The Play Ethic

Fashion Crafting - from 'No Logo' to 'Own Logo'

Thanks to Jyri (another impossibly bright Finnish digital boy), I am alerted to the rise in something called 'fashion crafting', courtesy of this blog. There's even a Draft Craft Manifesto:

1. People get satisfaction for being able to create/craft things because they can see themselves in the objects they make. This is not possible in purchased products.
2. The things that people have made themselves have magic powers. They have hidden meanings that other people can’t see.
3. The things people make they usually want to keep and update. Crafting is not against consumption. It is against throwing things away.
4. People seek recognition for the things they have made. Primarily it comes from their friends and family. This manifests as an economy of gifts.
5. People who believe they are producing genuinely cool things seek broader exposure for their products. This creates opportunities for alternative publishing channels.
6. Work inspires work. Seeing what other people have made generates new ideas and designs.
7. Essential for crafting are tools, which are accessible, portable, and easy to learn.
8. Materials become important. Knowledge of what they are made of and where to get them becomes essential.
9. Recipes become important. The ability to create and distribute interesting recipes becomes valuable.
10. Learning techniques brings people together. This creates online and offline communities of practice.
11. Craft-oriented people seek opportunities to discover interesting things and meet their makers. This creates marketplaces.
12. At the bottom, crafting is a form of play.

I have only one contribution of street anthropology to add to this: the return of "scoubidous" to North London schoolyards (my partner's boy Conn just handed me one). But the writer also extends this to a thesis about a post-'No-Logo' response to branding:

First, in the global entertainment industry, an increasing percentage of sales come from products that were never meant for the masses - that is, products that make up the Long Tail. Recently, niche production has also increased sharply in the fashion industry. Witness the increasing number of designer and crafter communities who discuss trends and techniques, post photos of their designs, and often also sell their hand-crafted products online. On the demand side this means that an increasing number of people prefer products that a) they have made themselves or b) somebody they personally know has made.

For the young people who are leading this trend, buying a mass-manufactured garment is totally uncool. Instead, buying a garment that has a (hi)story is awesome. I guess this could be interpreted as a form of self-expression - partly by rejecting readymade mainstream designs offered by global fashion brands, but also (perhaps more interestingly) by inventing new designs of their own. An essential aspect of the own logo phenomenon is the branding of one’s own creations. Many of the people who have started to make their own designs (including me and my friends) want to tag their creations with their own symbol. The symbol can be their initials, a nickname, or any other sign that they want to adopt as their own brand.

These people would probably agree with most of the arguments that Naomi brings up in her book. Still, instead of No Logo, they are signing up for Own Logo.

Everybody Loves Ludwig

Terry Eagleton writes a necessary piece on why Wittgenstein is the artist's philosopher:

Wittgenstein’s technique, like a novelist’s, is to show rather than to say, allowing illumination to dawn upon us gradually, by drawing us into a complex play of scenes and voices. As with any effective dramatist, we are not always sure which of these voices is his own. Like the Freudian analyst, we suspect that the author has a few answers but is keeping them up his sleeve for the moment, forcing us into the work of self-demystification, genially inviting our collaboration, but running the odd ring round us at the same time.

Pimp my Ride? Puhleeze!

Just on the trawl for sheer playfulness today... And I can't imagine any adornment more fun than these decorated trucks of Pakistan. Here's the explanation:

This extraordinary tradition has it's routes in the days of the Raj when craftsmen made glorious horse draw carriages for the gentry. In the 1920's the Kohistan bus company asked the local Michaelangelo, Ustad Elahi Buksh, a master craftsmen to decorate their buses to attract passengers. Buksh employed a community of artists from the Punjab town of Chiniot, who's ancestors had worked on many great palaces and temples dating back to the Mogal Empire. It was not long before truck owners followed suite with their own designs. Through the years the materials used have developed from wood and paint to metal, tinsel, plastic and reflective tape. Within the last few years trucks and buses have been further embellished with full lighting systems.

Here comes the Channel Four documentary, the cool-hunting corporate designers... But it's also some degree of vindication for Virginia Postrel's treatise the Substance of Style. Here's an extract from a useful PDF of her argument:

Human beings do not wait until they have full stomachs and a roof that doesn’t leak before they satisfy their aesthetic needs. Given a modicum of stability and sustenance, people have always enriched the look and feel of their lives through personal adornment and decorated objects. Poor people created the body decoration illustrated in National Geographic. Poor people built cathedrals in Europe and sand paintings in Tibet. Poor people turned baskets and pottery into decorative art. Poor people invented paints and dyes, jewelry and cosmetics. Five thousand years ago, unimaginably poor Stone Age weavers living in Swiss swamps used fruit pits as beads to work intricate, multicolored patterns into their textiles, work that archeologists have found preserved in the alkaline mud.

These artifacts do not reflect societies focused only on “lower-order” needs. Aesthetics is not a luxury, but a universal human desire. The anti-capitalists who criticize markets for luring consumers into wanting more than meets their basic needs and the capitalists who scoff at aesthetics for detracting from serious work are missing a fundamental fact of human nature.

At least this allows me to tolerate the "playas" in MTV's Pimp My Ride a little better...

Pop waylays the player

Sorry about this, folks...but I entered a tv pop competition with my old band Hue and Cry - in order to frankly get myself a few days of pampering, while singing for my supper - and we actually won the damn thing (if you want to know more, visit here). Very surprised and delighted, but it's taken the edge of my blogging for about a week or so. Now have a few hours to reconnect to the PE agenda. Stay tuned. 

The UK's first 'Thinker in Residence' is...

I've just been appointed Britain's first 'thinker in residence' at Bristol's new Festival of Ideas, 16-20th May. It's an exciting prospect. I'll be staying in Bristol for five days, attending all the public events. I'm licensed to be a 'constructive heckler' - identifying broad themes that emerge from the discussions, making connections between realms of knowledge. (For any of you who've read The Play Ethic, you'll realise what an ideal gig this is for me...) I'll also be blogging the event everyday, posting right here, and writing up a report/article after.

In between events, I'll be doing learning journeys into the city of Bristol itself - talking about the power of play, bringing reports from the festival to everyone from teachers to technologists to entrepreneurs, being a 'contrarian catalyst'.  Bristol's creative and innovative credentials are second to none - from Brunel to Allen Lane (founder of Penguin) to Massive Attack. I'm happy with my press release quote:

Ideas are the lifeblood of cities – the faster and richer they flow, the healthier and more robust urban life becomes. I'm delighted and honoured to be appointed the first thinker-in-residence at Bristol Festival of Ideas. The luxury of following one's intellectual and creative instincts, in the company of such an exciting roster of thinkers and writers, is something I'm going to exploit to the full. Ideas should always be festive – as David Hume once said, true enlightenment is a "disagreement between friends". If we attain that ideal, we'll all have a wonderful week!

I'd urge you to download the PDF, but some of the names and topics are:

• Paul Ormerod on economics
• Colin Tudge, John Gray, Julia Neuberger, Joanna Bourke on the Moral State We're In
• John Carey on What Good is the Arts?
• Deyan Sudjic on the Edifice Complex
• Paul Martin and Tom Hodgkinson on Happiness and Idleness
• AC Grayling on Power of Ideas
• Marek Kohn on Darwinism today
• Steven Johnson on Why Popular Culture is Good For You

Fun, yes? For some reason, my appointment has caused some consternation among the punditocracy and editoriat. In Scotland (no surprise there), see the Daily Record, The Sunday Times, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday (reg. req. for the last two). And, surreally, in the Daily Telegraph - an op-ed piece, no less (more like burble-ed, but there we are). A little thread has started up at Demos, where I'm an associate - feel free to chip in. And Patrick Barber at the Guardian helpfully invited me to explain myself. In any case, hopefully, I'll see some of you at Bristol!

Birth of the Supermodern

A meme moment here on Play Journal - or more accurately, giving some more impetus to Bruce Sterling's cheeky new periodisation of the times.  Say a big ludological "Hi!!" to The Supermodern (raise your font size):

MODERN                          POSTMODERN                                   SUPERMODERN

18th c - 1960s                  1960s-1990s                                     1990s-present day

International                    Multinational                                    Globalized

Nation-States                   Multinationals                                   Market States

Philosophy                        Theory                                              Actionable  Intelligence

Discovery of Truth          Uncovering Repressed Truth           Datamining the Chatter

Essence                           Simulacra                                           Plausibility

Have to say, it works for me. Is there a shift between play (postmodern) and play-ethics (supermodern)? That is, players  "take reality lightly" (Super), rather than all is illusion and spectacle (Post)? Supermoderns think there is such a thing as ontological reality - but the truth we discover is that matter itself is flux, form and movement (hello Deleuze, DeLanda, and complexity theory). Thus 'plausibility' is important - we make the best case for acting in shifting circumstances. And 'actionable intelligence' - almost a core definition of how play works in terms of learning and understanding - is required to inform our actions. Certainly, 'datamining the chatter' - ie, a public datasphere composed of many active,overlapping voices - is enabled by the play-tools of the web.

"Market-state" is the only one I'd question as the inevitable supermodern polity. I'll still go with Castells' network state - it has to be open to other modalities of production and creation that are distinct from market or state.(See Yochai Benkler's stunning new work on the economics of peer-to-peer sharing, here and here.)

Thoughts?

Play del.icio.us vs. Play Typepad

A small note about how this blog is developing: More projects requiring more effort (because paying more) means that I'm only doing about two posts a week on the main PlayJournal site, and those of a more column-like, speculative nature. But for those of you who want the 'outboard brain' of Play Ethic thinking, I'm using del.icio.us to capture quickly, and in a daily manner,  whatever interests me on the web, and taxonomising (sorry, folksonomizing) like fury at the same time. There's a 10-item feed to the left of this posting, and a link to the main site just above it. Just letting you know...

Palaces of Bling

It may seem a bit off-topic, but I was interviewed heavily by my old employer The Sunday Herald today on the Pope's death, and its significance for Scottish Catholics.

I wrestle a lot with the implications my Catholic background has had on my world-view, even my epistemology -  how its spectacle and ritual, and its mysticism, has shaped my more visionary tendencies.  There's an element of this in the Play Ethic of course - my opposition to the Protestant Work Ethic, its communitarian regulations and sensual prescriptions; my validation of other literacies (visual, networked) and the power of icons and symbols, rather than the merely textual perspective of classic Bible-based Presbyterianism.

I suppose, also, it's part of the player's faith that one's most elemental human spirit is creative and reciprocal, rather than 'fallen and sinful''; players are gnostics in that sense (I've struggled with that one before, in a more Marxisant frame of mind, and am always inspired by Erik Davis's Techgnosticism.) I've put my full exchange with the Herald below in extended post, but here's a paragraph that didn't (unsurprisingly) make it in:

I'm something of a fan of Catholic mysticism, magic and weirdness, and the way it anticipates our current wild science. Virgin birth and IVF? Transubstantiation - loaves and fishes, water into wine - as a dream of biotech and nanotech? And in terms of gayness, who's more androgenous than a Jesus icon? I think there's so much sexiness and style in Catholicism - its paganism and iconophilia needs to be liberated from strictures like celibacy and right to life. I visited St. Peter's in Rome last year, and I've never been in such a Palace of Bling in my puff.

Bless me father, I cannot but sin...

Ethix Korner

I'm in the freelance dance a little at the moment (thus the light posting), but I'm delighted to get this snazzy link from Matt Jones on what a hacker ethic might mean - we know Pekka Himanen's version, but let's try Steve Bowbrick's:

Hacking, like jazz music, is an indigenous American form – a gift to the world from the people who brought you rock and roll, personal computers and aerosol cheese. Hackers are engineers, problem solvers. They're impatient with what came in the box, they just won't read the manual and they think your retarded efforts to keep them out of your corporate network or your gated community or your DRM system are an impediment to the proper movement of knowledge.

Hackers are freedom lovers (usually, but not always, libertarians), rational (usually atheist, often militantly so), individualist (they hate collectivism but love motivated cooperation), analytical (they're the enemies of received wisdom), obsessive (often autistic) and oh so clever. They will – it seems inevitable to me – pretty soon be ruling the planet (at least the parts of it not ruled by their polar opposites, the fundamentalists). They're approaching the right age (40-ish) – although, of course, every generation knows its hackers, back to the dawn of time. Who do you think figured out you could heat clay to make waterproof vessels or extract iron from red dirt or control a loom with a punched card?

I'd be delighted if hackers began to assume the kind of political responsibility that Bowbrick imagines (and so would McKenzie Wark). Indeed I heard a presentation at the Skoll Forum from Lee Bryant of Headshift which made a strong case that social software, and social enterpreneurship, were absolutely in lockstep. Douglas Rushkoff is also about to publish on a new definition of enterprise and activism, as our networked society gets more powerful. As he puts it:

As collaborators, we are no longer setting ourselves up for exclusion, conflict, or even the postponement of joy. We don't need to dangle the carrot of cash prizes, salvation, or Bhoddisatvahood in order to get others to join in our enterprises, because they are so much fun to do right now, for their own sake.

A play ethic? It could be coming closer than even I might have dreamed. If you want some evidence for this, read the musings from the ludic community site Gamasutra on (no less) "The Moral Responsibility of Game Makers". Impressive, direct, hopeful - at minimum, because of their unforced seriousness.