The Play Ethic

#amp09 #digitaloptimism

I attended an unusual conference in London yesterday - Amplified09. Not unusual for the overall topic - social media/Web 2.0 - but for its organisation. Which was a very intriguing mixture of the virtual, the networked, the architectural and the personal. On one level, something of an exemplar for a 'serious play' environment. But on another level, reminiscent of a very historic phenomenon indeed.

I began with Amplified by going to its wiki (which you get access to when you sign up), and printing off a list of topics that people had posted up there, each with its own number. Not so unusual - except that each topic was prefixed by something called a hash tag. This is a convention that the micro-blogging service Twitter has evolved, by which people who are attending an event, or who share interest in a topic, signal that they're doing so by putting a specific hash tag in their messaging. 

So if you'd gone to Twitter's search engine and typed in #uksnow a month ago, you would have seen a nation of tweeples (as they cry themselves) reporting on its snowfall as it happened. What Amplified09 asked you to do, when you were twittering on the event, was to use hash tags that didn't just refer to the overall event (#amp09), but to the number of the topics that someone wanted to talk about (eg #amp 09 #100). 

As Toby Moores, Amplified's founder explained at the event, the desired behaviour would be that if there were a few good ideas that struck you from each discussion you were involved in, you would tweet those in a disciplined way (ie, using the proper sequence of hash tags). In this way, I guess Amplified wants to be able to retrospectively map the landscape of ideas arising from the discussion - the hot tables, the good talkers, the consistent themes. And also tie the peaks in those landscapes to particular individuals, who might wish to take further action. 

This process promises to solve what often frustrates me about ideas conferences - which is the difficulty of translating rich discussions into useable knowledge. Yes, if we're disciplined, we blog seriously about it - which I did, for example, when I was a "Thinker-In-Residence" at the Bristol Festival of Ideas a few years ago. But my incentive there was, frankly, that I was getting paid for that activity (among other activities). What Clay Shirky identifies in Here Comes Everybody is that social networks enable people to get organised, and contribute to collective projects, for not that much individual effort - small contributions, loosely joined, potentially mounting up to a Wikipedia (or an Obama victory). 

Each tweet from Amplified09 becomes that kind of contribution, if the participants are disciplined enough to do so. And crucially, if the organisers then have the resources to be editors and executors of these accumulated idea-flows, presenting them back to the participants in a convincing way, clearly highlighting possible projects and initiatives. (For example, it seems that an 'Alternative Digital Britain' report is going to be a tangible outcome of the day's event.) 

I'm still a bit sceptical that Twitter's 140-character message limit (already eaten into by hash-tags) isn't just too arbitrarily small a text-window in which to get a good idea down from these processes. The fact that wi-fi wasn't available at the event meant that people were driven to their smart phones to tweet - and for me, that's not the most comfortable interface. 

But what was very cool about the event was the way that its organising principles - where the online and offline easily interweave - transformed what was a rather bordello-like bar in Trafalgar Square (Tiger Tiger) into what Hakim Bey used to call a T.A.Z. (Temporary Autonomous Zone). No doubt money from the sponsors helped to secure the venue - but it makes you realise how rare a London experience it is (apart from, say, hanging around Tate Modern) to be freely, inexpensively and noisily conversing with your peers, without the expectation that money should change hands at any point. Recession brings the agora back to life? If that's what Nesta's public funding of Amplified does... then that's what it's supposed to do.

I also admired what you could call the 'human iterative rules' of the event - the behaviours that Amplified09 prescribed at the face-to-face level, which would (hopefully) burgeon towards a rich and meaningful collective experience. The one I liked were the 'two ears, one mouth' rule ("use them in that proportion", admonished Toby, "don't grandstand or perform, listen twice as much as you speak"). And the 'law of the feet' rule - that once you feel you've received or added your pearls of wisdom to a particular table, then walk to another one, and fertilize (or be fertilized) by that conversation. 

I was trying hard (honest) with the first rule, and I failed miserably with the second rule - partly I think because there were too many diverse and rich groups, and too little time to sample. But it's attractive to know that Amplified's schedule means that people might reconvene around certain topics, across different times and events (I'd very much like to engage with the 'future of the book/future of journalism' topics). Any socially-minded funding body could profitably dedicate one of its cash streams to be simply about making interesting urban spaces available to these netizens, wifi enabled if possible - and then let them coagulate furiously, using all the networked ad-hocracy at their disposal.

Of course I left with a pocketful of interesting biz cards, which I will explore. But the whole day reminded me of some quotes from (tighten the straps, matron) the anarchist David Graeber that I featured in my Play Ethic book. His experience of the anti-globalisation movement was that it was a 'prefigurative politics' - a politics which gave people a tangible sense of the change they are struggling for:

this is a movement about reinventing democracy. It is not opposed to organization. It is about creating new forms of organization. It is not lacking in ideology. Those new forms of organization are its ideology. It is about creating and enacting horizontal networks instead of top-down structures like states, parties or corporations; networks based on principles of decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy. Ultimately, it aspires to be much more than that, because ultimately it aspires to reinvent daily life as whole. 

At the end of the New Left Review article, Graeber makes an interesting point. Why is it that movements for radical change always find sympathy among "artists, musicians, writers, and others" - to which we must add the geeks and hacker classes in full attendance yesterday - "who are involved in some form of non-alienated production?" Why is it that it's often craftsmen and craftswomen, rather than necessarily the oppressed worker (of head or hand), that sees a new path forward?

Surely there must be a link between the actual experience of first imagining things and then bringing them into being, individually or collectively, and the ability to envision social alternatives—particularly, the possibility of a society itself premised on less alienated forms of creativity? One might even suggest that revolutionary coalitions always tend to rely on a kind of alliance between a society’s least alienated and its most oppressed; actual revolutions, one could then say, have tended to happen when these two categories most broadly overlap...

Now, calm the horses - I'm not saying there was anything revolutionary going on in the squeaky leather booths of Tiger Tiger on Tuesday (not with the Economist's offices just a brick's-throw away). But I was very much encouraged by the general eagerness to relate any software, platform or infrastructure developments to genuine social need - and by the disdain for corporate and vested interest, and support for small-trader rights, that the Digital Britain report provoked in many conversations. I've been to my fair share of dot-com capital-jerks in the metropolis over the last 15 years, and this was at the very opposite pole from that. Perhaps it's the times - but perhaps it's also the maturing self-awareness of the digital classes

For me, Graeber's vision of networked activism - "being able to envision social alternatives", facilitated by a "less alienated form of creativity" - captures what was beginning to happen over six hours yesterday, and elsewhere in social media activism (see the Social Innovation Camp for example). 

Or to be perhaps more reassuringly historical about it, Amplified09 also felt like a 21st century version of those 19th century associations and craft guilds - those who could intuit a better society, and a more active citizenship, by virtue of their immersion in their material and social practice. For awls and hammers, substitute mobys and netbooks: for printers-turned-pamphletters, substitute interaction-designers-turned-network-forgers. And perhaps even, for the rituals and protocols that bound masons and freemen together, substitute the subtle harness of behavioural cues (and hacker ethics) that suffused that venue yesterday.

As Richard Sennett says in his recent book, The Craftsman, "we gain our sense of citizenship in the experience of play - and we often lose it when we work". I felt among soulitarians yesterday, as I call them in the book - or citizen-players, or ethical hackers, or the newly militant creative classes, or "Leadbeaters" even - whatever label sticks. 

#amp09 #optimism. And of course, this'll be on the twitterstream in a minute. Serious play, indeed.

'Driving is not a game': when criminology met the Play Ethic

One of the enjoyable things about forging a meme (maybe it's a strange attractor?) like the Play Ethic is the stuff that comes to you, from expertises and disciplines you'd never even thought about. So it's been a knotty delight to read through Nic Groombridge's paper, Playing Around with Crime and Criminology in Videogames. The original document Nic sent me was actually titled 'iPlod', which is a much funnier title. (PC Plod is a British slang term for 'policeman').

As Groombridge tartly notes, the ambition of most criminologists would seem to be either "doing research for the Home Office or speaking out on behalf of the criminalized". He tries to steer round the obvious point of intersection between games and criminology - the debate about whether computer games are a factor in teen violence. (Beware of immersive, isolating personal media platforms that can often engage its user in a set of extreme and dastardly scenarios... Yes, ban the book! And whatever we do, don't put Raskolnikov into a computer game). But he doesn't quite manage, as we'll see later on.

There is indeed a lot of 'cybercrime' around - but defintions are crucial. To help us sort through it, he quotes David Wall's very useful distinction (in his book Cybercrime) between three generations of cybercriminality:

Gen 1: 'crimes using computers' - recognisable crimes that just use computers as tools. Payrolls have always been diddled, drug dealers dealers have always needed secretive communication, terrorists have always needed to find a way to produce bomb guides. Now they have better means - and the law will try to get them for activities they're still familiar with.

Gen 2: 'hybrid crimes' - old crimes for which computers and networks provide new opportunities. Like internet auction fraud, or cracking/hacking (in the malevolent sense), or paedophile porn networks, or mass identity theft, or information on how to crack digital decoders or make synthetic drugs. This crime would also happen anyway, but not on this global scale, and with not as much virulence.

Gen 3: 'distributed and automated crimes' - crimes which couldn't happen without the internet. For example, spambots which relentlessly attack your computer. Or the 'misappropriation of intellectual property' - which can cover everything, in Wall's definition, from teenage downloaders flouting copyright laws, to vandalism and rape in virtual worlds. (There is a 'fourth generation' to come, apparently, as 'ambient' technologies like wifi and bluetooth bring connectedness into the streets).

Clearly in this third generation of cybercrime, all the ambiguities of play - unleashed in the synthetic worlds of the net - come rushing up to meet the criminologist. But what kind of criminologist? One contracted to the Home Office, gathering statistics on anti-social behaviour - or one seeking to defend and understand the criminalised? It seems to depend what kind of political state you practice your criminology in.

Groombridge quotes Edward Castronova on South Korea's National Police Agency, who recorded 40,000 computer crimes in 2003 - with 22,000 of them being online related. If you've stolen 60 quadrillion pieces from a virtual game-world, the Korean police will eagerly get you for property crime - no hesitation.

Shift, however, to the US, and the phenomenon of "griefers" - where teams of spoilsports go around trashing virtual worlds with stunts and hacks. They thrive in that legal gap between real-life and virtual-life actions that most game-world hosts loudly proclaim. As Julian Dibbell says in his brilliant piece of reportage in Wired, the griefers aim is to point out that "nothing on the Internet is so serious it can't be laughed at, and that nothing is so laughable as people who think otherwise". Sheer anticness: the primordial rumble of play. Not much that the law can do about that.

Pay and/or/to play? Some gurus on the crisis of the music biz

Rehearsing at the moment for the Hue And Cry tour, so apologies for lighter posting. But as I'm mostly in a music mode at the moment, I thought I'd share some of the sources and pieces that fuel my theory and practice as a music entrepreneur.

Gerd Leonhard is quite rightly gaining pre-eminence as one of the visionaries who can see a new business model for the music business, beyond the current panic about the collapse of copyright. His slogan is 'compensation not control' - meaning, we have to start thinking about licensing the overall usage of music through digital streams, rather than controlling the usage of every piece of music that gets played. Lawrence Lessig makes this point about digitisation in his book Remix which I reviewed recently - literally, every time you play a piece of content on your computer, it makes a 'copy'. So, whither 'copyright' as a means of recompense? Is that really concievable these days, outwith some Orwellian system of total control of all connected machines?

I love Gerd's latest riff, inspired by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, about how the music business should start thinking about its stuff as an 'app' to be downloaded to mobile devices (like Android or the iPhone), with a whole load of services that could be charged for or rented. (The one thing you can say about mobility is that it has built in some expectation of content being paid for). No-one knows how things will settle with digital content in the next few years - as my column for the Guardian said a few weeks ago, there is regulatory-level as well as company-level reforms and innovations being pursued here. But Gerd is a superbly responsive and intelligent guide to the landscape. Here's a great interview with the music blog Rollo and Grady

Another font of useful (and occasionally wild) theorising is Bob Lefsetz (also interviewed recently in Rollo and Grady). Nothing if not passionate, Lefsetz constantly takes the major music business to task for its head-in-the-sand attitude to the digital tsunami that has rushed over them - and (inspiringly for musicians) says that the only safe course amidst the business turmoil of digitisation and networks is for bands to make the most inspiring music they can, for the most committed fans they can find. And then, assume that there's a living to be made, not a fortune. Musicians and bands should grow their presence horizontally and organically through the various fan-and-content networks available, with live performance at the core of the model. This is exactly what we've tried to do with the Hue And Cry Music Club (based on the Ning platform) - and our current near sell-out UK tour is some proof that the model can work.

And finally, from the live events specialist Sarah Farrugia, I recieved note of this interview (again from Rollo And Grady) from marketing guru Seth Godin. Here's the most relevant quote:

Seth: My new book is called Tribes, so I can’t help but use the term “tribe.” I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I define a tribe as a group of people sharing a common culture, a goal, a mission, probably a leader. There are tribes of people – like the ones who go to South by Southwest – who are connected because they want to remake the music industry. There is the tribe of people who follow Bruce Springsteen and will pay unreasonable amounts of money to hear him live and compare playlists. The important distinction here is that music labels used to be in the business of grabbing shelf space, on the radio and in the record store. Now, the music industry needs to realign and be in the business of finding and connecting and leading groups of people who want to follow a musician and connect with the other people who want to do the same.

R&G: I see artists actively pursuing their fans by gathering opt-in mailing lists and offering B-sides and tickets before they go on sale to the general public. I feel like a lot of bands are actively reaching out to their fans.

Seth: Also, the middle geography has disappeared. In the ‘70s or ‘80s you listened to a song because “everyone else” was also listening to it. That’s the definition of pop music. In those days we defined “everyone else” as people in our high school or people who listened to WPLJ. Now, “everyone else” is not defined by where you live or what radio station you listen to. It’s defined by which horizontal or vertical slice of the world you connect yourself with. I might listen to Keller Williams because everyone else in my world includes frustrated Deadheads. We don’t have new Grateful Dead to listen to, so everyone else in my circle is listening to Keller Williams, so he is pop to us. He’s not pop to the kids at the middle school who have never heard of him, right? So you end up with all these silos and niches and lots and lots of ways to look at the world.

What's the Chinese curse - may you live in interesting times? The Chinese have certainly cursed the music business at the moment. And I'm tempted to say, thank Confucious for that. It's at least not boring - and a constant and direct invitation to think through what a "play ethic" might actually mean.

Carnage Not Required: questioning the commercial need for violence in video games

A very useful and extensive psychological study from the University of Rochester, claiming that "the enjoyment from playing computer games likely stems from the healthy pleasure of mastering a challenge rather than from a disturbing craving for carnage":

Video games are enjoyable, immersive, and motivating insofar as they offer opportunities for psychological need satisfaction, specifically experiences of competence and autonomy, to which violent content per se is largely unrelated.

Initially, many games are perceived as being fun. Much of our work is focused on understanding when games reach to deeper levels of satisfaction that often sustain engagement over time, and to identify both the healthy and unhealthy aspects of that play.

The research (free abstract and absurdly expensive paper) also quotes Scott Rigby, president of Immersyve and a co-investigator in the study:

Much of the debate about game violence has pitted the assumed commercial value of violence against social concern about the harm it may cause. Our study shows that the violence may not be the real value component, freeing developers to design away from violence while at the same time broadening their market.

And three cheers for that. I've had too many conversations with game-makers (particularly from my Scottish locus) who, when presented with a range of possible game motivations and scenarios that don't involve spectacular male violence in urban settings, shake their heads and say, "just don't see the game in that, Pat. You gotta see the game." I've always suspected that this was male geek laziness on the industry's part. Incidentally, this report is based on a sample set that was 85% male.

Immersyve have developed a psychometric methodology called PENS (Players' Experience of Need Satisfaction) - be good to hear from some core games researchers whether they rate this. In any case, this is a much needed research distinction for games makers (and those who agonise about games' impact): the "competence and autonomy" that players get out of their game-play does not necessitate conflict or war contexts. (Many thanks to International Hobo for the link).

Thinking like Noah: Mike Davis' "mental tournament" on saving the planet

My utopian friend Micheal Bauwens points me to a piece which applies utopian thinking - the habitual mind-set of the authentic player - to our ecological crisis. But from a writer who's utopianism is about as hard-won as it can be.

I first read Mike Davis while spending some time in LA as a musician in the late eighties. I dimly wish I hadn't been reading his dissection of Los Angeles, City of Quartz (one of the best combinations of topic, style and intellectual rigour I've ever encountered) - I might have had a little more fun amid the pines in Laurel Canyon. I later met Mike in Sunnyvale, while doing a documentary for the BBC, and he spoke in paragraphs as lucid as his writing. I love embattled, yet deeply patriotic American socialists (Micheal Harrington, C. Wright Mills, Cornel West... don't start me) - as much for the impossibility of their aspiration as anything else. (And although I do have an Obama/Marx t-shirt, I ain't kidding myself).

This speech, delivered at the Brecht Forum, in New York, is called 'Who Will Build The Ark?" - and it's a summation of his recent writings warning us about megacities, avian flu and the ubiquity of violent terror. But with ineffable coolness - and this is enough to lead you into the rest of the piece - Mike has chosen to structure his essay according to a scene from Orson Welles' Lady From Shanghai, where a defence lawyer interrogates himself at the witness stand:

In the spirit of 'Lady from Shanghai,' I've organized this talk as a debate with myself, a mental tournament between analytic despair and utopian possibility that is personally, and probably objectively, irresolvable.

In the first half of the presentation, 'Pessimism of the Intellect,' I adduce arguments for believing that we've already lost the first, epochal stage of the battle against global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, in the smug but sadly accurate words of one of its chief opponents, has done "nothing measurable about climate change. Global carbon dioxide emissions arose by the same amount they were supposed to fall because of it." It is unlikely, moreover, that a post-Kyoto process can stabilize greenhouse gas accumulation this side of the famous 'red line' of 450 ppm by 2020.

If this is the case, the most heroic efforts of our children's generation will be unable to forestall a radical reshaping of ecologies, water resources, and agricultural systems. In a warmer world. Moreover, socio-economic inequality will have a meteorological mandate, and there will be little incentive for the rich Northern Hemisphere countries whose carbon emissions have destroyed the climate equilibrium of the Holocene to share resources for adaptation with those poor subtropical countries most vulnerable to droughts and floods.

The second part of the talk is my self-rebuttal ('Optimism of the Imagination'). I appeal to the paradox that the single most important cause of global warming - the urbanization of humanity - is also potentially the principal solution to the problem of human survival in the later twenty-first century. Left to the dismal politics of the present, of course, cities of poverty will almost certainly become the coffins of hope; but all the more reason that we must start thinking like Noah. Since most of history's giant trees have already been cut down, a new Ark will have to be constructed out of the materials that a desperate humanity finds at hand in insurgent communities, pirate technologies, bootlegged media, rebel science, and forgotten utopias.

Edmonds/Beale: mad as hell, unable to take it anymore

It was one of my great maturing moments as a young man: the first time I sat down and watched Lumet and Chayefsky's Network. As the years go by, it gets more and more spookily prophetic. (And for me, more moving: William Holden, that dogged, craggy empiricist, so reminds me of my late father.)

But I'm going to spare you a lengthy exposition for the moment - though believe me, it's coming - and proceed by YouTube montage, to make my case for its continuing relevance.

Firstly the great Howard Beale going mad as hell (as Faye Dunaway's cash register visibly rings):

And here's his 2009 UK inheritor, Noel Edmonds, on his "Noel's HQ" show on SKY1:

 

But here's what you really want Noel to say:

And of course, the cameras keep rolling...

"Reality's broken/Games aren't/Let games help fix reality": Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal is an extraordinary evangelist for games (computer or otherwise) as learning and activist tools, based at the Institute for the Future in California. She's quoted the Play Ethic in many of her presentations so it's nice to be able to return the favour.

Her ludic thang (first signalled by her 'I Love Bees' marketing campaign for Halo 2 in 2004) is 'alternatve reality games'  - where the boundary between game and life is seamless for the players, and involves running around the real world as much as it does a virtual one, with signs and signals in each realm leading you to greater depths in the other.

In her current futurist guise, Jane is (in her own words):

explores how games are changing the way we conduct and influence real business, real health care, real scientific research, and our real social lives. She focuses on ways that alternate reality games in particular could lead to a higher quality of life in both Western and developing nations, and how they could produce more engaging and thriving democracies worldwide... She also develops massively multiplayer forecasting games.

An exciting agenda. But there's a phrase that been creeping into my vocabulary recently - "that's a real time-suck". Which, apart from being grotesquely ugly, points up a little road-block in Jane's inexorable progress. To the degree that we get that 'cognitive surplus' which Clay Shirky talks about from not being enslaved to the tv, we might well have the social and personal time to invest in games that bring us the same civic motivations and humanist satisfactions as novels, movies, periodicals, music... cooking, attending meetings, caring for elders and children...

You get the point. I'm wondering simply what room there is left in a modern, over-worked life - even if we're becoming less entranced with the tv spectacle - to get "immersed" in "massively multiplayer games". (Although I keep coming back to my European-welfarist answer to the question of whether we have enough time our lives for play).

Jane has a fascinating, progressive answer to this. If we are increasingly interested in the "politics of happiness" in Western societies, then we should be looking to the games sector for inspiration and wisdom. As she says, "games designers have spent twenty years trying to optimise happiness". So maybe we should be prioritising games as a literacy and an experience (the cutting edges of e-education has been doing this for a while), vis a vis other cultural forms. As long as it's something accumulative and generative like Spore or The Movies, and not linear and destructive like most of the rest of the console games I steer my 11-year-old daughter away from, then I'll go with that.

Her recent slogan is "reality is broken - games aren't - so let our game experience help us fix reality". McGonigal wants to take those feelings of meaning, pleasure and community that a well-fashioned game provides, and reconnect them to citizenship - by creating games whose worlds contain recognisable crises and challenges. Her projects like A World Without Oil ("play it before you live it") and Superstruct (a multiplayer forecasting game - which came up with some great projects) attempted this last year. (I was signed up for the latter - but did I have the time, between playing with music, playing with words and playing with children? Nope...)

The new McGonigal project, discovered this morning, is The Signtific Lab (yes, that's the spelling, and here's the blog) - which seems to be an attempt to create a playful space in which future trends in science, technology and society can be collaboratively posted, sifted through, highlighted and then acted upon (here's their first experiment). I promise to get involved in this one - but Jane's energy and commitment will doubtless keep evolving play and games as a necessary social literacy well into the future. She's about as play-ethical as it gets.

Innovating our way out of recession? The expectations of Charles Leadbeater

Kindly enough to provide a rave quote for the Play Ethic book, the innovation expert Charles Leadbeater is always worth reading. His latest publication, sponsored by Nesta and trailed in the Spectator last year, suggests that the best way to cope with the recession is to "attack" it with innovation - not just technological, but social and in terms of business models too. His paper contains a fistful of proposals - to do with regional policy, the general encouragement of enterpreneurship, and the application of the web's spirit of collaboration to public services - that politicians will doubtless be poring over.

But he hits on a point about this recession that's been nagging at me for a while. Yes, the spectacle of an untethered finance capitalism, and its blithely globalist managers, has scared and disgusted many. But we have to be careful not to allow public debate to swing to the other extreme - a kind of "protect your own" defensiveness that allows the odious phrase "British jobs for British workers" (surely Gordon Brown's greatest moment of political shame) to adorn the placards of striking workers.

I remember writing at the end of the Play Ethic book in 2004, while musing on another systemic calamity (9/11), that it was hard to think of a pluralist, tolerant Britain - a nation which could produce profoundly playful classics like Bend It Like Beckham, The Kumars at Number Ten or White Teeth - harbouring any kind of extremism based on cultural identity. After 7/7, my hopes were severely dented.

Yet as anyone working in the field of social and community cohesion in the UK will tell you, at the ground level Britons - whether native, second generation or recent immigrant - are always trying to figure out how to get along with each other, whether in schools, marketplaces, firms, public spaces. As Richard Sennett has eloquently written, social respect often comes from propinquity - people of all identities and ethnicities having to rub along together in urban and suburban environments, in the 'street and the office', and eventually rubbing off on each other.

Yet I sometimes worry that we critics and consultants under-value these daily networks of 'rough' community (which the social work academic Bill Jordan has briliantly described), and over-value the scintillating networks of the web and social media. Does contact with and literacy in the web necessarily transform its users, no matter how impoverished and embattled their identities, into benign, creative cosmpolitans? I'm really not so sure.

Of course I react excitedly to passages like this from Leadbeater:

Networks will also be critical for individuals. This is the first downturn we have faced with the web woven into our lives. A recession will be a boon for the web’s pro-am, do-it-yourself ethic. Professional social networks such as Linked In may come into their own as out-of-work people look for jobs. There may be more Popbitch and less Heat magazine; more use of free, open-source software than expensive offerings from Microsoft; more recycling of secondhand goods through eBay and freecycling schemes; more sharing of resources like cars through websites like GoLoco and Liftsharing. The collaborative, low-cost organisational models the web allows will come into their own; high-cost industrial-era models will suffer.

But although his Nesta paper is much more painstaking about how to ensure that those who've lost their jobs are not necessarily disconnected from employment networks, I still think that Charles reveals the narrowness of the 'culture of innovation' that some of us are steeped in. Less Heat, more Popbitch? That is, less populist magazines, more e-mail newsletters that circulate among cynical media insiders? And it's glib to say that open-source software will start to be preferred over Ballmer's latest bug-laden offering, when many media activists (like Scotland's Simon Yuill) will tell you how difficult it is to build literacy about coding and software in economically-embattled communities.

Leadbeater rightly cites Finland as an example of a country that responded to its Nineties recession by pulling all the national players together, and heading for a ideal as a "internet society". But my impression of Finland, when I went to visit its hacker policy people in the early oughties, was that they were very focussed on mass media literacy in every corner of society. Very non-glitzy, "welfarist" programmes that steady raised the capacities of Finnish society.

Leadbeater is thoroughly aware of the reserves of frustration and anger that will lurk in the hearts of many - particularly those who percieve that the far-off operations of gilded symbolic elites in world cities have caused their factory or retail outlet to close:

...In some places capitalism could get uglier. A severe recession could provoke an unseemly fight for resources and a generalised breakdown of trust. That would not usher in a new era of co-operation but a brutal struggle in which each protects what is his. Those with money will drive a harder bargain than those without. The state will be beset by demands it may not be able to meet. In white working-class communities that gained very little even during the boom years, things could turn nasty. People already disconnected from mainstream economic activity and public life, even during the boom, will be further disconnected. People may not turn en masse to fascism and communism as they did in the 1930s, but their sense of anger and dispossession will be more difficult to contain.

Well, maybe. And according to Madeleine Bunting this morning, neither communism nor fascism but a strange new Toryism might be poised to benefit in the UK - one which reverses the consensus, as its main advocate proposes, that we are "left in social values, and right in economic values, when it should be exactly the other way around". There's so much incoherence and flim-flammery in the Cameron project, as I've written before, that we can ignore it for the sake of this discussion (even though Leadbeater, and his old think-tank Demos, are flirting deeply with the dark side).

But I think there is still a political opportunity - which the Compass end of the Labour Party has consistently addressed - to evoke a rich vision of the "quality of life" for ordinary British citizens. A vision which neither excludes others in order to "defend its way of life" - nor too readily imposes a blithe, business-lounge cosmpolitanism on those who are perhaps too injured and depleted to respond.

Can the culture of 'networks' really sustain that better vision? I agree with Leadbeater, and his book We-Think, that social media does seems to conjure up a culture that delivers both the consolations of community, and the flexibilty of network living. I was happy to give some Scottish leads last week to people from the Social Innovation Camp, whose aim is to try and connect technical geeks with social need.  Finding a language that might profitably unite a young hacker with an under-employed tradesman, or unemployed shopworker, is worth attempting. Yet the challenge shouldn't be underestimated.

I love my socio-technical communities, their intertwined ethos of play and care, as much as anyone does. But I am wary of them being used too arrogantly as a social template - to speedily recast recession-battered ex-workers as New Model Mass Innovators. Deaf ears may be the least worst of the consequences.

Steal this post! Or, the troubling possibilities of the electronic book

Update: Powerful post on Computer World which predicts that next year is the year of the e-book - not just for books, but for many other bits of print media. I'm nearly convinced. And here's the killer quote: "If you'd like to get a stark view of the relative economics of electronic vs. paper newspapers, check out a blog post on the Silicon Valley Insider. The blog did the math and determined that the New York Times could buy every single subscriber an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and it would still cost them half as much as it will cost them to send paper newspapers for just one year."

* * *

Everybody has their favourite play material. Mine is the book. Leave me in front of a well-stocked domestic bookshelf, or in one of the great world bookshops - like say New York's The Strand (or the extremely lamented Compendium Books in Camden Town, London) -and I'm effectively back in kindergarten: smile on the lips, lost in the flow, needing only occasional watering and nutrition. 

The only property fantasy I've ever had is that of a proper domestic library, worthy of the six or seven thousand books I have scattered across two houses and two garages. (When my band Hue And Cry gets the Bond theme - hey, it's only a matter of time - I'll post you on my progress). 

So discussions about 'the future of the book' - and they are multiplying at some rate - are profoundly interesting to me. And mostly because I am fearful about whether technological change is going to enrich or deprive, expand or contract, my biblio-play.

Nicholson Baker wrote a warning book a few years ago, when the trend for major libraries to digitise their book collections (with some of them throwing away the physical originals) started to pick up speed. Though his tone was high-alarum, some points stuck with me. What about software obsolescence - the book-images encoded in a particular file format, which would be increasingly difficult to read as future document systems evolved? 

And what about the usage question, elaborated later by Lawrence Lessig in various books. Do we want to get into a situation where a digital book might be rented rather than owned? Where the freedom to read the object you possess (or give it away) as you wish, is placed by a 'right of access' to a tightly-copyrighted and -controlled piece of software - access which can be changed on the terms of the publisher? (Unless, that is, you know your friendly neighborhood crypto-hacker). 

Lessig's conclusion was clear: we need to use the law to ensure that we can own a digital copy of a book, in the same way as we can own a physical copy of a book. If I have a digital book, in my digital reader, I want to be able to mark it, annotate it, lift quotes from it, gather it together with others books, and - most importantly - give or lend it to my friends and colleagues as I wish. That's the way I play with my physical books: and as many neo-Luddites say, you can do that with your wood-pulp-and-ink, no batteries (or e-commerce encrypted connection) required.

But as I've blogged recently, this would put the publishing industry in the same position as the music industry. Digitisation means potentially infinite copies of anything - and so the whole 'scarcity' model of publishing falls down (here's an object that costs money, available from shops now). As you might expect - see iTunes as the music biz's most coherent response to this - code has to be deployed to impose that scarcity again. 

Though from reports I've read of Amazon's Kindle, it's much tighter than iTunes in terms of how much cultural material can be shared. iTunes at least allows you to pass their DRM'd stuff to a few people: unless you lend people your Kindle, you can't pass on (and certainly not sell, or even Oxfam-gift) your Kindled book-purchases. This feels wrong, and oppressive, and I expect the Luddite resistance to it will be easily mustered.

Yet as a biblio-player, do I dream of the ultimate digitised book-and-text system? Indeed I do. And the way it might fit into my lifestyle and productive choices is fascinating me. 

A good childhood, in a complex world

The Children's Society report, A Good Childhood, has sent a few extremely sulphurous memes spinning through the media in the last few days. Our children are the most depressed and distrustful in Europe, goes the headlines, because modern British parents are "extreme individualists". We put career and personal life-trajectory ahead of our families, which we break up (through separation and divorce) much too easily and readily. The children in these situations, says the report, tend to do significantly less well in life on a whole range of indicators, including school performance and mental health. The report's author, Richard Layard, cut to the chase in a Guardian article:

In our report we offer an array of specific proposals to improve the lives of children. For example, we advocate the banning of advertising aimed at children, and the abolition of school league tables. We suggest free parenting classes around childbirth, covering relationships as well as childcare, and the training of more psychological therapists for disturbed children. We urge the elimination of child poverty. But we doubt whether much of this will happen without a fundamental change of values in our society - and indeed whether a set of specific changes would be enough. The change we most need is one that puts harmonious social relationships rather than the pursuit of private success at the centre of our value system. We do not want a society where children are taught above all to look after number one, since we know from psychological research that a life which is devoted to more than yourself is intrinsically more satisfying.

There's been so much impassioned commentary about this - quite a bit of it picking up on the fact that the Children's Society is in fact The Church of England Children's Society, and wondering whether a context of Christian piety guided the report towards certain outcomes (while not denying the veracity of its findings). Also some interesting commentary on how such recommendations feed into a general tendency to 'psychotherapise' problems in social life; how they seek to 'over-protect' children from the necessary struggles of growing up (including the developmental risks of play); and how the emphasis on social harmony can slip into communal intolerance, and blind us to our cosmopolitan advances.

But I'm divided along several intellectual (and personal) lines here. I've objected to Layard's work in the past as an attempt to marshall a whole range of psychological and social sciences to justify a new 'paternalism' in government. (There's no surprise that he was one of the architects of New Labour's welfare-to-work schemes). He's leaned particularly on behavioural economics (also beloved of the New Tories), with its Homer-Simpson-esque view of humanity as always knowing less than it thinks it knows, and thus needing wise rulers to steer it away from irrational behaviour. Thus governed, we'll be happy - or at least, in a situation of "harmonious social relationships".

Yet there's something weird going on here. In his happiness studies Layard wants us to accept that, in the face of our own psychological self-subversions, we have to be guidable children vis-a-vis the state and governance. But in this report he urges parents to be "properly authoritative", knowing exactly when to set limits on behaviour for children. And if they can't manage that - well of course, they can go to parenting classes and learn it, classes devised by Layard and his mandarins. 

Can they make their mind up? Are we autonomous, capable adults, or aren't we? Or is there a new sliding scale of human autonomy on offer here - fragile kids at the bottom, deluded-but-trainable citizen-parents in the middle, and effortlessly capable policy czars on the snowy peaks?