The Play Ethic

Thoughts on "Avatar": change it all, so nothing changes

A few points and theses inspired by James Cameron's Avatar:

1) Why is hi-tech/virtual Hollywood so anti-imperialist and anti-corporate? Maybe it's the movies I'm choosing to see. But as an example, take the last three Pixar movies. The Incredibles has that sequence where Mr. Incredible is trying to hold down a job in an insurance company, defying bureaucracy and the profit motive to give fragile old ladies their health cover. Wall-E describes a brand-totalitarianism - the Buy'n'Large corporation - that has despoiled Earth, turned humans into dependent grubs, and conducted a program of mass delusion and seduction to keep the truth from citizens. (Only knowledge, love and virtuous robotics can break through the mental grip). 

And UP!, though it's mostly about the joys of ageing, has its expected anti-corporate sequence at the beginning, where impassive suits in shades exploit the tiniest social and legal infraction to get old Carl out of his house, so the developers can move in. The Pixar paradox/hypocrisy - these vast, thoroughly commercialised and marketed 'event' movies preaching about the balance of nature, the primacy of relationships, the tawdriness of capitalist modernity - has often been noted.

And you'd have to say that, at first sight, Avatar is the height of this tendency. The colonisers of Pandora represent mid-22nd century American(ised) culture at its most brutal and reductive - its empty consumerism ("they don't want what we have"), its bottom-line commercial myopia, its terrifying patriarchal/hierarchical militarism (literally embodied in the military commander Miles Quaritch), all supported by a gross technological power. The humanoid species they face, and whose mineral deposits they want to secure, live in a state of hunter-gatherer equilibrium, supported by a mythology and set of practices familiar from accounts of aboriginal cultures. The Na'avis connection with nature, however, is more than merely systemic or ecological, but bio-neural - they can entwine their ganglia with the neurology of other fauna and flora in Pandora, and transmit and receive messages with them.

I want to say more about this piece of post-human wish fulfillment later. But I think it gives a clue to why the most technologically cutting-edge movies have a consistently anti-authoritarian tone. In essence, the geeks and techs have inherited the shooting lot in Hollywood. And geek/techdom often operates best in small, motivated, obsessive groups, who often simply want to be mostly left alone to solve their problems and come up with new ones. They obviously have to deal with the managers and executives who provide the resources and conditions for their furious imagineering - and who will impress marketing and audience considerations upon their work. 

So it's no surprise that Pixar movies recapitulate the creativity-vs-bureaucracy trope over and over again, given their tense relationship with Disney for most of their existence (and now even that they're in the Mouse House, the trope still persists with UP!). And the stories of James Cameron's fuck-you attitude to his Hollywood paymasters, particularly as he pursues new technological platforms for visual wonders, are well-documented. 

You also have to consider that persistent overlap between counterculture and cyberculture described by Fred Turner - for example, the way that Burning Man becomes the paradigm event for Google employees, serving as a utopia of autonomy, creativity and ingenuity. The crew of scientists (headed by Sigourney Weaver) who work for the human corporation in Avatar are an instance of this overlap. Of course, they are an analogue to the embedded anthropologists who are currently at work in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who have often accompanied American adventuring (and one shouldn't underestimate how much the American public's war-weariness shapes the radicalism of Avatar's narrative). But they are also the geek-squad par-excellence - chain-smoking female scientist, white and nerdy linguist, super-cerebral Indian neurologist, all building avatars that help you enter into the imaginative world of others. Analogue to the filmmaker and his team of obsessives, I'd suggest. 

There's even a scene in the movie which refers to what you could call classic hacker politics. That's the moment where Weaver's head scientist is remonstrating with the corporates and soldiers as to where the real wealth of Pandora lies - and it's not the energy-providing mineral deposit called 'unobtanium'. "The Na'avi are hooked up to nature, they are part of a planetary network - imagine what we could learn from them if we lived with them, observed their ways..." This netological idealism - exemplified currently by writers like Kevin Kelly, but rooted in cybernetics and the philosophies of McLuhan and Teihard De Chardin - is at the core of the hacker belief system. The response from the corporate boss is salty - "what have you people been smoking!?" But from the tech-hacker angle, it expresses precisely the kind of linear, hierarchical narrow-mindedness that you'd expect from bottom-liners, money-men and top-brass strategists. 

So the secret ideological drama of the digital movie spectacular is: highly skilled tech-creatives against the executive suits.  But given that...

2) What does the Hollywood SF movie prepare us for? Where Avatar is most deeply radical - in the sense of getting to the root of our selves - is in its post-human banality. A future in which transgenic chimeras - the human/Na-avi "avatars" of the film's title - are brewed up in tanks, ready for use in exploration, diplomacy or war. 

The Internet as Playground and Factory (3): play, cybernetics, Twitter, Iran

More musings on play, politics and technology generated by my involvement in the iDC list discussion for the Digital Labor (sic) conference in NYC in November. The original post has been amended slightly so that it makes public sense - but please refer to the full discussion. (And note Brian Holmes' eloquent response to this post.)

Internet as Boho Art-Space and Heaving Public Square: play, Iran, Twitter, cybernetics 

Yes, Julian and Brian, play is a primordially ambiguous domain of human responsiveness. Indeed, in terms of its evolutionary role as maintaining a sense of energized possibility for the organism, the darkest power-plays as well as the most bucolic festivities have to be part of its repertory of simulations, repetitions, games and laughter. (I often, and no doubt contentiously, say that if the work ethic can take a bad trip and end up at the sign over the gates of Auschwitz, the play ethic can also terminate in the boudoirs and rape/torture chambers of the good Marquis).

Indeed, our multidisciplinary ludi-guru, Brian Sutton-Smith, would be the first to assert that the too-idealised zone of child's play is a pulsing phantasmagoria of transgression, insurrection, corporeal anarchy - if only adults could hear it. Part of my definition of a 'play ethic' is partly that the sheer non-moral openness of play compels us to think "ethically", in that Foucaultian sense of ethics as a practice of freedom. It's too powerful in our lives not to take, as it were, deadly seriously. 

So Julian, I do think I acknowledge play's murkier potentials - I'm not one of those legions of blithe boosters about its effects that appear in management circles, play as a toolbox for positive psychology. But you will know that  that the final words of Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, when he lays out his evolutionary thesis about play, is a confession that "despite my extensive criticisms of the rhetoric of progress,  I have now invented yet another form of it, although this time as only the potentiation of adaptive variability".

I keep my eye on play theory for the same reasons, I think, that Deleuze and Guattari kept their eye on fractal mathematics, non-linear systems theory, or neuroscience. That is, as a resource to confirm my assumptions about an immanent creativity in the human condition (which of course for D&G was part of that greater, concept-strewn plane of materiality). It's certainly about counterposing a more open and unpredicable subject than the "Homer Economicus" of behavioural economics, that coming governmental logic in Euro-America, which erects upon our evolved psychosomatic equipment some miserably limited (and easily governable) consumer-citzens, "nudged" this way and that ahead of their savannah atavisms by a mandarinate of "liberal paternalists". Some of you may think it's dangerously positivist to engage in the "politics of human nature" this way: I feel the opposition is too powerful not to.

But to the "play-labor nexus". I urge you all to read Brian Holmes' very elegant essay on play, link previously posted here - http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/games-corporations-distant-constellations. And I want to take seriously Brian's, Ulises', Trebor's and others ludo-scepticism: That the absorption-in-possibility which defines the play experience is, through interaction design, a mechanism of identification with the social order - and one which could be, at worst, a willful mystification of our relationship with real-world exploitation ("Web 2.0 as ideology itself", as Brian says). In his new essay, Brian tries to establish some kind of opposition between play-as-identification, and play-as-disidentification. It's worth quoting at length, just for the prose:

.... Will a repressive hush fall back over the emergent world society, as the postmodern tool sets are gradually outfitted with surveillance mechanisms and encumbered with intellectual property laws, while dissident behaviors are pacified and normalized within corporate frames? Or will a resurgent artistic activism learn from its historical failures, and launch new and more effective techniques for the free and open transmission of countercultural knowledge? How to enlarge the circle of initiates? How to increase the possibilities of active participation? How – and where – to extend the terrains of struggle?

...The procedures of deskilling and deconditioning, the anti-disciplinary revolts deployed by the early vanguards against the remains of a bourgeois ideal of ennoblement, then by mid-twentieth century artists against the quality standards and technocratic abstraction of the corporate capitalist societies, are only understandable as a struggle within this dominant politics of culture, conceived in Schiller’s terms as the psychic vector of a social status quo: “free play” as the intimate and voluntarily cultivated instance of the state. This is what we are up against, if we seek, like the Situationists, to invent “an essentially new type of games.

... Now the urgency of deconditioning makes itself felt once again in vastly expanded cultural circles, even as the patronage of imperial capital exerts increasingly stronger channeling and framing effects. How to introduce a subversive “free play” into circuits of exchange that have been built up on the dogma of dematerialization, liquidity, liberalism? How to twist the grids of expression outside the control of the managerial elites? How to eliminate the brokers?

Behind this is his reading of Schiller's theory (which he shares with Terry Eagleton) casting the play-drive is the ultimate civic seduction, the ultimate embourgoisifier:  "The revolutionary individual is not to be crushed, but should ultimately become the new regime".  Yet I do think we get into hard politics here. And I do have some sympathy for John Sobol's blast against "the experts in theoretical revolution, who have insisted that capitalist networks are inherently anti-revolutionary, inherently anti-human, anti-inspiration" – particularly in the light of those furiously using Twitter, Friendfeed, Typepad and every other corporate platform they can get, to sousveille and maintain the momentum of the Iranian uprising.

In short, can one be a reformist in this discussion, as well as a revolutionary? And can play be developmental, as well as disruptive? Progressive as well as liminal? Bauwens' constant refrain on this list is that an autonomous digital counterculture can "fight/hack for user rights, open standards, free network service principles" with the commercial platforms: they can establish a 'social contract' (a social democracy?) from a strong base in which they build their own "radical distributed infrastructures". I go with Pekka Himanen that hackerism is the first real instantiation of a 'play ethic' in the network society. Isn't it this counterculture which presses externally and internally upon organisations like Twitter and Google? And hasn't hackerism deeply enabled - indeed, "conditioned" - the openness and iterability of the platforms currently being used by the Iranian people?

And yes, there is a degree of yada-yada-yada about our ritual invocation of the Italian autonomists here. But surely one of the things they get right is that our new sense of collective power (see Kevin Kelly's 'New Socialism' thesis in Wired) is more than just a by-product of an increasing cyberneticized fabric of society. Techno-potboilers like James Harkin's Cyburbia try to claim that cybernetics is the core, militarily-originated episteme that keeps us phatically and pointlessly chattering to each other, over brightly-coloured networks. But as Micheal Hardt puts it (http://www.vinculo-a.net/english_site/text_hardt.html), interactive machines aren't just "a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds", but also "a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves". This presumes a seer-through-the-lens - meaning, to some degree, a subject who can gain some Enlightenment-style purchase on their embroilment in protocol and code. An autonomous, passional, strategic player, not just the heteronomous, befuddled and processual played.

To bring it back to the moment of play: The point about the 'ambiguity of play', its necessary potentiation and proteanism, is that it encompasses (as Sutton-Smith says) both extreme agency and extreme envelopment. Play-as-fate-and-chaos, yes, the play of being caught up in cosmic mechanisms way beyond ones power to control or influence - but also play-as-progress, play-as-imagination, play-as-freedom. Cybernetics is indeed subtle and pervasive in its harnessing of human differentiation and singularity - but I'd content that play is more powerful, more generative and more constitutive of said difference and singularity. Because it is the 'difference engine' of our species, it always gives us enough cognitive and affective headroom - not just to generate better antagonisms to systems, but better systems as well.

Which is what Brian Holmes, to me, exactly does at the end of his playpiece, when he invokes the map-makings of personal and political potential conducted by Felix Guattari: that is, he points to a better system to support richer play. Radical creatives might want to disidentify from the interactive funfair of the entertainment-military complex, asks Brian - but where, other than the metropolis as a stage for "processual social events" and "punctual encounters", can they go to practice, let alone theorise,  their counter-play? I am touched by Brian's answer:

The art circuit today – including not just museums, but the enlarged and diversified networks of experimentation, debate and display – can function as a public site of initiation to this kind of reading, making it a new form of common knowledge, too broad and unpredictable to remain under corporate control. In this way, art can help reactivate the suspended promise that sixties’ thinkers saw in the expansion of free time. If it can avoid capture and “ennoblement” (or conversely, brutal repression) by the pervasive powers of the corporate capitalist state.

The artworks before your eyes appear irreducibly singular, tangential, distant; and everything else that gives consistency and dynamism to dissenting subjectivities – the discourses, the technologies, the territories of intervention – is necessarily elsewhere, displaced into another space. Yet even within the seeming calm and neutrality of the museum, these constellations of distant universes are inviting you to play an essentially different kind of game.

This reminds me so much of that powerful essay that Habermas wrote about George Bataille in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (Google Books wont show me the relevant page - Bauwens' Chartists, advance!). But from misty memory, it's something about how Bataille's transgressive and illimitable practice – which is hard-core, radically-potentiating play - is good for the steering systems of modernity, in that it reminds governance that there will always be challenges to its complacency about meeting human needs and desires. Art institutions need artists, system needs lifeworld (even at the Bataillian limit), and networks need play (and players), to develop, form and reform.

We should be vigilant over forms of interaction labor that canalise the full spectrum of playful possibilities, yes. But it's a more exciting moment for systemic development, of all kinds, than a counsel of "control-society" despair. Precisely because we're players, and not laborers, in these playgrounds.

The Internet as Playground and Factory (2): beyond the 'play-labour nexus'

Here's the second of my postings to the Institute for Distributed Creativity's mail-list, leading up to the Digital Labor: internet as factory and playground conference in New York at the end of the year. I was specifically asked by the Institute's director, Trebor Scholz, to think a bit about the relative definitions of "play" and "labor" (I'll go with the US spelling for now). It's been edited slightly so that it can make some sense for public consumption (well, here's hoping - it's the academic/theory side of my activity). 

GETTING BEYOND THE 'PLAY-LABOUR NEXUS'

[...] So much of this discussion is rooted in a Marxist/post-Marxist framework about the nature of labour as 'exploitation' and 'alienation'. I want to try and step back towards some roots of the Marxist analysis, and attempt to link that to current multidisciplinary understandings of play.

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (see link below) Terry Eagleton devotes a chapter to Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man – one of the most important theories of play ever (and much quoted by Johan Soderberg in Hacking Capitalism). Eagleton notes that Schiller's evocation of the importance of play – what he called the 'play drive' – allowed Marx to envision the kind of rich, fully-extended humanity that exploitation and alienation would damage and distort. "Marx's critique of industrial capitalism is deeply rooted in a Schillerian vision of stunted capacities, dissociated powers, the ruined totality of human nature" (http://bit.ly/rcBx).

 

The "play-drive" for Schiller is also the ground of possibility of all human action: it suspends the destructive tendencies both of our appetites ('sense-drive') and our reason (form-drive), and creates a zone of "free determinability". From this sublime experience of possible states of being (which Schiller terms 'aesthetic'), we will be able to assess the best, most "graceful" options for personal and social action.

 

So Schiller's vision of the play-drive is that of a space of potentiation in the human condition – and I guess Marx's radicalism was to see that this protean, self-creating force at the heart of our species being needed a revolutionary redeployment of resources to come into its own. But what is interesting about the study of play since Schiller, right up to the present, is that so much biology, zoology and psychology confirms his characterisation of play as that zone of possibility in the human condition.

 

Play is 'adaptive potentiation', as the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith puts it. By this he means all those experiments, simulations and virtualisations that we recognise as play, but which clearly serve an evolutionary purpose - namely, to aid our survival and flourishing. How? By helping us rehearse strategies for dealing with our complex social worlds, composed (as they are) of other linguistic and richly emotional human beings. (On Sutton-Smith's latest formulation of this, see http://bit.ly/wQTwp).

 

So play is deeply constitutive of human sociality: we know this from child development. And that productive adulthood has been about the 'soul's play-day being the devil's work-day', or the 'putting away of childish things', is a Puritan truism that any student of Weber knows about. And any other student of E.P. Thompson also knows how relentless was the campaign needed to subject the pre-capitalist culture of festivals and 'Happy Mondays' to disciplinary, workplace rule.

But here's what might be the truly revolutionary fact of our digital and networked lives: Its symbolic and immaterial plentitude, and the participative design of its tools and platforms, helps adults to recover, and then extend and develop, that constitutive experience of play. As many of the Italian Marxists say, particularly Paulo Virno in his recent 'Multitude' books, there might be a new anthropology required to cope with a world in which the most protean of human faculties – language, affectivity and symbolic analysis itself – becomes the basic productive infrastructure of organisational, community and personal life.

 

Does this deep link between species being and our digital-and-networked 'extensions of the human' (to smarten up McLuhan), around the axis of play, have consequences for how we arrange our productive lives? At the very least, one can point to the amazing diversity of web-initiatives on the iDC list – every "adaptive potentiation" from a mark-up language that encodes the working conditions of its sites, to an iPhone app that helps you do voluntary info-work for charities, to Ned Rossiter's 'organised networks' as the successor to trade unions – as indication that an extraordinary creative energy is being tapped. 

Clay Shirky tells us that it's a matter of insanely-easy group-forming networks opening up space below traditional organisations, but there's more to it than that. To explain this fecundity, I keep finding myself turning away from sociology or economics, and either turning to philosophy – the creative ontology of Deleuze, Negri, Virno and others – or to what has to be called (with some tentativeness, I concede – but only some) the 'socio-biology' of play. (Maybe biosemiotics – see http://bit.ly/SvDT5).

 

In a recent presentation, http://bit.ly/RGjlU, I talked about the common conditions for a 'ground of play'. Cubs cavorting on the savannah, children having fun in a playpark, adults interacting with the Web: each of these playgrounds have 1) loose but robust governance, 2) ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff, 3) treat failure, risk and mess as developmental necessities. I went on to cite Google's 20 percent rule – where its engineers are encourage to devote 20% of their work time to projects that don't follow company imperatives – as a rare example of a mainstream company trying to recreate those constitutive conditions of play for their employees. (I've also been delighted to dive into Fred Turner's archive, triggered by his contribution to this list, and find this brilliant essay on Google's embrace of Burning Man culture, which corroborates my point http://bit.ly/AvFUZ).

 

Does Google, or any of the 'netarchical capitalists' that Michel Bauwens talks about, in any way exhaust the organisational possibilities available? In no way. And can the engaging interactions that we have upon these 'grounds of play' be pointed towards socially progressive ends? Well, I'm looking at the Extraordinaries app on my iPhone at the moment (though I'd like to have more to do than tagging the Smithsonian's pics). And we know from people like Jane McGonigal (http://www.avantgame.com) how much gaming has the possibility to improve governance, foresight and collective wisdom.

 

We need to keep carefully attending to the design of our networks, protocols and interfaces – immersing ourselves in an "aesthetic craft" which Schiller and Marx would both have recognised as the authentic practice of autonomous, non-alienated labor. (And which playcraft Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman locates as the very conditions of citizenship http://bit.ly/nQTS). As Soderberg rephrases Schiller in his book 

"If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom". Both adherents and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that flow from the "beauty of the baud" and the play with source code in the computer underground.

Like Michel Bauwens, I see this playfully-driven moment of infrastructural and organisational creativity as an opportunity for civic enterprise on a number of fronts (and niches), rather than as one more version of the 'bigger cages, longer chains' tradition of left pessimism. Building good, generative playgrounds is noble labor indeed.

 

But for my neo-Marxist friends in this discussion, I respectfully suggest that the irrepressible creativity of the internet might have its roots in the way that digital networks articulate a long-repressed aspect of our species being. Femina et homo ludens, as a mainstream and self-conscious identity of developed-world citizens, may be exactly who the bearded one was waiting for.

Painting the kettle: more thoughts on play, protest and the G20

There was one report from the recent City of London protests against the G20 summit that really struck me. As the crowds brandished "Hang the Bankers" posters, shouted that "Nature doesn't do bailouts", and paraded their raggle-taggle Four Horsemen of the Eco-calypse, the financial workers decided to respond in kind:

Slogan of the day, accordingly, must be awarded to the sign reportedly glimpsed in a bank window: "While you are here protesting, we are repossessing your homes." We also liked the four cricket bats - a fitting choice - lined up by the door at the Bishopsgate restaurant L'Amina in a bid to deter any rough stuff, though it's just possible this was not meant as a joke.

An honourable mention, however, to the bankers spotted by the Associated Press waving tenners at the protesters from their upper windows - who could tire of that old joke? (Though you can tell we're in the midst of a credit crunch surely they used to be £50s?) The crowd, in response, shouted "Jump!" How festive.

How festive indeed. Even though the "kettling" of the crowd by the Met Police resulted in its inevitable frustrations and violence, reports like the above are trying to characterise the essentially "good-humoured nature" of the tension between protestors and their targets (as the man from the Financial Times, of all organs, was at pains to point out).

As my last post highlighted, it's a matter of principle for many of these protestors that their occupation of public space has a playful element. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her history of collective joy, Dancing In The Streets, this is a tradition stretching from medievality to modernity – the lords and ladies of misrule doing their turns in the crowd, tipping the conventions of the world upside down to make collective action feel even more transformative and charged. (Though carnival can also be a yearly or seasonal safety-valve, a ritualised letting-go of social frustration from below).

But I also liked the comments from Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb, scratching his head a little (from his hard-left position) at the point of it all:

I'm still not clear on what the strategy is behind these mini-spectacles. It's great to see thousands of people turn out to protest against capitalism, despite all the media hysteria and off-putting threats from the police. We need far bigger protests in the future, ideally coinciding with a general strike or something. But it seems as if the idea at the moment is to have a carnivalesque parade, wind up in one spot and get penned in only to have the police mess with you if you try to have a drink or some weed. I don't want to be a negative nelly, but that's not reclaiming the streets, it's getting owned by the cops.

In terms of anti-capitalist direct action (if that's what you're looking for), Seymour is surely right that the current European (and American) wave of factory occupations is way more effective than some diddy hurling a projectile through a Royal Bank of Scotland window.

But there's something about the conviviality and creativity of these protests (which the Climate Camp maintained honourably in Bishopgate, until being rather brutally swept away by the riot police) that I think is worth preserving and developing. I kept thinking of the iconic images of sixties protest – the hippie inserting a flower in the barrel of a gun. Or even more effectively, Abbie Hoffman (the Yippie) scattering money over the trading floor of the NY stock exchange, and watching them scramble for the notes.

Short of a state of sheer totalitarianism, there is a point where authorities are vulnerable to collective ridicule and derision. Remember the experience in the Velvet Revolution of Czecheslovakia, where (as Ivan Klima recalled) the appearance of satirical cartoons and slogans in the windows of houses and shop-fronts became completely ubiquitous, subtly infusing the streets of Prague with civic confidence.

If the tools of humour and wit are prominent in a social struggle, might change come more profoundly and elementally – the possibility of change appearing more everyday and accessible, if "reality is taken lightly" (the nutshell definition of play that I've been using for some years now)? The Italian thinker Paulo Virno has elaborated this in his recent book on wit and innovation: the linguistic explosions of humour constantly remind us that we can play around with the rules of social existence. (Which explains my obession with Bill Hicks, I guess – and why comedians can often be so scary-thrilling).

Compared to the testosteronal anger that often marks labour-movement militancy, the carnivaleers against capitalism are trying to reimagine the spaces and places where intransigent power often feels at its most settled and complacent: a nuclear power plant, the building of an airport runway, the tidy streets of a financial district.

If you look at those images of the Climate Camp, and its little micropolis of tents (and doubtless passionate discussions within them), you can see them using the "tools of conviviality" to change how we might think of public space. The City of London can be more than an orderly space for carbon-burning, money-circulating business as usual – but an opportunity to demonstrate a flavour of the cooperative lifestyle changes that might be required in order to stave off eco-catastrophe. 

I don't think that creative anarchism (or "expressive democracy") like this is in any way a leading edge of change. If anything, our clear and present eco-danger reinforces the need for national and international governance. But it's incredibly important that this grass-roots passion and commitment exists. As the Americans say, someone needs to "hold Obama's feet to the fire". 

And yes, the grand irony of all of this? That a few miles away, the Community-Organiser-in-Chief himself was gladhanding and cajoling a set of bristling, well-padded leaders into the minimum set of regulations and investments required to keep their capitalist (or now, Keynesian) show on the road. Did the Barry Obama who hung around with socialists and Chicago radicals as a community organiser twenty years ago cock an ear to the street protestors? While the Climate Campers try to seed the City, Obama and his family dig up the White House lawn to grow designer herbs for their chef. 

There are some strange parallelisms at work on the stage of world politics at the moment. And although I may be the man with the hammer who can only see nails to be bashed, the ethics of play does always seem to me to be hovering around the scene.

Alter-globalist, meet benign capitalist: the encompassing attractions of "creative play"

My journey back to Scotland had me furiously ripping articles out of today's Guardian, in a chain of play-ethical topics I just couldn't ignore. Forgive the cognitive leaps, they were irresistible...

Carnivals against banksterism

My first example is Katherine Ainger's op-ed on how the anticapitalist movement of ten years ago is gearing up for a comeback, timed to the coming G20 conference in London. It reminded me of some of my political aspirations in the Play Ethic book (which I'm re-reading with a macabre interest at the moment). I'd hoped that between the 'work ethic' espoused by orthodox, growth-oriented government and companies, and the 'protest ethic' coming from the streets and the South, a 'play ethic' could perhaps be a mediating argument - translating the idealism and utopianism of the latter into new institutions and policies for the former.

It didn't look like anything like that was happening in 2003-2004. But if the ethical and civic vigour of the social software movement in the UK and the US is anything to go by (with Obama's election, if not quite his government so far, the best example of their effectiveness), it looks like those connecting tissues are being formed now - tissues partly made up of the playing, gaming and enterprising nature of net-enabled activism. And not just technological networks, but societal networks too.

Ainger's piece also reminded me of my book's quotation of anarchist David Graeber, who I've mentioned in a recent post (scroll to bottom). Here's Ainger's relevant and fascinating words:

The solutions the "alter-global" networks have developed offer a way out that is based on whole systems thinking. Fundamental to this vision is an economy that meets the needs of everyone on a planet of finite resources.

Which is why the climate camp in the city, with its slogan "Because nature doesn't do bailouts", is one of the most interesting of all the movements coalescing in London next week. It's a potent mix of seasoned anti-globalisation activists who are skilled in creative direct action and a new generation that is energised and refreshingly undogmatic. 

The camp has taken a key component of the globalisation movement - the temporary autonomous zones of street parties and convergence centres liberated in cities during summit protests - to a new level, creating a transformational space which prefigures the world they want, featuring everything from wind turbines and composted waste to decentralised decision-making and creative play.

There's no doubt that 'reclaiming the streets', in a playful, carnivalesque and collaborative spirit, is a powerful experience - both for participants and the onlookers it's intended to challenge.¹ And if a play-ethical perspective isn't open to new forms of democratic creativity, it's isn't worth the invocation. As ever, one hopes that it's Ainger's idealism that characterises the protest. And that the usual marginals out for a bit of cathartic urban confrontation or destruction get reined in by her more "seasoned" activists. 

Doing well by playing well: Lego 

The other piece in today's Guardian that talks about play's power and potential is a lovingly written cover piece by Jon Henley on Lego - pegged to the information that the Danish company is doing especially well in the teeth of this recession, with its sales up 51% in the UK last year.

 

With the creative passions of the alter-globalisation protestors in mind, it's intriguing to read this account of this thoroughly Scandinavian company (who regularly top reputation indexes for corporations), and their seemingly universally beloved product. 

Ainger might talk about 'whole systems thinking' (this kind, I guess). The "Lego System of Play" was introduced in 1955, and Henley relates lots of kindly tales about the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, compelling his son to repaint toy ducks because he'd put on only two layers than three, or citing the company slogan about quality control for children's toys Det beste er ikke for godt (Not even the best is good enough). And though it's true that Lego did catch some of the brand intoxication of the 90's - expanding into theme parks, movies, clothes, software, thinking they could be as sexy as Apple - they've since returned to their core business of making toys. 

At the moment, Lego's next new frontiers are fusing virtual and physical game-play ("imagine if kids were telling their playmates, 'Hey, guess what - if you clip a set of shoulder pads onto this guy, he gets three times as many strength points online!' That's the holy grail"), and moving into the world of board-games (Lego Ludo, anyone?). There doesn't seem to be much to object to a company whose aim is to make a toy that gives such a sense of imaginative mastery to children (and as Henley writes, quite a few obsessed adults).

Even if you go online to find any alter-globalisation dirt on the company, there seems to be very little. I found this extensive response to a parent's worry in the company's forum pages, about the extent to which Lego were using sweat-labour in China to make their toys (very little, it seems). And in a toy business conference on safety I spoke at last year, the company's head Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was clearly the poster-boy for an industry which had been badly fouling its own nest, with lax safety and labour-standard practices in the far East.

It's not much of a "full disclosure" to say that I've spoken at Lego conferences, collaborated with their Serious Play consultancy, have met their CEO a few times now, and generally approve of them and their works. But if we're also thinking of a playful critique of current capitalism, it is interesting to consider how much Lego, even as a capitalist multinational, is a product of a certain Scandinavian sensibility. One in which a commercial enterprise regards the pro-development, pro-community values of its products as being its crucial competitive advantage - with these values reinforced by the company's strong base in its place of origin. (Usmir Haque's recent lectures on Constructive Capitalism are relevant here). 

Yes, there are always questions to ask about any company who seeks to extract value from children (or their parents' wallets). Some of their lines still seem pretty badly gendered (there's slashing Bionicles for certain boys, and Belville horse farms for certain girls - though they have reestablished the unisex fire-stations of old. And Spongebob Squarepants' "Good Neighbours at Bikini Bottom" looks, frankly, covetable by children of all ages). 

But I'd like to know from the net-rades in the coming G20 Climate Camp whether they have a positive vision of any company that might fit their "alter-globalising" criteria. (Not to dismiss their critique of existing institutions - but it would be interesting to know). Would Lego fit the bill?

Update: From a few Google searches, I have a troubled answer. It seems the climate campers have indeed used "creative play" to create a "transformational space" - in Legoland, Windsor (see pic at the top, and video below). 

Originally I thought the protestors had constructed the whole thing. But having looked at it closely, Legoland has clearly already built a smoking nuclear power plant (with evident sponsorship from the not-very-well-behaved energy company E-On). The Climate Campers have climbed in wearing company shirts, attached a Lego-sized protest banner, and placed Lego-sized protestors on its polluting rim... 

Now, an activism that makes you broadly smile can't be entirely off the mark. If it makes Lego think harder about their environmental associations, it was definitely worthwhile. And an example of the necessary tensions that need to exist between Ainger's playful radicals, and even the most ethically-playful organisations. We live in inescapably interesting times...

 

NOTES

¹ And we shouldn't forget that they were having their effects. Some dates and places you'll never forget: 8.30am, Sept 11th, 2001, Glasgow. Buying my Financial Times and looking forward to reading its four-part series on "the anti-globalization" movement. "It is wide in its tactics and ambitions, violent and revolutionary on the edges, peaceful and reformist in the main. It rushes in often contradictory directions, anti-corporate and entrepreneurial, anarchistic and nostalgic, technophobe and futuristic, revolutionary and conservative all at the same time", wrote a clearly enamoured James Harding (now editor of The Times). And then, at 8.46am in New York, a screaming came across the sky...