The Play Ethic

My books of the year

This may be of interest - my books of the year, as requested by my old paper, the Sunday Herald:

Pat Kane, writer and musician

Afflicted Powers: Capital And Spectacle In A New Age of War by the Retort collective (Verso, £9.99) is the most intelligent, holistic and well- written leftist critique of our current world disorder that I’ve ever read. The collection Islam, Race And Being British, edited by Madeleine Bunting (Guardian Books/Barrow Cadbury Trust, £9.99) is a vital toolbox for building harmony on these islands. And all not-yet- entirely-jaundiced hacks should read Peace Journalism by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick (Hawthorn Press, £25), a new paradigm for reporting. For fun, I virtually inhaled Chronicles, by Bob Dylan (Viking, £7.99).

Dearie me: given 100 words to fill, the inveterate old activist comes out... I should also mention Geoff, The Buddha and Me, A Hacker Manifesto, Ulysses (again!?), and Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. The rest of the Sherald list, like all these year end things, makes fascinating reading (and is very useful for Xmas).

Follow the Fun, says Rushkoff

Been looking forward to Douglas's business book Get Back In The Box, particularly since he told me it was going to foreground the presentation on play in business that he's been making for the last few years, under the title 'Follow the Fun'. He's posted some of this material on his blog:

In a renaissance society driven by the need to forge connections, play is the ultimate system for social currency. It's a way to try on new roles without committing to them for life. It's a way to test strategies of engagement without being defined by them forever. It’s a way to rise above the seemingly high stakes of almost any situation and see it as the game it probably is. It’s a way to make one’s enterprise a form of social currency from the beginning, and to guarantee a collaborative, playful, and altogether more productive path toward continual innovation. 

And this play begins at work.

Establishing a playful career or company isn't as easy as it looks. It doesn't require expensive consultants, trips to the woods, or the reinvention of a company's culture based on some abstract ideal. But it does mean going against much of what we’ve been taught about competition and survival - not just in business school, but for the past five centuries! Still, just as people have stopped relating as individuals to their brands and opted instead to become members of brand cultures, producers in a renaissance era must come to think of their companies as collaborative minisocieties, whose underlying work ethic will ultimately be expressed in the culture they create for the world at large.

Couldn't agree more - the first paragraph is a lovely summary of the kind of social mentality I was proposing in the Play Ethic book. I particularly like the idea of producers seeing their companies as "collaborative minisocieties".

But I also think this needs a real metaphor-shift (meaning head-and-heart shift) at the strategic and executive level, particularly with traditional companies, for that vision to have purchase. (Speaking from some direct consulting experience here). I'm sure Douglas would agree that some of that impetus comes from new business models forged by entrepreneurs, social and private, who (if they're successful enough) can generate profoundly playful productive cultures.

Rhythm is a dancer

I've been trying to extract this clip from my cameraphone for about six months, and finally cracked it... This is a short clip of an electrodancer  I came across at Brent Cross Amusement Centre in London, playing one of those dance competition machines. As a street-level skill, this is hard to beat (though I think the machine gets trashed). It's on one of these mobile phone formats (3gp), but it seems to play in the latest versions of Quicktime. Enjoy.

The Game of War

Couldn't resist this piece of ludic realpolitik from Jean Baudrillard, gloomiest of all living French intellectuals, in an interview with the New York Times (reg required):

At 76, you are still pushing your famous theory about "simulation" and the "simulacrum," which maintains that media images have become more convincing and real than reality.

All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It's a simulation of freedom.

So you don't think that the U.S. invaded Iraq to spread freedom?

What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It's a game.

Google - Turing's Cathedral

George Dyson on his visit to Google:

Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing had advised. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates."

Google is Turing's cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope. In the words of an unusually perceptive friend: "When I was there, just before the IPO, I thought the coziness to be almost overwhelming. Happy Golden Retrievers running in slow motion through water sprinklers on the lawn. People waving and smiling, toys everywhere. I immediately suspected that unimaginable evil was happening somewhere in the dark corners. If the devil would come to earth, what place would be better to hide?"

Just if you thought to underestimate the Google phenomenon...

What's My Name, Fool!

You gotta love a book with Ali on the cover...  and this is a long-overdue overview of  the relationship between protest and American sports, from a  punchy young writer called Dave Zirin. (He gives a big long interview on the book here.) I like this bit on the title of the book:

Now, when Ali changed his name, first from Cassius Clay and then to Cassius X, and then to Muhammad Ali, there was just no word for the firestorm that this caused. The heavyweight champion of the world is supposed to be a symbol of all that’s Americana and masculinity and standing for the flag, and you had him join the organization of Malcolm X, that believed in self-defense against racist attacks.

I’m trying to relay to an audience today about the firestorm that this caused, and the only thing I could think of is you have to imagine if, say, Jenna Bush joined the Iraqi resistance...