Here's the content of my presentation at the Digital Labor conference in New York, 14th November, 2009. (You can also see a fully footnoted and referenced version (MS Word file). And the Powerpoint presentation on the day is below. And before you get to that, thanks to the joys of sousveillance (and @brainopera), you can hear and see the last 15 minutes of my presentation.
Here's a preview video that was made before the conference began
The Internet as Playground and Factory - Pat Kane from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.
All comments very welcome.
Play, Potentiality And The Constitution Of The Net - Pat Kane at www.digitallabor.org
View more presentations from theplayethic.
PLAY, POTENTIALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NET
PAT KANE
[DRAFT version, presented at 'The Internet as Playground and Factory", 14 Nov 2007]
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In a 1999 CNN article (still available online), Tim Berners-Lee answers what now seems like an antique organisational question: What role do network managers serve in the Web-based computing environments of the future?
Network managers need to get out of the way and not be seen. The user's job is not to use the network, it is to do whatever they do. Network managers need to create systems where they are not needed for users to create new files, new workgroups or new directories. They should not get in the way of people's creativity. You might want to filter what goes out to a public Web site. But within a company, you need to let people use the Web as a play space.
As we now know, post Web 2.0, the 'Web as a play space' has truly burst the boundaries of the company. And there is something intriguing here about Berners-Lee's sensitivity to the need for organisations to manage their public net profiles, while internally retaining the Web to encourage a culture of occupational creativity (perhaps a hangover from the peer-to-peer, pure-science conditions at the CERN laboratories where hypertext was birthed).
Ten years later, in Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky describes the rise of "insanely easy group-forming tools" after the first wave of web services and development at the turn of the millenium. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Groups or Ning allow for "people's creativity" – not awkwardly "using the network", in Berners-Lee's words, but freely "doing whatever they do" – to slip under the floor of traditional organisational structure, and fashion their own, low-cost, constituency-seeking projects.
Shirky's title is taken from the leitmotif ("HCE") to James Joyce's mind-wrenchingly ludic and aleatory final novel, Finnegans Wake. A vision of web culture as exactly this overwhelming, overlapping, polymorphous torrent of forms, driven by all the available human forces of desire, identity and technique, is Shirky's (and many others') neo-naturalist view of the Net. His closing metaphor makes this explicit: charting a course for the development of web culture is not like driving a car round a route, but a matter of keeping a kayak stable, in a turbulent stretch of river not of one's choosing.
Between Berners-Lee's early (and curiously constrained) vision for the web as a kind of organisational sandpit-meets-toybox, and Shirky's near-surrender (similar to that promulgated by Kevin Kelly ) to open digital networks as a new domain of second nature to which we must continuously adapt and exapt, the question of whether the internet is "factory" or "playground" - or some unholy fusion of both - is acutely posed.
Much of the heat of the discussion in online forums like the Institute for Distributed Creativity laments the evident shift from active to passive technical consciouness that is underway in Berners-Lee's quote, and fully realised in Shirky's book. For some digital activists, to be a "network manager" (or a "sysadmins op") is not an impeding layer of organisation to be smoothed away by more amenable interfaces and interaction designs: it is a necessary critical understanding about what constitutes our networks that needs to be recovered, and more widely distributed.
These activists would read Berners-Lee's moment of organisational double-think ("you might want to filter what goes out to a public website") as an early indication of the underlying control logics that drive the creation of 'insanely easy' social tools. In the case of a Web 2.0 enterprise, the intra-company 'creativity' that Berners-Lee concedes could easily be directed towards the fine-grained marketing analysis of user data. Shirky and Kelly may flirt with the idea of the user's experience of Web 2.0 as being like a responsive organism in a fertile, niche-generating ecology. But critical digital theory sees behind this the true exploitative ingenuity of the net-capitalists.
On the iDC list, Mark Andrejevic asserts that the goal of harvesting hard data from avid users is about "discerning a dominant feeling tone" around products and services. They aim at "a kind of gestalt reading of the data flow: a means of seeing the whole without necessarily having to read through all the discreet data, that is reminsicent of the new spate of attempts to privilege gut instinct, first impressions, body language, etc".
Brian Holmes notes further that, after rational homo economicus died in the financial Crash of 2008-9, social cognitive neuroscience now aims to "get closer to what makes Jane investor and Joe consumer really tick". If this intellectual strategy towards shaping human nature – aiming to discern "neobehaviorist reflex-arcs originating in the autonomous nervous system" - then shapes the design of our interfaces and apps, the effect will be "the manipulation of people for the usual purposes of naked greed and subliminal control".
For many critical digital theorists, this is a pernicious nexus. Interaction design encourages a 'naturalised' user response to the environment of the web – where our species-specific sociability and symbolic creativity find a new means of expression and extension. Yet our conviviality-with-digital-tools provides market and state enterprises with an ever-subtler flow of psychometric data.
This sustains the accumulative momentum of a capitalism that is now fully focussed on the manufacture of needs as much as of goods, on the commodification of consciousness as much as nature, on the exploitation of our communicative as well as our physical powers. There may be some ambivalence among these thinkers about whether this "biopower" is a pervasive act of dominion, or a permanent potential for resistance (the work of Antonio Negri expresses the confusion particularly).
But there is little doubt in their minds that for all our avid embrace of the platforms and interfaces of Web 2.0, for all its organisational upheaval and institutional corrosion, the process is shaped by an underlying rationale of exploitation – our clicking, posting and gaming a "free labour" that allows corporate power to analyze our sentiments, and refine their commercial strategies. The games theorist Julian Kucklich, in an unlovely but penetrating phrase, describes our input into the mainstream social and content networks of the current web as one of "playbour": our experience is that of free and unalienated interaction, but the reality is that our activities are being used to add value to a communication-based capitalism.
Our joyful play with and in networks is, essentially, the new opium of the people. Or as Scott Retburg puts it: "Play becomes a manifestation of our interpellation in he world of 24/7 real time labor/consumption (consumption having become an aspect of labor and labor an aspect of consumption)….Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill."
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Yet can play be so easily made into an instrument of commercial strategy? Is playful experience, as Brian Holmes puts it, only the lubricant to "a perfected system of second-order cybernetic control over the consciousness of the [developed world's] middle-classes… a kind of world-creating and attention-channeling system [based on] contemporary social media, in its dominant corporate 2.0 forms"?
To answer these questions requires that the "playground" element of the internet is analyzed and plumbed just as deeply as the "factory" element - with due respect to the former's intrinsic complexity and eclecticism as a topic of study, and thus as an angle of inquiry on the nature of digital networks. My claim here will be that there is a deep homology between the multi-disciplinary zone of contemporary play scholarship – particularly in biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity theory – and the constitutive forces that maintain (despite the various attempts at enclosure and exploitation already mentioned) the openness and creativity of what Manuel Castells called "the internet society".
Probably the most comprehensive recent account of play in its many dimensions comes from the educational psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, in his 1997 masterwork The Ambiguity of Play. Sutton-Smith hazards what is essentially a socio-biological defintion of play as "adaptive potentiation". By this he means all those experiments, simulations and virtualisations – games, jokes, stories, constructions - that we recognise as play, but which clearly serve an evolutionary purpose: namely, to aid our flourishing. Play does this, as Sutton-Smith puts it, by "the stylized performance of existential themes that mimic or mock the uncertainties and risks of survival and, in so doing, engage the propensities of mind, body and cells in exciting forms of arousal". We establish zones where we take reality lightly, and joyfully: and we do so in order to master the tensions and challenges of sociable living with other complex, communicating and interiorised human beings.
Sutton-Smith is careful to challenge the Piagetian model of play as merely the "scaffolding" of youth development, eventually falling away (a "putting away of childish things") to reveal the mature, post-ludic adult beneath. The continuity of play forms throughout the lifespan – not just leisure pursuits like hobbies and sports, but all manner of potentiations pursued in our occupational, domestic and civic lives - demonstrates humans' extended neoteny (meaning the sustaining of child-like characteristics throughout the lifespan) as compared to other play-exhibiting complex mammals.
It is around the concept of extened neoteny – our continuing playfulness as one of the distinctive markers of our species-being - that some of the initial linkages between the consilient science of play, and play as it operates in the networked world, may begin to be forged. Within the discourse of critical digital theory, we find one of the most powerful accounts of the role of neoteny in human affairs in the work of the Italian autonomists – in particular, the sociologist Paulo Virno.
Virno argues that all politics has to contend with the fact that the human animal is the potential animal. By comparison with even other complex-mammalian relatives, we are always in an "unfinished state". There are four natural causes of this open potentiality in homo et femina sapiens: a) the language faculty; b) our instinctual non-specialization; c) neoteny; d) the absence of a univocal environment, and its replacement by a 'world'.
Our language faculty isn't some kind of Chomskyan universal grammer, says Virno, but the "biological and physiological requirements which make it possible to produce a statement" – beginning literally in a baby's gurgle, the basis of all lingusticality. This power or dynamis of language gives us the ability to set ourselves at a distance from our instinctuality. Or rather, language is our uniquely a-instinctual instinct – one marked by "polyvalence and generalisation", which allows us to "adopt behaviours that have not been preset" by evolutionary programming.
Virno takes his definition from neoteny from Stephen Jay Gould: "the retention of formerly juvenile characteristics produced by retardation of somatic development''. As human animals, "indecision befalls us": we are "congentially incomplete" because of our "constitutively premature birth". Virno puts it unsentimentally: "a chronic infancy is matched by a chronic non-adaptation, to be mitigated in each case by social and cultural devices".
The societal consequence of this combination of elements – the language faculty, non-specialisation, neoteny – lead to what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Virno's account of the 'potential' animal. Because our nature is explicitly non-specialised, we are never at home in any definite "environment": there is no natural fitness landscape in which we "insert oneself with innate expertise once and for all". We must thus '"wrestle with a vital context that is always partially undetermined, a world in which a stream of perceptual stimuli is difficult to translate into an effective operational code".
We can already begin to see some crucial differences between Virno's account of 'potentialised' human nature, and the 'adaptive potentiation' play-theory of Sutton-Smith. Sutton-Smith identifies one evolutionary function of play as the continuation of "neonatal optimism" throughout the life-span. The "unrealistic optimism, egocentricity and reactivity" of the growin child, all of them "guarantors of persistence in the face of adversity", characterise many of our adult play behaviours. Play brings a sense of joyful indefatigability and energetic resilience, which – like the pleasure of sex for procreation – is evolution's "salute" to the human animal for maintaining a "general liveliness", in the face of the challenges of existence.
Yet while Sutton-Smith's player draws on the organismic resources of joyful potentiation to cope with an open, perpetually challenging world, Virno's "potential" human animal faces the same unpredictable social universe with, it seems, much less supportive emotional resources.
His homo sapiens exists in "a state of insecurity even where there is no trace of specific dangers". Where adaptive potentiation generates a plethora of symbolic objects and routines invested with pleasure, the 'potential' human of autonomist Marxism needs social and cultural forms to "blunt or veil [its] disorientation". The "dynamism" that linguisticality unleashes must be tied down to "a circumscribed set of possible actions". Virno makes it clear that this anxiety is more manageable in traditional societies, where pseudo-environments (religious, regional, linguistic) are steadily brought forth to enable stability in the face of this intrinsic anxiety and indeterminacy.
What is so fiendish about contemporary capitalism, in Virno's account, is that is deliberately accelerates this indeterminacy – the faculties that open us up to endemic flexiblity and openess – to make it the very fuel of the social and economic order: "The death of specialized instincts and the lack of a definite environment, which have been the same from the Cro-Magnons onwards, today appear as noteworthy economic resources". Virno moves through our natural faculties of potentiality, and lashes them methodically to the flexible personality required by informational capitalism.
Our biological non-specialization? The grounding for the "universal flexibility" of labour services: "The only professional talent that really counts in post-Fordist production is the habit not to acquire lasting habits, that is the capacity to react promptly to the unusual". Our neotenic forever-youngness, always ready to learn and adapt? We are now subject to "permanent formation… what matters is not what is progressively learning (roles, techniques, etc) but the display of the pure power to learn". That fact that we are not determined by our environment, but make and construct our worlds? This is mirrored by the "permanent precarity of jobs", where we wander nomadically from one cloud in the nebulous world of labour markets to another.
With a sardonic gloominess worthy of Theodor Adorno, Virno denies that this intrinsically unstable system necessarily leads to unruliness – "far from it". In traditional societies with less pervasive markets (which one presumes includes Fordism), our deep ontological anxiety could be contained by "protective cultural niches". The "omnilateral potentiality" of flexible capitalism shakes those niches to fragments. Yet even though this disembeddedness allows for an "unlimited variability of rules", when those rules are applied, they are much more "tremendously rigid" than the Fordist workplace. Each productive instance is like the tight rules of a competitive game, easily entered into but severely binding when the play begins.
When commanded by our managements to respond to today's adhoc list of tasks and projects, in a world of frazzling openness and potentiality, we display "a compulsive reliance on stereotyped formulae". It is via these formulae that we "contain and dilute" the pervasive indeterminacy of the human condiion. Virno characterises them as
reaction-halting behaviours, obsessive tics, the drastic impoverishments of the ars combinatoria, the inflation of transient but harsh norms…Though on the one hand, permanent formation and the precarity of employments guarantee the full exposure to the world, on the other they instigate the latter's reduction to a spectral or mawkish dollhouse.
Virno's tapestry of the social pathologies of flexible capitalism is doubtless populated by more characters than those we find grasping or perched at their screen-displays. But there is something about the image of a "spectral or mawkish dollhouse", or the "drastic impoverishments of the ars combinatoria", as a description of the triviality that often courses through corporately-owned social networks, that lends the playbour critics some near-poetic ammunition.
Yet from the perspective of play theory, the neotenic openness of our human condition generates a wide spectrum of possible human agency, from absolute voluntarism to cosmic dependency. If we grant this, it would defy Virno's attempt to damn human potentiation as endlessly susceptible to exploitaton as biopower; the implication of which is that, under the conditions of informational capitalism, play will always collapse into playbour.
In The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith's own typology of dominant play epistemes – if not "metahistorical", then certainly applicable over a very long duree – illustrates how much the domain of play escapes, or more accurately encompasses, most or all attempts to place it functionally within any societal logic, let alone that of any particular political economy. Sutton-Smith describes seven "rhetorics" of play, ways of talking legitimately about the effect of play across all disciplines across a very broad historical reach, which he divides into ancient and modern rhetorics.
Modern rhetorics he characterises as play-as-self (play as an expression of free-will and voluntarism), play-as-imaginary (play as imaginative freedom in arts and sciences), and play-as-progress (play as a contribution to human development through education and nuturance). This is a modernist, progessive picture of "health-through-play", a play forged by Enlightenment.
By contrast are the ancient rhetorics of play – play-as-contest (play defined by agonism, sport, war), play-as-identity (communal play, aimed at confirming social identity), play-as-fate-and-chaos (play as manifested in gambling and religion, presuming a degree of individual powerless before the operations of a cosmic system), and play-as-triviality (sheerly antic play, nonsense, tomfoolery). Play here often defies its modernist interpretations – there is coercion, there are actual as well as virtual consequences to each play, there is surrender to greater and more implicate orders, instead of simply a rehearsal of one's own mastery.
The very diversity of play-forms, says Sutton-Smith – and in particular the way they express autonomy and heteronomy at different levels and in different contexts - is to some extent a refutation of "reductive sociobiological theory" and its inability to see how play stages collaboration between altruism and cooperation. Play's diversity may also pose a bigger challenge to evolutionary theory:
… the neurological and evolutionary developments involved [in play] point to something more complex than Darwin’s notion of natural selection as the single driving force behind evolutionary change. To the contrary, the concept of natural selection may have biased us to favor unitary explanations and prevented us from appreciating just how complex these matters become. According to recent research by Douglas H. Erwin , evolutionary outcomes are likely also to depend on complex, functional, internal, and spontaneous neurological developments within the genes themselves.
By quoting a Santa Fe complexity theorist like Erwin, Sutton-Smith indicates that an understanding of play in relation to any network or system, natural or artificial, might depend on a more holistic, or at least non-linear, conceptual framework than the neo-Marxist, critical-theory approach represented by Virno (I will develop this point in the closing section).
Virno in particular demonstrates the dangers of being too instrumentalist with the insights he takes from the sciences of human potentiality. In his essay "Natural-Historical Diagrams", he states confidently that "human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process". Yet Virno's own shifts and contradictions as to the specifics of that relevance shows how slippery play can be as any foundation for a particular political analysis.
In Virno's most recent book, Multitude: between negation and innovation, humour and jokes are now an immanently-availble resource for political innovation. Virno begins by invoking neuropsychological research on 'mirror neurons' – sometimes known as 'Gandhi neurons' for their identification of basic processes of intra-species empathy. This allows him to re-state his belief in the constitutively open (and dangerous) power of our linguisticality. That is, our ability to use language to negate that very mirror-neuronal empathy; for the Nazi guard to say to the prisoner, "this is not a man". The joke becomes our permanent linguistic opportunity to "negate the negation". Linguistic humour addresses such cruelty head on, and turns both these characters into provisional figures in an alternative reality. In short, dark humour in the worst of times makes the claim that "this is not not a man" (which is a more capacious and diverse position than the presumption of intra-species empathy ("this is a man")).
For Virno, the joke brings us a brief moment of expanded illumination, showing us all as broken and contingent on the same blasted heath (and if the first joke doesn't do this, the second might, and so on…) The joke defies the Aristotelian injunction of 'tertium non datum' – that there is no third term beyond, say, domination and our resistance to it. In doing so, humour maintains a discursive latency in our minds that other innovative courses of social action are possible – for example, a creative exodus into new styles of living, loving and creating together.
And yet… Wasn't humour the very instrument of degradation in those empire-puncturing torture snaps from Abu Ghraib? Don't we have a 'comedy industry' on both sides of the Atlantic that functions as a safety valve for collective anger, as much as it might grant us some cognitive wriggle-room? In terms of Virno's own attitude towards the susceptibilities of our potentiating nature, his theoretical incoherence is obvious. Don't jokes and humour flourish in exactly those "mawkish dollhouses" and "impoverished combinatorics" which Virno identifies as the inevitable and degraded coping-culture of the 'potential' human, whose innate improvisation is now harnessed to capital accumulation? To challenge Virno straightforwardly: can he claim play as both liberating, and oppressive, as it subtends the constitutively open post-Fordist society?
Virno's confusion – where potentiation both traps us in a velvet cage of cliché and compulsive behaviour, and is an everyday linguistic resevoir for political innovation - demonstrates that play's lability is a challenge to even the most capacious of social theories. And his opportunistic grabs for brain science and biology as naturalistic anchors points towards the need to bring a much wider and more integral field of play theory and studies to bear on the "internet as factory and playground".
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One question that play theory poses for critical digital theory is whether play is being used by interactive capitalism - or is play using it? Is "playbour" on platforms and networks a compelling and seductive new form of exploitation, which uses our desire for self-control and autonomy against us? Or is playfulness a sign that a new, joyful collective consciousness – arising from innate human faculties of potentiation that have been amplified by communication networks and simulation software – is beginning to form, pushing back against old organisational and institutional structures?
I am fully aware of the conceptual politics of such a framing – which could easily be cast as "Deleuze's society of control" versus "de Chardin's noosphere". And I am also aware that appeals to the neuro-physiological or socio-biological determinants of playful behaviour on the Net are not far behind either. John Marks's excellent paper 'Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics' carefully outlines how different the cybernetic vision of living-in-information-networks is from the tougher, more resistant vision of Deleuze. Both the cyberneticists and de Chardin identify an "evident kinship" between human neurology and "the apparatus of social thought" (Marks), further animated by a post-Cold-War idealism that saw free and easy communication as a bulwark against fascisms and totalitarianisms. By contrast, Deleuze sees the same dream of "instant communication" as compelling us to endlessly modulate our identities, "obliged continually to reinvent and account for ourselves. We are denied the privilege of having nothing to say, of cultivating the particular kind of creative solitude that Deleuze values" (Marks).
Yet even here, in arguing that communication can be about resistance as much as consensus, Deleuze (like Virno) reaches for the sciences of human nature. Against a brain whose information processing is continuous (or at least homologous) with that of digital neworks, fulfilling a dream of informational transparency between minds, Deleuze argues for a dynamic, plastic brain, where "any new thought traces uncharted channels directly through its matter, twisting, folding, fissuring it… New connections, new pathways, new synapses, that's what philosophy calls into play as it creates concepts".
As Marks says, this is Deleuze's "expressive materialism" in operation, as opposed to the "reductive materialism" of computational or cognitive models. But his move is still significant. The temptation to reach for innate biological faculties as some kind of explanatory locus for the sheer dynamism of the networked society is understandable, and persistent. For example, Manuel Castells' most recent work Communication Power links cognitive science and his theory of socio-technical networks, in a way which emphasizes how susceptible the citizen's brain is to framing techniques by major political parties – and, as a corollary, how important bottom-up communication activism is to the health of a information-age democracy. Yet whether we prefer models of neuro-psychology that emphasize plasticity and emergence , or models which identify recalcitrant residues of evolutionary struggle in our minds – or any other hybrids or transcendances of those – we must concede the moot point: there is a clear biological/socio-biological determination to the "biopolitical" which cannot be waved away as "naturalist fallacy".
In the context of the internet, play brings the question of those determinations to a head. Can we articulate the Net as a tool to serve the expression of human neoteny, a medium for generic faculties of potentiation - without falling into the idealism of noopolitics or cybernetics, or falling foul of a critique of digital innovation and playfulness which links it directly to capital accumulation and the subtlest of social repressions?
For me, there may well be grounds for doing so, if we consider what we could call the constitution of the Net. I partly take this notion from Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas, where he tries to defend the internet as an "innovation commons". In his pains to valorize the end-to-end network structure of the Net, and to defend its openess and dynamism against corporate or state incursion, Lessig compares the protocols and practices that make up the functionality of the internet to a political constitution. Lessig specifies a constitution as an "architecture of value", an ordering of space and time guided by certain robust principles. No doubt guided by his background as a legal counsel in constitutional affairs (not just in the US but across the post-Communist European states, where he served as a consultant to their own constitutional drafting), Lessig attempts to rally "netizens" to protect the "constitution" of the Net. In a more critical, control-society mode, Alexandar Galloway might also call this "protocollary" dimension of the net - where the power of "distribued networks lie in invisible architectures that drive behaviour in one direction or another". Yet I want to hang on to Lessig's more equitable vision of the structuration of the internet, and to ask whether what the Net demonstrates is the relationship between constitutional power and constitutive power.
Constitutive power, coming from the later theoretical refinements of the Italian autonomist tradition, has its own philosophical lineage – particularly in the counter-modern tradition that Negri identifies stretching from Duns Scotus and Spinoza to Descartes and Deleuze. But I think that the concept can be stretched to encompass the potentiative human faculties that both Virno and Sutton-Smith explore, from their differening (indeed, nearly Romantic and Tragic) perpsectives. The constitutive power inherent in internet behaviour can be understood as an expression of human neoteny through open digital networks. The tumult of networked invention that Clay Shirky eulogises at the beginning of this paper is thus an expression of play-forms as adaptive potentiation, the responses of netizens to the risks and challenges of their environment.
Yet what I want to steer clear of is that turn from cybernetics, through biology and game theory, towards complexity studies (or "complex adaptive systems"), as a bigger framework for comprehending the internet. There is always the danger that complexity theory reduces the imaginative and enterprising human power of neotenic innovation within socio-technical networks to a kind of "proteanism" or "iterationism" – the random, unpredictable play of elements or players which keeps a system perturbed, open to bifurcation and branching, the infamous "order for free" described by theoretical biology. I don't discount that there might well be a distinctly "netological" dimension to the analysis of internet phenomena – both Sean Cupitt and Galloway/Thacker have pointed towards the non- or a-human agency of network power , not to mention Kevin Kelly's current exploration of the concept of the "technium" as a neo-naturalized envelope of technoculture with its own, near-Gaian autonomy.
It is also worth mentioning at this point (as Michel Bauwens frequently has in his many writings and activisms ) that one cultural tributary feeding into the networked autonomy of peer-to-peer platform innovation and "open" projects of all kinds is a non-Western, non-dual, thoroughly web-like epistemology and ontology – surely one of the consequences of the impact of the "counterculture" on "cyberculture" that Fred Turner documents, effective as recently as Google's organisational embrace of the Burning Man festival. That the spectacle and matrix of the Net induces the most startling echos of Buddhism's eternally reticulating Net of Indra, or Hinduism's Lila, playful god of endless forms, is surely a mild caution to critical digital theory to be aware of its Western dialectics of enlightenment, post- or not.
Yet for those of us who have not (or cannot, or will not) make the tiger's leap out of the prison-house of ego just yet (to dwell in the immanent connectedness of universal com-passion), will have to concern ourselves with more mundane forms of exodus - the construction of polities, infrastructures and socio-technical networks, guided by values which come about as the result of both determinate will formation, and of knowledge practices which stake some claim to falsifiability, at least.
And neoteny's generation of play and playforms throughout the human life-span strikes me as a credible area for inquiry, as one of the deeply constitutive processes shaping the design, functionality and culture of the internet. One epochal answer to our potentiating faculties that the internet could represent is that of an extension of the "ground of play" that we see across the higher complex mammals – that open but distantly monitored developmental zone of time, space and resource, where potentiating risks are taken by explorative, energetic organisms, in conditions where scarcity is held at bay.
Lion-cubs or chimps compelled to diversively play, risking injury and predation, but in a delimited zone with ultimate defenses; children in their local playground, enjoying their rough-and-tumble with solid equipment and open space, under some kind of municipal governance; all of us on the internet, improvising our sociality and extending our conviviality with powerful communication tools, resting on a complex but (so far) resilient infrastructure. All of these can be cast as complex-mammalian 'grounds of play', sharing three conditions – they are 1) loosely but robustly governed; 2) a surplus of time, space and materials is ensured; 3) failure, risk and mess is treated as necessary for development.
So the 'constitutive' power of play in humanity – that neoteny-driven potentiation that excites both autonomists and socio-biologists – seems to also require a 'constitutional' dimension: a protocol of governance securing certain material and emotional conditions, to enable a rich plurality of playforms. When Lessig speaks of the Net as an "innovation commons", the resonance with a socio-biological vision of the ground of play is clear. His idea that the internet represents an "architecture of value" is also homologous with these conditions for play: both are discernable zones of rough-and-tumble activity in which our social-ethical identities are forged.
Does a "human-nature'd" understanding of play behaviour on the Net insulate us from considerations of exploitation or control in Web 2.0? Does it obscure the extent to which our "free labours" in the internet-as-playground are a manipulation and monetisation of our playful instincts, amplified by social tools? I don't believe so. But I think it may help us to discern what drives the most enduring creative and emancipatory phenomena in our network society, all the better to defend it against enclosure, crudification and poor governance.
On the iDC list, Michel Bauwens, has suggesed that
the role of critique is to show us where we have to be active. But if it is merely to stand on the sidelines, to say how bad things are, and that 'there is no autonomy possible' or 'that we shouldn't fight the platform owners', then it is ultimately disempowering, and worse than the disease itself. The key, I think, is to be integrative - because let's face it, we don't know in advance whether and how things will work out and change. This means sustaining and integrating all the different efforts that go in the right direction - to closely observe what seems to work in order to potentially emulate it.
Sustaining, integrating and emulating – familiar feeling-tones from the ground of play as I've characterised it. Adam Ardvisson's recent suggestion that the digital and informational plenitude of developed-world capitalism creates a new scarcity – the ability to forge an ethical community around a product or service, by harnessing attention and affect, and thus creaing a new source of economic value - also points towards how suffused with the constitutive processes of play our network society might be.
We should try to clearly chart the "play ethics" that may arise from our digital interactions, and allow for new sensibilities and solidarities to be possible from this potentiating, neotenic fervour of our embrace of the Net. Between Shirky's rhizomatic river of forms, and Berners-Lee's organisational play-space, there is a wealth of study to be done about how we constitute ourselves, and our networks.
ends
