The Play Ethic

Player at Rest

Off for a week's paddling about in pools with my daughters, so I will absolve myself from daily blogging until August 6th. After that, it's book-launch-erama...

Troy, Ruddick, and Bush Culture

From Bad Subjects. Now this is the kind of thing you should be doing with a higher arts education: making enormous sweeping politico-philosophical analyses of over-produced Hollywood ancient-hero blockbusters. To wit: why Troy is Bushism unalloyed, and the Chronicles of Ruddickis sheer subversion of the norm:

Film screens the politics of war, and today's Clausewitzes know it. A politics that can defeat the social forces that the presidency of George W. Bush embodies is one that can recognize and re-enunciate the opposition to American empire lodged within The Chronicles of Riddick and narratives where weak oppose strong. It will recognize the difference between the exhibitionistic violence-marketing of Troy and the resistance to empire in The Chronicles of Riddick.

From Lonely to Naked Crowd

As Big Brother in the UK gets weirder, more lab-rat-like, I'm struck by this essay from Jeffrey Rosen on his concept of the Naked Crowd - our increasing desire to live an exposed life, up for all kinds of scrutiny.

There is no such thing as public intimacy. Intimacy can be achieved only with those who know us; and strangers cannot know us; they can only have information about us or impressions of us. To offer up personal information that has been taken out of context, in an effort to create the illusion of emotional connection with strangers, requires us to homogenise and standardise the very qualities that made the information personal in the first place...Living in the Omnipticon, where we are increasingly unsure about who is observing us, individuals will have to worry more about acting consistently in public and private, in precisely the way the branding advisors prescribe.

Hacker Play

Thought (or should I write 'thot') -provoking piece from Globe and Mail on how it might be that the web is revivifying a kind of new, playful literacy with text and language rather than destroying it. Consider the 'leetspeak' of hackers:

[Leetspeak is] the code or cipher that hackers and on-line gamers use to communicate in secret under the gaze of law-enforcement and mere lamers like me and you. Leetspeak (which comes from "elite") relies on humour and improvisation, and on layers of reference, and is a new kind of language in several startling respects. It consists of slang words -- such as "warez" for pirated software, or "woot" for cool or excellent -- which are then transliterated into numbers and symbols. The numbers and symbols are visual puns or icons for the letters represented. For example, the letter E is written as a 3 (which looks like an E when read backwards), A as 4, L as 1, S as 5, O as 0. Letters are also created by assembling typographical symbols, as in ASCII art -- for example, R can be written P\ or |2 or just 2. My name could be written 2(_)55311 $/\/\i7[-] or P\u$$31L 5miT#. The variations are endless, and depend largely on how many strange characters you can conjure from your computer's hidden sets.

There have been underworld dialects in existence forever, from Cockney rhyming slang to children's pig Latin, and they have had the same function: They are both an area of play and a mechanism for exclusion. Leetspeak is both, but takes a new form. Where street slangs are entirely oral -- they have no written form -- this one is only written, and never spoken; many of its typographical extravagances cannot be spoken at all. This language is a cipher on top of a jargon: in other words, the slang words, already incomprehensible to outsiders, are further rearranged into symbols. This is not, as is commonly said, "postliterate"; it is in fact purely literate, indeed it is, like the play of sounds and shapes that makes up the best poetry, literary.

Pro-liberal, pro-sixties, pro-dissensus

Entirely flummoxed by Mr. Blair's diatribe against the 'liberal consensus of the sixties on law and order', and by association all things counter-cultural and permissive. As Zoe Williams's excellent Guardian piece points out, his periodisation is out of whack in the first instance (most of the criminal-centred laws were passed in the seventies and eighties). And it also looks like these two Christian politicians (militantly so) are going to use this as a smokescreen to realise their Godly Commonwealth as a digitalised Panopticon. As Williams says:

Most of Blair's inaccurate time-lining is naturally just set-dressing for the real action - a proposal to set up a satellite track on 5,000 serial offenders, and extend the use of DNA profiling. If there's any obstacle to this at all (unless a Tory bright spark wants to bring a charge of theft, not just of ideas, but also of priggish tone of voice), it's the Human Rights Act, which was passed in 1998.

What an sanctimonious and incoherent bunch. Multiplying the channels of desire with one hand (looser gambling laws, more media channels, encouraging 'creative industry'): policing those who don't have the human resources to respond 'decently' to these phantasms of potential on the other. And they're surprised when some young men at the bottom of the pile explode with violence and anomie (sorry, sixties word there). How I loathe (not a word I like to use these days) such authority-hungry, scapegoating, judgmental politicians as Thatcher and Blair. Power players who want to deny the full panapoly of play to their citizens. Grrr! (rant over).

Automation vs. Outsourcing: who wins?

From InformationWeek I know it's another self-justifying consultancy report... but doesn't it have the ring of truth about it?

In the manufacturing sector in the 90s, companies sold $100 billion worth of software and hardware for robotics, said Harvey Cohen, president of Strategy Analytics. While the technology increased productivity and added to companies' bottom lines, it also eliminated 10 million jobs worldwide.

In the new millennium, as the use of intelligent computers increase, jobs will vanish, with several million expected to disappear over the next five to seven years, Cohen said. While less labor to do more work is great for business, there will be an impact on society as people find decent paying jobs harder to find.

Technology "will take the job growth out of the industries that the government has said are good places to develop employment," Cohen said. "So we've raised the question, have they thought this problem through properly?... Looking forward, we don't really see the big threat in the long run being outsourcing to India. We see the real threat from outsourcing to intelligent capital.

Are we ready to live the players' life, in the face of this mental automation? According to PM Blair, the last experiment in those kind of values led to social rack-and-ruin. More on the latter point in later posts.

A five-figure sum will suffice, thank you

Breaking news! Small statistic enthuses freelance inter-netual... Ie, this blog reached 10,000 hits today, after eight months of assiduous form-filling. Thanks to all who visit, lurkers, link-suggesters and comment-posters alike. Hoping for a spike when the Play Ethic book launches in September.

Robotic Nation

One of the lines in my friend Madeleine Bunting's book on overwork culture ponders why automation and new tech didn't bring in 'the Age of Leisure' promised in the seventies. She blames labour movement failure, New Right deregulations, global markets, and in particular a UK mindset that glories in a kind of Puritan exceptionalism (Benjamin Franklin, meet Samuel Smiles). Info-tech is still being struggled over - the rise of hacker, open-source, downloading, texting and karaoke cultures show that it's not just shareholder-driven management that controls the direction of this communicational matrix, but living, loving citizens and players.

But I think the 70's visionaries always over-estimated the arrival of the more directly human-replacing technologies (except in areas of manufacturing). Until now, maybe. The Observer this week, tying into the I,Robot franchise, did a non-sceptical article about the arrival of the domestic robot. I also note that some lab, somewhere, has announced that they have created 'an artificial brain with 20 billion neurons'- which happens to be the density of connection of brains in higher mammals. When does all this join up? And when it does, what will our ethical position be towards our artificial, non-human companions? The ecological record isn't too bright... Keep an eye on the newly founded Asimov Laws site, and Marshall Brain's Robotic Nation, for more ponderings on this. And if you want a heart-ripping meditation on such matters, go no further than Spielberg/Kubrick's AI.

Islamophones

For the spiritual mobile player, comes the Ilkone i800 - customised and designed to help the pious Muslim do his or her observances, no matter where they are. Features include:

Automatic built in electronic device & special software to give automatic direction to Mecca
Complete Holy Quran in Uthmanic font drawing in color, with powerful search engine
Azan voice for Mecca, Madina, and Cairo mosques
Automatic converter for Hijri and Gregorian calendar

This is fabulous of course (the name, incidentally, is a derivation of the Islamic word for 'universal'). Can we look forward to a Buddhist mobile phone, deploying Bluetooth and wireless to maintain full non-dual connectivity at all times? Or a Hindu-fone that instructively misbehaves, thus reminding the believer of the fickle nature of Lila and her playful powers? I'd like Douglas Rushkoff to devise a Torah-phone... (Thanx to World Changing).

Not Funnies

Nice to see the The New York Times Magazine run the standard bi-annual "are-graphic-novels-the-new-poetry?" piece.

My (UK) era was 2000AD, Moebius and V for Vendetta: nowadays, it seems to have gone a lot more literary-and-literal (documentarists like Art Spiegelman, and short-storyists like Joe Sacco, are in the NYT piece).

But I'm still a sucker for a tightly-crammed frame, and a preposterous premise: go no further than Grant Morrison's The Filth, if you want to read the kind of comics you'd want to be hiding from your parents, if you were buying them these days.