bright idea of shooting the car whilst speeding around on his skateboard. Some lovely moving panning shots, but it was the “in-between the lovely panning shots” shots that brought up Kath’s breakfast.

How’d the performance function, once you’d captured and edited the various shots?
k: The performance is yet to eventuate, the reality is that this was more of a two week project rather than a two day project. The time to capture 15 angles of the event left me somewhat … motion sick. Syncing up the video tracks by their sound files takes patience, and it began to reveal itself that if it wasn’t right on cue the whole idea would fall down. I messed around with a little short-cut spin around the block maximising everyone’s best angles and there is definitely ample footage to make a worthwhile performance, its just pre-production time that was lacking.

e: When we put the thing together, it will basically be an exercise in live editing. We use a midi keyboard, and map each key to a different view. We kick off the video, then hit any key to change the view. With 16 views, there’s lots of funky editing you can play around with. Our preliminary playing around tends to suggest that the final footage feels more like a movie than a Matrix style trick. It is a very cinematic aesthetic, combined with a strong live component.

What worked better / worse than expected?
e: The block the car drove around was too big. For each minute of footage, you have 10 seconds of useable stuff and the rest is shots of people’s feet and / or sky, so we didn’t end up with 15 simultaneous views of the same thing. At any one time there was only a maximum of maybe 5 views….. So if you go to view No 12, there’s a high chance it’ll be somebody shooting their feet.
k: Unfortunately sometimes what people decided to film whilst waiting for the action to spin past, meant the car was no longer the subject.
e: People were into it though – there was lots of enthusiasm from volunteer video makers. That was really cool. Getting together with a bunch of people and making a movie where EVERYONE was the cinematographer.
k: It was excellent to get everyone’s different camera skills coming out in their footage, there are some really contrasting shots that never would have happened with one or two people filming.

Are u planning any Sydney performances of this or future multicam shoots?
k: A Sydney performance should happen before the end of the year definitely. A future multicam project would be a little more controlled, using the same number of cameras but have a larger number filming the subject at the same time, rather than completely interspersed views which limits potential for chopping between angles in the performance.
e: It’d be nice to get 15 people with cameras and shoot a couple of drunks doing some fisticuffs in the street or something. Maybe we’ll start the Lalila Multicam Club…….. get a bunch of people in a van, and drive around looking for stuff to shoot.

Do u plan a port to pd of your objects ? (Q from iko@prac.net )
e: nah. Christian (Klippel) was talking about it, but there is way too much work yet to do on the jMAX end … and I am not really interested in developing a piece of software… I just write the code so that the creative stuff is not limited by a software package.
k: /too much else to do/

And the rumours of a Lalila linux-evangelism road movie?
e: With linux, you can get 144 frames per second! need I say more? Seriously though, linux is neither for the faint hearted nor the weak-necked. It’s a rough ride, but if you are serious about using a computer as a creative tool, and you are serious about mastering your tools, then there is no other option…. there is simply no limit to tweaking and manipulating the system.
k: h/mmmm….that would be next year, we’re still deciding on the vehicle./

jp: This week’s column dedicated to the Ladiez of the Jump Rope 4 Art Skipping League & the Sage Francis Broccoli experience.

A Tasmanian tiger foetus was discovered a wee while ago, preserved in such a way that allowed it’s DNA to survive. Blurring the lines between science and science fiction, a journey has been embarked on by Australian scientists which may see the now extinct Tasmanian tiger re-introduced into the wild. Loaded with ethical issues, it’s a project that fascinates, whatever your stance. Here’s what the person who found the foetus said.

What do you fear about unleashing rabid tigers in the wild?
There’s a long way to go before we’ll be unleashing specimens into the natural environment, and many hurdles to overcome before the current samples of tasmanian tiger DNA can effectively be transformed into an actual living tiger. As for fears about reintroducing the tiger to the wild, it’s not like there’ll be giant genetic mutants roaming in packs and bearing their fangs at tourists.

How long do you think it would have taken the Tasmanian tiger to learn how to rollerskate?
Well, the last Tasmanian tiger was sighted early last century and I think tis unlikely it would have been rollerskating anytime in the next century.

To give readers some idea of what the Tassie Tiger was like, who do you think would win a fight inside a cage, ‘Batwoman or a Tasse tiger’?
Well, to be honest, I’m more familiar with those in the cat family, fine felines such as Catwoman, so I can’t really say.

Who is smarter – the beagle sniffers at airport customs or the tassie?
You’d have to say that to survive in the rugged Tasmanian wild, the Tassie would surely have needed to be a far more cunning critter.

Have you considered Lindy ‘the dingo did it’ Chamberlain as a possible spokesperson for the re-introduction of the tiger?
That’s an interesting proposition. There is a large and unwarranted public fear of genetic engineering to be countered with a project such as ours, but I think we’ll probably stick with a spokesperson who has a stronger relationship with science.

How successful would a re-introduced Tasmanian tiger be at ridding Queensland of the introduced cane toad?
Not very. The cane toad is actually responsible for killing many native animals – by eating much of the native animal’s traditional diet, and by secreting poison when native animals try to eat the cane toad. Even the tassie tiger wouldn’t stand a chance with one of those in it’s belly.

What sort of modifications have you considered making to the Tasmanian tiger?
Again, we’re a long way from creating another actual living Tasmanian tiger. Once we get there, and I’m confident we can, I think any..

Do you like that Pixies lyric – ‘I’ve smelled smoke from the gun named extinction’ ?
I haven’t heard The Pixies, but the dramatic levels of species extinction in the last century is very alarming ( do a web search about extinction ). Given the interconnected web of life we live within, it really should be of utmost concern to us that large proportions of species are continuing to disappear. We hope our project will stimulate thought and action about this.

You don’t think people will just think ‘oh well – as long as we sample it first, it doesn’t matter if we lose that species when we chop that forest?’
Not at all.

Software review : Flix by www.wildform.com

As the tropical fruits really start to rain down upon us, tis a fine time for brushing up on cocktail recipes, smoothies and exotic breakfast juices to kickstart the day. You’ll need a blender, you’ll need good squeezing muscles and you’ll need lots of juicy flesh. Here’s a little sample I prepared earlier.

Video Compression Online
It’s fairly easy to turn chunks of pineapple, watermelon and guava into dribbly juice. Try squeezing your latest video into a size suitable online viewing however, and you’ll soon find your machine or modem with severe digestion cramps. Until recently video online has meant either using QuickTime, Real Player, or Windows Media to play back the videos, and encoding or compressing your video to suit these formats. And while the DivX format has emerged to shrink full length movies into a size suitable for CDs, it still isn’t suited for easy access to smaller clips online.

The Flash .swf format is now capable of embedding compressed video though, and given most browsers have flash plugins now, this can make both video compression and viewing online very easy. Sorenson Squeeze and Wildform Flix are both programs dedicated to compressing video for Flash, with Flix just ahead in features and quality and size of compression.

The Bare Bones Of It
While Flash is pretty much about vectors and simple lines that maintain their sharpness no matter how large you scale them, Wildform Flix can take any video and turn it into a Flash-compatible file. Flix Lite is easy and straightforward to use and it allows you to create files that are compatible with versions of the Flash plug-in from 3 through 6, or with only version 6 (also known as Flash MX). Flix Pro adds more functionality, more capacity to tweak how your files are encoded, add pre-loaders, and a cool ‘vectorizing’ feature which transforms any videoclip into a vector-based flash animation.

Under the Bonnet
Running Flix Pro on a mac g3/333, I found Flix to be very slow in starting up and getting to move. Once processing files though, it is very easy to use with a useful range of presets that shrink files to suit whatever modem or bandwidth size you are aiming at. Simply select your video file to be compressed, select an output name and destination, choose from one of the many presets, and off you go. If you like, you can also adjust the number of frames per second, the dimensions of the final file, and overall visual quality using either a slider or by entering a maximum bitrate.

Generally I found Flix often compressed video files down to a tenth of their size. If you want to explore the software controls more, it also has 2-pass Variable Bit-Rate encoding, which analyzes the video first before encoding it, feeding an even higher quality video at a lower file size. Flix also has editing tools to crop your video and set start and end points – both big plusses if you want to trim edge “noise” or only encode a small portion of your video.

What You Need
Flix is a dual platform beastie, and if you were already able to compress video for online us, your machine will be fine with this. You’ll also need some moola – Flix Lite comes at $US29, and Flix Pro – $US 149, both prices much cheaper than other professional online encoders of video.

Verdict
Flix Pro delivers fantastic video quality for a tiny file size for Flash 6. It also generates compressed files for older versions of Flash but these are far less impressive. It’s very easy to use, although a little slow, and the ‘vectorization’ feature alone is a lot of fun. definitely recommended for anyone looking to put lots of video online.

Down at my local jellywrestling haunt last night, fellow connisseur Harmonica Lewinsky popped an indecent proposal. She put it to me (with a disclaimer that she wasn’t a conspiracist) that machines will one day rule the earth, and are already beginning to slowly make their moves. You be the judge.

This Is What The Barman Heard
‘I saw this tv show the other night that said Japan is shit-scared about young women not having enough sex..’
‘Whaaaaat? Oh – was it some sort of manga-anime thing?’
‘No – it was a doco’ and get this – within a decade, one whole third of their population will be retired, which they won’t be able to afford and women are marrying older and older or not getting married at all and partying instead of having kids, so they’re madly trying to encourage young women to have babies…’
‘Far out – and I suppose you reckon the machines are breeding faster then?’
‘Well obviously in Japan, but most Western countries are worried about aging populations these days…’
‘Yeah yeah – the machines are winning the population race – but hey it’s your shout – howz about another franjelica and lime?’

Transcript from Taxi-Microphone
‘Humans don’t have any secrets anymore – I mean we’re being monitored all the time by machines…we have no privacy from machines.’
‘Yeah – but there’s always some human who watches the security cameras..’
‘Not anymore – we don’t have enough spare eyeball hours to watch each other all the time, and so computer software automates surveillance, supposedly able to spot a person in a crowd, or able to find keywords like ‘blow up the trade towers’ or ‘marihuana’ out of the zillions of messages zooming around between satellites.. so humans get to see some bits – but the machines have all of our communication…and their database of us just keeps getting bigger.’
‘Okay so we’ve got more information stored on machines than our memories – but it’s not like machines are able to do anything with it..’
‘Ha~! I thought you were smarter than that – but here’s your house..’

Transcript from 24hr Supermarket Security Camera
‘Fuck – that’s pretty expensive for 6 litres of chocolate ice-cream, isn’t it?’
‘Well it is 3.30am… and what do the buddhists say – don’t scratch your ice-cream itch of desire?’
‘Ha~! Something like that – but exactly when will a machine be able to have desires? And don’t go tellin’ me about your little handheld virtual pets or computerised chess players or soccer robots..’
‘Is it just the ice-cream sir?’
‘oh yeah, sorry.. Hey – what do you reckon? Do you find it ridiculous that people believe machines will become intelligent?’
‘Do you mean like the terminator?’

Silent-Dome Words
These are just from memory, ain’t nobody who can get transcripts from dis-place. Except maybe Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris when they was still fresh from ‘nam. Apologies in advance too for the lacklustre conclusion, but it’s a battle that you have to figure out for yourself really. After a few weeks grazing the Osbourne show and the vaccuous celebrity show, I’ve softened my views a little too – maybe humans aren’t that evolved after all.

‘So basically – machines are breeding faster, machines are smarter, and machines are stronger – our thumbs are no match for the onslaught of mobile phones and handheld games… so how can they lose? Nice pyjamas by the way~!’
‘In a word – ‘Flexibility’ – it’s’ll be a while before you see a robot smiling it’s way down a curvy hill… and no robot’s ever gonna write ‘zen and the art of skateboarding’.. not that it’s a battle anyway..’
‘Ha~! Humans are already robots, we’re already machines – shaped by the technology we use, pre-programmed to keep the machines rollingout…’
As Harmonica reached for a bedside drink, her slender spine posed before me. I reached for her off switch, I needed to sleep.

City towers seem to have a certain resonance these days, which was nicely tapped into by a German project ( www.blinkenlights.de/arcade/live.en.html ) which allowed all the window lights of an office block to be controlled by mobile fones to play tetris or by Berlin VJ Falk, who drowned the building in animation. He speaks here:

How did the Blinkenlights project come about?
Blinkenlights was first put into action in Berlin last year. The German Chaos Computer Club (www.ccc.de) was celebrating its 20th anniversary and thought it’d be cool to light up the windows in of a large building to show their logo. Hacking together the soft and hardware the CCC managed to turn a house in the middle of the city – into a huge computer screen sporting 18 by 8 pixels. The computer used was a pre pentium (I think 386) running Linux online. The lights were cheap construction work lamps and the windows were painted white. 5000 meter cables running all over and glued together.

The second Blinkenlights incarnation in Paris had more windows so the resolution was increased to 26×20, and the addition of grayscale. We now had eight scales of gray, which made the animations smoother and better looking overall. The installation was dubbed ARCADE as it was pretty close in resolution and possibility to the early arcade computer games. What you had in the end was a HUGE very low-res grayscale computer screen.

What was your involvement?
When I saw the first Blinkenlights in Berlin I thought it was perfect for my live video installations and performances. I filmed most of the beautiful animations, later resampling and blending them into my own art. I’d had a long time involvement with the CCC, and showed my Blinkenlights VJ set at last years Congress. The Blinkenlights crew liked it a lot and invited me to do a special Set at the Blinkenlights Berlin Switch-Off Party. Then we came up with the idea of doing a live VJ set on the Blinkenlights Paris installation. My VJ set coupled with an audio reactive levelmeter was targeted to be the high point of the 10 day installation in Paris.

How were people able to get involved online?
People could download a little program called Arcadepaint (the Berlin version was called blinkenpaint) to create animations. Over 600 were emailed in to the Blinkenlights team. You could also stand where you could see the house, and dial up a french phone number and play 4 popular games on the house: Tetris (the number one favorite of the crowd), Breakout, Pong and a lite version of Pacman with one level. Coders could program their own games and features through an open source application interface. An application of this was the audio reactive level meter also showcased on the final night. For viewers there was a high quality live stream the whole 10 days.

How did it actually turn out on the night?
The installation itself was very nice. I was first put live on the house it all looked much better then expected. Thanks to Sven from the open source Gimp project there was a special Linux MPlayer Blinkenlights plug.in that could convert any live video input to the special Blinkenlightsformat. I had the big limitation that the resolution and the 8 shades of gray made most of my video clips look like random pixels. Only the clips with a lot contrast worked. There was also no way to layer video as this just created a random pixels mess. The house sported 25 frames per second and synchronizing a whole house big video screen to music made a very very big affect on the crowd and myself. As a VJ you can’t ask for more than playing on 3370m2 screen – its world record We all are very motivated now – we call it: THE BLINKENLIGHTS EFFECT.

What got the biggest crowd response?
The interactive games! People where playing tetris all night through. The sent in animations that where funny or 3d rotating objects like the ones send in by Australian by the name “spin by ben” – worked very well and where most liked by the crew. I think the dancing people and clear typography effects worked best on the house, and the pure synching with the music made the biggest impression. It has a big impact if you turn on and off a whole house to the beat of very good techno music. It feels a little like making the whole city dance

What other projects are you working on?
We now start work on the Blinkenlights:Arcade documentation video and DVD. I am planning a next generation club near Berlin, and of course video is at the forefront of the club and there is also a lightweight Blinkenlights version in the thoughts. Together with the worldwide Aveja Video Collective (www.aveja.net) we are planning to release a VJ DVD.
hack the planet // fALk – http://www.prototypen.com/blog/falk/ //

Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet
by Graham Meikle, Pluto Press, 2002.

Book Review by Jean Poole ( first published for Real Time magazine, Australia )

I like the internet. I think Graham likes it too, perhaps for similar reasons: we can explore our favourite mudwrestling webcam sites, meet other fans, keep in touch. Graham’s position as an author and mine as a reviewer, also imply a healthy respect for the expanded research methods the net allows, the online communities we can be part of, the e-mailing of stories at the last minute. This shared respect, I suspect, finds us both very curious about how the wrestling of public and private interests will shape the internets development.

Imagining Grahams desk
Pens, paper, a compaq (?) laptop, dictionary, thesaurus and a gleaming crystal ball sitting to one side into which Graham gazes periodically with an optimistic pragmatism, rather than tech-utopian drool. Above the desk a mirror – reflecting bookshelves creak-heavy with politics, postmodernism and the entire cyberculture canon. And a good deal of print-outs, because net-dissectors still like to underline words with a pen. From this very desk, Graham has conveniently chronicled the most famous political uses of the net in recent years, pored over interviews with many key outspoken online activists and authors, grouped the different shapes of net activism into useful categories, and offered some perspectives on ways the internet may continue to be developed in an open form. I’m thinking it’s a nice old wood.

Imagining Graham’s Internet
Some of its key features include openness, resource sharing, communication, conversation and collaboration. While these are features celebrated by the early digerati such as Howard Rheingold and John Barlow, Graham is careful to debunk ‘cyberhype’ during a quick tour of the net’s early years and evangelists. He maybe spends a little too much time translating the hyperbole around the net as ‘market boosterism’, but is sharper in critiquing ‘interactivity’. Usefully, he outlines transmissional, registrational, consultational and conversational forms of interactivity, and proposes that Tim Berners Lee’s ‘intercreativity – solving problems together’ as a better challenge to aspire to. Throughout the book, an open, conversational, intercreative internet is described as a Version 1.0 internet. A Version 2.0 internet, Graham proposes, is one where we move to the closed system preferred by entrenched corporate interests, a broadcast rather than many to many model. By the way the book is riddled with characters doing their utmost to steer us away from a version 2.0 internet, I fancy Graham’s down with numero uno.

Some of The Riddlers
An English couple being taken to court by McDonalds, launched the mcspotlight.org website in 1996. Being dragged through the British legal system for distributing a critiquing pamphlet, they found with the website a way to match their wits rather than budget with the legal muscle of a multinational food giant. In subsequent years, millions of visitors viewed the original pamphlet and much supporting material, but as Graham reveals, it was the astute site development and understanding of online community and information navigation which made mcspotlight one of the more successful online political campaigns.

Future Active similarly traces many popular political campaigns such as the B92 radio station’s celebrated use of online radio to spread news during the Bosnian war. Much of the work is in documenting what happened as events unfolded and how the net was used, but this is supplemented with plenty of insightful quotes from both campaign organisers and relevant theorists. Graham diverges from the media theory pack a little though, by exploring ways some nastier groups have used the net.

Web Nasties
While Graham’s careful to point out he doesn’t endorse, merely analyses the net strategies of – deathnet, godhatesfags.com and the North American Man Boy Love Association, I don’t understand why he didn’t use the same sort of caution in detailing his flirtations with the Labor Party, Liberal Party and One Nation websites. To his credit, he thoroughly exposes the major parties’ lack of engagement with their constituents online, speculating that it’s not that the major parties don’t get it – but that they don’t want it. Prefer they, the broadcast or version 2 model rather than a community based model with lack of hierarchy or control. In contrast the web-Hansonites are shown to have embraced and harnessed the qualities of the internet effectively. Although One Nation sitemaster Scott Balson’s claim that ‘Hanson was the first cyber-politician on the internet’, is slightly dubious, their integration of e-mail lists and bulletin boards was apparently commendable.

Other Commendables
Veering into newer political territory, one of the book’s better sections links together the ‘free software’ movement, the growth of the indymedia online publishing centres, globalisation, and the role of two Sydneysiders in making this happen – Matthew Arnison on code and Gabrielle Kuiper. The free software and open publishing movements are becoming increasingly influential in many spheres and their development is well described here. With his encouraging tone and enthusiasm for the topic however, some chances for exploring the issues and difficulties currently being experienced by open publishers have been missed. This is my only problem too with the near closing pieces on ‘culture jamming’ and ‘tactical media’ . Fantastic coverage of interesting projects, people and events online, but scarcer on the ground critiquing the limitations of their approaches.

The book for you?
Depends. Maybe you’re a sociology, communications, cultural studies, art or media theory student looking for a good, brisk overview of recent online skirmishes, blossomings, battles? Perhaps you’re interested in understanding more about our transforming society and ways the net is being tactically used? Maybe you don’t share the same bookmarks as frequent indymedia visitors, or the ‘nettime’ / ‘fibre culture’ / ‘rhizome’ etc mailing list members?

For me?
I liked it, although much of the terrain was already familiar. Wished occasionally for more criticisms of people being celebrated, but admired the collation, the crisp, want-to-communicate tone. A broader ‘media activism and the internet’ might have covered more artistic strategies online, mp3s and more software development. Like Naomi Klein’s ‘No Logo’, this is a fine book which may end up being in the right place at the right time.