Hello to everyone who attened the Cremone Theatre in Brisbane, on March 31st. What follows is the unamended text of my lecture to the Brisbane Festival of Ideas on 'The Power of Play'. I'd be delighted if you used the comment box below to respond to the piece, in any way and at any length you see fit. If you want to contact me about any issues directly, or find out more about the Play Ethic book, the links are below. You can download a fully footnoted version on MS Word from this link.
best wishes, pk
The Power of Play
Lecture by Pat Kane at Brisbane Festival of Ideas, Friday 31st March, 2003
For more information, contact [email protected]
And visit http://www.theplayethic.com
The crisis of work + the ‘work ethic’
We – and by ‘we’ I mean the developed nations – are in a state of crisis about work: about what we do when we work, what it does to us when we work, even what the very nature of work is. And this is a particularly propitious time and place to be talking publicly about this topic. In France, millions of students and workers have been taking to the streets to protest against the ‘precarite’, or precariousness, that new deregulations of the labour market hold out for their lives. While in Australia, laws pointing in a similar direction cause many heated column inches but, as far as I can tell, little storming of the barricades. (Maybe they were all stormed, and dismounted, before I arrived).
As to the difference or similarities between these two moments, I’m hoping that some of your questions tonight (or tomorrow’s responses to the blog) will clarify that for me. But it may help if I briefly run through some of the major themes on the crisis of work that have become clear over the last five years:
Work isn’t making us happy. This has become one of the new factoids of the age – that famous graph, highlighted by Richard Layard in the UK and Clive Hamilton in Australia, which shows a prodigous post-war ascent in levels of GDP in the countries of the developed world, but a steady flatlining of reported levels of happiness in those same countries over the same period (with Japan and Sweden as interesting anomalies to this). Backed up by the research of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, this seems to show that beyond a certain level of income, relative to spending power, we don’t get that much happier the richer we get.
There has been much discussion of this on both sides of the globe recently, with much that’s interesting for policy and policymakers, but I just want to point out the obvious. We may well have become more productive (by both using new technology and increasing our working hours). But the extra fruits of our labours – the consumerist model of house, car, holidays, malls, treats and toys (adult as well as childish) – do not seem to bring us greater happiness and meaning. If so, what’s the point?
Work is making us unhealthy. Again, there’s a huge amount of recent research on this, both national and global, some of which is referenced on the website. But the most interesting research I’ve found is the Whitehall Study, done by Micheal Marmot on the British Civil Service, with a data-set of over 10,000 subjects, tracked over 40 years to the present day.
What he reveals is that those civil servants with more choice, autonomy, resources and decision-making power in their jobs live considerably longer than those with less decision-making power, who are much more prone to the onset of ill-health. (Marmot assesses that only a third of this differential is due to more self-abusive lifestyles of the lower ranks – smoking, drinking, etc).
This to me is a more devastating point than the usual, and correct, complaint about the overall-rise in working hours in developed countries over the last twenty years, and the consequent stresses caused by indebtedness, strained family relations, etc. The very inequalities of power and status that most of us might accept as the somewhat tedious price of working for a stable organisation – these are inequalities are, literally, toxic and death-dealing.
And if this is the case for the British civil servant – perhaps, if we believe the portrayal of Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister, not the most dramatic or frantic of all occupations – what must the effect be in other, more cutting-edge areas of bureaucracy or the market?
Work is making us confused. This is a crisis of identity – what does it mean to be a good or respected worker these days? – which is to say, a crisis of what we’ve come to know as “the work ethic”. Apart from the evidence of the revolting French (who I’ll come back to later), there is again a huge body of research detailing a broadening and deepening disaffection with this legacy of Puritanism and the industrial revolution – the attitude that work diligently performed, no matter the degree to which it expresses the talents or sensibility of the worker, is the minimum badge of social respectability.
As Richard Sennett notes in his new book, The New Culture of Capitalism, diligence and commitment to a particular task or craft – one dignity that adherence to the work ethic afforded – is no longer respected, in the flexible and endlessly adaptive modern company. Yet the sheer acrobatics involved in that ‘new work’ – where individual self-reliance (on a short term contract) is invoked in the service of an often asphyxiating corporate ‘vision’ – is hardly a more attractive alternative. The rise of ‘stress’ as a factor in our working lives is due to this lurch from a ‘work ethic’ to an ‘enterprise ethic’. Madeleine Bunting notes that, in the UK, the number of days lost to individual “sickies” in the late nineties and early oughties, is actually greater than the total number of days lost to collective strikes in the dreaded early 70’s.
There are so many other factors involved in this delegitimation of the work ethic – the shifts in male identity around work and family, the attractions of interactive popular culture, which I’ll expand on later. But in terms of the new capitalism treats us, the crisis is easily summed up in one sentence: Why believe in work, when it doesn’t really believe in you?
All these elements add up to a general crisis of meaning and purpose, for countries whose leaders and establishments believe that the most stable social identity available comes through work. I’ll come to the bigger general factors fuelling this crisis – which is the increased pace and global reach of capitalism itself – later on.
But for now, before the braying voices of the business columnists drown us out, let’s try to imagine an answer to these crises. The first thing I want to do is to rub out the word ‘work’, and replace it with a clunkier term like ‘valuable activity’. What is the ‘valuable activity’ that could make us happier, make us healthier and make us clearer in our minds (rather than confused) about who we are, and what we want?
I think this conference is partly about throwing up a variety of answers to this question, from a multitude of different perspectives. So let me suggest mine…
The power of play
The first thing to say about play is that it’s not what you think it is. Or, to be exact, it’s much more than you think it is.
For most of us, at the level of daily speech, play is what children do, or what adults do sometimes in sport, or at parties. For some of us, play (and players) connotes the idea of creativity (as in theatre and music), or enterprise and strategy (as in politics and business). For a certain younger generation – and increasingly beyond them - play is what they largely do with their interactive technologies and communication devices.
And deeply embedded within the language are phrases, which we hardly notice, like ‘played it up or down’ ‘she plays her part’ or ‘he played a role’ – the very movement of the history of our societies considered as an open drama, a participatory project larger than ourselves, which we script or which, as often, scripts us. And at that point, someone – or some process – is ‘playing god’ with our lives. Or perhaps our genes. Or, as Einstein feared, the very dice themselves.
I hope that little sequence has shown, very quickly, the extent to which play is actually an extremely pervasive and elemental term in our language. Note the way we easily move from what we think is its most obvious definition (the mere activity of children) to something which is, to use an extremely Scottish word, epistemological – that is play as a way of framing what counts as true in our material and social world. And beyond that, even cosmic or spiritual. (Most creation myths are acts of play. The sheer gratuity of “Let there be light” in genesis; the dice tumbling from the hands of Mahabarata; the permanent play of forms and connections in Hinduism and Buddhism.)
Of course, the reason why play travels so promiscuously across our worlds of meaning goes all the way back to the child at play. For without play, we simply would not develop as advanced mammals; in a very direct and causal way, play enables the entire human condition. No wonder its metaphors pervade our mentalities – literally, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
The psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, in his masterwork The Ambiguity of Play, says that for humans (and mammals), play is ‘adaptive potentiation’. That’s a tough piece of jargon, but when you think about it, it’s actually a beautiful scientific anchoring of the kind of things we see our children do in their play spaces and play times. The density of our infant brains, the weakness of our infant bodies, and the complexity of our relationships with other young humans, means that we need a zone in our early years in which we can literally test out all this sophisticated biological and psychological equipment.
The strangeness of early play is that, strictly speaking, it’s maladaptive: young humans, in their relentless cavorting, scenario-exploring and intensity-seeking – this potentiation - open themselves out to more possible injury and damage that they would if they just stayed in an egg, or chrysalis, and grew.
Yet the need to play is so strong that the more complex adult mammals ensure that there are play times, play spaces and play resources – a patch of protected ground, supplies of food, maybe even materials – to enable this development through play to happen. And the end point of human play, its outcome, has been our species dominance on this planet, through our sheer capability and flexibility as organisms.
To me, the obvious question is: if play is so constitutive of our humanity, the the psychological and biological starting-point of all our complexities and capacities, why do we think that at a certain stage in our development, we must stop playing, ‘put childish things behind us’, become non-playful, perhaps working adults? I think the elemental key to this lies in the relationship between play and scarcity, or (the same thing) play and abundance.
To stay with ethology for a moment: the young mammal at play needs the labouring adult mammal to provide the resources for play, whether that’s defence of territory or basic sustenance. That is, developmental play occurs best in an environment which is some distance from immediate survival – even if the skills learned in play (hunting, status management, various ingenuities of perception) are skills that will help the mammal contribute to basic survival, her own and her progeny, when she is older.
I hope the point is becoming obvious. The further we move from scarcity as human animals, through our capacity to ‘do more with less’ through the application of science and technology, the more opportunity we have to extend the moment of play throughout our adult lives.
Play isn’t leisure
Yet I immediately want to distance this idea from the ‘leisure society’ theories of the seventies and eighties. In my understanding of the word, play is not leisure – if we understand ‘leisure’ to be that compensatory activity we conduct after our ‘necessary labours’ have been completed, a ‘re-creation’ of our exploited selves in order to return to our duties.
For if play is ‘adaptive potentiation’ – that is, the spinning-out of possibilities, experiments and imaginings to ensure our continuing development and adaptability – then our play is as ‘necessary’ to our survival (and thrival) as our work. The problem with the leisure society vision is that it usually presumed a kind of well-managed, semi-bureaucratic, ‘steady’ state, with productive automation of various kinds purring away in the background, and usually an alarmingly homogenous population living in quiet consensus. (All those white-bread happy families in zip-up jump suits…)
Yet, as we know, things have developed a little more raggedly and unevenly since the seventies, with both positive and negative consequences. Our societies have become far more conflictual, disruptive, emergent and surprising than the leisure theorists could ever have imagined.
In the face of the challenges presented by feminism, environmentalism, fundamentalism, monetarism, globalism and informationalism, the last thing our response could ever be is ‘leisurely’. To make a point briefly that I’ll develop later on: we need to be players in this accelerating world, not idlers or strollers or contemplatives.
But there is one residue of the leisure society thesis – how should we benefit from our increased technological ability to ‘do more with less’, our state of material abundance? – that does linger. And particularly around the crisis of the work ethic that I began this lecture with.
“Why are they so unhappy?”
I occasionally consult to large organisations in the private and public sectors. And I often have some sympathy for the senior managers and executives I talk to, as they try to respond to the levels of unhappiness, discontent and lack of motivation that they face in their workforces, who are often operating under conditions which – seen from the perspective of the leisure society theorists of the seventies – might seem like a partly-achieved utopia. And certainly from the perspective of working conditions in the first half of the twentieth century, a real one. “What can we do to address these issues?” I am asked. “What else can we do?”
My response is rarely satisfying to them – which is why I’m only an occasional consultant. (Or a deconsultant, as I often call myself – someone who goes into an organisation, unravels everything into a fertile mess, and is rarely invited back).
What I usually say is that they are facing a workforce whose very 21st century skills – the ability to communicate well and respond empathetically, to respond nimbly and enterprisingly to new tasks, to use networks with ease to collaborate with others and inform themselves – are not skills that can be ultimately be harnessed to the ends or goals of any organisation. These are the skills of the ars de vivre, of the arts of life themselves.
This is also a workforce which is not just better educated, healthier and longer-lived, but which also has access to an ethical perspective on their organisations – the product of feminism, environmentalism and increasingly spirituality – which they find difficult to bracket off from their day-to-day activities and work duties.
Their discontent is a discontent of sheer potential: what do I do with my life, my capacities? What is my purpose? Is this the right place, with the right structure and the right people, to manifest that? Material abundance has generated ethical anxiety, not complacency.
Again, after all that, the executive will come back to me again: “so what can I do then?” My response is to suggest that they recognise that this restlessness comes from a very deep place – the place of play, that wiring which compels to explore, self-develop and potentiate, whenever we feel we have sufficient distance from necessity. (Which, for most of us in the developed west, is a steadily increasing distance.)
So, I propose, could they consider turning part of their workspaces into playgrounds? By which I don’t mean a ‘leisure’ or ‘recreation’ space, the pool table or Playstation machine in the games room. But actually offering up the resources, both human and technical, of the organisation to support the diversive explorations, the adaptive potentiations, the developmental play of their staff – whether relevant to the company’s overall directives or not.
I usually cite Google at this point – who allow their staff one day a week to work on their own projects (which are usually to do with software) in company time, using company resources and materials. I point to their extraordinary financial success, their relentless culture of innovation, their strongly virtuous brand value (at least until their acceptance of censorship of their search engine by the Chinese authorities).
Yet it’s at this point the conversation usually peters out, with everyone rushing from my playshop to get back to their groaning in-boxes and time-shifted meetings. In my experience, it’s a rare organisation which can face down their accountants and shareholders, or (if in the public sector) their political masters, and genuinely respond to the crisis of working values – or looked at from my perspective, the renaissance of play values – that’s happening within their workforce. It seems to be a limit within conventional forms of organisation, that they can rarely imagine that they exist in a condition of abundance – whether of material or human resources.
The sheer paucity and exceptionalism of business models that could be seen to respond to the player rather than the worker – beyond what Ricardo Semler is doing with Semco in Brazil, I haven’t seen any – has forced me to look in two separate directions for possible movement and change.
• At one level – the micro, bottom-up level – there is much evidence of a broad culture of substantive play, manifesting itself through our active use of interactive technology, our diverse pop cultures, and what I call our ‘lifestyle militancy’ about nuturance and self-development.
• Yet there is another level – the macro, top-down level – which is also promising. At least in some parts of the developed world, particularly Europe, some legislators and statespeople are becoming aware that the ‘grounds of play’ can only be secured by regulation and policy. The state becomes an active supporter – and more importantly, a legitimator - of a variety of forms of valuable human activity, not just those which can be commodified. The state thus ensures that the full range of adaptive potentiations that humans might pursue, are pursued – and not just those edited and selected by a marketplace. If these pressures at the micro and the macro level can intensify, the meso level – meaning our daily life in our institutions and enterprises – will more lastingly change.
But what I want to stress very strongly – and I’m aware this is the most controversial part of my argument - is that these organisational changes are impeded by the very vocabulary of work itself. The cultural and historical weight of work – particularly the legacy of Puritanism – means that it is a poor and crude description of the subtle range of creative actions that we actually pursue, and would want to pursue more intensely, in our information-age organisations, given how much human and technical resource we have at our disposal to do so.
And the ethical residue of work – that sense of duty to others, the notion of ‘good works’ – I think should be properly called ‘care’, rather than bound up in a term which can makes our altruism and empathy seem like a functional necessity.
So between ‘play’ and ‘care’, in my view, we can get rid of the term ‘work’ altogether. And with that mind-forg’d manacle loosened, we can begin to devise institutions and organisations that respond to our growing sense of genuine playfulness.
How many ways to play?
At the beginning, I touched on the diverse meanings of play that stud our daily language. Sutton-Smith, as a demonstration of what he means by adaptive potentiation, has outlined what he regards as the seven ‘major rhetorics’ of play – the main ways in which play has been valued in human culture. I want to briefly outline them, and hopefully you’ll begin to see just how much of what we regard as work in the information age is actually a form of play.
He divides them into the modern and ancient rhetorics of play:
Modern
Play as progress – we adapt and develop through play
Play as selfhood – play as an expression of voluntary freedom
Play as imaginary – play as symbolic transformation, mental energy
Ancient
Play as power – we contest and compete with others – in sports and games, in theatres of power
Play as identity – the play-forms we use to confirm membership in a community – carnival, ritual, festival
Play as fate and chaos – the sense that we are played by forces greater than ourselves, not accessible to reason
Play as frivolity – play as laughter, subversion, tomfoolery
I hope you can see from this that a huge amount of human social order is expressed through these rhetorics of play – and that the ancient play-themes are as alive in our existences as the modern ones. If there is a more philosophical definition of play that unites these rhetorics, it’s that which comes from Friedrich von Schiller, author of the first great play theory, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in 1794. Schiller said that play means to ‘take reality lightly’. The etymological root of play is even more appropriate, from the Indo-European –dlegh, meaning ‘to engage, to exercise yourself’.
Certainly, those first five rhetorics – play as self-development, play as voluntary will, play as imagination, play as power, play as identity – seem, to me at least, like the skill-set of the very best enterprises we could conceive. And what is powerful about the remaining two rhetorics – play as fate, play as frivolity – is that they are an in-built caution to the over-confidence or presumptiveness of the preceding five.
I have attempted a ‘play audit’ of organisations, using these seven rhetorics, among non-executive-level workforces. But often the very constrictions of these organisations, whether it’s their hierarchy or corporate identity or strategic goals, means that workers can become incredibly dissatisfied with their existing conditions. (Again, fulfilling my role as a deconsultant…) The audit either shows up how much they are maxing out on certain kinds of play (often identity and power, in terms of a competitive corporate identity): how they are impoverished in some forms (say, play as freedom and as imagination, in terms of the unengaging and uninspiring nature of their tasks); and are positively toxic in others (play as frivolity, translating as the darkest office humour and parody).
But I still think the rhetorics – or some other typology of playful activities conducted beyond scarcity - would be a useful tool for any start-up organisation: particularly one that accepted the player-nature of their employees, and that wanted to ensure every possibility for ‘adaptive potentiation’ was being nurtured throughout the design of their company, and its product or service. I live in hope.
The techno-politics of play
I mentioned earlier that there is both a bottom-up vitality of play cultures, and (in some areas) a top-down receptiveness to supporting and sustaining a multi-active society. Let me expand on that.
In a country which has produced such brilliant Left critics of consumerism as Clive Hamilton, and such trenchant analysts of technology and work as Barry Jones and Sharon Beder, I’m happy to be a wee bit chastened in my enthusiasm for information technology as the crucial platform for the players’ identity. But only a wee bit!
Yes, as it is applied and used within traditionally-structured organisations, information and communications technology (or ICT) doesn’t just replace routine human mental labour, it also over-works and over-controls those humans who remain. But thankfully, ICT does not begin and end in the organisation. Indeed, in terms of participation, local custom, and the transmission of traditions and forms, I would go as far to say that cyberculture is one of the most powerful and authentic ‘folk’ cultures ever created.
As Cory Doctorow no doubt mentioned earlier today, the World Wide Web was originally conceived as a ‘play’ technology by Tim-Berners Lee – a way for scientists to play brain tennis with each others’ papers and documents, across long distances. Much of the essential architecture of the internet has been created by enthusiastic programmer amateurs, who then gifted their creations to the electronic commonwealth. The most notable, and explicitly playful, of these was Linus Torvalds, who created the operating system Linux in the early 1990’s as a post-grad student, which has now grown into a low-or-no-cost alternative to Microsoft, embraced by giants like China and Brazil.
It hardly needs demonstrating just how vital, democratising and participative the general effect of the Net, and digitalisation, has been in our societies. What I simply want to point to is just how deeply congruent cyberculture is with the notion of play as a possibility generator, helping us to survive and thrive by generating potential options. Net culture is, I would assert, one of the first authentic institutional responses to our emerging play-identity.
And its implicit ethos – the creation of robust, repairable, reliable collective infrastructures, which nevertheless allow and encourage a multitude of enterprises and initiatives from the individuals and groups that use them – is almost directly analogous with that mammalian play moment I was talking about earlier.
The internet is just like that defensible, well-resourced space for young complex mammals, protected by responsible guardians (which, at least up until this point, the elders of cyberspace – the hacker priesthood – have largely been), within which much developmental frolicking, testing and experimenting can take place. Now we could have a huge argument about how much playful development is actually occurring in cyberspace… but I think the analogy still holds.
And in terms of the Australian debate, I find myself still siding as much with Barry Jones’ argument in Sleepers’ Wake!, as I do with Clive Hamilton in Growth Fetish. We have to develop a consciousness – and an educated consciousness - that can cope with the technological outcomes of our playful imaginations. We have to be able to sift through – and if possible, proactively design – those systems that empower and enrich our sense of agency, and those which make us passive, disatissfied, fruitlessly envious. The prosumerist, or even the producerist, aspects of our media and internet culture, as opposed to the consumerist.
(This imperative is most acute in the case of the computer-games industry – an incredibly powerful tool for literacy, enabling the disciplined imagining and simulation of possible futures. However, in terms of content, games are currently trapped at the level of the penny-dreadful and the sensationalist novel – or worse, as in the case of the US Army, used as a scarily congruent recruiting tool. Yet the play-ethical response to games should not be demonisation of the play-form itself, but a concerted effort by the humanities and institutions of education to provide an non-commercial space for development of alternative contents and uses.)
What’s extraordinary about the play-space of cyberculture is that it has, quite spontaneously and emergently, returned some very familiar old values back to the mainstream – the idea of a commonwealth (or what Lawrence Lessig would rather call an ‘innovation’ or ‘creative commons’), or of active citizenship and reportage (see the rise of blogging and ‘smart mob’ street movements, nowhere more evident this week than in the Parisian demonstrations), or of co-operative organisational structures (see any number of activist, friendship or affinity networks).
These values, emerging from within this play-space, stand alongside critiques of modernity coming from environmentalism, feminism or spiritualism – and indeed, in their horizontal and connective principles, have a deep affinity with them. Yet they emerge out of culture, not nature – or out of that aspect, the playful aspect, of our nature that cannot help but create culture. Our elemental capacity for play, and the structures of the Net, have conjoined with startling fruitfulness at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.
Precarious life, flexicurity and care
I’d like to conclude by talking about the top-down, political response to the prospect of a mainstream of player-citizens, player-consumers and player-producers. In the UK (and to the extent that I know about it, Australia), I think the political response has often been confused and contradictory.
Certainly the basic contradiction in both societies – ie, legislating for a full-on, capitalistic popular culture, our visual environment strewn with mind-blowing and seductive advertising images in every corner, and then bemoaning the fact that ‘dole bludgers’ and ‘sickie merchants’ can’t manifest enough commitment to their humdrum office tasks – is never addressed, or it seems even understood. There has been some shift in the direction of common parenting rights for men and women – in which the classic (and ludic) test moment is the flexibility to able to see a daughter or son’s school team play a mid-week match. Yet it’s not far enough to really address growing anxieties about how children are developing in a two-parents-full-time-working society.
I have an interesting angle on the current French protests. If you read the news reports, you will find that the student banners have a consistent buzzword – precarite. The English equivalent is ‘precariousness’, but this doesn’t quite capture it – a more unsettling, fearful insecurity is implied. On my blog last year, I wrote a post about a prankster political movement in Italy, which aimed at creating a new patron saint for the flexible, short-term, precarious worker, called Punto San Precario. This was funny and inventive – San Precario can be seen in supermarkets in Milan, in full costume, laying a benediction upon the poor shelfstackers – and definitely playful. From this I discovered a whole, semi-subterranean discussion about the condition of precarity in the modern workforce, and how this might well be an opportunity for a new collective movement. After a lot of extremely abstract Italian-Marxist talk, Frenchi, part of the Milan activist group Chainworkers, defines precarity this way:
the problem of precarity is when they call you at midnight in order to tell you “look, tomorrow you’ve gotta work” when you’ve already got plans to go to Lugano to visit your family.
If these precarity activists are in some way co-ordinating and guiding the French protests, then it becomes at least not just one nation’s pathology, but an indication of a future politics to come. Chainworkers are keen to distinguish their complaint from that of the old Fordist worker, looking for a secure existence tied to a respected craft or skill. There is an element of the short-term, freelance worker’s condition – that lack of commitment to any organisation - that they like and enjoy: like so many in this mobile-phoned, cheap-flying, net-café-dwelling generation, mobility and new experience are largely what they crave, in a context of strong friendship connections. (Many of the Chainworkers are self-defined as cultural producers, but do a variety of jobs to survive – from temp work to shelf-stacking).
Their challenge to just-in-time social capitalism is this: if you only require my labour and skills for a limited period of time, and for a specific task only, then in return the state must provide me with “social flexicurity” – that is, a social security that empowers the flexible worker to control his own time, to receive part-time rates in exact proportion to a full-time wage, to receive the same social benefits as a full-time worker. Frenchi’s quip about precarity almost perfectly evokes the “caring” end of my play-care duality, mentioned earlier: this is a player who wants the time and space to develop his human relationships, valued as an activity intrinsically good in itself, and is prepared to accept part-time work as the means to that balanced life – but resists the idea of employers putting his part-time productivity at their beck and call.
If this is part of the understanding of the French students’ protest about new employment laws, then I would suggest that they are not as regressive or petit-bourgeois in their concerns as some of the commentary suggests. (“In ’68, they wanted to change the world; in ‘06, they want it to stay the same”).
Indeed, as you might expect, I see the basic scene of the play moment being enacted here again: young people willing and eager to live exploratory, unpredictable, possible lives – the lives of players – but unwilling to do so without a solid ground of play. Without some collective assurance, that is, that this free play does not end up leaving them vulnerable to attack or exploitation.
I agree with Richard Sennett at the end of his new book, where he accedes that our technology-driven economies and societies has moved us irrevocably away from the old organisations of the past. (Sennett reminds us that we can find the roots of the classic big organisation in Bismarck’s militaristic idea of the German firm - a 'social capitalism' which would employ as many people as it could, with as fixed roles as it could manage, in order to suppress revolt and insurrection). The ‘new men and woman’ of information capitalism, shaped by their net culture and experience, simply won’t buy the work ethic any more – their lives are too speedy, mutable and transformatory for all that.
But one of the things the state can do, says Sennett, is to help these new players build a narrative in their lives – some sense that their player’s moves build up to some accumulation of talent, status or experience, rather than just a series of disconnected episodes. His answer to that, similar to the Chainworkers, is to promote the status of part-time work, and support it through various income supplements, targeted benefits and tax breaks.
His second suggestion is that greater opportunities for social usefulness, for care and mentoring should be provided by the state, deploying the part-time and the underemployed, should be provided. Player-workers, in their mobility and fleet-footedness, may slip the bonds of social duty – but they may also miss that sense of responsibility and neededness also. A clever state should provide those opportunities – and not just as an entreaty to free voluntary action, but one which might also provide some kind of financial or material incentive also.
Again, that tandem appearing: play and care, care and play. The desire to live an adapting life of possibility and openness – but also the expectation that this will take place upon a background of support and protection. No matter how this may look to someone standing in the new industrialising towns of China or India, this structure of feeling is, I suggest, where many of us in the developed world are, in our hearts and minds. Not a work ethic – but a play ethic.
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