The Play Ethic

Summit Series Preview (1): me, Bill C, Ray K, Jason & Max...

Now here's an adventure... I've been invited to speak on a panel, and hang about for three days, at an invitation-only event called the Summit Series in Washington DC. May 13-16th 2010 - here's my session, titled “Media for Change”. 

It has a pretty high-powered cast-list. From the heights of the US power structures (Bill Clinton, Ted Turner, the MD of Carlyle Group David Rubenstein, a clutch of White House “innovation officers”), through scientists and gurus (from the edges - long-life techno-advocates Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Gray – to the founders of Craigslist and Second Life, as well as quite a few health and yoga masters), to a decent sprinkling of Tinseltown glamour (R'n'B titans John Legend and Russell Simmons, Peter Petrelli from Heroes, the MD of Variety, an Estee Lauder 'spokesmodel').

But the driving force of the event is the twenty-something organisers' belief that they are the “Millenial leaders” - a generation born in the 80's, but getting ready to take power (see this NYT article which captures their culture well , and their press page). Their agenda seems (from this event) to be a heady mix of social and tech- entrepreneurship, dreams of human life extension and techno-utopianism, and a lot of 'playing hard' - they have a 'Revelry' strand which involves hip DJs and jam bands, 'altruistic' dating casinos and paintballing.

My entry point is through the inimitable duo of Jason Silva and Max Lugavere, hot young anchors of Al Gore's Current TV network (and known in the US press as “Al's boys”) - both of whom are big fans of my ideas, and particularly Jason, who's something of an ardent transhumanist and futurist. Here's his Huff Post columns, and below is a teaser for his forthcoming documentary (in which I am planned to appear) called 'Turning Into Gods' (from the old Stuart Brand saw, "we are as gods and we might as well get good at it").

TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from jason silva on Vimeo.

I'm going to write about this event in some form or other over the next few months, and will gather much material while I'm there (interviews, podcasts, etc), as well as blog from the event. 

But I seems I am being caught up - from my Glasgow/London perch, sending out memes about the Play Ethic - in a new wave of Gen Y/Millenials-era public entrepreneurship in America. They are naturally globalist in outlook, completely native to the internet society, optimistic about growth (but in a green- and socially-centred way), and seek a new justification for their enterprise which gets beyond the Puritan work ethic (which is, I guess, why I've been invited). And (of course) they're inspired by Obama's victory, which has given them a new political horizon of successful activism. 

On the eve of a UK election which has possibly registered a million extra younger voters, will we begin to see the same urge here for a generation to identify themselves as "millenials" quite so self-consciously? 

All fascinating. More to come. 

The Play Ethic and the Financial Crisis

Here's the first draft of an essay I'm contributing to a Stanford University Press volume on 'Learning from Global Financial Crisis'. All comments welcomed (here's PDF).

The Play Ethic and the Financial Crisis

Pat Kane 

First draft, 26th April 2010. Contribution to Shrivastava and Statler, Learning from Global Financial Crisis: Building the Future Creatively, Reliably, and Sustainably, Stanford University Press (forthcoming) 

For those of us whose topic is the cultural, psychological and evolutionary reality of play in the human condition, the financial crash of 2008/9 only confirms the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of our subject.

One can cite immediately the self-description of many financial agents in this environment as 'players in the financial game' themselves, part of a long tradition of sportive and contestive metaphors in Western business culture itself.ⁱ The oeuvre of journalist Micheal Lewis, moving effortlessly between casino capitalism and sports studies, is exemplary here.ⁱⁱ In his classic writings on the 'organisation man' of mid-century America, William H. Whyte notes that when business uses sports metaphors,

the goal of sports activity is always unambiguous … Participants do not come together to discuss or debate the ends for which the activity has been established, but rather take this end for granted and apply themselves in a single-minded fashion to the task of developing the most efficient means to achieve the predetermined, unchanging and noncontroversial end: winning.ⁱⁱⁱ

What's interesting in Whyte's quote is the implication that contestive, zero-sum games as a framework for finance is not the only way that “participants” in a marketplace might come together. Discussion or debate on “the ends for which the activity has been established” - what mainland Europeans might easily call “stakeholder” capitalism, or South-East Asians “the infinite game” of the keiretsu^iv - is not within the autotelic purview of the Anglo-American financial player. They are focussed on their own and/or their shareholders' pecuniary victories, with all other social externalities “beyond the game” simply imperceptible.

And “developing the most efficient means” to maximise shareholder and personal value is a delightfully moderate phrase to apply to the “financial innovations” that brought the transatlantic banking system to its knees. There are a few fascinating parallels between innovative processes in both sports and finance, conducted as “finite games” where victory comes at any cost. In both spheres, there is a semi-covert pursuit of biotechnical enhancement of human performance, both of which test the existing regulatory structures to their limits.

In sports, we see subterranean regimes of chemical and surgical enhancements surfacing controversially in every other tournament – and even, with the disabled athlete Oscar Pistorious (known as the 'Blade Runner'), a challenge to the very adequacy of the human skeleton.^v In finance, we see the cognitive and cybernetic enhancements that the “quants” derive from their superpowered computers, which enable the algorithmic trading of minute fractions of debt and currency fluctuation, at speeds largely beyond human deliberation. ^viIn both domains, we see the perversion that theologian James Carse once predicted as the result of an “infinite game put at the service of a finite game” - that is, human possibility and ingenuity harnessed to the ends of supremacy-in-contest, a slip from the autotelic to the autistic.^vii

The perversion comes in the very collapse of the “fair play” ideal inherent in both sportive and financial games. The relentless pursuit of personal performative advantage subverts the very regulations and refereeing which gives each game-space its legitimacy – that which guarantees that the market or sporting field will be a open, viewable spectacle of evident strategy and meritable effort. Without referees or regulations, each zone of contestation would be a chaos of all-against-all.

Thus we see a complex resurgence of the power of regulators in both sport and finance. The soccer referees empowered to penalise “divers” and “fakers” in match-play, who themselves were taking advantage of the outlawing of particularly egregious and destructive tackling; the financial regulators across the developed West pressing for greater transparency in, and impedance of, trading – and like the soccer referees, literally attempting to shape the rhythm and flow of financial transactions.

The subtle balance of the role of conscious regulation vis-a-vis free play in these arenas of transaction and interaction is interesting to note. There has been a strong intellectual alliance between free-market ideology and game-theoretic/complex adaptive systems science for quite a while now. Prepared by Hayek's idea of the market as a “game of catallaxy”,^viii which enables wealth-growth as a consequence of the necessarily limited systemic knowledge of the market trader, much of the economic theory that accompanied the networked digital (or 'New') economy of the 90's and 00's had a romance with an 'evolutionary' context for enterprise.

These writings – exemplified by Wired magazine and its founding editor and lead theoretician, Kevin Kelly – saw the company as an survival-oriented organism in a ecosystem: relying on its own adaptive resilience and flexibility to progress, probing its niche until it established some local dominance, or otherwise expiring, but in any case excepting itself from wider “discussion or debate about the ends of their activity” as epistemologically impossible.^ix If the environment of finance is regarded as a teeming rain-forest of biological diversity, rather than something more institutional (and thus regulable), then “financial innovations” of whatever kind become acceptable in the general creative destruction: a CDO or derivative is mere mulch falling healthily to the forest floor. Two years after the Crash of 2008-9, we know differently.

Yet if we are to think about the relationship between play theory and business/finance more progressively, it might be worthwhile shifting the terms of consilience between economics and biology away from game theory and complex adaptive systems thinking, and towards the ethological and psychological studies of the 'ground of play' being conducted by scholars like Stuart Brown, Brian Sutton-Smith and Marc Bekoff.^x That is, away from abstracted logics of interaction between entities in a network, and towards the actual behaviours of embodied, materially-potentiating complex mammals (like us). As an evolutionarily-determined psychology, I would stress that this is far from the “Homer [Simpson] Economicus” described by the behavioural economists, that easily governable human afflicted by short-term perspective and a fatal inability to regulate desire or mood.^xi

I am more interested in how the developmental moment of play in complex mammals, but particularly humans, constitutes our neoteny – that is, the way we extend the flexibilities, enthusiasms and response-abilities of the child-at-play throughout the span of our adult lives. What are the conditions which support and enable healthy, resilience-building play, and install a capacity for “adaptive potentiation” into humanity? And what might they tell us about the healthiest arrangement between the free-play of financial speculation, and the structure of financial regulation?

To begin, let me suggest that neoteny's generation of play and playforms throughout the human life-span is homologous with the deeply constitutive processes shaping the design, functionality and culture of the internet. The internet could represent an extension of the "ground of play" that we see across the higher complex mammals – that open but distantly monitored developmental zone of time, space and resource, where potentiating risks are taken by explorative, energetic organisms, in conditions where scarcity is held at bay.

Lion-cubs or chimps compelled to diversively play, risking injury and predation, but in a delimited zone with ultimate defenses; children in their local playground, enjoying their rough-and-tumble with solid equipment and open space, under some kind of municipal governance; all of us on the internet, improvising our sociality and extending our conviviality with powerful communication tools, resting on a complex but (so far) resilient infrastructure. All of these can be cast as complex-mammalian 'grounds of play', sharing three conditions – they are 1) loosely but robustly governed; 2) a surplus of time, space and materials is ensured; 3) failure, risk and mess is treated as necessary for development.^xii

So the 'constitutive' power of play in humanity – that neoteny-driven potentiation that excites both autonomists and socio-biologists – seems to also require a 'constitutional' dimension: a protocol of governance securing certain material and emotional conditions, to enable a rich plurality of playforms. When Lawrence Lessig speaks of the Net as an "innovation commons”, ^xiii the resonance with a socio-biological vision of the ground of play is clear. His idea that the internet represents an "architecture of value" is also homologous with these conditions for play: both are discernable zones of rough-and-tumble activity in which our social-ethical identities are forged.

Map this over to the tumult of computerised finance, however, and a certain blitheness appears in the presumption that a “play ethic” is implied by the operations of an end-to-end network like the Web. Tiziana Terranova has looked at how the internet has come to be blamed for the uncontrollable nature of the financial crash of 2008.^xiv Specifically, she examines how the hyper-gossipy “echo chambers” of Web 2.0 had “contaminated” financial capital, scrambling any rational assessment of risk in a “fog of data”, itself caused by a widening of financial agency to the everyday chattering traders of social media:

The internet would have therefore brought on an intolerable multiplication of the number of economic operators whose joint behaviour lacks that intrinsic rationality that permits the market to correctly assess commercial value. On the other hand, the ease with which it became possible to buy and sell shares exponentially multiplied the number of transactions that became practically untraceable and consequently increased market volatility.

Terranova cites the famous Newsweek article which argues that a new, well-designed simple “dashboard” must be built to represent global financial transactions on the internet – an interaction design composed from instantly comprehensible graphs and dials, governed by consistent colour codes that can tell all of us, not just Bloomberg-literate traders, “what is currently working properly in financial markets, what isn't, what you should be terrified about”. ^xvAs Karin Knorr Cetina has also noted, this is continuous with the already “visual and scopic” fetish of financial culture – the market “fully visible on screen” producing a “global inter-subjectivity”, composed from traders' “immediate, synchonised and temporal continuity” with the activity on their terminals.^xvi

But this desire for a visual, even haptic clarity to financial information strikes me as consonant with the valences of play in the financial game-space. Is it any surprise that the Newsweek device sounds like some new interactive kids toy by Fisher-Price? As an image for a tool that might enable the sensible regulation of finance trade, it looks like something well-engineered for the kindergarten (or if you're an iPad-wielding knowledge worker, for the wifi'd corner coffee shop) – something that's guaranteed as safe and consistent for use by responsible intermediaries.

Add to these toys whatever new raft of rules, impedances and breakpoints that will result from new post-Crash regulatory regimes and the new space of finance capital comes to resemble a developmentally-aware kindergarten or early school^xvii: where the “irrational exuberance” of the players is presumed, but is forced to engage with standards of civil behaviour, with participants (to quote Whyte again) “coming together to discuss or debates the ends for which the activity has been established”.

In the open net beyond finance, the most communally substantive of activities – ie, the open source developer community – self-consciously forges (or “source-forges”, to adapt the title of one of their main institutions) the values that guide their practice. Their open play with code-forms comes along with an “play ethos” that values creativity, participation and adhered-to common standards and protocols, the “rules” of their game.^xviii What might a comparable “play ethic” for the financial sector be? Is there a way for the necessary “rough-and-tumble” of capital markets to be an expression of healthy, diversive neoteny? Can there be a “creative destruction” that sustains and is sustained by a better-monitored financial system - rather than a perverse pathology of accumulation that unravels the very grounds of its operation?

So am I suggesting that stakeholder capitalism is what the Danes would call leg godt, Lego, “good play”?^xix Possibly. And it would surely be better than the toxic, testosteronal, autistic play of financialized capitalism that puts infinite invention into the service of finite, zero-sum pecuniary victory. Italian Marxists would say that all contemporary finance is parasitic rent-seeking upon the productive excess that a communicational society inherently generates, Antonio Negri's “communism of capital” or “value beyond measure”^xx But that is another perspective, for another time, on the game of money under capitalism. For now, Yochai Benkler's parental injunction – and network theology - about “sharing nicely”^xxi will suffice.

ends

Notes

i http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/cis/wp/tiano/project/sources/metaphors.pdf

iiSee Micheal Lewis, “The End”, Portfolio magazine, Nov 11, 2008 http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom/index.html

iii William H. Whyte, Jr., "The Language of Business," in Technological and Professional Writing, ed. Herman A. Estrin (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), p. 83.

ivGavin Kelly, Dominic Kelly, Andrew Gamble, eds, Stakeholder Capitalism (Macmillan 1997), Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars, Mastering The Infinite Game, Capstone 1997

vhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius

vi http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2009/06/19/rise-of-the-market-machines/

viiJames Carse, Finite and Infinite Games, Ballantine 1976

viii Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, p115 passim. Google books link http://bit.ly/afhZ0V

ixSee Kevin Kelly, New Rules For The New Economy http://www.kk.org/newrules/contents.php

xStuart Brown, Play, Avery 2009: Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, Harvard 1997, Marc Bekoff (ed), Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Perspectives, Cambridge, 1998

xiAlan Wolfe, 'Hedonic Man', The New Republic, July 9, 2008 http://www.tnr.com/article/books/hedonic-manttp://www.tnr.com/article/books/hedonic-man

xiiPat Kane, 'Play, Potentiality and the Constitution of the Net', http://www.theplayethic.com/2009/11/play-potentiality-and-the-constitution-of-the-net.html

xiiiLawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/

xivTiziana Terranova, 'New Economy, Financialization and Social Production in Web 2.0', in A. Fumagalli and S. Mezzadra, Crisis In The Global Economy, Semiotext(e), 2010

xvPaul Kedrosky, 'The first disaster of the internet age', Newsweek, October 18, 2008,http://www.newsweek.com/id/164588

xviKarin Knorr Cetina,“The Market”, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Knowledge: the New Encyclopedia Project. Theory, Culture and Society (Special Issue), 2004

xvii Pat Kane, 'The Infinite Game: an education for players', The Play Ethic, Macmillan, 2004

xviiiJohn Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, Viking 2005, Fred Turner, From Counterculture To Cyberculture, Chicago UP, 2006

xixRichard Roberts & David Kynaston, "The rout of the stakeholders", New Statesman, 17 September 2001 http://www.newstatesman.com/200109170017

xxAntonio Negri, 'No New Deal is Possible', Radical Philosophy, May-June 2009, http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=27980

xxiYochai Benkler, "Sharing Nicely": On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production, 114 Yale L. J. 273 (2004)

Review of 'You Are Not a Gadget' and 'Googled'

Here's a recent review for Scotland on Sunday of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget and Ken Auletta's Googled - ridiculously small word-count, so apologies for the compression, but I will be elaborating on both in a bigger post (and doubtless later presentations & consultations) later on. The Lanier book is brilliantly and provocatively wrong - I want to engage with it in terms of the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, and what an technologically-friendly artist's perspective should be on the debate. Later! [This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on April 04, 2010 - below is the unedited version]

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET Jaron Lanier (Allen Lane, £20)

GOOGLED Ken Auletta, Virgin Books, £11.99

Reviewed by PAT KANE

In case you hadn’t noticed, the war for the future of the internet has reached the peak of battle. On the shimmering plains of cyberspace, Rupert Murdoch and the music multinationals are sandbagging themselves against the oncoming waves of news-surfers and file-sharers. Paywalls are being erected, the regulatory arm of Peter Mandelson is being seductively bent - anything to get a regular buck off those rapacious, intellectual-property-despoiling hordes.

To the philosophical rescue of hacks and A&R men, in a tangle of dreadlocks and perched on a silver surfboard, comes Jaron Lanier. Lanier was a pioneer of virtual reality in the early 90s (remember those goggles?) and is now the author of a carnaptious yet brilliant denunciation of The Way We Network Now.

You Are Not A Gadget is hardly a Luddite tract from some defender of old technologies and even older monopolies. There’s not many non-fiction “talkers” that plausibly invent an entirely new form of human discourse (“postsymbolic communication”, if you must know, seemingly a fusion between software and the behaviour of octopi) in the last few throwaway paragraphs.

So when Lanier says that our beloved Twittering, YouTubing and Facebooking is about reducing our personhood to fit the limitations of software, about “becoming a source of fragments exploited by others”, we should at least put the devices to sleep and pay attention.

Happily for Rupe and the satin-jacket brigade, Lanier says that one of the ways that technology can express a “digital humanism” is to allow musicians and journalists to make a middle-class living again. How? By turning every current (and neutral) click on the internet into a tiny monetary transaction between seller and buyer, enabled by a very deep change in the internet’s operating code. For Lanier, this would clean out the witterings of what he calls “the hive mind”, and allow those who live by their craft and skills in symbols to flourish in the Net, rather than see their royalty cheques reduce to zero.

Lanier notes the paradox that an exponential rise in broadband and computing power hasn’t resulted in the cyber-equivalent of a Mozart, an Orwell or a Thelonious Monk, but much more culture-as-nostalgia – the “YouTube” evening watching classic tv clips, or Spotify as a rummage through three generations of record collections.

As someone who plays between both of the industries that Lanier focusses on in this book, music and journalism, I can appreciate his Romantic angst about the dimunition of originality. Yet I think he’s wrong to suggest that a more closed, narrowed-down and marketised internet will foment genius or even just excellence.

Creativity is as much about reading and listening, as it is about writing and composing – and my own creative experience with the new digital plenitude, in all its cost-free ubiquity, is that of swimming in a sea of permanent inspiration. The end of the old business models means that both music and journalism will have to boil down to what is enduring and scarce in their professions: the live performance and the heartfelt, self-produced song; the necessary investigation and the unfettered comment. Rather than the hype, flash and churnalism that clogged up too much of both professions in the good old days.

The point is to use the wild and free internet to connect these moments of cultural integrity to communities who only have time for the best: and then, eclectically figure out how to monetise their intense interest and commitment. It can be done.

Something that Lanier refuses to do – but which exercises the Digger greatly – is to condemn Google as the cuckoo in the nest of content. Ken Aulietta’s meticulous account of this huge company’s fundamental geekery should encourage Lanier that the basic infrastructure of this new era is being driven by insanely creative individuals.

And Googlers know fine well that they’re in the position of the old railroads and private utilities of the 19th century - in the queue to be nationalised when they become too big and infrastructural to fail us. Our future might not be the "digital Maoism" that Jaron deplores – but something more akin to a digital social-democracy. Let’s have a debate about that vista, rather than worry too much about Kevin the teenager in his downloading frenzy. A war against enthusiasm could hardly be more pointless, or less winnable. 

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com) and one half of Hue And Cry  

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

* * *

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 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.

Blogging and "informationalism" - interview with Murray Newlands

I did quite a useful interview with Murray Newlands, the social media consultant, for his blog the other month - now available here. We cover my long history with blogging - that's micro-, macro- and meso-blogging - and how that fits with my general analysis of culture, economy and technology as expressed in the Play Ethic book. An exchange:

Where do you see growth in the blogging field?

Again, I think micro-blogging (a la Facebook and Twitter), particularly conducted through rich portable media devices like the iPhone, has taken some of the burden off traditional web-based blogs to be these instantaneous places of self-expression. For me, blogs are now an opportunity for you to step back a little from the cybernetic loop we can so easily get caught up in with mobile, locational and real-time media. However I think that micro-blogging can itself develop a little more, up and away from the “140″ character limitation. My presentation at the Media140 conference in London suggested that a ‘meso-blogging’ might be possible. (Which allows for my kinda blogging to be ‘macro-blogging’, I suppose). If we’re not just reading newspapers on street corners, but now producing news on street corners, are the devices, networks and platforms were using really up to the task yet? I’m using and trying out everything in this field (AudioBoo my favourite), but I still think there are slightly richer on-the-move blogging experiences to be had than the ones afforded by a telecom engineer’s casual addition to the design of his device…

What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of new trends?

As Clay Shirky says, we’re in the space between the death of the bad old things and the birth of the good new things - meaning that online advertising is not yet an complete replacement for the kinds of ads that a collapsing old media used to serve up. And perhaps they never will be. I wonder whether the whole relationship between someone who makes a product or service that they think might have users or consumers, and the deeply demanding conversations and transparencies that characterise online behaviour, means that advertising will have to completely rethink its function - and by association, the manufacturers and service providers themselves. Add to that recession and eco-crisis, and it may be that online advertising and its clients will have to become part of the toolbox of living sustainably. lightly and well - clearly seen to be adding to the solution, not wasting and problematising our precious time.

Social Media and Informationalism blogger and author of The Play Ethic, Pat Kane an Interview

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