The Play Ethic

Buying Experiences

Already well-blogged column from Virginia Postrel on the problem with the current American boom: they're buying experiences, not products. Take our expectations of a restaurant meal:

More and more of their value comes not from the nutrition and dishwashing services - function - but from the experience the restaurant provides. We don't go out to eat just to avoid cooking. We go to enjoy different cuisines in pleasant environments.

For successful restaurants, aesthetics is no longer an afterthought. Customers are paying for memories, not just fuel. What's true for restaurants is true across the economy. New economic value increasingly comes from experiences.

Americans have not stopped buying stuff, of course. (Indeed, there's a whole industry devoted to organizing our pantry-like closets.) But the marginal value of tangibles versus intangibles has shifted. That many manufactured goods are also getting cheaper only intensifies the trend.

Products as well as services increasingly distinguish themselves through aesthetics, adding emotional value to practical use. This trend confounds those who equate "quality" with function. Hence a recent Dilbert comic strip satirizes a product designer who declares: "Quality is yesterday's news. Today we focus on the emotional impact of the product."

In fact, the trend toward emotional value is exactly what psychological research would predict. Particularly as incomes rise, people find that additional experiences give them more pleasure than additional possessions.

Hmm. Almost no consciousness in this consumerist paen about the status of those who provide the quality experiences (other than an economic view). So many times I've been asked, 'but who will flip the burgers in a play society?' You'll flip your own, comes the reply, particularly if you have a regulation of working hours that allows you to attend to your own nourishment . Or you'll enjoy them from someone who wants to take gastronomic care and give extraordinary service, rather than the sub-robotic assembly of diseased crap (SuperSizeMe!) The Slow Foodies - and their theorist, Carl Honore - are onto something here. It's another reclamation of the right to order our time, space and materials. As Will Hutton says, we players, idlers and slow-coaches might well be in the ascendancy...

(You want numbers for all this? Try the New Economics Foundation's well-being website. They're launching 'a well-being manifesto - for a flourishing society' at the coming Labour Party conference.)

Play Ethic on the Radio in UK and Ireland

Such an amazing response to the Johnnie Walker's drivetime show I did last week in the UK, on BBC Radio Two. Johnnie was by turns tough-minded and sympathetic, and I've had scores of e-mails from listeners -one woman almost crashing the car because she was taking so many notes. Here's a link to a clip of the show - don't know how long it'll be up, but it's about the last half an hour.

The highlight of a breakneck day in Dublin last week was an interview with Pat Kenny, who's taken over from Gay Byrne as voice of the nation there (at least on radio). He was well-informed, critical but also responsive. (I appear about 1hr 37 in). There's quite a few pieces to appear in the Irish press - post 'em here when they appear.

Play Ethic @ IoS, PanMac, The Times

More press on the Play Ethic. I got the chance to summarise the book for the Independent on Sunday - see continued post link below - and there's also a semi-serious 10-step guide to playerhood which you might enjoy. Posted there is also a review from the Times Educational Supplement - which is happily positive. My publisher, Macmillan, has also built a site for the Play Ethic, which contains a good explanatory interview about the book from me. And the Times did a little blurb also, pointing out the parallel with Richard Neville's Playpower manifesto. Some more pieces to come over the next few weeks - will keep building up the archive here.

The slacker's new bible

Finally got a free link on this Financial Times piece on Bonjour Paresse (Hello Laziness), the new bible for French slackers. The book seems to have become a best-seller - apart from its obvious wit and sardonics - because the writer's employer is trying to fire her for writing it. Now that's what I needed to do for the Play Ethic - write it while being employed
as an adviser to Gordon Brown... Again, I have no problem with slackness in a sick workplace culture. The question is, as always, how can you feel in control of your own activity? What are the structural environments to deliver that? What's the playground/ground of play?

Play Ethic review in Guardian, FT

Delighted & intrigued by the continuing coverage given to the Play Ethic book. Two reviews here from UK business commentators - one truly engaged with the thesis, the other essentialy (though instructively) dismissive.

Will Hutton will need no introduction to some, as the author of the best-selling stakeholder manifestos The State We're In, and The World We're In, Observer columnist, and director of the Work Foundation. His review in the Guardian Review puts the Play Ethic in context with a slew of other anti- and counter-work ethic books out at the moment, like Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle, Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow - and happily, Hutton thinks mine is the "most arresting, fresh and insightful". He really gets my point about how play is at least a legitmate framework for action and understanding as work (maybe a fruit of the seminar we had last year).

But I'm most intrigued by the point he develops from the closing chapters of the Play Ethic, about how these post-work values might be a way to increase the global peace, by projecting an image of a less punitive, more embracing West (what Joseph Nye calls 'soft power'). It's a genuinely new insight, and one I'm going to muse on.

Not so impressed by Stefan Stern's review of the book in the Financial Times last week (see post continuation link below) - by turns inaccurate and abusive. Indeed, Hutton's point about the global impact of play values -which I talk about in the book by saying that, 'after 9/11, the relationship between work, play and spirituality are almost unbearably pertinent' - Stern dismisses like a schoolyard bully. 'No, they aren't'. Um, yes, they are...

But I'll concede that the economics of the play ethic anticipate a kind of 'busyness model' which is only beginning to be assembled. The thinker to watch on the notion of an 'economy for players' (or as she calls them, 'psychological sovereigns') is Shoshana Zuboff - her interview in the current edition of Strategy and Business (registration. req.), outlining her commitment to a support economy, is a great place to start. One of my major research topics in the coming year.

Future imperfect

From The Age (Melbourne). 'To generation Y, the world is an uncertain place - and for many of them, that's not such a bad thing.' Smart, accurate piece about a demographic that I call the 'soulitarians' in the Play Ethic book. Says the piece's paradigm Y'er, Nick Verginis:

"Our generation thinks anything is possible because we look past constraints imposed on previous generations. We hear the economic rationalist theology which dogs people 30 to 40, but we are not taken in by it. We are realistic, so that when management talks like that, we see through it."

Professor Johanna Wyn, the director of Melbourne University's Australian Youth Resources Centre, which has studied 2000 Y-gen twentysomethings, agrees. "They have their eyes wide open," she says. "They really are looking at things differently to previous generations. They are the most educated young people ever, and they have been made to stay at school longer." She calls them the "Don't Lock Me In Generation". "They understand there's no point putting all your hope in one thing, because everything is changing," she says. "They don't want to be stamped with a label, like 'plumber'. That's the old model. It doesn't fit the world. They opt for experience. They're secretly smarter than we think."

Here's a more political celebration of the uncertain life, from veteran US left historian Howard Zinn.

Players and Idlers on BBC Radio Scotland

Here's a nice radio promo spot for the Play Ethic that I did with Tom Hodgkinson of The Idler and How To Be Idle fame. As I expected, we agree on most things - we're both trying to define a different model of activity and creativity from that defined by work culture. But I think he's the bohemian, and I'm the futurist...

A really smart website

This is a laugh. 20Q.net is an exercise in web-based artificial intelligence: the AI starts to ask you questions, and from your answers it eventually figures out what you were thinking. It's worked four or five times for me, quite freakily. And the more you use it, folks, the smarter it gets. Through playing, we create Hal 9000 (hear his dulcet tones). On second thoughts...

Under the Third Way, the beach

Neat essay from my fellow Demos associate Charles Leadbeater on what the beach can tell us, as a ground of play (and perhaps a model for other social organisations):

The beach has long outlived the cotton and coal industries that spawned it as a mass destination for the northern working class in the 19th century. Now it acts as an escape route from commerce and branding, technology and corporations. Not only do we like what beaches do for us as individuals, we like the kind of society we keep on beaches: civil, playful, active, open. The beach is a prime example of successful collective self-organisation, without either the heavy hand of the state or the competition of the market. Our summer holidays are a homage to the third way.

As Alex Garland puts it in The Beach, there is the beach and the rest of the world. And as we reluctantly drag ourselves back to the world at the end of our two weeks there, how many of us wish that our offices and companies were governed, at least for some of the time, by the spirit of the beach?

Play Ethic on 'Heaven and Earth'

Welcome to those who've seen me on BBC1's Heaven and Earth show, talking about players, workers and idlers. If you're interested in the book, you can buy it here, and find out more here. There are some recent reviews also available.