The Play Ethic

The Internet as Playground and Factory (5): We refuse to die of boredom...

Enjoying responding to the mailing list around the forthcoming Digital Labor conference - apologies if it's overly-academic, but that's the kinda place it is..... here's my response to Andrew Ross's piece on Digital Labor  Andrew is author of No Collar and Nice Work If You Can Get It. 

Original mail post here

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Beautifully argued, as ever, from Andrew, and I can't respond to everything, but a few caveats:

ROSS: These violations of work standards occur in the sector of old media that is most clearly aligned with the neo-liberal ethos of the jackpot economy. It’s an ethos which demands that we are all participants in a game that rewards only a few, while the condition of entry into this high-stakes lottery is to leave your safety gear at the door; only the most spunky, agile, and dauntless will prevail, but often at high psychic cost–witness Susan Boyle’s recent return to the spotlight after a long bout of medication and institutionalization.

I'm scratching my head here at what you're defending: the unionized rights of tv workers to produce decades of passivity-inducing pabulum, and worse than that (as Brian Holmes has dubbed it), a cyber-marketing "Neilsenism" which locks the viewers into a sad loop of uneasy identification, leading to restless consumerism? Didn't Paddy Chayefsky nail all this in Network in the mid-seventies?

And from a play studies perspective, one has to immediately relativise and historicise your linking of this particular 'game' of culture to neo-liberalism. As Sutton-Smith reminds us in Ambiguity of Play, agonism - play-as-contestation - is an enduring modality of play, functionally deep in our evolved condition, alongside others to be sure. I doubt whether Simon Cowell's various spectacles are qualitatively different from other symbolic expenditures of power in other, certainly pre-modern eras. The point about social media, in or out of the clutches of parasitic corporates, is whether we can use it to tap into more expansive, enriching, sustaining games, simulations and rituals.

To my eyes, though these shows successfully commodify the 'interpassive' dimensions of the network society - phone/text votes, branded forums, cheap shows (the X-tra Factor) on multiple channels - they are also vigorously subverted by a fourth estate (amplified by social media) which is still doing its job. Witness the recent convulsions of both ITV and BBC in the UK about game-show rigging.

ROSS: Yet the labor infractions I have been describing are only visible because they take place against the heavily unionized backdrop of the entertainment industries. In the world of new media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the formula of overwork, underpayment, and sacrificial labor is entirely normative. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure, the widespread use of amateur or user input on the social web or in open source, and the systematic expropriation of Tiziana Terranova first described as “free labor” has prompted some commentators to ask whether the experience of digital environments should direct us to rethink entirely our basic understanding of labor and enterprise. [2] While skeptical, I am certainly open to such inquiries and look forward to any such discussion.

Do you have no perspective on the Italian autonomists' (and in recent times, Andre Gorz's) response to the spectre of free labor - the horizon of a 'guaranteed income' or 'social wage', which would recognise that we are cognitively and affectively producing in our generality? I don't know that this is necessarily such a utopian horizon, or so disconnected from policy processes. One of the arguments about the nature of creative work I'm hearing in the UK and Europe is that it may well demand a new conception of welfare/well-being support - what has been called (and I think precipitately rejected) by Rossiter and Lovink as 'flexicurity'. (for a rather watery version of how this might work in terms of state allowance see http://www.newdealofthemind.com/?page_id=1329). This is the commons-ization of cultural production as a consequence of open digital networks (and remember how it could have been different? Ted Nelson and his hypertext micropayment system?).

Never mind recompense for unionised tv workers - the whole field is de-monetizing (or at least re-monetising, but at a much lower level). And there's a bigger ecological horizon about the extent to which we need to move away from (heavily) material consumption - wherein the rush to (relatively) immaterial prosumption, production or interaction, as our psychic compensation for being Northern, late-modern 'flexible personalities', might be one kind of answer. I don't know that agonising over the labour conditions in making trash tv is the right zone in which to deploy one's critical energies.

ROSS: Subsequent ethnographic studies of knowledge and creative industry workplaces show that job gratification still comes at a heavy sacrificial cost–longer hours in pursuit of the satisfying finish, price discounts in return for aesthetic recognition, self-exploitation in response to the gift of autonomy, and dispensability in exchange for flexibility.

And for most creative workers, the alternative is...? A career in advertising, where a satisfying finish, aesthetic recognition, autonomy, and flexibility in the job are indeed handsomely rewarded - but towards the end of numbed and dumbed mentalities? You seem to have an angst for a pre-digital, almost Mad Men style world of cultural employment, where symbolic analysts did at best mediocre, at worse mendacious work, yet at least managed a serene martini in comfortable surroundings at the end of an 8-hour day. Are sectoral employment deals on residuals and recompense going to be enough, when (as you say further on) the dream of semiotically-active, mass-innovative citizenry has now come true, in all its copyright-busting fecundity? And further: Will all art and culture become folk-art and culture in a steady-state economy - and is the mass embrace of interactive tools an anticipation of this shift?

ROSS: for the business entrepreneur, the outcome is a virtually wage-free proposition. There are costs involved for bandwidth, hosting, and maintaining commercial platforms, but as far as the monetizable product goes, it is the users, or prosumers, as industry strategists call them, who create all the surplus value (which could be described as the difference between the value such free services offer to users and the value they create for business).

I'm one of those entrepreneurs, using (though not owning) one of those platforms, encouraging that kind of fan labor (http://hueandcry.ning.com). I can tell you our anxiety is that we have built a fan community upon a platform whose advertising-convertible interactions won't be substantial enough to maintain the functionality of its social tools (whether through its own bankruptcy, or a takeover leading to reduction of service). At the very least, Ning's ability to allow you to export your data-base as a file, and measure some degree of customer behaviour through Google Analytics, means that this small-trader has the possibility to start again if his platform fails. But there is no doubt that the free-culture expectations induced by net behaviour has shaped Ning till now - and its combination of power and low cost has given us (and I'll bet many others) the possibility to conduct our cultural commercial enterprise *without* a sell-out of our art to corporate interest, and with a direct relationship with people who want to give us money - for our performances, at least (if not to the same degree our music).

I would say a net-preneur has to have, at best, a tragic perspective on the permanence of the institutions and networks which sustain their enterprise. What I'd like to know is: if there are dimensions of the private banking system that are too big to fail, which of our commercial social networks might also fall under the same category? Or alternatively: what is the public infrastructural stake in robust open networks? Or: was Minitel really *that* silly?

ROSS: Technolibertarians who have consistently viewed cyberspace as a haven of free being are notoriously oblivious to the impact of the cut-price labor economy that is its default mode. The flourishing of self-publication and amateur content has been a clear threat to the livelihoods of professional creatives whose prices are driven down by, or who simply cannot compete with, the commercial mining of the online, discount alternatives to their services. Print journalism is only the most recent, well-publicized example of a profession trampled underfoot as advertisers and owners switch to online assets. Indeed, it’s ironic to see how media critics who are more accustomed to proclaiming that the “press is free only for those who own one” have lately been defending these bastions of information gatekeeping as stable sources of valued livelihoods.

As I said in previous post, I think there's a good ferment of thinking about how journalism as an ethical, professional practice is sustained in the digital meltdown of company and organisational models. Could be legislation to support new, with- or non-profit company structures; could be some new maleficent integration of device, software and e-commerce (wait to see the deals that the iTablet has cut with publishing houses). But in any case, and to repeat myself, it could be that journalism becomes (has already become?) one of the many operations of the 'General Intellect' in necessarily steady-state economies, in a sousveillant mode. Rossiter and Bauwens' separate calls for 'organised networks' might well be a template for what succeeds the big-city, ad-driven newsroom. But no Martinis in the wood-panelled bar at the end of the day, I would hazard.

We (the self-consciously creative/cognitive classes) will be poorer in the post-capitalist economy: however, we may well be more alive. What did Vaneigem say? "We refuse a world where the guarantee that we will not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom...We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity".

Internet as Playground and Factory (4): burning down the house (to build a new one)

Another one 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 this month. It's a little embroiled in debates, but I've provided links to most of the references - and I think the main points stand. I'm debating a very brilliant and very radical thinker called Brian Holmes:

Brian you talk of the "tawdry narcissism of networked environments organized to promote the delusion of transparency and community". Is this part of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the DiLampudesa strategy - the power elites of globalised capital "changing everything, so that nothing changes"?  You tend to think so. But Wallerstein says clearly that it's democratisation, over the pass of the last two centuries, which has been instrumental in re-addressing basic allocations of wealth and accumulation of capital.

I do value your hands-on accounts of avant-garde network activisms which are prefigurative of a future society (David Graeber) and are 'expressively' democratic, in Negri's terms. That countervailing pressure is required. But like Michel Bauwens, I do despair of the panoptical trance that you and other critical theorists on this list get into when looking at corporate social-media networks. 

Can't we be a bit more capacious than that? Can't we BOTH support the field of autonomous system-and-tools-making that Michel so brilliantly maps out, AND use the passions and commitment of hacker values to keep a civic pressure on extremely user-sensitive commercial networks? And maybe deploy them, as far as one can take them, to keep up that democratic pressure Wallerstein talks about? You can argue for better libraries, AND leech off the coffee-driven commons on your local Borders to read and take notes on your latest political tomes: I do it all the time. Isn't it the enduring power of the public sphere that shapes both these private and public enterprises? And doesn't that map over to social media?

As I go about my daily wage/rent-labours, I'm standing in the ruins of two industries - news journalism and the music business - and am utterly aware of how intrinsically decommodifying open digital networks are. Music will take care of itself: like play, it's an anthropological constant. But now disconnected from its classified-ads scam by our good friend Craig Newmark, the funding of a newsroom - which could help us maintain a beady eye on those victims and perpetrators of neo-liberal economics - is a really moot issue. This is not to say that journalism was perfect - too much of it was PR-driven automatism, it needs a Coaseian organisational shake-out and a return to its best professional ethics, as Clay Shirky says. 

But the net-driven crisis of journalism is an example of how we need transitional as well as radical strategies to make the most of the new societal ontology of networks. What comes after the net destroyed the newsroom isn't just a moment for anarchistic fecundity - though it should be - but there should also be space for thinking about how a revenue stream might fund future 'afflictions of the comfortable, and comforting of the afflicted'. Seymour Hersh brought us the Abu Ghraib pictures - Western power's enduring semiotic wound - out of the bowels of Conde Nast, via the New Yorker. Future tricky alignments of capital and ethics - around philanthropy, tax breaks, company law - will be necessary to maintain that kind of journalistic process. I can't, and won't, eschew them because they have a corporate locus. 

In order to multiply and ramify that democratisation process Wallerstein talks about, we should be confident enough in our analysis (and consciousness) to use any tool necessary - however tainted by data-tracking or commercial behaviourism (which, as Goldhaber correctly says, is often hubristic and presumptious in the extreme). Yes, we have to encourage those roving posse comitatus, Brian - the times are too fluid and open to constitutive power for creative activism not to flourish. But on the same savannah, some of us would like to use existing institutions/organisations to get towards new institutions/organisations. And in any case, one has to praise a space like iDC for demonstrating that conversations can happen between avant-garde and reformist elements in a movement.

The Play Ethic in late 2009: my interview with John Williams of 'Creative Maverick'

I like to hammer out requests from authors and bloggers as to 'what is the Play Ethic exactly?' - the quicker you do them, the more you find out about yourself... Trainer and consultant John Williams at Creative Maverick is writing a book for Pearson called 'Screw Work, Let's Play', and I was delighted to do an e-mail interview with him today. For anyone wanting a quick overview of where I am intellectually, emotionally, politically and professionally with The Play Ethic, this should be useful.  

Interview with John Williams, Creative Maverick, 14th September 2009

I like to ask interviewees the dinner party question “What do you do?” (It’s a very worker-oriented question but I’m interested to see the creative ways players find to answer it)

I sing, I make songs; I write reviews, commentary, and theory; I parent, love, and (as the footballers say) try to keep my engine going. 

What is the play ethic?

The play ethic is what comes after the obsolescence of the work ethic. The work ethic is an ideology or belief-system which asserts that any job has dignity and worth, despite how alienated it makes you feel or how disjunct it is from your desires and aspirations, because society recognises this submission to the job as the basis of social order. The play ethic is an alternative belief-system, which asserts that in an age of mass higher education, continuing advances in personal and social autonomy, and ubiquitous digital networks (and their associated devices), we have a surplus of human potential and energy, which will not be satisfied by the old workplace routines of duty and submission. The identity of a 'player' - optimistic, willing to try and experiment, open to participating with peers in a multitude of projects - fits this new landscape, this new social order, much better. But we need to forge a convincing 'play ethic', particularly for organisations and government, which will help them to  change their structures (or make way for new ones) to accommodate the expanding constituency of networked players.

What’s the state of play 5 years on from the publication of your book? How is your mission going?

I feel that my project has contributed its small part to a much wider legitimation of the power and potential of play in mainstream British and American society, particularly in organisational studies, education, social policy and even advertising (I did a lot early consultation with advertisers!). I look at initiatives like the UK government's nine-figure commitment to encouraging play in schools and early development, and I see a lot of the research I was adducing about the cognitive and civic benefits of keeping play at the centre of children's lives being quoted. I know that there are a few initiatives - like The School of Life and the The School of Everything - which were directly inspired by my writing and advocacy. And the continuing invites to speak at events from Sydney to New York, from primary educators to Nokia and Lego, tell me that I have carved out a reasonable expertise, and am having a reasonable impact, on a wider variety of sectors. 

Several of the players I have been interviewing and studying come from a background in the music industry (Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Derek Sivers of CDBaby). What does the world of pop & rock music in particular have to offer to the play ethic?

Making rock and pop regularly gives you an unalienated experience of expressing your passions through technique and technology, in collaboration with other people - which is the definition, it would seem to me, of a play ethic! The trendy management term 'ad-hocracy' was tailor-made for the music business: there, people demand enough time and space to experiment, try things out, follow their noses. And they will construct the situations, however provisional or fragile or flaky, that enable them to get the result they have an investment in. All of life is a 'gig' for a musician - an event where you perform with and before others - and I think that this prepares you for a life of self-starting, flexible working and enterpreneurship. We're all players in the most profound sense - courting possibility, living with its openness, not fearing it. 

If you could get one message through to the worker - someone feeling trapped by the work ethic - what would you say?

Going back to musicians, I would say that you have to accept that there's a price you pay for living a profoundly playful life - which is that there is less stability in some of the more recognised features of an adult existence, but more stability in others. Clearly, if you're chained to a mortgage/big-car/foreign-holidays/high-consumption lifestyle, then you need a constancy of income - which usually only comes from the kind of occupational commitment (one company, one building, one practice) that most players are unwilling to make. If you can downshift some aspects of your life, you can "up-shift" many others - for example, pouring your energies into a practice or project that makes you feel more alive and purposeful than you've ever been; finding more looseness in your life into which can enter new relationships, the opportunity to reinforce old ones. I've come to believe that the players' life is what you could call 'post-consumerist', or participative - and in an age where we might well be looking at ecological limits on consumption, a play ethic might be one of our main hopes for building a sense of positive identity about ourselves, when the status items lose their status.

Social Media has moved on since you wrote the book and is becoming an even more powerful force for change in both business and society. How do you see it supporting the play ethic now? 

When I was completing the Play Ethic in 2003, one could see the new eco-system of networks and participation growing - mostly in cutting-edge hi-tech areas like open source and free software. But the expansion of that into everyday life is extremely encouraging to me. It's almost as if tens of millions of people are voting with their attention spans, when they engage with everything from Twitter to Facebook to You Tube to whatever blogging platform they have. They're asserting their joy in mutual communication, in tailoring their public identities to exactly the specifications they want (and also opening that identity out to commentary by others), right in the heart of networked capitalism - those 'homing from work' behaviours which so infuriate the key-stroke counters of management and business. Organisations should be (and a few are) responding positively to this mass desire for people to enthusiastically build structures and networks around themselves - tapping into this energy in order to make productive life more satisfying, and its products and services more meaningful to both producers and consumers. But it's usually rendered by business leaders as just "playing around". A shame, but that will incrementally change. 

What does the recent financial meltdown mean to both the work ethic and play ethic?

I think the 'ethical' part of the play ethic is about placing the idea of creativity, activity and collaboration - rather than being programmed, being defined by consumption, taking orders - at the centre of a society. I do think this means a shift of energies and commitment from a society with a certain model of growth, to one with a different model of growth - where it's a growth in happiness, or the richness of one's interactions, or the satisfaction in one's labours and projects, that becomes our collective target for the future. I think the coming age of fiscal and financial austerity - the hangover from our days of credit-fuelled consumerism - could provide the necessary conditions for that growth-model to move from the margins to the centre of policy, politics and daily life. We won't have the money to solve our problems and assuage our existential angsts - we'll have to innovate, act and collaborate to fill those holes. I hope the idea of a 'play ethic' is useful in that scenario.

I’m interested in the internal shift a person needs to make to move from worker to player – beliefs to question, habits to transform. What do you think is the biggest part of this?

I'm very interested in that too! The more I deep-dive into the psychology and neurology of play, the more I think that one of the main tasks for the play ethic is to engage in an argument about human nature. So much of the story of play for advanced mammals like us is that it's necessary to keep us adaptive - Brian Sutton-Smith calls play 'adaptive potentiation', the testing-out and prototyping of behaviours and possibilities, so that we can endlessly refine and improve our response to everyday challenges and opportunities. And I think that modern people, living in societies that have many resources to support our actions, can actually bring play as a rehearsal for real life, and real life itself, a lot closer together. But yes, there needs to be an internal shift to match all the external shifts that are inviting us to a playful life. I think we have to try and listen to this deeply-constituted inner dynamic of play in our selves - and I think we can become profoundly deaf to that. I'm certainly interested in meditation, whether contemplative or as a result of some active practise, as a way of getting 'above yourself', so you can see the patterns of life that you're trapped in. I have to say personally, that my life with my children - not just playing with them as they grow-up, but also in terms of the miracle of their autonomy, the glory of watching their gradual self-empowerment - was also crucial to deepening my sense of myself as a player. That's not available for everyone, but it was essential for me.

How does play sit with hard work in your own working life and in the lives of the other players you have met? Can play be hard work?

I like to use the terms of the philosopher and theologian James Carse, when he talked about finite and infinite games. "Hard work", committed labour through a field of activity heading towards a determinate goal, is what Carse would call the 'finite game' - a series of tight victories over necessity and urgency. In my own life, I compare it to the singing practice I have to do every day as a musician - a kind of exacting, pains-taking self-development, a struggle to improve technique and control. But I do that in the service of Carse's 'infinite game' - the game not oriented to victory, but to extending and enriching the game itself, to seeing new horizons and new rules through playing the game itself. If I stay on top of my technique, I will maintain the possibiity of having those transcendant gigs where my voice, my self and the whole room merges - or where something genuinely new and unprecedented pops out of my mouth. But I have voluntarily chosen this 'hard-work', this finite game, because it serves the 'infinite game' of expression and exploration. You can see it as the circle of hard work within the bigger circle of the horizon of play. And incidentally, to reverse those two - to put infinity at the heart of the finite, or to see victory as something to be endlessly toiled for, the intoxication of the 'winner' as worthwhile in itself, is to me (and Carse) a kind of hell on earth. 

Players, it seems to me, will naturally tread on other people’s beliefs and taboos. I’m sure you must have met some controversy and disapproval in your own work. How do you respond to it?

Most of the controversy comes from people who have invested so much in the work ethic, and have suffered the psychic injuries that result from living a heteronomous (not autonomous) life, that you literally pain them when you express or display a players' sensibility or preferences. I understand that rage and annoyance - and often my response is to try and point to long-term social, technological and cultural trends which show that a life of purpose and productivity doesn't have to be lived in a state of grim determination to triumph, or acceptance of one's conformity. One of the things I tried to do in the book was to point out what I thought the complement to play was, in a healthy society. What happens when an exuberant player fails, falls, gets exhausted or broken, runs out of ideas, hits a crisis of health (mental or physical)? So I've been attempting to say that 'care' is what should complement 'play' in the ideal society - not the 'work-leisure trap', or the 'work-life balance', but the 'play-care continuum'. If we grow into our identities as players, we should also value the care that's required when our playful enterprises do not go as planned. And this is real 'care', involving the open-ended use of time and space, not just repairing people to be chucked back into a labour-market which has caused the damage in the first place. One way to assuage the rage of a 'worker' is to say that we need collective regulation to increase these spaces of care - eg, four day weeks, a robust parental and sabbatical culture, a revitalised public provision of housing and facilities - to enable properly the players' lifestyle. That is, everybody should get the benefits - not just jumped-up creative freelancers!

I want to follow your lead and help reclaim the label “Player” as a positive one. From your experience of adopting the word, what do you think are our chances?

I think we have a good chance, John - but I think it has to be founded on a deep and broad understanding of what we mean by play. We already have a discourse about players which is, in my view, narrow and agonistic - the big City "plays" and "players" swinging their dicks in the halls of Capital, the "playas" hustling for supremacy in the ghetto, never mind the empire of sports spectaculars coursing through our mass media. Play isn't just about competition for victory - far, far from it. If we keep people attentive to the dynamic, plural nature of play in our species-being, the aim to reclaim 'player' as a positive term might be worth trying for.

What’s next for you and the play ethic project?

My aim for the next few years is to come to a deeper synthesis of my researches into, and experiences of, play - whether through writing, consulting or just living. It feels like a lifetime interest has opened up for me around this topic - and to walk my talk, I expect to be surprised by what it turfs up next for me!

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.

A Welfare System For Players (1): The Spirit of Informationalism

A blog about a "play ethic" can't always be about favourite bands, fun software and festive practices throughout the world. I wasn't directly inspired to write the Play Ethic book by cavorting rejuveniles in gaily-coloured clothes (though there's enough of that in the music business), but by a line from the Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells.

Castells asked: If the "work ethic" could be described (by Max Weber) as the "spirit of capitalism", what might the "spirit of informationalism" be? In the late 90's I thought I knew what "informationalism" was. It wasn't just a "knowledge economy": after all, the Roman Empire was a knowledge economy, from its sanitation strategies to its legal code. Informationalism meant a social order that was deeply shaped by computer networks – and was thus a very flexible, unpredictable and mobile society indeed.

It struck me that the answer to Castells question was that the spirit of informationalism was obviously a "play ethic". If the "work ethic" made industrial workers duteous, time-keeping, diligent and self-disciplined, a "play ethic" would just as effectively shape informational workers to fit their system. That is, it would make them resourceful, able to shift tasks and learn new skills, willing to deploy their imaginations to solve problems in their organisations.

As writers like Richard Sennett have been mordantly pointing out for years, those were the psychological habits demanded by the new capitalism – demands not just driven by computers and networks in themselves, of course, but by the new pressures of global competition that they enabled. In his view, these habits resulted in the very "corrosion of character" itself. A strong character, according to Sennett, was composed from those traditions and practices that people derived from apply themselves to their trade or occupation. The new capitalism literally tore those old occupational identities to shreds, and then expected people to compose and recompose themselves from the fragments.

Yet I always resisted the idea (also promoted by critics like Zygmunt Bauman) that such 'players' were just the bright-eyed, endlessly malleable jack-rabbits of super-capitalism. This scepticism almost certainly came from my experience as a musician. There's no shortage of lifestyle and career flexibility in that realm. But within and around your art, you were free to make critical statements about politics and society – statements that would surely not be encouraged in any usual market-facing organisation, where your smarts and adaptability tend to be harnessed to serve "world-class competitveness", first and foremost.

When I discovered hacker communities (primarily by way of Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic), I found some kindred spirits. Hackers were as joyfully committed as musicians to their symbolic craft (making code rather than music, though of course both are notation in some way). And they were even better at deriving an ethics and politics from their practice.

Why was I interested in the politics of such players? Partly because the "work ethic" has always implied its own politics: from Paul's biblical injunction in Thessalonians that "them who shall not work, shall not eat" all the way up to the welfare-for-work proposals of New Labour and New Democrat governments in the 90's. 

The "dignity of labour" didn't depend on what that job was, or to what degree it expressed the talents, aspirations or desires of the worker, but mostly on the fact that they were willing to submit themselves to work – something that proved their "character", in Sennett's sense. And as long as everyone else agreed to work under these conditions, you could presume a kind of solidarity-in-privation: together we're all alienated, or at least relatively disatissfied, with what we're doing with our waking lives.

There were two compensations for this lack of essential autonomy over your productive life. On one side there were wages-for-consumption – money to buy the weekend/holiday hedonism of leisure and lifestyle. On the other side, at least in Europe, there was a welfare state which promised to repair you if you broke under the strain of labour (health), skill and re-skill you for the relevant slots in the labour market (education), and ensure you warmth and shelter in any eventuality (public sector housing).

The story of how that political arrangement fell apart (partly because of all those wider and deeper changes that Castells gathers under the title of 'informationalism', partly due to internal tensions – between the contrary pulls of consumer hedonism and producer self-discipline, for example) would take me into another thousand words.

But what I've always wondered is whether a "play ethic" – if it ever became dominant in a society - could generate its own political arrangements, its own social compensations, to match those of the work ethic. What would a welfare state be like that could support (or in the old Marxist sense, "reproduce") the intrinsically flexible, necessarily imaginative, endlessly communicative lives and selves demanded by our current model of capitalism? And if that ever came to be, how transformed would capitalism be as a result?

Over the next few days, I'm going to explore some notions floating around my various networks at the moment that might make up a "A Welfare System for Players". Heaven knows, I'm no social policy expert! But as a member of the precarious class of players, I have a direct interest in what reforms could be implemented. All comments and forwardings, of course, entirely welcomed.

The 'green work ethic'? A player's (slightly disgruntled) thoughts

As unemployment heads for 3 million in the UK, I've found a rash of newspaper features about the meaning of work - most of them citing the pop philosopher Alain De Botton's new book, The Pleasures And Sorrows of Work. The observation they share is how historically specific the idea of a 'work ethic' actually is – in which work is not just the means whereby one resources one's life, but also provides us with meaning and status. 

But I'm wondering whether this ethos is about to see a bit of a revival, in this new moment of crisis - and on whose terms it will revive.

In the Sunday Herald, DeBotton ties the work ethic to the European Enlightenment - and notes that the idea of the 'nobility of labour' emerged there at the same time as the idea of 'a marriage of love' (rather than of financial or procreative convenience):

We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human.

Peter Conrad in the Observer also cites the Greek disdain for work: 

The 12 labours of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labour-saving gadgets - not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.

Much to chew on here, including this: Advocates of play have to grapple with the elitist, even aristocratic overtones of many self-consciously 'playful' or 'leisured' cultures of the past. This has the logic of evolution behind it. Play thrives for complex mammals in zones where scarcity or danger is held well distant from daily life. And in terms of adult play, beyond its compulsiveness in youth, it's only been aristocracies and elites who have had (or commanded to themselves) the resources to enable that. The servant class is usually presumed.

But I've always questioned myself: do contemporary play advocates sometimes substitute automation and networks for slaves and homesteads? I was noticing this morning, while re-reading my Play Ethic book, that so much of its argument depends on an assumption that Westerners already live in an environment of technology-and-science-enabled plenitude. The target of much of my critique is against the Puritan (and Enlightenment) 'work ethic': after William Blake, I claim in the book that the work ethic is a 'mind-forg'd manacle' which ties us to hierarchy and conformity in overly disciplinary organisations. 

A 'play ethic' might allow us to think anew about our social order, if we presumed (as a player does) that our true 'human nature' loves self-expression, self-realisation and invention more than the dullness of routine. Applying a play ethic might help us to identify jobs, occupations and services that we don't really need to do, and imagine and forge new purposes and practices that better express our creative human nature. 

All this presumes a society of excess resources - where productive technology gives us enough material surplus to be able to make those choices. This is one of the oldest "modern" stories. For 150 years, one strand of the labour movement has argued that productivity gains should result in shorter working weeks for constant wages. This fulfills Marx's idea (and socialism's idea generally) that humans come into their own when they move beyond the 'realm of necessity'. And what did the Left imagine those workers would do with their 'realm of freedom'? Sometimes that's a horrific answer. I prefer the Adolf Loos quote: "The difference between myself and a Bolshevik is that I want to turn everyone into an aristocrat whereas he wants to turn everyone into a proletarian."

Yet are we coming to the end an era where we blithely assume we have, literally, enough resources to play with? Not just in terms of the inevitable contractions and expansions of capitalism, but in terms of the looming horizon of ecological crisis? 

The Three-Day Week: more rest, less work, more play...and better?

Signs that our economic crisis are compelling politicians to think the unthinkable. There are several reports today that UK ministers are considering imposing a three-day working week on large areas of British industry and services. With the general tightening of finance and credit, the suggestion from both business and government is that it would be better to have people working three days out of five at 70-80% of wages, with the gap covered by a government subsidy, than have the businesses collapse and risk the far greater social expense of millions more on unemployment benefit.

For those of us who have been advocating regulations towards a shorter working week, for a whole range of different reasons - to benefit from the productive gains of technology, to address our deep disatisfactions with our parenting or community lives, to expand opportunities for self-development and mental health - this suggestion seems more like an opportunity, than the "dark threat" the Independent renders it as. 

As Jonathan Gershuny and Madeleine Bunting reminded us several years ago, the original 'three-day week' in the UK of the early seventies - instituted as a response to energy shortages caused by industrial dispute - had a very small negative effect on general productivity levels, way smaller than the 40% drop you might have expected. (I found a discussion on Channel Four's community website which backs this up anecdotally). 

There's a classic unreconstructed quote in one of the Independent pieces, covering JCB's decision to adopt this policy: "All the wives have given their men lists of things to do since the hours disappeared," says a foreman varnishing his door. But again, those of us who are interested in the power of play have to ask: is this a true picture? Do people, when given more free time from work, simply turn to leisure-and-recreation? ("Gardening leave", they call it in the newspaper industry, when a writer or editor who had been poached by another paper was being paid not to work - ie, add value and quality - for his new organisation). 

One would hope that things have changed since the seventies, and that there might be a significant amount of workers - in these 'quality-of-life' conscious times - who would welcome and embrace this de-centering of work (and to a degree consumption) in their lives. There are so many social indications - from the rise in demand for literary festivals, allotments and personal training, to the attractions of social media (now becoming real utilities like The School of Everything, Gumtree and Freecycle), to the incessant anxieties over parenting - that we want more time and space away from the workplace. 

Why might we want this? Well, to explore these highly-connected, highly-informed, highly-sensitised selves and communities that we have become, in the network society. And maybe, as a result, this free-time will give us a new perspective on the kind of products and services that we have been making and delivering. If it's a "New Green Deal"  that both the US and the UK are promoting as the ultimate kick-starter for prosperity again, then that can't be just construction jobs - it will also require some degree of innovation and entrepreneurship, about how we can live sustainable lifestyles that feel as replete and complex as the ones we've left behind. I think some more guaranteed free-time in our lives to explore different lifestyle options - and maybe open up new green markets, products and services as a result of these explorations - might be not a temporary measure, but an essential shift.

Again, I point you to Benjamin Barber's fabulous essay in The Nation, where he suggests that the financial crisis gives us a real opportunity to re-assess what we regard as 'valuable activity' in our lives - and one of those re-assessments might be that if we aim to reduce our consumption, we'll be able to work less, and invest in life more:

What if Obama committed the United States to reducing consumer spending from 70 percent of GDP to 50 percent over the next ten years, bringing it to roughly where Germany's GDP is today? The Germans have a commensurate standard of living and considerably greater equality. Imagine all the things we could do without having to shop: play and pray, create and relate, read and walk, listen and procreate--make art, make friends, make homes, make love.

Sound too soft? Too idealistic? If we are to survive the collapse of the unsustainable consumer capitalism that has possessed our body politic over the past three decades, idealism must become the new realism. For if the contest is between the material body defined by solipsistic acquisitiveness and the human spirit defined by imagination and compassion, then a purely technical economic response is what will be too soft, promising little more than a restoration of that shopaholic hell of hyper-consumerism that occasioned the current disaster.

Amen. Let's see opportunity in this crisis - the play of possibilities in what might seem the darkest of situations.

Always living 'elsewhere': the new intraviduals

The splendidly urbane On Point podcast (from Boston's WBUR) informed me this morning about a new social-issues 'talker' from America, called "Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety" by a New York sociologist called Dalton Conley. 

For a book that's all about how much the old social opposition of work and leisure is being broken down by, amongst other things, 24-7 connectivity, I'm faintly ashamed to relate the context in which I was listening and taking notes. That is, cradling my iPhone, in an empty coffee bar at 10.00am in the business end of Glasgow, with some decaff and bacon roll by my dilatory side. Undoubtedly performing an act of 'weisure', in one of Conley's unlovelier coinages.

Though there's the suspicion that Conley is angling for Malcolm-Gladwell-guru-status in some of his pronouncements, there's also much food for thought in his spiel. Some choice quotes:

Changes in three areas — the economy, the family and technology — have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed — the intravidual — has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously...

Leisure? The 'good life'? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work — work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable — but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work. There is always an email to answer, a paper or memo to read, and a lecture to give or receive. Success in today's professional world doesn't mean retiring at fifty to play golf in Florida, it means working more and more hours as you move up a towering ladder of economic opportunity (and inequality). Socializing usually revolves around professional colleagues.

Sound familiar to you? The 'intradividual', flexibly responding to a demanding social world, certainly sounds like the 'self-in-and-at-play' that I've been talking about for years. (Deleuze talks about 'dividuals'in his final essays). Yet the second passage ties that player to a universe of endless leads, tasks, items of interest, possibilities of advancement - where the difference between 'friendship' and 'networking', or say 'family time' and 'surfing time', is completely elided. 

The image on the cover of his book - with a family arranged around a table, three with laptops and the other one plugged into her iPod - certainly horrified the admirable On Point host Tom Ashcroft, who pushed Dalton to take a negative line on this networked family (he refused, calling himself a 'social describer' than critic).

Yet I'd have to be honest and confess that I saw that scene regularly over the holiday period - an 11 year-old, a 14 year-old and an 19 year-old each with respective wireless laptops (one regularly purloined from parents), sitting around an old Dutch family table. 

The delightful aspect was that the periods of silent surfing were regularly punctuated by long, giggling interludes of You Tube inspired show-and-tell ('Downfall' mash-ups, lauguhing babies, and Fonejacker were the favourites). Sometimes there would be spontaneous dancing or harmonising to a particular track; and sometimes one would shout up from their browser, having found a particularly cute exhibition or film they wanted us all to go and see. Was this any different, in essence, from a classic family pastimes scene, with the copy, paste and link of their operating systems substituting for the magazines, glue and scissors of old?

To develop Dalton's coinage, we were all intra-viduals easily flipping into being inter-viduals - the fun, laughter and mutual benefit involved in sharing the resources contained in each others' networks. And if the parents are net-friendly (as we are), then this doesn't feel like some alienated gathering of functional schizophrenics, but actually a lovely, rich, memorable time together. 

But this happened in the holiday season - those rare moments when parents and children can hover around each other, untethered from their institutions (whether school, work or portfolio). Doesn't free-time, even in the digital age, still help cement emotional bonds? In the show, Dalton addresses this directly, by noting that in America, at least, the historical fact of mothers working more has not been complemented by the phenomenon of men working less (by comparison, Scandinavian legislation compels the sexes to take equal parental leave). 

He also talks about the psychological self-subversion of current American (These-Islands, too) anxieties over work, which he reckons is impervious to recession or boom. When it's bad times, you'll over-work because you want to hang on to what you've got; when it's good times, you'll over-work because you're comparing yourself with the rapidly advancing Joneses. Either way, you're anxious about not filling every minute with some moment of career-building interactivity. This is a kind of cul-de-sac perspective on human potential (bolstered by behavioural economics - see recent post) which I don't accept. There's more to the human condition that fear of failure, or resentment of success. 

And I still think we need to listen to some real radicals (here and here) on this matter. If the economic health of society now partly depends on our collective willingness to interact, to be creative and expressive with our social tools, don't we need to nourish that "mass innovation" (as Charles Leadbeater calls it) through new types of welfare and regulation? To be an "intervidual", to be a player, is exciting but exhausting: we need a complementary politics of time and care to help us repair and restore ourselves for this active, creative life. Which means sleep, holidays, sabbaticals, shorter-working weeks... you know my litany. 

But always scanning the horizons for other suggestions...

Why not start your weekend on Wednesday?

A useful column from the counter-intuitive economist Tim Harford, on why it is that we can't stop thinking of increasing consumption as the best indicator of a healthy economy. So many of the government measures deployed in the financial crisis are aimed at "restoring consumer confidence", and for good short term reasons:

Economists worry about a sharp fall in consumer spending, because when demand for goods falls, so does demand for labor. Our desire to spend less is quickly revealed as a desire to spend less hiring each other (and our friends in China) to make things. Result: economic collapse, unemployment, misery.

But in the long run, 

the picture is completely different. We earn—this is a very rough average—twice what our parents did when they were our age. When today's teenagers are in their 40s, there is no reason why they shouldn't decide to enjoy their increased prosperity by working less instead of earning more. Rather than being twice as rich as their parents, they could be no richer but start their weekends on Wednesday afternoon.

So why isn't that shift happening? Harford (a bit disappointingly) refers to some familiar studies in behavioural economics, which try to show that we want to earn more money because it's a sign of status - and that we're irredeemably status-obsessed. (It's the usual stuff: if you're given the choice between earning £100,000 in a society where people are earning more than you, or £50,000 in a society where people are earning less than you, you - irrationally - choose the latter option. As sociologist Alan Wolfe and I have both noted, in reviews of some of this stuff, it's mostly based on student samples in abstract psych-lab conditions. A very impoverished human data-set). 

His other answer is that historically, we already do have more free-time - more than four hours for women (and more for men) since 1965, and a huge gulf away from working (and dying) conditions at the turn of the century. Harford is a bit sneery about the "work less, spend less" movement, and its critiques of advertising as the bonds which tie our psychologies to consumerism. 

But he's somewhat trapped by his use of the tainted term "leisure" to define non-working time (tainted because it implies passivity and triviality). What we've been noticing over the years is that people are seeking the feeling of being fully autonomous and self-determined throughout all areas of their lives, whether productive, creative or familial - and we've called that the "play ethic". 

People's increasing interaction with social software and digital culture is one example of how the general urge to play (as I define play) is beginning to affect many different kinds of institutions. And create different kinds of institutions, too. See for example enterprises like The School of Everything or The School of Life, which are trying to fill up these extra hours Harford identifies with informal, innovative learning of all kinds, both on and offline. Indeed, they're realising the original Greek definition of school, shkole, as Pekka Himanen once wrote:

Shkole did not mean just “having time”, but also a certain relation to time: a person living an academic life could organize one’s time oneself – the person could combine work and leisure the way that he wanted.

For me, there is still a need for some kind of regulatory or welfare support - ie, a political strategy - to help people expand the zone of play into these increasingly less work-dominated lives. As Harford says: 

If this were a gradual process, mass unemployment would not result. People would simply earn less, spend less, wear a few more secondhand clothes, and spend more time reading or going for walks.

Add the collectivist energies of Web 2.0, volunteering and social action, and that's a picture of a post-recession (and maybe even post-consumerist) lifestyle that might well attract many. See the work of the Compass ginger group in the Labour Party for a sense of what the politics towards that might be.

Idling through the recession (and beyond)

Mark Kingwell, Canada's top pop philosopher, has written a compendium on idling (on a very long publishing delay, years after the UK's leisurely prince of idleness, Tom Hodgkinson, established his own dilatory empire). There's lots of bright wit in this puff piece in the Globe and Mail (thanks George Cairns for link), for example: 

Mark 1: ...What distinguishes idling from slacking?

Mark 2: The problem with the slacker is that he is, in the very act of resisting them, wedded to the norms of work. In avoiding work, or pretending to work, or hiding from the supervisor in the mailroom, the slacker is implicitly granting the world of work a dominant position. He gives work power as that which he should be doing even as he does not do it.

Mark 1: And idling?

Mark 2: Idling establishes an independent scale of value. It's like the difference between dozing - falling asleep from overwork - and napping, which we all know is an art form. The true idler enters the moment of not-working and takes it into a new realm of not even thinking about work, of strolling away from that collective addiction of the past 2,000 years.

All very familiar. (Will Hutton's review of my, Tom's and Carl Honore's book 'In Praise of Slow' put us all in the context of Western 'soft power' - displaying a kinder, gentler, less relentlessly acquisitive image to the rest of the world). But it was this exchange between the Mark's that really piqued my interest:

Mark 1: Suppose everyone was idle, though. How would society function?

Mark 2: Think of it this way. Any market economy is a failed attempt to distribute goods and services exactly where they are needed or desired, as and when they are needed and desired. That's all markets are, despite the pathological excrescences that nowadays attach to them: derivatives funds, advertising, shopping as leisure. If we had a perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because distribution would be frictionless. Most work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need. In other words, idling is consistent with capitalism's own internal logic, which of course implies, even if it never realizes, the end of capitalism.

Now, I guess this is some reference to a pure theory of the market of which I'm unaware. But it certainly sounds like elements of the internet - where distribution is fictionless (hey! another iPhone/Android app!), where the long-tail delivers exactly what you want (maybe not when you want, but in a few days anyway). And who can deny that, when we have a consistent experience of getting what we want from a network-enabled screen, our behaviour tends towards the intrinsic self-satisfaction of the idler? 

The other reference this sparks off is that of distributed manufacturing and local fabrication (which we're beginning to get a hint of with things like print-on-demand books in bookshops). This is the great wet-dream of the post-scarcity prophets - a state of material plenitude that would destroy economics as the management of scarcity, and indeed allow universal, beauteous idling (hello, Iain Banks' Culture). 

I was delighted to see the Star Trek end of this - "make me a milkshake in the Universal Fabricator, Deanna!" - get a run-out in Ed Regis's contribution to the World Question Centre this year. Problem is, 'molecular manufacturing' might not be possible, says Regis, due to "insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level". Well, they said the same about Trek's communicator and the teleport machine...