The Play Ethic

The Rebel Sell

Here's a necessary corrective to Naomi Klein's neo-puritan line on logos and brands, from two Canadian writers. The Rebel Yell makes the obvious point that even an awareness of corporate shenanigans can, itself, be a great brand - witness Micheal Moore, and Adbusters' own new 'blackspot' sneakers, which gives the writers their cue. From the review in the Toronto Post:

culture jamming (a largely Gen X activity of critiquing corporate culture with its own symbols) is philosophically no different than what the boomer generation professed when turning on, tuning in and dropping out. That's okay. GenXers can console themselves with hope they won't sell out like the hippies-turned-yuppies.

Except for Heath and Potter's next point — that the largely maligned hippies never sold out. In fact, their philosophy of hedonism and experiential wisdom always fit quite well into the capitalist marketplace. Finally, the authors argue that counterculture, the undercurrent of thought that unites the '60s radicals and the culture jammers, is, at best, a nice way to sell new products. At its worst, it represents a way of thinking that over the past 40 years has consistently exacerbated existing social and environmental problems and produced worse conditions.

There's a great supporting site on the book, with a fulsome author Q&A.

How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

This is an extraordinary 1972 essay from the sf writer Philip K. Dick, so favoured by Hollywood recently (Blade Runner, Payback, Minority Report). If anything were needed to prove that this was one of the most original minds in 20th century American fiction, this essay is it. Of interest to ludicists are passages like these:

Do not believe -- and I am dead serious when I say this -- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Hit the road, Jacques

Couldn't let the passing of Jacques Derrida go unremarked on this blog. As many people have pointed out to me, this was the original philosophical player (note his essay 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'). Like anyone else, I struggle with his original texts, but not with the principles of deconstruction - which was never destruction. The insight that the most abstract analytical prose rests on unarticulated metaphors, or uses terms that have an unavoidable slipperiness, I always found a liberating insight. It's the anarchism at the heart of play - what he called 'freeplay - that Derrida theorised (and at the risk of chasing you all away, here's the relevant quotes from Sign and Structure):

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game...Freeplay is the disruption of presence. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around.

Or, to quote the man in his last interview in Le Monde, 'Deconstruction is on the side of 'yes,' an affirmation of life'. (And for all 80's types: an article on the best pop songs ever written about a philosopher).

Playing-god ethics

Something I'm increasingly interested in is the need for a play ethics in genetics, nano- and bio-science. If we have the power to 'play God' with biology and matter, do we eschew it, or try to develop our ethics and consciousness to match our technical powers? Or is that ethical development beyond us?

Last holiday I consumed Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake voraciously, keen to see whether a great writer - through dystopian fiction - could get to the core of these issues. I have to say I found it a little disappointing - the Earth brought low by the arrogance of a nerdish gene-hacker (though I suppose bad watercolourists have got their malevolent hands on structures of death before...) This think-piece from the excellent Renewal mag kind of concurs - is it enough to claim that a genetic disaster would come from a deficit of humanism? The structural point is welcome:

Whatever the reader thinks about her apocalyptic vision, Atwood’s act of imagination is made possible by the sense in which science is now fully imbricated in the worlds of politics, venture capitalism, multinational corporations and international law. Theorists of this change, such as Helga Nowotny, suggest that the old model we had of Science as disinterested and separated off from the grubby real world has now become redundant. Our first response to the latest scientific finding or survey these days tends to be: who paid for that? Even august scientific journals, as Sheldon Krimsky’s recent book details, often print supplements of ‘research’ that are paid for by particular drug companies. As with the debate around the safety of MMR vaccination, whole issues, with profound implications for health, can come to rest on who helped fund the research, or in whose best interest a certain finding rests. Pristine science has fallen into a messy and conflicted world.

Berners-Lee sets us free

He's such a hero of mine...Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist whose profoundly and explicitly playful urges built the world its first truly global space - the web - is setting out his values for the next development of public networks. 'World Wide Web Inventor Warns Of Patent Licensing Royalty Threat' runs the headline, but his comments are (as usual) more profound than that:

[Berners' organisation] W3C, an open forum of companies and organizations chartered with adopting new Web standards--is promoting a royalty-free standards policy for patent licensing. "It is a common agreement," Berners-Lee said. "It shows an understanding that if you are trying to build a new market, then the common standard infrastructure must be royalty-free." Nevertheless, getting various companies to agree on standards is difficult, Berners-Lee said. "It takes a much bigger person to look at how someone does something differently" and to agree to adopt that technology as a standard, he said.

Yet again, a consciousness issue - what's the level of internal development of business/political leadership, that could countenance letting go of property rights, in order to develop the overall prosperity of a society or civilisation? Or as James Carse says, can we decide to play the infinite game rather than the finite game? Maybe it's the activists who will compel the change...

Addendum: another hero of mine was in the UK recently - Lawrence Lessig, spreading creative commons everywhere, and helping the BBC to build its reputational capital beyond any media organsation in the world, by advising on its Creative Archive project. More from Wired News.

Winning the Oil Endgame

Posting this not so much about the argument - though I think Amory Lovins' vision of a eco-tech society doing 'service and flow' is deeply attractive, particularly since design and innovation are at its core, rather than luddism and parsimony - but about the dominant metaphor. To think of 'Winning the Oil Endgame' is to see the range of responses to the decline of fossil fuels as a possibility for new paradigms to emerge, rather than as a story of increasing instabilty and desperation. Again, just confirmation that I'm onto something, in the way that we compulsively reach for the ludic trope and metaphor as a way to frame the reality and truth - or to be posh, the ontology and epistemology - of our accelerating world. Will Hutton, in the Guardian review of the Play Ethic book, thought so too:

Kane argues that our language subliminally recognises the role of play: we talk about putting an idea or concept in play; a company that is the object of takeover speculation is "in play"; a politician on the up is a "player". Yet we never stop to think about why we use play in contexts that the wider work ethic would insist are the ultimate in seriousness. Kane insists that the language is pointing us in the right direction, if only we recognised it. Of course all the world's a stage, and we are merely players with our exits and entrances; the trick is to lighten up and recognise that all aspects of life are more about gaming than working. There's fun to be had in taking over a company or challenging for the leadership of a political party - and once you locate what you are doing in those terms you are readier to experiment with the unexpected or devise a winning stratagem. Moreover, our language - talking about play and players - recognises that this is what is going on.

Labour-ing in the fields of play

Sorry for network silence - was lost in a few play sessions over the last few days... Stuff that I've noticed coming right up, speedily and without too much annotation.

Happy to see the New Labour think-journal Renewal embrace the toughest policy implications of a quality-of-life/play ethic agenda - citizens' income and reduction of working time. Stuart White's paper on markets, time, and citizenship is particularly powerful - and the journal's editorial puts this in the context of a 'social democracy' that a Labour government might begin to argue for (well, in Miralles' parliament, perhaps). I think there needs to be a more joyous and creativity-oriented argument for this kind of market regulation - and I'm always a little dismayed that my fellow work-ethic sceptic Madeleine Bunting comes at these issues from such a despairing, we're-all-nearly-doomed perspective (see this column).

Fancy a game of Democs?

A very neat initiative from the New Economics Foundation on a card game that makes policy-formation... fun! It's a called Democs - standing for DEliberative Meeting Of CitizenS. No great details on how it works, but here's the kind of topics that it can cover. The card game as means towards policy consultation is clearly the idea of the moment: my old think-tank the IFF also have a pack of 'possibility cards' on sale. The Play Ethic doesn't have any games as yet - but I can recommend anything from Cranium.

3 Myths about the Music Biz

Usefully challenging piece from LA Weekly, bringing some reality to the three biggest myths about the music biz. Which are:

MYTH NO. 1: The prevalence of file-trading services and free music on the Internet indicates that recorded music may no longer be an economically viable business.
MYTH NO. 2: Record sales are down. The situation is only growing worse.
MYTH NO. 3: Musicians no longer need the record industry. The Internet and other new technologies make this a new era of “do it yourself.”

The toughest debunking line: "Unfortunately, all this really means is that now there’s an infrastructure to support everyone’s delusions of stardom". True: we all want to be players. This annoys cultural gatekeepers... More background here.