The Play Ethic

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  

True Mutations

Thrilled to find that my 2001 interview with the estimable left cyber-libertarian R.U.Sirius has made it to a new paperback out in the US, called True Mutations. I'm in there (talking about play) with many other highly (dis)reputable neophiliacs - indeed in my section, 'An Open Source for the Self', I am sandwiched in between Genesis P. Orridge, the late Robert Anton Wilson, Richard Metzger, Daniel Pinchbeck, Howard Bloom and D.J.Spooky. I have never felt so happy to be among such peers (though just slightly creeped out also).

R.U. is also a burgeoning podcast titan, with his shows on the Mondo Globo Network, which are feeding automatically to my iPod as I speak. His blog, Ten Zen Monkeys, is a superior entity also. Anything he does is thoroughly recommended - his personal mix of stoner diffuseness, and Frankfurt-school analytics, is quite irresistible.

My books of the year

My books of the year for the Sunday Herald (not online, so reproduced here):

A strange year of non-trendy reading, squeezed around musical projects. Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 (Fourth Estate) does exactly what it says on the tin, and reminded me (like I needed reminding) of just how impure the sources of the purest pop can be. From Edinburgh University, Claire Colbrook's Gilles Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum) also realizes its promise about the most difficult of modern French philosophers. And some fiction (though not enough): Jonathan Raban's Surveillance (Picador) is like Dickens revived to witness the Age of Terror; and Micheal Gardiner's Escalator (Polygon) is an elegant collection of short stories about life in Tokyo, from one of the most original minds in Scotland.

Surfing (the zeitgeist) in Brisbane

Been here for a few days at the Brisbane Festival of Ideas, at which I'm speaking this Friday. This is my third trip to a major Australian city since the Play Ethic launched as a website in 2000 (Sydney in 2001, Melbourne in 2002), which is at least some evidence that its themes find resonance here. I'm preparing my lecture at the moment, which I'm intending to be a kind of assessment of the idea after nearly ten years of thinking about it - a pretty shocking realisation for me. (Should I change my tune, or sing it better? Hmm). I'll be posting it here on Friday, fully hotlinked, and with an invitation for as much commentary and response as possible.

In the meantime, here's some local press I've been doing:

• firstly an interview with Time Off, Queensland's "premier street magazine". And it's my luck that the writer used to be a student when I was Rector of Glasgow University...
• next, an interview with The Courier and Mail (jpeg), Queensland's quality tabloid
• and finally, a half-hour talk on ABC Radio's The Conversation, with Richard Fiedler.

Play Ethic out today in US

This is the official release date of the Play Ethic in the US - welcome to all and any readers. If you want to know more about the project, please visit the main website, or dive into this blog and its archives - the entries are organised by chapter theme.

South China on the PE

It's not exactly a startling critique, but still nice to know that the new paperback copy of the Play Ethic has made its way out to the South China Morning Post for a review (on extended post below).

Little black books for black times

Almost forgotten I'd written this, as part of the new paperback version of the PE's promotion - a long over-due (and far too short) appreciation of James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games as my 'Book of a Lifetime' (it has supplanted yet another small black book, Adorno's Minima Moralia, as my primary life-saving carry-around). The piece doesn't seem to be available online, so it's on extended post below.

I must admit, after our recent London Tube bombings, and particularly the mistaken assasination of Mr. Menezes, this quote from Minima on the bourgeois nature of walking (how Adornian) is all too relevant:

Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze the limbs.

Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past terror. Traffic regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but they have not pacified running. It estranges us from bourgeois walking. The truth becomes visible that something is amiss with security, that the unleashed powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be escaped.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.

And here's some lefty satire to polish the insight off, thanks to Red Pepper magazine.

The Play Ethic in Paperback and Academia

A busy few months ahead for the Play Ethic - our mass paperback version of the book (with new cover, to the left) will be out on September 30th in the UK (buyable here on Amazon.co.uk). I've already done a few radio spots, and am hoping to place articles around the media over the next few weeks (see this interview in Ode magazine).

What's interesting is the increasing amount of academic interest in the Play Ethic. On extended post below is a review in a journal called Organisations and People - which happily describes the book as a 'modern classic' - and downloadable here (pdf) is a very in-depth treatment of 'Play at Work: questions of historical interpretation'. I'm digesting it slowly, but excitedly - and I'm most thrilled by their conclusion:

the new mixture of play and work is an epiphany of ethical inarticulacy which manifests itself at macro and micro-cultural levels. The way in which Kane, Carse and Csikszentmihalyi, for example, propose play as an infinite possibility of being and suggest that all life experiences should be turned into ‘infinite games’ is a cultural expression of this search for a way of leaving behind the 'space of experience' of finitude and reaching new horizons of ‘infinity’. In fact, it is this idea of a world in which ‘everything might be possible’ and in which everybody is entitled to endless enjoyment (what Bruckner calls ‘the utopia of fun’), in which youth is prolonged, and in which life itself will be delivered from suffering and even mortality (and why not? what else is the current investment of hope in the promises of genetic elucidation of man's biological being?) that Taylor suggests is the essence of what he terms ‘ethics of inarticulacy’.

Well, they get that right: the play ethic is, on one level, an attempt to help us cope with our increasing ability to control and 'play with' the fundamentals of our lives - social, material, technological and biological - by developing an ethic for these burgeoning powers.

The Slacker Ethic at the ICA

Come along to the ICA tomorrow night, 7pm, Nash Room - I'll be on the panel at the following event:

The Slacker Ethic

The relentless wave of cost cutting in the corporate world in the last couple of decades has taken its toll on the protestant work ethic.  But if the work ethic has taken a battering amongst young people, what is there to replace it? Should we take our revenge on the world of work by ‘downshifting’ or ‘protiring’, by idling or becoming a player, or simply staying put and slacking on the job? Can the vacuum created by the absence of work ever be filled? An international panel of rebels against the work ethic considers the alternatives.

Speakers: Corinne Maier, author of Hello Laziness (Bonjour Paresse); Pat Kane, writer and author of The Play Ethic; Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and author of How to be Idle.

Scholarship vs. Rock

Some interesting pieces appearing recently around the Play Ethic - one a review by Catholic educational thinker Bob Davis in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (download word doc here) and my own proposal for a 'Play Foundation' (download word doc here) in the current issue of the Idler, 'War on Work' (in which I recommend a wonderful interview with Raoul Vanegiem, bon vivant soixante-huitard).

And for those of you with an appetite for agonised post-punk-pop-star narcissism, here's a piece I wrote in the Sunday Herald today about the coming week... Epistemology meets bad dancing (but hopefully, a solid tenor voice will mediate).