The Play Ethic

What is a "Constitute"? Prez to HubWestminster, London, 15/11/11

This is a very tentative presentation I made to Vinay Gupta's Truth and Beauty seminar at HubWestminster in London, on a concept I've been toying around with in my mind for a few months now... What is a "constitute" - as opposed to an institute? Or a constitution?

Personally, it's an answer to my anxiety about being drowned in rich and meaningful connections in the social-media age, and not being able to turn even a small percentage of them into resources for action or enterprise (of whatever kind - civic, intellectual, commercial). Do we need to forge a "craft of info-citizenship" or "netizenship", some guild-like or practice-like behaviours or conventions, that can capture the value of the relentless connecting, conversing and curating we do with our networked devices? Similar to the hacker ethic, or agile programming, or the Transition Towns protocols - but at the level of a great conversation in a cafe that we don't just want to let sink into the background of our busy lives? "Ok, this has gone well...let's make this a constitute...." So what behaviours/duties/commitments would that imply?

The word "constitute" points to a need to name a new, network-society subtlety in the relationship between idea and action (of course, there are older and other words like rubric, model, method, praxis, meme... I just happened to notice that constitute wasn't a noun!). And theoretically, it's another one of my journeys into the Italian Marxist tradition, looking at culture and communication as real forces for systemic change in society (but particularly coming from the work of Negri/Hardt, Virno, Marazzi, Bifo). And behind that - always behind that - my 30 year sea-journey with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in which I occasionally, nowadays, glimpse the shore... 

All comments welcome (indeed if you do comment/repost, it becomes a constitute!) 

What is a "Constitute"? Pat Kane prez to HubWestminster

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Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity? My piece for Open Democracy

Delighted to be able to contribute to Open Democracy's Happiness debate series, commissioned by Potlatch's William Davies. Here's the published piece, full text below.

 

Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity?

 Pat Kane, Open Democracy, 6th April 2011

At the start of this debate series on the potential of happiness to shape political discourse, William Davies hoped that it would return our attention to production - or more specifically, how our experience of work in organisations is a crucial determinant of our wellbeing and life-satisfaction. A long history of economic thought in the 20th century had led up to a moment where the consumer was sovereign, and the producer his willing slave: workers' conditions were always ultimately malleable - flexible, just-in-timed - in the retail service of this whim-laden desiring machine.

Of course this machine, as Davies plaintively says, was often a worker too. Can't our politics encompass producer as well as consumer identities? Buttressed by the The Spirit Level and the happiness science of Richard Layard, Davies wonders if might there not be a new political appeal to the "workers" available to Ed Miliband's Labour Party. A health-oriented, moral-political rhetoric that could render bad employers (and the paltry labour market regulations binding them) "toxic" and "polluting" - perpetrating injuries upon the bodies and souls of their employees as mendaciously as cigarette vendors, or nuclear-powerplant owners. (And who knows, perhaps just as vulnerable to class-action litigation on the basis of prior knowledge of harm?)

I'm fascinated to observe the battle raging between the major UK parties for ownership of the new sciences of the "social animal" or "social brain". They're all struggling to realise their own political capital from the intellectual collapse of utility-maximising "economic man", in the face of consiliences between neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, epidemiology, network theory and more. And not forgetting a financial crash that caused its architects to doubt their own intellectual edifice.

Read Conservative MP Jesse Norman's ideas-tour of The Big Society, and then read some of the papers coming from the Compass group of the Labour Party. Both of them cite the same sources - particularly Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's work on capabilities - to claim that a "social recession" has been occurring, regardless of economic recession. They share a figure of the healthy, happy citizen as needing "meaning, mastery and autonomy" - a purpose, goal or shared cause; an avidity for learning and new skills; the freedom to choose one's engagements in life.

In the midst of my own creative consulting practice, I did a double-take recently, when this trinity of capacities popped up in a discussion of what makes for a truly satisfying video-game. Yet surely it's all too obvious what the differences are between a PS3 "player" and a Big-Society "creative, active self". The former pursues meaning, mastery and autonomy (MMA) as a voluntary and joyful act, under conditions where there is a surplus of time, space and materials, essentially socially secure. The latter is being asked to become a "fizzing bundle of energy" (in Jesse Norman's words) under conditions of social insecurity, with extreme deficit-driven cuts slashing employment in public services. As far as my expertise in play tells me, these are not the most enabling conditions for MMA.

It's very easy to see The Big Society as an attempt to gull the aspirational and "creative" classes into supporting widescale privatisation, by talking their beloved language - specifically, appealing to their desire to achieve personal wellbeing through pro-social activities. But the Big Society falls down on its own terms, unravelled by the Oscar Wilde one-liner about the problem with socialism: "it will take too many evenings".

One might imagine that there could be a joyful, playful volunteerism to be pursued - if the Conservatives got tough with business and regulated for a shorter working week (say 30 hours), without a directly proportionate wage reduction. This would provide a rich systemic support to all that volunteering which, of course, has already been going on (one of the sharpest objections to the Big Society is that it's an opportunistic re-branding of what already exists). But a Conservative party that's brazen enough to preach democracy in Egypt, while hawking arms to Arab autocracies, is hardly going to take that kind of stand against squealing employers.

But while it's easy to critique a Tory philosophy on happiness which over-emphasizes voluntaristic "risk" and "creativity", and under-values the collective "security" and infrastructures which give a platform for the "active self" - you'd expect them to do that - I am doubtful that the Labour Party will find a better balance between these two in the modern workplace. How much of the sense of meaninglessness that pervades work in the commercial services sector, for example, comes from an awareness that much of what occurs there is the excitation, administration and sustenance of false needs, or delusory social-positioning? How much MMA can really be achieved by employees in hyper-consumerist industries based on the exploitation of guilt, shame, envy and anxiety?

At least the Green critique of current working practices, as exemplified by think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation and writers like Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor and Jeremy Rifkin, has the urgency of carbon-reduction and global warming at their backs. "Meaningful work" - which could as easily be fully-engaged, hacker-like play, or absorbed, intrinsically-motivated care - is what they hope will substitute for the planet-crisping satisfactions of lifestyle consumerism.

In a low-carbon economy that takes itself seriously, "flourishing" in the form of participation, self-provision and conviviality will have to compensate for "growth", "wealth" and its mountains of stuff. But no party will be able to preach the benefits of plenitude-without-trinkets, the happiness that comes from relationships, mindfulness and autonomous labours (see the five virtues extolled by the NEF's Happy Planet Index), while the financial plutocracy cavorts freely and unemployment rolls burgeon.

Cameron's plan for happiness began in the blithe financial-bubble-bath of the mid 2000's: pursued in these brutal conditions, it seems more like an idee fixe than a thought-out component of political hegemony. For Labour to succeed with its own version, some guarantee of greater security has to be offered - but it'll be through bold proposals on labour-market regulation, new networks of public goods, visible restorations of income equality - and an honesty about how our indicators of progress and prosperity will have to change. And not, I'd suggest, through workplaces the majority of whose enterprises contributes toward the consumerist tumult that guarantees unhappiness.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic and one half of the band Hue & Cry.

Why The Big Society Should Be A Playground (But Isn't): Presentation to The Young Foundation, 1/03/11

 

Why The Big Society Should Be A Playground (But Isn't) - Pat Kane talk for The Young Foundation - 1:03:11

Double update: Here's the Young Foundation's own page on this, with podcast and slides and nice pix (see left)

Update: Above is the full podcast of the talk below. You can download as MP3 (63Mg),  or subscribe iTunes or Feedburner, 

Below are the slides to my presentation to the Young Foundation, a social enterprise think-tank in London founded by Micheal Young, exploring the concept of the "Big Society" - the UK Conservative Party's big idea for its Coalition government - in relation to my evolving theories about play, human nature and governance. 

The slides may need a little context. My subtitle as announced on the day was "48 hours in the life of an London ideas merchant". The day before my Young Foundation presentation I'd had a meeting with a commercial digital agency to see if we could devise some useful strategies about convincing advertisers and marketers that they should approach a game/play based approach to their expenditure. We cited the work of game analyst Sebastian Deterding, from whom the test of a great game experience is that it allows "meaning, mastery and autonomy".

That evening, while preparing for next day's presentation, I was reading the Conservative MP Jesse Norman's The Big Society on my Kindle - when I came upon a passage where he talked about the Big Society's motivational drives being that of "autonomy, mastery and purpose/meaning"... Thus alerted to a synchronicity in the world of ideas, I tried to follow through the consequences...

All comments welcome below. (An extended article will be available over the next few days). 

Why The Big Society Should Be A Playground (And Isn't)

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My Indepdendent review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion

My review for the Indepdendent - unedited version in this post. All comments welcomed -- PK

The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World

By Evgeny Morozov

(£14.99, Allen Lane)

Reviewed by Pat Kane

In the world-theatre of geopolitics, where hubris sometimes seems like the only hit production running, Hilary Clinton's 'Internet Freedom' speech of January 2010 deserves some kind of special critics' award.

Drawing a parallel between the Iron Curtain of the Cold War and the "information curtain descending across much of the world", the US Secretary of State praised "viral videos and blog posts" as "the samizdat of our day... We need to put these tools in the hands of people around the world who will use them to advance democracy and human rights".

Wiki-oops! Since then, of course, we've seen April's "viral video" of trigger-happy US soldiers killing Reuters journalists in Iraq. And over the last few weeks we've been reading the world's most incendiary collection (so far) of "blog posts", a recent selection from a vast cache of secret US diplomatic cables spanning the last forty-odd years.

In one of Evgeny Morozov's three cursory references to Wikileaks in over 400 pages of the The Net Delusion - ah, the perils of papery publishing schedules! - he notes that the American political elite "can't be calling for imposing restrictions on sites like Wikileaks" (already being proposed earlier this summer) "and also be disparaging China and Iran for similar impulses".

Quite so. Yet it's strange to read this truculent but extremely well-informed critique of "cyber-utopianism" and "internet-centrism" - with its demolition of such phenomena as the Iranian "Twitter Revolution", never mind Clinton's vapors about digital freedom - in the aftermath of the structural shock-waves that Wikileaks has set off around the world.

Morozov builds up an almost unarguable case that the internet is easily deployable by authoritarian states to serve the time-honoured oppressors' trinity of censorship, surveillance and propaganda. Much of his book is a useful tour d'horizon of the ways that the security regimes in Russia, Iran, China, Turkey, his homeland Belarus and many others are matching, mimicking and populating the best of Web 2.0 - all those idealised "social tools" from the coding labs of California.

Yet we've seen an American establishment successfully putting pressure on some of the poster-boys of the network society - be it Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and now Apple - to cut off the digital and financial supports of Wikileaks. Federal employees and students have been blocked or banned from visiting the site; prominent politicians and columnists have called for Wikileaks' founder, Julien Assange, to be assassinated.

It's getting a little difficult to discern one repressive cyber-regime from another these days.

One wonders whether Morozov's dull antennae towards Wikileaks' potential in this book (though ironically enough, he's making up for it now, in his unstoppable stream of tweets at @evgenymorozov) comes from his own institutional conditioning. From his days as a scholarship schoolboy, Morozov has been sponsored by Soros's Open Society institute, on whose board he now sits. This has clearly been an entree to fellowships at Stanford, Yahoo! and the New America Foundation, generating bylines at the Economist, the FT, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.

And throughout The Net Delusion, Morozov shows a degree more sympathy for the kind of diligent, time-and-people-intensive democracy promotion of the diplomatic classes revealed by the Wikileaks cables, than he does for the crackers, hacker and platform-makers of digital evangelism.

Indeed, his central caution is that the unthinking Western promotion of cyber-tools as enablers and organisers of dissent under authoritarian regimes - sometimes driven by Cold-War nostalgia, sometimes by a lazy and mistaken search for "diplomatic efficiency" - can sometimes make things worse for those concerned.

Encouraging dissidents to use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or mobile texting - even if those services protect the identity of users and don't cave under state pressure (whatever the state) - still provides a stream of social data which can reveal networks of activists, or alerts regimes to protests and concerns well in advance.

The powerful "sentiment analysis" software required for these tasks is being provided to regimes by Western tech-corps like IBM, Cisco and Ericsson - an amoral info-commercial complex about which Morozov is enjoyably robust: "we don't just need a wikinomics, but a wikiethics as well".

Though his demolition job on the embarrassments of Cupertino-driven "internet freedom" is comprehensive, Morozov does have more than a few positive suggestions on how Western powers can fashion information networks to give power and voice to those who need it most.

Encryption and security protocols are high on his list. He suggests they are a "win-win" for Western tech giants, who might both placate the increasing data-privacy concerns of their domestic customers, as well as give dissidents a much safer medium for informing and organising themselves.

Of course, security is at the heart of Wikileaks' offer to whistle-blowers everywhere. As Assange said in an interview with David Frost on Al'Jazzera recently, their extremely secure upload technology means that they cannot know the identity of any particular wikileaker to their service in advance.

Indeed, Assange's insurance policy - against heaven knows what depradations from the American state - is an encryption key that will unlock the complete archive of Wikileaks' documentation to the world, unfortunately described by his lawyer as "the information equivalent of a thermo-nuclear bomb".

Yet Morozov, no doubt directly informed by the particularly fustian nature of Belarussian oppression, reminds us that hammering in your safe code at a keyboard is only a secreted micro-camera away from revelation. And apparently, it's not yet possible to use long-range audio equipment to tell what characters are being distantly tapped out on a laptop (for that, some small mercies).

The Net Delusion is most useful as a reminder of how fleet-footed, rather than leaden and second-rate, many authoritarian regimes are in their cyberpolicies. China is a veritable powerhouse of disinformation-technology - not only building effective mobile, social networking and gaming platforms in which users trade off efficiency for surveillance, but also inducing the required netiquette on those services.

The Fifty-Cent Party, for example, is an army of blog-commenters who get paid for every dissident blog they snow with patriotic, party-approved rebuttals. And more subtly, China encourages blogging that highlights local corruption or poor services, while keeping a ceiling on more ambitious political critiques.

It's also a delight to be reminded that, in their search for ever-better propaganda techniques, a most honoured guest of the Central Party School in 2001 was one Peter Mandelson, there to "share his insights about the re-invention of the British Labour Party". China is inspiring the same burst of innovation in many other regimes: and Morozov usefully reminds us that loyal nationalism and patriotic service can be as much a motivation for the young socio-technical operative as the bohemian anarchisms of Julien Assange and his pals.

Which makes it imperative that the demonisation of Wikileaks stops, and a clear-sighted engagement with the shift in power that it heralds, begins. Morozov himself set out the options in a superb Financial Times editorial recently: these info-hackers, present and future, could become either a new "Transparency International" or a new "Red Brigades".

That is, their desire to be a new "fifth estate" - true to the spirit of the American "First Amendment" which holds a free press to be the best friend of accountable democracy - can be steadily answered by a non-panicked establishment. Or if things go pear-shaped (or bloody) for the likes of Assange, an info-insurrection may be unleashed that could leave considerable swathes of our comfortable, well-functioning knowledge society in ruins.

"Internet freedom", in short, is a valiant sword with a number of blades, existing in several dimensions simultaneously. As we go down the rabbit-hole of Wikileaks, Morozov's humane and rational lantern will help us land without breaking our legs.

Dougald Hine's New Public Thinkers project - my nominations

The P.T. Barnum of modern British autonomism, Dougald Hine, has come up with a great new project, defined - like many of the best are - by an argument with the establishment. BBC 3, in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is embarking on a quest to find "New Generation Thinkers" in the UK - meaning public intellectuals who shape debate through writing, broadcasting, blogging and other kinds of intervention.

Nice idea. Only problem is, the rules of the competition are that you have to be a staff academic in some way. Dougald quite rightly points out that not only would this disqualify past great thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, John Berger and Karl Polyani, but it disqualifies many current voices who find the time for critique and research in the midst of non-academic lives - as writers, entrepreneurs, employees, activists, artists.

So, platform-ready as ever, Dougald is going to set up a site called New Public Thinkers (first announcement here, holding page for actual site here), which as I understand it will have at least a wide-open door to those who are publicly intellectualising from a non-academic perch. Many thoughts on the state of public thinking come to mind - but to begin with, D wants some nominations as to who should be on a putative list of NPTs. Some of my favourites have already been proposed, here's some others:

Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk). Now straightaway this gets complicated, in terms of the initial definition. I didn't know much about K-Punk other than his extraordinary blog - which uses the best of radical left theory (Zizek, Badiou, Negri, Deleuze) as tools for writing heterodoxically about music, popular culture, the political spectacle and activism, in a way which for me defines what "public thinking" should be.

But the more you read, the more you realise his own predicament - as a precarious academic teacher, hopping from gig to gig teaching late teens, and thereby gaining an insight into contemporary passivities and pathologies. Keep reading, and his network of pals emerges - voices like Nina Power aka Infinite Thought (a philosopher at Roehampton University), Owen Hathereley's Sit Down Man You're a Bloody Tragedy (freelance architectural critic and lecturer), and Richard Seymour aka Lenin's Tomb (who's a PhD sociology candidate at the LSE). All writing from the theoretically-informed activist left that I value - but with some academic locus.

Should "new public thinkers" also allow for post-grads and employed academics who do carve out time to make public interventions - meaning, they don't keep their heads down and direct all their textual production towards peer-ref'd articles that can improve their research ratings and thus career? I think they should. Otherwise a lot of the new leadership that's coming from the student protests will be unnecessarily ruled out. 

John Thackera (Doors of Perception). In terms of consistency of approach about the importance of "design for resilience" over the last decade, John Thackera gets my vote as a "public thinker". He isn't just a persuasive advocate of ideas about green design, but his "Doors Of Perception" conferences have been great opportunities for the meeting of practical minds across disciplines, under the urgent horizon of climate crisis. I think it's also helpful that a public thinker knows how to write clearly and effectively, particularly if the topic is recondite or specific. John, as an ex-hack, knows how to do that well. A busy man, but I'd love to see his voice much more in the agora of ideas about green economics in this country again. 

Indra Adnan (Downing Street Project, Soft Power Network). Indra has been writing publicly (and from a non-academic perch) for the last four years on the nexus between Buddhism, soft power and the politics of gender and families. In her columns for the Huffington Post and the Guardian, Indra has explored how the crisis of power in the UK - exemplified by political corruption and the financial crash - has a complex relationship with notions of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine': we simply can't make an effective critique of how power structures order our lives if we don't find a way to talk about our deeply-held attitudes towards control, participation, acceptance.

Indra's advocacy and development of Joseph Nye's concept of soft power - from an American propaganda exercise, to a radically compassionate network politics, rooted in conflict-mediation and practised throughout the world - brings new insights about public life (see for example, her ambivalence about Wikileaks on this Huff Post blog). And yes, this woman is my partner, but sometimes the obvious is sitting right in front of you... 

* * *

Already excited, waiting to see a list of these thinkers in one place - feels like a handy new blogroll to look forward to. 

Why Wikileaks should be an asset to the brand called democracy

Followers of the Play Ethic should be interested in my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thoughts on the Wikileaks controversy. A huge moment for net-activists everywhere, where the openness of the web as a structure meets the self-defined boundaries of state power. High stakes, no matter your assessment of Assange. The research references for this column are available on my Scottish-affairs website Thoughtland

 

On Thoughtland: the green, playful and post-consumerist case for the Scottish 30 hour week

Introducing to the Play Ethic readership my new Scottish ideas blog Thoughtland, mostly concerned with mapping the ideas culture as it supports and extends the politics of Scottish independence. But as it has an explicitly global and universalist framework - bringing the best and most visionary policies to bear on the independence movement - it will draw from my interests in play, well-being and social innovation explored here.

The essay out today in the Sunday Herald, Towards a Scottish Thirty-Hour Working Week, (link to the Herald website here) begins to point towards the next stage in my thinking around play, which will involve a much more detailed engagement with the politics and culture of sustainability and climate crisis. As ever, all comments welcomed. 

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. 

Cyberspace ≠ big bad wood: children and the Net

Update: found a great symposium on Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law and Play Online - video presentations. Supporting blog from Terra Nova. 

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Here's an essay I wrote for my old employer, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, on children and the internet (the uncut version is below, here's the edited version). I was commissioned under the headline, "Who's afraid of the big bad Net?", so it begins a little more luridly than I'd like. However, I think it grapples with a lot of the phobias about the topic pretty well, and suggests some creative (rather than just regulatory) proposals towards how cyberspace might exercise a "duty of care" to children. 

Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Net?

Pat Kane, Sunday Herald, 22 Nov 2009

You're hovering at the door, and your beloved has turned back to her machine, a moon face in the monitor's glow. You've been what they call in the instant-messaging world a "POS" (Parent Over Shoulder) – asking about this online game and that customisation, smiling at the Twilight obsession and the LOLcat video sitting side by side on her social networking site. 

So far, so early-adolescent, so familiar. Yet you know that, at this age, there's a genuine need for privacy with her friends: a space to work out who she is, who she wants to be. So you close the door and leave her, for her allotted 45 minutes, as she taps out incomprehensible mixes of mnemonics and icons into a message box.

The question in the mind is: have you sent her off to a virtual version of the local playpark – with good facilities, chatting to friends in the sunlight, in a well-run, somewhat monitored space? Or have you left her to wander into the gloomy, unpredictable woods of cyberspace, where duplicitous wolves, terrible visions and worse lie in wait? 

There's no doubt that the latter metaphor describes most of the tabloid headlines about our children's relationship to cyberspace. If the internet service provider TalkTalk is to be believed, more than half of UK parents believe the internet is a more dangerous place for children than the real world. In other words, it has replaced the deep, dark forest – where Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel confronted their demons – as the locus of our most visceral fears. And even as an evangelist for the networked world, I'd be the last to minimise the issues.

The recently revealed operation by Central Scotland Police, sweeping social network sites like Bebo, Facebook and MSN, identified some alarming numbers – like 1700 men involved in 4000 sexually explicit chat logs with children over the summer, a small proportion of which led to arrests in the UK and abroad. Bebo itself has just announced what they call a "Panic Button" for their websites. This links directly to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, allowing any user, child or adult, to report their worries about online activity to child protection workers.

And it's the predatory monsters called other people's children that cause almost as much popular anxiety. A report on 'cyber-bullying' in England and Wales last week identified that 22% of schoolkids had reported being harrassed or intimidated via internet or mobile phone. 

Yet some aspects of these stories deserve an instant reality (and history) check – mostly around the degree to which an age of networks merely amplifies existing social disorders.