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A blog about a "play ethic" can't always be about
favourite bands, fun software and festive practices throughout the world. I
wasn't directly inspired to write the Play Ethic book by cavorting rejuveniles in
gaily-coloured clothes (though there's enough of that in the music
business), but by a line from the Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells.
Castells asked: If the "work ethic" could be described (by Max Weber) as the "spirit of capitalism", what might the "spirit of informationalism" be? In the late 90's I thought I knew what "informationalism" was. It wasn't just a "knowledge economy": after all, the Roman Empire was a knowledge economy, from its sanitation strategies to its legal code. Informationalism meant a social order that was deeply shaped by computer networks – and was thus a very flexible, unpredictable and mobile society indeed.
It struck me that the answer to Castells question was that the spirit of informationalism was obviously a "play ethic". If the "work ethic" made industrial workers duteous, time-keeping, diligent and self-disciplined, a "play ethic" would just as effectively shape informational workers to fit their system. That is, it would make them resourceful, able to shift tasks and learn new skills, willing to deploy their imaginations to solve problems in their organisations.
As writers like Richard Sennett have been mordantly pointing out for years, those were the psychological habits demanded by the new capitalism – demands not just driven by computers and networks in themselves, of course, but by the new pressures of global competition that they enabled. In his view, these habits resulted in the very "corrosion of character" itself. A strong character, according to Sennett, was composed from those traditions and practices that people derived from apply themselves to their trade or occupation. The new capitalism literally tore those old occupational identities to shreds, and then expected people to compose and recompose themselves from the fragments.
Yet I always resisted the idea (also promoted by critics like Zygmunt Bauman) that such 'players' were just the bright-eyed, endlessly malleable jack-rabbits of super-capitalism. This scepticism almost certainly came from my experience as a musician. There's no shortage of lifestyle and career flexibility in that realm. But within and around your art, you were free to make critical statements about politics and society – statements that would surely not be encouraged in any usual market-facing organisation, where your smarts and adaptability tend to be harnessed to serve "world-class competitveness", first and foremost.
When I discovered hacker communities (primarily by way of Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic), I found some kindred spirits. Hackers were as joyfully committed as musicians to their symbolic craft (making code rather than music, though of course both are notation in some way). And they were even better at deriving an ethics and politics from their practice.
Why was I interested in the politics of such players? Partly because the "work ethic" has always implied its own politics: from Paul's biblical injunction in Thessalonians that "them who shall not work, shall not eat" all the way up to the welfare-for-work proposals of New Labour and New Democrat governments in the 90's.
The "dignity of labour" didn't depend on what that job was, or to what degree it expressed the talents, aspirations or desires of the worker, but mostly on the fact that they were willing to submit themselves to work – something that proved their "character", in Sennett's sense. And as long as everyone else agreed to work under these conditions, you could presume a kind of solidarity-in-privation: together we're all alienated, or at least relatively disatissfied, with what we're doing with our waking lives.
There were two compensations for this lack of essential autonomy over your productive life. On one side there were wages-for-consumption – money to buy the weekend/holiday hedonism of leisure and lifestyle. On the other side, at least in Europe, there was a welfare state which promised to repair you if you broke under the strain of labour (health), skill and re-skill you for the relevant slots in the labour market (education), and ensure you warmth and shelter in any eventuality (public sector housing).
The story of how that political arrangement fell apart (partly because of all those wider and deeper changes that Castells gathers under the title of 'informationalism', partly due to internal tensions – between the contrary pulls of consumer hedonism and producer self-discipline, for example) would take me into another thousand words.
But what I've always wondered is whether a "play ethic" – if it ever became dominant in a society - could generate its own political arrangements, its own social compensations, to match those of the work ethic. What would a welfare state be like that could support (or in the old Marxist sense, "reproduce") the intrinsically flexible, necessarily imaginative, endlessly communicative lives and selves demanded by our current model of capitalism? And if that ever came to be, how transformed would capitalism be as a result?
Over the next few days, I'm going to explore some notions floating around my various networks at the moment that might make up a "A Welfare System for Players". Heaven knows, I'm no social policy expert! But as a member of the precarious class of players, I have a direct interest in what reforms could be implemented. All comments and forwardings, of course, entirely welcomed.
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