The Play Ethic

America the Ludi-ful: Current TV's Jason Silva & Deep Fun's Bernie De Koven...play ethical

Some welcoming noises from America today. First, an email from Jason Silva, the hot young 'intellectual hedonist', futurist and key anchor of Al Gore's all-access cable channel, Current TV. We've been in correspondance for a wee while - and as you'll see on the video clip below, he's a fan of the Play Ethic:

And secondarily, one of my own play gurus, Deep Fun's Bernie DeKoven, has been disseminating some of my links across his networks, here and here. Add that to my presentation at the coming Digital Labor conference in New York, November 2009, and it looks like the ludic gospel will be heading westwards for the rest of the year. 

Review of Douglas Coupland's 'Generation A' in The Independent

Here's my review for the Independent (UK) paper of Douglas Coupland's new novel Generation A (the title comes from Kurt Vonnegut, objecting in 1994 to the depressive terminality of the concept of Generation X, Coupland's great fictional opener). 

I've reviewed Coupland before for the Indy, in the mid 90's. He's always been the most super-intelligent and hyper-modern of writers, but with a belief that the semiotic chaos we developed-worlders live in can still somehow make for a good-enough society, not just a frazzled and relativistic one. In Gen A, he looks at the coming culture of eco-limits that his compatriot Margaret Atwood scanned in Oryx and Crake (and recently with The Year of the Flood), and does perceive a way through - via our compulsion to tell stories to each other. Sounds simplistic, but he turns it into a real survival strategy.

I always turn towards novelists who try to grapple with the real historical forces of the present - Coupland always tries to do that, however successfully. This is (thankfully) a real success. Recommended.

GENERATION A

Douglas Coupland

(Heinemann, £16.99)

REVIEWED BY PAT KANE

The Independent, 25 September 2009

When a major writer gives you the title of your next novel for nothing, you store away the treasure. In a 1994 commencement address to students, Kurt Vonnegut railed at the media for giving Generation X a name that was "only two clicks from the very end of the alphabet". He then declared his audience "Generation A – as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago".

Douglas Coupland, who took Generation X from a cheesy punk band and turned it into a civilisational benchmark, has clearly waited for the right time to cite the wild-haired master. Generation A  anticipates a shabby, corporate-dominated, environmentally rickety world, where the bees have finally given up on us and buzzed off.

But Coupland deploys his talent for techno-whimsy and semiotic farce to create a delightful Decameron of a book. It's a crazy but happy tale, where the hopeful affinities of friendship, driven by the power of imagination, triumphs (just about) over big business and pervasive controllers of all kinds.

Coupland is still writing from familiar coordinates: those rudder-loose, over-informationalised X-ers have spawned their next generation. And to some degree, they're in their parents' image. Like Gen X, Gen A weave pop culture throught their conversations - Simpsons, World of Warcraft, Abercrombie and Fitch - with as much detailed reverence as old literary critics used to cite Shakespeare and the Bible. They scuttle just as atomistically around the iron stanchions of money and power as their parents did, making and breaking weak ties according to unpredictable pulses of desire and revulsion.

These 'last men and women', as Fukuyama called them, are at least charmingly drawn. Zack from the Midwest, naked on a webcam as he drives his agribusiness harvester, is the kind of all-seeing Priapus that we recognise from Irvine Welsh's fiction. Harj from SriLanka, polite and insistent in his call centre, regards the individualizing dreck of US lifestyle he's selling as ornately beautiful, but spiritually empty.

You have to credit Coupland with consistency. Book by book, as the mass confusions of the new millennium rumble on, he's doing a proper 19th-century novelists' job - building characters that try to persist and cohere, in the best and the worst of times. And with true vocation, his ambition is to capture the totality of a society, to hear the collective plainsong through the static.

Right after Generation X, Coupland was onto the resurgence of religion as a social anchor in Life After God. He's a bit late to the party of eco- and bio-crisis (fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood started that with Oryx and Crake). Now he's here, Coupland crunchily evokes a near-future of shabby limits, intrusive regulators and consumerist disenchantment.

But Coupland always leavens his paranoia with optimism. These representatives of Generation A are doing their dorky, geeky best to raise their brand-strewn minds to the level of the global crisis. One New Zealand girl's hobby is to take photos of an "earth sandwich": her and a pal use their phones' GPS to position themselves on the top and bottom of the planet, daintily pressing a slice of bread to the exact spot.

The bio-scientific McGuffin that Coupland uses to link these six Gen-A'ers to the disappearance of the bees – and their return – just about passes SF muster. It's more of a pretext to allow him to fill half the book with some hilarious and provoking modern fables. In these Coupland captures, with some poignancy, a coming truth about our post-consumerist age of eco-limits. It might well be that sitting around and telling stories to each other, on or offline, is one of the least costly options available to us. 

Generation A takes our pressing realities lightly. But in this real return to form, Coupland's playfulness is rich, educative and even consoling: we might well think, and feel, our way out of this corner.

The Play Ethic in late 2009: my interview with John Williams of 'Creative Maverick'

I like to hammer out requests from authors and bloggers as to 'what is the Play Ethic exactly?' - the quicker you do them, the more you find out about yourself... Trainer and consultant John Williams at Creative Maverick is writing a book for Pearson called 'Screw Work, Let's Play', and I was delighted to do an e-mail interview with him today. For anyone wanting a quick overview of where I am intellectually, emotionally, politically and professionally with The Play Ethic, this should be useful.  

Interview with John Williams, Creative Maverick, 14th September 2009

I like to ask interviewees the dinner party question “What do you do?” (It’s a very worker-oriented question but I’m interested to see the creative ways players find to answer it)

I sing, I make songs; I write reviews, commentary, and theory; I parent, love, and (as the footballers say) try to keep my engine going. 

What is the play ethic?

The play ethic is what comes after the obsolescence of the work ethic. The work ethic is an ideology or belief-system which asserts that any job has dignity and worth, despite how alienated it makes you feel or how disjunct it is from your desires and aspirations, because society recognises this submission to the job as the basis of social order. The play ethic is an alternative belief-system, which asserts that in an age of mass higher education, continuing advances in personal and social autonomy, and ubiquitous digital networks (and their associated devices), we have a surplus of human potential and energy, which will not be satisfied by the old workplace routines of duty and submission. The identity of a 'player' - optimistic, willing to try and experiment, open to participating with peers in a multitude of projects - fits this new landscape, this new social order, much better. But we need to forge a convincing 'play ethic', particularly for organisations and government, which will help them to  change their structures (or make way for new ones) to accommodate the expanding constituency of networked players.

What’s the state of play 5 years on from the publication of your book? How is your mission going?

I feel that my project has contributed its small part to a much wider legitimation of the power and potential of play in mainstream British and American society, particularly in organisational studies, education, social policy and even advertising (I did a lot early consultation with advertisers!). I look at initiatives like the UK government's nine-figure commitment to encouraging play in schools and early development, and I see a lot of the research I was adducing about the cognitive and civic benefits of keeping play at the centre of children's lives being quoted. I know that there are a few initiatives - like The School of Life and the The School of Everything - which were directly inspired by my writing and advocacy. And the continuing invites to speak at events from Sydney to New York, from primary educators to Nokia and Lego, tell me that I have carved out a reasonable expertise, and am having a reasonable impact, on a wider variety of sectors. 

Several of the players I have been interviewing and studying come from a background in the music industry (Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Derek Sivers of CDBaby). What does the world of pop & rock music in particular have to offer to the play ethic?

Making rock and pop regularly gives you an unalienated experience of expressing your passions through technique and technology, in collaboration with other people - which is the definition, it would seem to me, of a play ethic! The trendy management term 'ad-hocracy' was tailor-made for the music business: there, people demand enough time and space to experiment, try things out, follow their noses. And they will construct the situations, however provisional or fragile or flaky, that enable them to get the result they have an investment in. All of life is a 'gig' for a musician - an event where you perform with and before others - and I think that this prepares you for a life of self-starting, flexible working and enterpreneurship. We're all players in the most profound sense - courting possibility, living with its openness, not fearing it. 

If you could get one message through to the worker - someone feeling trapped by the work ethic - what would you say?

Going back to musicians, I would say that you have to accept that there's a price you pay for living a profoundly playful life - which is that there is less stability in some of the more recognised features of an adult existence, but more stability in others. Clearly, if you're chained to a mortgage/big-car/foreign-holidays/high-consumption lifestyle, then you need a constancy of income - which usually only comes from the kind of occupational commitment (one company, one building, one practice) that most players are unwilling to make. If you can downshift some aspects of your life, you can "up-shift" many others - for example, pouring your energies into a practice or project that makes you feel more alive and purposeful than you've ever been; finding more looseness in your life into which can enter new relationships, the opportunity to reinforce old ones. I've come to believe that the players' life is what you could call 'post-consumerist', or participative - and in an age where we might well be looking at ecological limits on consumption, a play ethic might be one of our main hopes for building a sense of positive identity about ourselves, when the status items lose their status.

Social Media has moved on since you wrote the book and is becoming an even more powerful force for change in both business and society. How do you see it supporting the play ethic now? 

When I was completing the Play Ethic in 2003, one could see the new eco-system of networks and participation growing - mostly in cutting-edge hi-tech areas like open source and free software. But the expansion of that into everyday life is extremely encouraging to me. It's almost as if tens of millions of people are voting with their attention spans, when they engage with everything from Twitter to Facebook to You Tube to whatever blogging platform they have. They're asserting their joy in mutual communication, in tailoring their public identities to exactly the specifications they want (and also opening that identity out to commentary by others), right in the heart of networked capitalism - those 'homing from work' behaviours which so infuriate the key-stroke counters of management and business. Organisations should be (and a few are) responding positively to this mass desire for people to enthusiastically build structures and networks around themselves - tapping into this energy in order to make productive life more satisfying, and its products and services more meaningful to both producers and consumers. But it's usually rendered by business leaders as just "playing around". A shame, but that will incrementally change. 

What does the recent financial meltdown mean to both the work ethic and play ethic?

I think the 'ethical' part of the play ethic is about placing the idea of creativity, activity and collaboration - rather than being programmed, being defined by consumption, taking orders - at the centre of a society. I do think this means a shift of energies and commitment from a society with a certain model of growth, to one with a different model of growth - where it's a growth in happiness, or the richness of one's interactions, or the satisfaction in one's labours and projects, that becomes our collective target for the future. I think the coming age of fiscal and financial austerity - the hangover from our days of credit-fuelled consumerism - could provide the necessary conditions for that growth-model to move from the margins to the centre of policy, politics and daily life. We won't have the money to solve our problems and assuage our existential angsts - we'll have to innovate, act and collaborate to fill those holes. I hope the idea of a 'play ethic' is useful in that scenario.

I’m interested in the internal shift a person needs to make to move from worker to player – beliefs to question, habits to transform. What do you think is the biggest part of this?

I'm very interested in that too! The more I deep-dive into the psychology and neurology of play, the more I think that one of the main tasks for the play ethic is to engage in an argument about human nature. So much of the story of play for advanced mammals like us is that it's necessary to keep us adaptive - Brian Sutton-Smith calls play 'adaptive potentiation', the testing-out and prototyping of behaviours and possibilities, so that we can endlessly refine and improve our response to everyday challenges and opportunities. And I think that modern people, living in societies that have many resources to support our actions, can actually bring play as a rehearsal for real life, and real life itself, a lot closer together. But yes, there needs to be an internal shift to match all the external shifts that are inviting us to a playful life. I think we have to try and listen to this deeply-constituted inner dynamic of play in our selves - and I think we can become profoundly deaf to that. I'm certainly interested in meditation, whether contemplative or as a result of some active practise, as a way of getting 'above yourself', so you can see the patterns of life that you're trapped in. I have to say personally, that my life with my children - not just playing with them as they grow-up, but also in terms of the miracle of their autonomy, the glory of watching their gradual self-empowerment - was also crucial to deepening my sense of myself as a player. That's not available for everyone, but it was essential for me.

How does play sit with hard work in your own working life and in the lives of the other players you have met? Can play be hard work?

I like to use the terms of the philosopher and theologian James Carse, when he talked about finite and infinite games. "Hard work", committed labour through a field of activity heading towards a determinate goal, is what Carse would call the 'finite game' - a series of tight victories over necessity and urgency. In my own life, I compare it to the singing practice I have to do every day as a musician - a kind of exacting, pains-taking self-development, a struggle to improve technique and control. But I do that in the service of Carse's 'infinite game' - the game not oriented to victory, but to extending and enriching the game itself, to seeing new horizons and new rules through playing the game itself. If I stay on top of my technique, I will maintain the possibiity of having those transcendant gigs where my voice, my self and the whole room merges - or where something genuinely new and unprecedented pops out of my mouth. But I have voluntarily chosen this 'hard-work', this finite game, because it serves the 'infinite game' of expression and exploration. You can see it as the circle of hard work within the bigger circle of the horizon of play. And incidentally, to reverse those two - to put infinity at the heart of the finite, or to see victory as something to be endlessly toiled for, the intoxication of the 'winner' as worthwhile in itself, is to me (and Carse) a kind of hell on earth. 

Players, it seems to me, will naturally tread on other people’s beliefs and taboos. I’m sure you must have met some controversy and disapproval in your own work. How do you respond to it?

Most of the controversy comes from people who have invested so much in the work ethic, and have suffered the psychic injuries that result from living a heteronomous (not autonomous) life, that you literally pain them when you express or display a players' sensibility or preferences. I understand that rage and annoyance - and often my response is to try and point to long-term social, technological and cultural trends which show that a life of purpose and productivity doesn't have to be lived in a state of grim determination to triumph, or acceptance of one's conformity. One of the things I tried to do in the book was to point out what I thought the complement to play was, in a healthy society. What happens when an exuberant player fails, falls, gets exhausted or broken, runs out of ideas, hits a crisis of health (mental or physical)? So I've been attempting to say that 'care' is what should complement 'play' in the ideal society - not the 'work-leisure trap', or the 'work-life balance', but the 'play-care continuum'. If we grow into our identities as players, we should also value the care that's required when our playful enterprises do not go as planned. And this is real 'care', involving the open-ended use of time and space, not just repairing people to be chucked back into a labour-market which has caused the damage in the first place. One way to assuage the rage of a 'worker' is to say that we need collective regulation to increase these spaces of care - eg, four day weeks, a robust parental and sabbatical culture, a revitalised public provision of housing and facilities - to enable properly the players' lifestyle. That is, everybody should get the benefits - not just jumped-up creative freelancers!

I want to follow your lead and help reclaim the label “Player” as a positive one. From your experience of adopting the word, what do you think are our chances?

I think we have a good chance, John - but I think it has to be founded on a deep and broad understanding of what we mean by play. We already have a discourse about players which is, in my view, narrow and agonistic - the big City "plays" and "players" swinging their dicks in the halls of Capital, the "playas" hustling for supremacy in the ghetto, never mind the empire of sports spectaculars coursing through our mass media. Play isn't just about competition for victory - far, far from it. If we keep people attentive to the dynamic, plural nature of play in our species-being, the aim to reclaim 'player' as a positive term might be worth trying for.

What’s next for you and the play ethic project?

My aim for the next few years is to come to a deeper synthesis of my researches into, and experiences of, play - whether through writing, consulting or just living. It feels like a lifetime interest has opened up for me around this topic - and to walk my talk, I expect to be surprised by what it turfs up next for me!

Play and Transhumanism - article for H+ Magazine

Been waiting for this one... the new Autumn edition of H+, or Humanity Plus, magazine is out (available in PDF , digital reader and good old fashioned paper formats. 

It's edited by the legendary R.U. Sirius, founder of Mondo 2000 and long-standing Californian futurist. H+ is devoted to a transhumanist perspective on life and society (a great overview on Wikipedia here on transhumanism). Essentially they're human-enhancement-friendly, on a whole range of fronts: cognitive, physical, cybernetic, sexual, health, etc. 

I did a long interview with R.U. about five years ago, just before the Play Ethic book came out. A few months ago, he contacted me to write a piece for H+ on the relationship between my understanding of play, and the transhumanist agenda - and I surprised myself with the results (in short, I'm not as radical as I might have expected). The final text is below (but if you want the full design experience, click on the links above). As ever, keen to hear your responses.

PLAY AND TRANSHUMANISM

by Pat Kane

H+ MAGAZINE, AUTUMN 2009

Watch children, or adults, at play. And by "play" I mean the real thing - experimental, messy, reality-shifting and explorative. Not the routinized pseudo-work we call "leisure" or "recreation". 

For kids, their play-world might easily imbue them with strange transformative powers, or equally enchant and animate the objects that surround them.For adults - say a bunch of Google engineers bashing and drilling away on the flats at Burning Man - the point of their play is to simulate, as tech historian Fred Turner says, a "utopia of relationships and technology". 

In either case, when they are at and in play, humans old and young naturally hypothesize about testing the boundaries of human capacities and faculties. The great guru of play theory, Brian Sutton-Smith, describes play's role in human evolution as that of "adaptive potentiation". 

By that he means play as the mimicking, mocking or fantasizing about our situations of survival, within zones of time and space that open up in our daily life. In this way, play helps us to improve our ability to respond to the challenges of living. It's our reherarsal hour for real risks and opportunities.

This is why such a flaky, mutable behaviour and phenomenon as play has persisted in the human condition. As complex social organisms living with others who are just as complex as us, we've needed the imaginative and hypothetical space it opens up in our daily lives, to cope with the strategies, feints and demands of human sociability. We "potentiate" or die.  

So play is our evolved and natural capacity to test limits, suspend conditions of reality, imagine our way out of tight situations. But how does this sit with the transhumanist agenda? Doesn't transhumanism take, as a point of principle, that our evolved nature itself is permanently up for being played with and amended, its limits made malleable and even transcendable? 

There is at least a positive and negative spin available here. Positively, transhumanist ambition could represent the next level of play's evolutionary development within our human condition. Whatever we have done with our fantasies, our flickering simulations, our imaginatively suffused games, we will be able to do with the raw bio-material of humanity. We then enter into the world of Scottish SF writer Iain Banks, and his space-operas describing the civilisational challenges of The Culture. This is, how to live well and ethically in a profoundly post-scarcity society, where we have the ability to "play God" with each others' biology and materality, as a matter of convivial living, and not just upon or over others.

But there's a prior presumption that ethical behaviour will kick in here. The negative spin is that transhumanism might well actually unleash play from its useful psychological netherworld in our species being – that is, as risk and experiment that doesn't have too much direct consequence, something that keeps the channels of human responsiveness from getting too rusty or ossified, from succumbing to their inherent limits. 

The fear could be that if we make our bodies, our intentions and their extensions illimitable, and thus fully expressive of the "phantasmagoria" of play – Sutton-Smith's descriptions of the transgressions and horrors that he often observes in the coping play of children - then we could be in real trouble. 

Play, as it functions in our socio-biology, has to be a-moral/non-moral. That's the underground and liminal job it has do - keeping our "potentiation" open, infusing the constraints of human living with indefatigable optimism and possibility. What beauties - but also what monsters - may be made manifest, with our play-drive connected to the transforming technologies of transhumanism? Is Pandora's Box, in truth, a toy chest filled with Ray Kurzweil's nano-, bio- and robo-technologies?

I wrote a book in 2004 with the pointed title of The Play Ethic. The title was partly aimed at addressing the fact that the sheer playfulness of our coming society – our ability to 'take reality lightly' in so many domains – compels us to think about ethics at the most basic level. How we decide to act humanely in a field of exponentially growing human possibility was, to me, the most urgent of issues – and is an obvious crossover with much transhumanist thought. 

Yet as the Italian Marxist Paulo Virno says, "there is no objective investigation of human nature that does not carry with it, like a clandestine traveller, at least the trace of a theory of political institutions". The Puritan work ethic presumes a human nature happiest with duty, routine, and social conformism – a useful credo for industrial capitalism. A protean 'play ethic' could easily presume a human nature happiest when improvising, being flexible and responsive, exercising imagination: an equally useful narrative, as we know, for informational capitalism. 

Both ethics have their supporting cast in the mind sciences. The work ethic is currently undergoing a new intellectual revival, in the age of Obama and his "economy built on rock than sand", and is bolstered by the new Chicago school of behavioural economics – which claims to identify the new "Homer (Simpson) Economicus" in all of us, and argues for a new paternalism to steer (or "nudge") us towards healthy social and economic outcomes. 

But a play ethic also has its grounding in neuro-research which emphasizes the plasticity of the brain, the deeply-founded creativity that generates our consciousness in the first place. Across the op-eds, blogs and book review pages, those who want to found their "theory of political institutions" in the next wave of Third-Culture science headlines will always have their opportunities. 

Yet transhumanism, it seems to me, almost transcends these familiar political uses of evolved human nature - in the sense that it asks us to squarely face our increasing ability to transform that very nature itself, intentionally and by design. And if play operates as dynamically and unpredictably in our unamended nature as I suggest, we are in a moment where we will have to begin to imagine what kinds of "politics" or "ethics" are possible, when play's energies are given the most powerful of chariots to drive.

The debate in the late nineties between the German philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Jurgen Habermas – Sloterdijk a partial enthusiast for transhumanism, Habermas a resolute opponent – generated much heat, but much light too. And it begins to hint at exactly what a "play ethic for transhumanism" might be. In his essay, the "Operable Man", Sloterdijk suggests the kind of living-well-together that a profoundly (and materially) playful society might generate:

Biotechnologies and nootechnologies nurture by their very nature a subject that is refined, cooperative, and prone to playing with itself. This subject shapes itself through intercourse with complex texts and hypercomplex contexts. Domination must advance towards its very end, because in its rawness it makes itself impossible. In the inter-intelligently condensed net-world, masters and despoilers have hardly any long-term chances of success left, while cooperators, promoters, and enrichers fit into more numerous and more adequate slots. 

There may be something a little lost in the translation… but the idea that the conditions of transhumanity may lead to subjects that are "refined, cooperative, and prone to playing with themselves" at least splits the difference between the polarities on offer. 

Richard Sennett in his recent book The Craftsman talks of two Greek myths that dramatise our anxiety about technology. It's ether Pandora and her box, unleashing all manner of unstable horrors; or the club-footed Hephaestus, whose diligent labour and craft built the palaces of the Gods. 

But what of Proteus, Prometheus or Bacchus – those shape-shifters, fire-bringers and lovers of sensual conviviality? Is there no place for the energetic, mutable, sociable player in transhumanity? No hope for a livable zone that can assuage the fear that transforming technology generates anarchy, and thus demands order? 

Sloterdijk may be an optimist. But optimism – a deep species-based optimism - fuels the play that lurks in all of our breasts. Whatever transhumanists seek to transform in human nature, they would do well to respect the innate transformativity of play itself.