The Play Ethic

Pat Kane review of "Free Ride" by Robert Levine

This is my review (for the Independent) of the Robert Levine book Free Ride: How The Internet Destroyed The Culture Business, And How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. The book is fascinating, detailed and dogged in its defence of intellectual copyright in the digital age - but I think it lacks a wider societal context, to explain the take up of the "open web" and its distinctive attitude to the sharing (rather than the purchasing) of cultural artefacts. 

I didn't really explore this angle in the review, but I am brewing up a proper Socratic exchange with the Scottish writer Ewan Morrison, whose clarion-call to prevent "The End of Books" at this years Edinburgh International Books Festival caused quite a fuss. Ewan is embracing and endorsing Levine's argument completely - and we've begun our detailed exchange on this Facebook post. But watch this space, because I think we'll be announcing a more engaged, and public, discussion about this soon. Meantime, all comments welcomed below. 

How To Sink The Pirates of The Web 

Unedited Review of Robert Levine's Free Ride in The Independent, 2 September, 2011 (edited version)

By Pat Kane

 

My eldest geek daughter and I were helpless with laughter the other night, rapt at our screens before another webcast discovery. 

We had found a brilliant “mash-up”: footage of the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster, lip-synching precisely to the Tom Waits song “God’s Away On Business”. (Really, get thee to a search engine now: your day will be beatified). Such a diverting, obsessional labour of love is what we celebrate about the internet - amateur energies coursing through democratic tools, coming to mass attention from nowhere. 

But what might the respective intellectual-property lawyers from Henson Enterprises, or Waits’s record label Anti, have to say about such a wisp of joy? According to Robert Levine, they should be fully empowered to discourage such irreverent bricolage, with all manner of punitions and legal threats. 

In this comprehensive but relentless book, Levine (an ex-editor of US music business bible Billboard) wants to make us realise that the internet’s facilitation of “free culture” - or a world of piracy to some - has to come to an end. His case is that technology companies have built their businesses - whether web-based and advertiser-driven, or integrated device companies like Apple - on the basis of unpriced (or underpriced) content, made possible by the open (or more precisely, under-controlled) web. Levine has made an very authoritative attempt to substantiate the content creators’ fightback. 

But his angst for the good old days of the music business (roughly the early to mid 90’s, before those subversive, system-wielding geeks came to spoil the party) also reveals some rather grisly commercial assumptions. For example, one of his problems with iTunes, even though it’s a monetised service, is that it “unbundles” the album. The consumer is now able to spend less money picking off favourite tracks - rather than, as before, having to spend more money on a complete magnum opus (including those interminable urban soundscape tracks on the second CD). 

Yet Levine has no appreciation for how this unbundling allows listeners to create their own stimulating playlists, refining and amplifying their musical enthusiasms. Would this ultimately result in more spend per consumer? Levine cites studies that say no, against others that say yes - but he also admits there is a general failure of objective market research in this area. Yet it’s indicative of the overly corporate, pro-bottom-line tone of this book that even Apple’s brilliant, integrated and mostly successful effort to commercialise the infinitely copyable is worth his sustained grouch.  

What would a “functioning market” for digital culture look like for Levine? A balance of stick and carrot, entrepreneurship and regulation, which he calls “blanket” or “collective licensing”. The carrots are well-designed content “services” (the current exemplar is the music-streaming service Spotify). We receive a bountiful - but licensed - downpour of music (Levine thinks it could be extended to other media, like tv and journalism) to our various screens and headphones. 

It would “feel like free”, because the user experience is the same click-frenzy as present: it wouldn’t be free, however, because our actual payment would be subsumed into the rental fees we pay for our information devices. (Levine predicts that we would have to accept some price rises in these rents). 

The “stick” part is that licenses, obviously, have to be enforced. Performing Rights Society inspectors already go round radio stations, restaurants and cafes, making sure these establishments are paying their dues for playing music. So a software equivalent would regularly monitor the usages of these services across the networks - ensuring that some agreed proportion of revenues is returned to the rights-holders (be they corporations or individual musicians).

Levine hopes we can redefine copyright, “the right to copy” - an unenforceable absurdity after ten years of the vast copy-machine known as the Web - as copyrisk. Like traditional actuaries gathering together pools of money to insure against the inevitable risk of shipwreck (or car accident), the content business needs to find a way to collectively compensate authors and creators for the healthy turbulence of internet usage. 

You almost feel sorry for Levine, in all his mercantile passion, when he discovers where these “collective licensing” agreements are already proving most successful: in Northern Europe, from Ireland to Germany, Denmark to Finland. That is, in national cultures where “they socialize any number of expenses that others would view as private. And as anyone involved in health care can tell you”, he continues sorrowfully, “what works smoothly in Scandinavia can start fights in the US”. 

His call for a “statutory approach” in his own country, as the American polity gyres and gambles on its various fundamentalist axes, seems rather forlorn. 

Ian Hargreaves’ constructive recent Digital Economy report in the UK would seem to chime with this European approach. He suggested a one-stop Digital Rights Exchange, which would help make intellectual property somewhat more trackable - and thus licensable - across the expanding wilds of bandwidth. 

 And away from the heavy-metal clangour of “thieves” and “property-owners” (oh enough of that, for the moment) it’s the filigree of patient, intelligent policy - forged through a boring old stakeholder-driven commitment to a well-regulated mixed economy - that will bring stability to these debates. Which labours, to his credit, Levine fully endorses.

Incidentally, Hargreaves’ report makes an astute and charming proposal: we should recognise the rights of parodists and satirists to recombine digital material, without Matrix-like IP lawyers swooping down to exterminate them. It looks like, at least in this jurisdiction, that Cookie Monster Tom will continue to flap his gums freely. Our house will be pleased.  

My Sunday Herald essay: Joyous austerity vs. The X-Factor

This is the unedited version of an essay on the UK tv talent show The X-Factor for my old paper, the Sunday Herald. The theme I'm trying to explore is how the combination of conspicuous glitz and vertical business integration that the X-Factor represents is a response to the crisis of the music business, brought on by the internet and its decommercialising tendencies. But it's not the only model of how to make a living (if not a fortune) in the music biz post the web - and I show how me and my brother's band, Hue And Cry, are using the current landscape to our advantage. All comments, as usual, more than welcome. 

Sunday Herald 'Opinion' essay: Joyous austerity vs. The X-Factor

5 December 2010

By Pat Kane

For the last five years, it's become a thunderous seasonal ritual, with only one blip in the procession so far. From 2005-2008, surpassing even the three year consecutive run of The Beatles in the mid-sixties, the winners of Simon Cowell's fiendishly brilliant license-to-print-money The X-Factor have grabbed the Christmas No.1 spot: Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke. So far as the bookies are concerned, they're giving 8/15 it'll happen again.

Only last year, as you may remember, corporate multimedia pop didn't quite rule supreme. As a result of anti X-Factor activism on Facebook, the national yuletide favourite buzzing out of young people's smartphones across the land was Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name, with its invigorating refrain, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"

The leading candidate this year is called, wittily, Cage Against The Machine. This is another social-network campaign, aiming to defeat Cowell's phalanx of Matt, Rebecca and Cher with avant-garde composer John Cage's 4' 33'' (that's four and a half minutes of total silence). Available on Dec 13th, if you're interested.

So it's all fun and games in the new Roman circus: the emperors with their thumbs raised or dropped, the Christians bleating in their borrowed designer gowns, the vox populi whooping from the hall or voting with their far-off devices. And outwith the spectacle, disgruntled indie-music barbarians sulk in their bars and student halls, or occasionally get it together to throw boulders into the arena.

Is that it for the music business? With the BPI noting earlier this year that pop music has outsold rock music for the first time in decades, and with The X-Factor being credited as the single-handed saviour of the ITV network, is this the new model? Pop ingenues from the street squeezed through a variety of cookie-cutter genres by a series of grandstanding judges, who then shuffle to find their slots in a crowded release schedule run by probably the most cynical cultural operator in Britain?

Many musicians looking at the X-Factor would resist the artistic passivity and audience programming that it revels in. And I say can from my own experience that there's an alternative business model of music-making, where a more mature balance can be struck - a balance between the necessities of getting a money-stream from one's own material and performance, and the communal power of fans as they express themselves through digital networks.

But this is a vision of musical practice that comes much closer to the participation and sharing culture of folk, than it does to the conspicuous and plutocratic display of the X-Factor. Is Cowell's circus the commercial wave of the future, or the last lurid gasp of the hyper-consumerist past - and not just in terms of the music business, but for much of our public life as well?

Looked at from a great height (and yes, other actions could be performed up there) The X-Factor is a clever, comprehensive response by the traditional music business to the challenge of the digital generation- a generation whose mindshare has been scattered to the winds by a zillion media attractions, and whose consumer behaviour has been exploded by ubiquitous broadband and free filesharing. 

From his experience in the pre-internet heydays of the 80s and 90s, Simon Cowell has remembered a few things and applied them ruthlessly. One is the continuing role of television in family life, particularly at a time when everyone's lost in their own media niches. Weekend telly provides a welcome shared experience for work-wearied parents, and children too young to go out themselves - one that won't present any ethical or moral challenges, but will generate some degree of excitement and involvement from the audience. 

But one thing that's infuriating for the average A&R man are the media gatekeepers - producers and researchers - who control access to prime-time viewing. So Cowell created his own tv format: and in this, every element of the pop process - the broadcast show, the brandname, the performers, their rights and royalties, and their final recordings - is under one business regime. (Incidentally, there's not much irony in the name of Cowell's company, Syco. Much of the music business does indeed exist somewhere between psychopathy and sycophancy.)

So whether it's Rage or Cage against the machine, there is clearly a towering new music-biz "machine" before us - and that "all those people who don't seem to like X-Factor", as Cowell ruefully put it last year, are feeling oppressed by its operations.

In the last twelve months, this constituency has been self-consciously active in other areas too. Take the successful campaign to save the digital radio channel BBC 6 Music from rationalisation and closure. Or the (not-so-successful) tens of thousands that signed petitions to protest against the passing of The Digital Economy Bill, which will criminalise music downloaders through new powers of detection and enforcement

We have a Tory-dominated, services-cutting government, a clearly-identifiable musical establishment sunk in luxury and corruption, a general state of anxiety and dread .... So should we expect a 'new Punk' any day now, combining anarchy, technology and refusal? A new movement of street, campus and community music, articulating protest and advocating alternatives against a broken capitalism?

Well, let's see. But there's also currently a middling space between the top-down soul-shredding of corporate pop, and the bottom-up world of wikileaking and militancy about copyright. This is a territory, I would suggest, that most active musicians currently occupy. The question is: how can someone find a sustainable way to make music, for all those good reasons we love - to express what's inside you, to follow your aesthetic joy, to connect meaningfully with appreciative audiences - while at the same time, trying to circulate some cash around the situation?

This is where my own music career, with my brother Gregory in Hue And Cry, has operated over the last few years - and where many others are trying to exist also. There's an axiom we've been using which seems to sum up our the challenge of the sustainable music career in the digital age: use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce.

Unless there is a huge shift in how the internet is basically structured (and while that shouldn't be ruled out, it doesn't look likely), any recorded content that any musician releases will be able to be copied and recorded by anyone else. And that's no matter how intricate the restrictions placed upon each music file. The internet is a copy-machine plus a telephone - and infinitely so. 

At the moment, even services that have figured out a simple way for people to pay for digital content - like iTunes or Spotify - are largely relying on the laziness of the consumer, as they use their well-designed devices. However, one teenager with a copy of a sound-grabbing program can easily defy every corporate programmer's control codes.

So there's the "ubiquitous" part - your content can be digitally everywhere, largely untrackable and uncontrollable. Deal with it, dude. But given that capitalism only works when you can make a resource scarce, and thus price it, what scarcity is left to the commercial musician? One is, obviously, the musician herself. Unless they've been taking too many illegal substances, even they'd have to agree they can only occupy one point in space and time. And so far, it's still the convention that a gig is an enclosed space, with entry requiring a cash payment of some kind at the door.

The primacy of the gig actually accounts for the relative health of the UK music industry. PRS for Music's 2009 report showed that live income rose by 9.45% that year, where games and DVDs has flatlined. Regionally, the report notes that Scotland "punches well above its weight", with 11% of the UK's music revenues generated from 8% of the population. The reason given is that festivals like T In The Park, Rockness and the Edinburgh Fringe support a lot of tourist-like consumer activity.

But this link between music and tourism can happen at the level of individual bands. This Feburary we'll be doing the second of our Hue And Cry Weekends at Glasgow's ABC venue - this one, tied to Valentine's Day, is called 'A Glasgow Kiss' (naturally). We'll make ourselves available to fans through meets, greets, and soundchecks, provide them with a guide to enjoying the city for a weekend - and get a chance to sing love songs for two days.

There's another other element of scarcity available to the musician: beautifully produced material objects with a personal, customised touch (the very opposite of the immaterial nature of digital music). For example, we have a facility called Songframes, where Hue And Cry fans can order a display frame containing a vinyl copy of a song from our back catalogue, with handwritten lyrics and music, and a personal dedication. It's hard work for us, but we're doing pretty good business; fans are devoting frames to children, spouses, lovers, departed ones. 

I know this sounds like a very old scene of creativity. Craftsmen making objects for bespoke customers. Troubadors cultivating their audience as a community. Music operating as social currency as much as commercial product.

The crucial difference is that the internet allows the artist and audience to exist face-to-face online, building a virtual village square together (although populated by people across this island, and way beyond). In this square, the conversations and sharing come first - and from that collective enthusiasm arise opportunities to sell services and products of all kinds. But not to excess, and with a premium on quality and experience, not disposability and transience.

Does this new music-business model, the musician as community-minded enterpreneur, make you a living? Well, did the music business ever make a living for that many people? For me, it certainly has its place within a portfolio of earning activities - a craft conducted somewhere in the spectrum between professionalism and amateurism, and perhaps alongside some other specialised skill that society finds hireable (in technology, design or education).

Because the music business felt the brutal, de-monetising impact of digitality first, I'd say many musicians have been developing resilience and skills for survival that others could learn from.

Take journalism. Like musicians, journalists exist amidst a community of readers. As the internet unravels their protected revenues and saleable objects, how can journalists use their unique presence and skills to command a fee for services - and for what services, exactly? Also: where are the opportunities to create beautiful, treasurable and customisable objects of journalism? Does the iPad and other tablet readers represent a new way to combine ubiquity and quality - for a price?

The muddle-through (as opposed to top-down or bottom-up) strategies of the entrepreneur-musician might well result in a new stability for the music business. Artists will want to support music services that "feel like free" for music fans - giving users that sense of digital ubiquity that they love, but with some revenue (though certainly nowhere near as much as in Cowell's 80's heyday) collected through subtle licensing and contract agreements.

But the important attitude is to be sanguine and relaxed about these crazy times. It's a time for commercial invention and trying things out - not for panicked scaremongering about piracy and theft, which ends up alienating the most enthusiastic members of your audience.

The much bigger horizon is whether consumer-led economic growth, challenged by our need to achieve low-carbon targets, is actually an outmoded system. Beyond the Saturday night hoopla and the stadium mega-gigs, many musicians have been practising optimistic austerity for years. And that just happens to be the mindset which will enable us to cope sanely with drastic environmental limits on our lifestyles.

Beyond the baubles and conspicuous glitz of the Cowell circus, Generation Zero - preaching minimalist living and post-consumerist virtue - is waiting in the wings. And a participative music business, less concerned with high profit-margins and more concerned with the strong relationship between artist and audience, may be perfectly placed to answer their needs.

The X-Factor is at one level just some weekend fun, of course: no-one's frogmarched to the flat-screen to watch it. But from where I'm standing, some of its bombastic hysteria comes directly from the consciousness of its smug, but undoubtedly switched-on creator: I think he really believes the glory days of the 80's are back-back-back.

I'll certainly be voting to make sure John Cage gets to number one this Xmas. But the more enduring challenge to the X-Factor Machine will come from working musicians trying to figure out their new music business model, building it out across the networks and audiences, one event or recording at a time. For all his cat-stroking, high-waisted genius, I don't think Cowell understands the real X-Factor involved in making music at all.

Hue and Cry's Glasgow Kiss Weekend is 11-12th Feburary, ABC Glasgow. Their new album Bitter Suite, Again is available at http://www.hueandcry.co.uk

My provocation to Channel 4: TV in a low-carbon, meaning-rich, networked era

A friendly young tv crew came to our flat in London today, and filmed me delivering this provocation to Channel 4 - solicited by my comrade Mark Earls, who's helping them think about the purpose of television over the next few decades. The question asked was: 

Which - in your opinion - is the change in the world around us to which Channel 4 needs to pay most attention? And why?

And what - if any - are the implications for Channel 4?

Here was my answer (I'll post the video version when they send me it). 

Pat Kane's provocation to Channel 4

The biggest issue exercising me at the moment is the clash between our hyperconsumerist selves and objective environmental limits.

At the moment it seems like a car crash between opposites:

• There's a top down establishment consensus of scientists, environmentalists and politicians which sets scary targets for carbon levels in the atmosphere that we cannot surpass, or disaster looms...

•  ... And this message rains down on a populace which has had its every niche desire answered by flexible capitalism, powerful marketing and endless credit for the last few decades, and is understandably resistant, losing themselves in escapist media. 

A very pessimistic argument about human nature could be drawn from this process - that we cannot truly transform our attitudes, we can only be "nudged" or guided into good behaviour. Homer Simpson needing to be taken in hand by The Wise Elites. 

I'd prefer that we focus on that part of human nature that joyfully responds to adaptive challenges - our playful nature.

If we move beyond our consumerist identities, what are the opportunities for ingenuity, for learning new skills, for developing new lifestyles, for finding pleasure in other people in new ways? 

To me, that's the territory that a national media entity like Channel 4 completely occupies - the shaping cultural space between exhortation and desire. You have an opportunity and responsibility to draw out the joyful adaptor in people - offering them semiotic resources (scripts, tools, scenarios, images and networks) which can make the low-carbon society seem creative, fulfilling, absorbing and meaningful. 

My direct question to you is: can that be done while your business model depends on super-fantastic car ads and sofa promotions between the shows, stoking up exactly the same kinds of escapism-through-positional-goods that caused the problem in the first place? Or in concert with the industry, will you have to also start rethinking entirely the very function and purpose of advertising itself? What kind of information about products and services should people have in a post-consumerist society?

And the last point would be: is sit-back television-watching really the medium that will support this new active, green citizenry? Or do you need to redouble your online efforts, to make the best of the collective action and engagement techniques that the internet provides?

Poverty Porn, part two: comfortable homes, 'acting-up', quality or form

Been snowed with comments on all media about my column for the Sunday Herald on BBC's The Scheme as poverty porn, and my subsequent tv debate with Stuart Cosgrove.

I think the best sustained discussion forum has been 38 Minutes, Channel Four's new media community site in Scotland, where Stuart and I have had some detailed exchanges. See for yourself what the discussion has been like - strong and varied - but I thought I'd edit and present Stuart and I's exchanges here. I'll update if we barney some more (Joan McAlpine has also joined the conversation).

This is an important debate about the role of public media in Scottish life, among good people, worth arguing to a standstill, I think. And as I always say, all play needs its ethic - tv documentary no less. All comments welcome.

PAT:

The defining sequence in the second episode of The Scheme [first episode here] is where junkie Marvin's girlfriend Dayna is standing on the green beside a cameraman. The shot dips towards the grass for a moment, showing the cameraman's silhouette for a moment, then rises up just in time to catch one of the neighbours socking Dayna shockingly in the face. Now does anyone *really* believe that the camera was simply "documenting" this kind of violence - or were they actually eliciting this kind of behaviour by their presence, like some overly-resourced happy-slapping phonecam video? 

This is the gold, the money-shots, that these documentary makers were panning for - the dog shit in the hallway, the wee daughter fingering the condoms on the shelves - as much shock-horror about the failure of the moral character of the poor as they could string into one episode. If you talk to social workers who deal with cases like Marvin and Dayna's, their aim is to get them to "re-story" their lives - to construct a narrative about how they'll progressively head towards a better life, small step by small step. 

By turning the chaos of their lives into such a public strip cartoon - Sorcerer's Apprentice sound track and all - the documentary makers rob the poor of the right to control the story of their own lives, which is a fragile, tentative and patience-intensive process best conducted privately and supportively. There's a regrettable faux-lumpen mentality in some stretches of the Scottish creative classes - eg below, "marvin cannae watch the Scheme cos some cunt's nicked his Plasma" - which is actually a way of denying the extreme structural inequality in Scottish life: don't sweat it mucker, we're all heiders together. 

No we're not: some of us have the power and responsibility to help the post-post-industrial classes to articulate their visions and regain their autonomy. And some of us are ok with them being antic entertainment, ratings-winning displays of character collapse. Sorry, folks, can't post-modernise this one away.

STUART:

Yes they were selecting and highlighting for effect like every other form of media and communication from literature to film - really surprised you are so startled and appalled by this Pat

Observational documentary is among one of the most selective and narratively chosen forms of media why would it not do those things?

You can say its clunky in style but to be shocked that it happens is bizarre. Surely you don't believe that this form of television is any more or less about form and convention than other forms of television, like history-reality shows or light entertainment. You can't 'naive' that one away

• The Scheme - Clunky Observational Documentary that uses underclass Scotland as its raw material.
• Sweet Sixteen - Bitter-sweet Ken Loach feature which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
• Rab C. Nesbitt - Hyper-panto comedy series which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
• Greyhounds for Breakfast - Great hyper-real literature using underclass Scotland as raw material.
• David Gillander's utterly brilliant photojournalism which won the Getty Prize and uses underclass Scotland as its raw material.
• Channel 4's Knife Crime Commission - discursive current affairs that uses underclass Scotland as its raw material
• Billy Connolly's The Crucifixion - Comedic parody of the Bible which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.

All of the above cultural producers enjoy successful careers and to my knowledge live in very comfortable homes.

So for me the real issue is not whether form should sue unedrclass Scotland as Scotland - that is a time-honoured creative tradition. What is at stake is one of two things - quality or formal construct? Either the form of observational documentary or the quality of the series?

If you hate it as telly that’s fine – I’m not sure I really care to defend that - but get it into some perspective please. To object to film-makers creating a cultural product from this raw subject matter is bizarre, self-defeating and against the grain of history.

PAT:

Stuart, not remotely denying any documentary maker the right to edit, narrate, shape reality, any of that - silly point. But do you remember a show from the early Channel Four, called Open The Box? They did an item where they filmed a camera crew filming a working class couple, decent but not too articulate, and showed how they were herded around, patronised - the director David Cohen even said at one point, 'never work with children or animals'. 

Your channel at its most subversive - showing the objectifying, class-ridden character of so much media production - time for some of that media critique back I think. Here's a commission for you, suggested by a one time resident of Onthank (now a think-tank director): why don't you give the residents of Onthank a few HD cameras, an editing suite, some expertise, and get them to follow tv production folk around for six months?

And yes, you're right, the BBC did have a tradition of community video programming which they let completely fall away. Why don't we revive that in our brand new Scotland? Or can we really imagine the broadcasting Lubiankas on the Clyde really opening their doors to the contextualisng community? We probably need a Media Panther fan-out into the community, Chavez and Gilberto Gil style (and you're writing about Detroit 1967 at the moment, surely you validate that kind of activity?). We need at least two dedicated scottish digital channels to give us some space for different voices, other editorial policies on the reality of Scottish life, to be heard - and more importantly, practise their street-media craft.

But please don't try to deny the loop between a 'punchy', 'character-driven' bit of drama-doc on the broken poor, and the general shift towards 'behavour management' and 'workfare' that's been the legacy of Thatcher-Blair-Cleggaron. This edit sets up the undeserving poor in a way the Victorians would happily recognise, and no doubt Ian Duncan Smith will glory in. (Possibly deliberate? Commissioned at a time when it looked like a Tory victory was inevitable? Just saying...).

I even hate the term underclass we've all fallen into using - a semi-eugenic term from the American neo-conservative right. I think the gaze of this programme, the "casting choices" they've made makes me more disgusted with them everytime I dwell on it. I mean, poor poor Marvin is so emaciated he almost looks like a different species. I'll admit that what does come through their sub-anthropological gaze is a real crisis of masculinity - apart from the patriarch of the Crees, all the men in the first two episodes bear all the pain and distortion of two generations of worklessness, while the girls and women are all mostly ebullient glamazons. 

I've no problem about cameras trying to capture the physical reality of poverty - and as many have said here (and to me privately), the sheer witness of the camera in The Scheme might do some good in reviving our collective shame and responsibility about poverty in Scotland. But that'll be in spite of its leering, prissy aesthetic, not because ot it. Where are the Frederick Wiseman emulators in the Scottish documentary commuity?

STUART:

Tom says: “Oh, and can we stop referring to them as 'characters'. They're real. Aren't they?"

Pat says:”...not remotely denying any documentary maker the right to edit, narrate, shape reality, any of that - silly point."

Far from being silly I think that is the deep core of the debate and the real reason that 'reality Tv or 'reality ob-doc' divide opinion so virulently. We seem more relaxed about forms where the lines between the 'real person' and the 'character' are more clearly drawn. Frank in Shameless is clearly an actor playing a character, the residents of the Big Brother house are real people who have agreed to partcipate in an entertainment game in which they assume the role of 'characters', programmes like X Factor are talent shows in which 'characters' like SuBo surface from the real world to seek fame. The trouble with the scheme is that people are less willing to accept the finer and less obvious lines between real people assuming 'character' status in something so close to 'documentary.'

What is so special about the documentary form that it alone cannot be transgressed - they were real people, with 'characteristics' and in some cases were promoting their 'character' or as some people have sauid 'acting up for the camera'.

In an era where cameras surround us daily why are some people allowed to 'act-up' and others not?

PAT:

We all "assume character status" in the service economy - we're all asked to construct an attractive, performative self in order to fit in to various service behaviour scripts (whether svengali Simon Cowell's or the training dept of Marks And Spencer's). I'm sure that why all forms of reality tv, either entertainment or community-based, resonate with Britons - it frames, and sometimes unravels, the the process of 'front' (or bullshit if you're feeling negative) that a large chunk of the working population is involved in daily. Not so much 'acting up' as 'acting out' the role that HR departments lay down for them.

I do think there's a deep attraction among the service workforce in watching the couch-dwelling, quilt-hugging wastrels of The Scheme (which is why it's hurtling around their favourite medium, Facebook at the moment). The Schemies are on a permanent sickie, rather than the temporary one that so many take as a respite from the grinding of their soul (and which causes employers such continuing consternation). They are the spectre that Brown used to aim his workfare at - "lying about all day, watching tv, doing nothing" - and that IDS is cranking up the benefit police on.

I guess, Stuart, you think that if all the world these days is a Truman-Show-like mediated stage, then why shouldn't the work-shy poor of the Ten's have their unashamed moment performing themselves in the spotlight, in the same way as two upper-working-class 80s boys from Coatbridge thought they could make music like Quincy Jones?

But it's not the same, is it? If you're an artist - and I'd have to say, if you were the writer and director of Shameless or Rab C. Nesbitt, undoubtedly writing from their own experiences - your performance is an expression of mastery or skill or vision, or at least an aspiration towards that. You also at some deep level want your 'performance' to tie together some aspects of the human condition, touch some deeper truths. Do you really think Marvin and Dayna are being 'artists of their lives', that they are enjoying their rights to 'act-up' their incoherence and incompetence at daily living, in the same way?

A working-class artist writes their script, or their song, and feels empowered, enlarged - they've conducted an act of poiesis, they've made their mark on the world. What psychological impact do we think this media spectacle of their ruin, however 'acted-out or up' it is, will have on the more heartbreaking participants in The Scheme - and do the documentary makers even care? Or as some of us keep saying, are they basically just raw fodder for a media which is exploiting the status and performance anxieties of a too-competitive, too-marketised nation, by showing them either redemptive or cautionary narratives of self-construction?

That's why I keep coming back to a rethinking of community tv - and why 38 Minutes is a good place to have this discussion. Do we always need be trapped within the editing suites of Tellyworld when we think of a media that empowers those who need to be empowered? With social media, it's not about the right to edit or perform, but the democratisation of the means and skills of editing and performance.

I know this all sounds 'back to the future'/early 80's - but perhaps our world of ubiquitous, cheap and powerful media was exactly the infrastructure those community video makers were dreaming of. Enable that, Channel Four, and you eventually might get the documentary equivalent of a Kelman, coming out of nowhere predictable, rather than these well-fashioned penny-dreadfuls like The Scheme. Let people ACTUP, in the manner of the 80's aids-activist moment, rather than just 'act-up'.

JOAN MCALPINE:

It's not the middle classes who congregate around The Scheme and set up facebook groups about Marvin's plasma telly. It's other working class people - most Scots are just a generation away from a council house and still have family on schemes. The voice of the breezeblocks has no problem getting itself heard thanks to social networking. The faceboook fans of the show exchange anecdotes about the drug addicts and neds making their granny's life a misery in Drumchapel/Kilmarnock/Greenock or wherever. They recognise the Onthank "characters". But the views they express about benefit dependence, poor parenting and methadone prescription, are far more judgemental than anything the programme makers would dream of saying. They make a Daily Mail leader seem overly liberal. (If I may be allowed my own Daily Mail moment, why the hell was poor Dayna on a methadone programme at the age of 18? Was there really no alternative? It was the social workers, not the programme makers, who did that.) Unlike Pat I think the programme was fair and showed the complex side of many characters - particularly that of Gordon Cunningham, trying to raise his family and make amends for his own past mistakes. The only ethical issue I have is with the young child Kendal who was unable to give informed consent and who doesn't really need this difficulty added to the other burdens in her life ie her hopeless mother.

One aspect of The Scheme's popularity that has been overlooked in these discussions is it's uncompromising Scottishness. We hardly every see slices of contemporary Scottish life on telly, or hear people speaking this language - the skeletal, linguistic remains of Burns' Kilmarnock Edition. When we do, we find it hilarious. That's why the character's "catchphrases" are now being printed on t-shirts. Mark is right to compare it to the John Smeaton moment. But what does our excitement and hilarity on hearing Scots enter the mainstream say about our attitute to the language we still speak on occasion, and which our parents and grandparents used unselfconciously? We love to hear it, but we simultaneously cringe. It's fit only for comedy shows. We mock these characters because, unlike us, they are unable (or unwilling) to adjust their speech patterns for the occasion.

fOR MORE SEE http://times.cluster.newsint.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article7140118.ece

STUART:

Pat says about the nature of people 'performing' But it's not the same, is it? If you're an artist - and I'd have to say, if you were the writer and director of Shameless or Rab C. Nesbitt, undoubtedly writing from their own experiences - your performance is an expression of mastery or skill or vision, or at least an aspiration towards that. You also at some deep level want your 'performance' to tie together some aspects of the human condition, touch some deeper truths. Do you really think Marvin and Dayna are being 'artists of their lives', that they are enjoying their rights to 'act-up' their incoherence and incompetence at daily living, in the same way?

I entirely agree with this there is a difference and there is a qualitiative gulf between the two things. But I am reluctant to say that Paul Abbot's right to recreate his families failings as the semi-autobiographical author of Shameless - a series I care a lot about, therefore prevents others from authoring their lives even if it is with less creativity. If that were the case a lot of created culture would fall away. Is 'showing off' in The Scheme so markedly different from say being drunk at a local karaoke, or being so incoherent you actually can't perform which is what I've seen from both Gil Scott Heron and The Pogues over the years. I'm nervous about a hierarchy that says some have permission to 'perform' via the mass media and others don't and that the permission will be granted by those that already enjoy the privilege of success in life. 

PAT:

Stuart, yes, I guess I'm making an artist's critique of the kind of "presenting" and performance that's going on in The Scheme. Kimberley's dance competition was utterly fantastic - like an irruption of Rio and Berlin into the middle of Ayrshire. (Away with yir El Sistema - I could have done with a whole documentary about that event). But apart from that, are there no local bands there, no hackers into technology, no menshie wall-sprayers? What courses, therapies, classes were happening at the community centre that WAS built? No joiners/decorators/sparks who were applying their compulsive ingenuity to local projects, house extensions? Looking at poor communities through the lens of what craft and skills they have gives a different result than picking off the worst or near-worst families and turning them into self-subverting strip cartoons. We know the old names to guide us by - Paulo Friere, Augusto Boal, recently Richard Sennett - and there are a few new ones too (Simon Yuill's history of bringing notational skills into tough communities comes to mind).

My youngest bro told me of a call he heard on Real Radio - a guy claiming to have been covered by The Scheme's makers for six months, in which he built up a help website to aid diabetes sufferers, and got married to his childhood sweetheart. He'd been told he hadn't make the cut - "maybe my story was too boring", he'd said. I know from my correspondence that there are many more, subtler stories to be told about Onthank than we're getting here - to grant this edit the generic title of 'The Scheme' is a complete misnomer about life in these communities. I hope one of the consequences of the stushie around this show is that we could perhaps get a web-enabled 'Stories from The Scheme' - stories not used, longer testimonies from people, interesting sideline material, follow-ups on the fate of individuals. And perhaps BBC could revise its editing policy, and invite those filmed into the heart of the production process - an education for both sides, very possibly.

Joan, you're right about the Scots-language element not being remarked upon - thought as a veteran of the Poll Tax wars, you'd probably want a Scots that had a lot more militancy and political consciousness than here. But on methodone and housing - we just don't know what stage of care any of these characters are at, how well others are doing round about them: it's a snapshot of the worst families entirely shorn of any of the systems that are undoubtedly trying to handle them, part of my beef about the prurient selectiveness of the series - showing the pathology, not the sociology. Something less pornographic (yes, still using the term) and fetishizing of the poor wouldn't get the Facebook groups frothing.
 

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 Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Some rough but subsequently edited speaking notes for my presentation to the Creative Clusters conference - organised by the Huddersfield Media Centre, and taking place at the stunningly beautiful Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Delighted to meet you all - be great to hear any responses in comments below, or directly.

The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

I'm fascinated by the premise of your event: what makes for a good 'creative cluster', that is, a place, space or locality where cultural industries can flourish?

Certainly as a working musician in Glasgow I know the enabling conditions of a good 'creative scene': a vibrant gig circuit, a density of art schools, music courses and big universities, a non-panicked official attitude to a culture of hedonism, many urban zones for convivality, public display...

But another enabling condition is a sense of trust and reciprocation between musicians: favours and collborations are as much a 'social' currency as money. I think we can look at 'clusters' of hackers/new media, fashion and design, and say the same thing. 

So there are some growing rules and disciplines that guide what makes a creative scene, which can then be the foundation of creative industry - Richard Florida's three t's - talent, technology and tolerance - are to me still pretty good advice.

But I've become interested in the deeper roots of creativity. What justifications can we find in human nature - in psychology, biology and anthropology - for a visionary creative industry policy?

I picked this up from your own Creative Cluster conference website: "businesses that trade in creative goods and services often have a profile that is hard for government and investors to recognise, and their needs can be very different from those that trade in physical goods"

Creative-industry policies may indeed seem to the outsider to be lacking in obvious outcomes, or involve a degree of imprecision or process, or seem to willfully flout a certain disciplined use of space, time and resources.

It's my contention that play's role in human development is a new foundation for much creative policy. In our justifications of creative sector policies to the wider world of financiers and politicians, we need at some point to stake a claim about human nature. That we at least might be able to start thinking of ourselves as not just homo et femina economicus, but also (and perhaps increasingly) homo et femina ludens.

Parenting the Play-Kids? A "play ethic" for the BBC

This is a paper for the BBC's R&D department called "Parenting the Play-Kids?", which is my suggestion of what a "play ethic for the BBC" might be (I've already made a stab at this a few years ago). It's triggered by some academic research the Corporation did on youth engagement with their online services (the papers are hotlinked in the essay below). The final "newspaper" (available here as PDF) also has some splendid contributions from online experts like Bill Thompson and Stephen Heppell (you can also e-mail request a physical copy). As ever, all comments welcomed below.

PARENTING THE PLAY-KIDS?

The net is one big playground for kids, a space where they can productively fool around with ideas, identity and media. Should the BBC join in? What can Auntie do for the Playful Generation?

For any modern parent, it's a familiar scene. You stand over your children's shoulders, however covertly, watching as their nimble fingers flutter over the keyboards, nunchucks and touch pads of their digital devices. An Arsenal-themed Powerpoint sits under three separate browser windows – one for chat, one for music sharing, one for Bebo or Facebook.

Someone's sending links of pics for the Powerpoint; fingers flutter back a rebuke, adding their own snippet of information-plus-emoticon. (The mobile intrudes regularly into the exchange, an angry buzzing fly trapped in a tin). And like some kind of domestic water-feature, the sports or cartoon channel shimmers, murmurs or explodes at the other end of the room, the tv merely an ambient input – or waiting to be turned into the full spectacle of a console game.

Yet strip out the flashy and mutable interfaces of these technologies, bracket off the sheer plenitude of material available to the digital child, and what kind of behaviour do we have here? Nothing too far, I'd suggest, from the classic moment of play – that developmental scene present in most human societies that have achieved some distance beyond scarcity or sheer survival, and can thus provide a surplus of toys and materials for their irrepressibly ludic young ones. 

Despite the hi-tech means, collages are still being made here, songs are still being sung and learned, teasing and hazing is still being conducted (across the input boxes), intensely imagined worlds of heroism and camaraderie are still being constructed and explored (frame by frame, level by level).

It's not that our children aren't 'digital natives', whose amateur (i.e. passion-driven) literacy and facility with ICT presents such a challenge to less hyper-mediated educators, broadcasters and parents. It's more that play, in the very way it constitutes our basic, complex-mammalian humanity, has itself always been digital – if by 'digital' one means the ability to compose and recompose culture and experience, with absolute combinatorial freedom, using abstractly redefined elements and materials.

The evolutionary urge and animus of play is to serve what the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith calls "adaptive potentiation". The very principle of variation that play seems to stand for – all those ways of 'taking reality lightly' that stretch from the crudest jokes to the most elaborate glass-bead games, from dressing-up to situationist art – functions to aid human survival and flourishing.

Our play moments generate hypotheses and possibilities, rehearsing us for the complex business of getting along with other complex, linguistic and self-conscious human animals. But play also delivers an emotional payoff, primarily optimism and hopefulness. We get a surge of positive, coping feelings from the games we construct, enlist others to, and try to succeed at ourselves. We are energised by the simulations we build by ourselves and with others to address some deficiency, or mitigate some challenge, in the real world. This child-like, but not necessarily childish indefatigability (or "neoteny", as the academics have it) is a particularly essential survival trait.

If this is the deep meaning of play in human socio-biology, then what becomes particularly powerful about our digital platforms and technologies is that they actually match, map and mimic the essential variability of play to an unprecedented degree. These children may be such 'digital natives' because they might well be the first generation of humans whose 'playful nature' has been given such powerful and appropriate tools of virtualisation, recombination and communication. Their phantasmagorias of play can now be made into robust worlds and environments, in which the playmates are numerous and global, and the experience can be as physical (eg the Wii console) as it is pixellated.

This will certainly be a generation of children who expect to manage their company's inventories via game consoles, or do their five-way business meetings via smart mobile phones. But their natural embrace of networks-and-digitality may have deeper, perceptual consequences. As the futurist and programmer Marc Pesce said in The Playful World a few years ago,

our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days.

A generation demanding that their material and social world remain as pliable, as infusable with imagination and desire, as their childhoods: is this a step-change to be welcomed or feared? It seems, at least, to be a possibility we should be prepared for.

The Man in Our Mirror: Michael Jackson

This is a piece written 24 hours after Michael Jackson's death, and commissioned by my old newspaper, The Sunday Herald in Scotland.

MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAN IN OUR MIRROR

By Pat Kane

Sunday Herald, 28 June 2009

THE misty black-and-white clip has been opening most of the televisual retrospectives for the last few nights, and to me it's the alpha and omega of Micheal Jackson. We're somewhere in the mid-sixties, and someone's on their knees with a camera in a murky Motown audition room. The band's cropped off at the chest, and all the universe is looking at this motion-blur of a boy. 

He's a compressed James Brown, in almost every way: the box-shaped 'fro, the tight tailoring, the carnal mathematics of the dancing (part robot, part boxer, part libertine). And that voice – impossibly percussive, a rythym section unto itself, wringing melody out of the tightest of corners. 

But in any of his early performances, you have to look closely at young Micheal's eyes. They are large brown pools of stillness, uncreased by any of the tell-tale signs of excess passion or abandonment, even as he throws out those startling extemporisations of larynx and limb that rightly took him to global fame. 

Look at this most naked of talent-in-the-meat-factory moments - with his ruthless father-exploiter Joe Jackson behind him, and the relentlessly aspirational regime of Berry Gordy's Motown ahead of him. Look at Michael. Right at the heart of this briar patch of virtuosity, ambition, brute commerce, punishing self-discipline - you're wondering who's looking out of those eyes. Is he utterly calm and self-possessed? Or is he utterly null, his soul the property of others? 

Cut to his last ever recorded interview, with an ABC news reporter only a few days ago, on the planned O2 concerts in London. "To do this you have to sacrifice your life, your childhood", he enunciates clearly, the timbred voice of a fifty year old evident through the crackle. "It's giving up your life for the medium". 

As the narrative begins to coalesce around Micheal Jackson's death – that of a weary, chronically unwell, stressed-beyond-imagining mature man, whose body finally rebelled against the regimens of performance and enhancement it had been subjected to for far too long – we need to keep in mind that lithe, strange little android, shimmying across the rehearsal tape. 

What was it like to be Micheal Jackson, from the beginning to the end? To "give up your life" – from that very tenderest of moments where his self was beginning to form, till the end of his complex, wracked adulthood – "for the medium"?

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 factory and playground (1): the travails of 'fan labour'

This is the first contribution I've made to a fascinating group of thinkers and activists called the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), whose organiser Trebor Scholz is organising a conference in New York in November on 'Digital Labor: the internet as factory and playground', which I hope to attend. It's a fertile space, generating much thought and insight, so I'm going to share my postings here. (Apologies in advance - it's an academic space, so Specialized Jargon Will Be Deployed Occasionally). 

THE TRAVAILS OF FAN LABOR*

In terms of a debate about whether users' interactivity with net platforms is a form of exploitation of labor (in the Marxist sense), I'm aware that I might be living a somewhat schizophrenic life. In one domain, I'm a working musician who is part of a UK "legacy" act from the 80's, Hue And Cry. Since our relaunch in late 2008, our strategy has been to use the enthusiasm of online fandom to reanimate our "brand", by using flexible and media-rich social networks (particularly Ning) to capture the passions raised both by our new music, our live performance, and other traditional outlets of media exposure (radio, TV, press).

 In these sites – particularly the Music Club- we actively encourage and facilitate all kinds of 'fan labor' (cultural note: our biggest hit was called "Labour of Love" in 1987, more inspired by Gramsci than Bateson). This can include: cam-phone audio-visual recording from gigs; giving fans the opportunity to suggest and vote on songs they'd like us to perform and record; allowing fans to upload their own covers of our songs. 

But this doesn't include a lot of emergent, spontaneous activity that comes from the users' own ability to generate sub-networks and forums of their own, within the Hue And Cry Music Club site. We don't charge subscription fees to the site (like many other bands), and we have a programme of regular updates of audio-visual content produced by my musical partner and I – again, freely streamed. 

There's much to say about this experience – which I hope to share at the NY conference in November. But in terms of kicking off this debate, the core point might be that our presumption has been that we're dealing with a radically counter-commercial audience and environment – one in which digital networked distribution of music has driven its price point to effectively zero, and in which that music has almost become a kind of 'community currency'. By that I mean a system of exchange whose value accumulation is fan enthusiasm and commitment, rather than straightforward monetary rent from IP-identified saleable objects. (Although as Spotify, Last.fm and other outfits show, a licensing system may be a possible recommodifier of music consuming habits, though with the pressure of 'free' keeping overall revenue much lower than the heydays of CD sales). 

So in terms of making a living, we have fallen upon the maxim "use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce" – ie use the ubiquity and tending-towards-free circulation of digital content to raise awareness about those real-world moments of spatio-temporal enclosure (the gig, the meet'n'greet, the music workshop) whose boundaries can be controlled, and thus commodified. (Our refinement on that is to create our own 'ubiquitous' commons of Hue And Cry music within the Music Club – 'reterritorialising', to no doubt misuse Deleuze, the deterritorialised flows of digital culture).

It's not that we don't try to sell recordings anymore – we do, and we are doing so, though the objects these recordings are attached to are way beyond the old CD, and are more lifestyle/luxury products with music inserted, an extension of our "brand" across non-musical physical objects. But our working presumption is that recorded music, because of digitisation, networks and their innovations, is always under a huge gravitational force dragging it towards free usage.

And just to be clear, I come at the question of what value is being realised by commercial platform owners by the free labor of users from a small-business perspective – as artists seeking some kind of income from our endeavours and enterprises. We are rights-holders in our own small company, who seek to use non-commercial, part-commercial (the usual social platforms) and fully-commercial (ie larger distributors and syndicators) networks to promote our music, both recorded and performed.

Commercially, I should be agnostic-ironic about what networks are best for that purpose. But civically, I'm a supporter of the 'innovation commons' of the Net a la Lessig, and would resist any attempt to tamper with the basic end-to-end architecture of the Web (ie, to create tiers of net access with protocols restricted, for whatever reason). 

I guess I have to stake out my petit-bourgeois, mixed-economy, social-democrat traders' identity at the beginning. And what I'm looking for from a conference/discussion on 'the internet and playground and factory' is a new political economy of the Net that can find a place for creative and sustainable cultural enterprise, within this complex landscape (as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks) of market, state and 'sharing' economies. 

I feel that the answers may lie as much in welfare and social policy. That is, what kind of social provisions and support can be made for a 'general intellect' now active throughout society, as the Italian Marxists say? Does a four day week or a citizens' income more effectively answer our anxieties about our affective and cognitive 'lives' pouring into these networks, than a discourse about how our free labor benefits Google's bottom line?

*with concessions to the American linguistic imperium