I was speaking at the Scottish Doctoral Management Conference in St. Andrews on 28th May, to a room full of prospective PhD'ers interested in studying the processes of the Creative Industries (the main organisation there is called The Institute for Capitalising on Creativity, run by Barbara Townley). And frankly, with a few hours to go, I was wracking my brain to think of what to say to them that might be of value.
Facing a blank Powerpoint screen, I came up with an idea: I would present myself to them as a one-man object of ethnographic study. And I would speak about the relationship between my love of social and cultural theory, and my actual practise as a cultural and civic entrepreneur over the last nearly 30 years, from studenthood to media company partner.
Once I started doing it, an onrush of stuff came out - simply going through Google Images and finding the covers of books I remember, in order to illustrate the presentation, heaved up all manner of ideas (and selves) that I had forgotten meant so much to me. It almost felt like an exercise in play-therapy - a rather joyful opening-up of some old chasms inside me. For anyone of A Certain Age who's made their life by ideas and projects, I'd recommend it.
I finished it with minutes to spare, and at times I'm not sure what the collective high-cognitive masses in front of me knew what was hitting them. Anyway, many thanks to all there for the invite, and here's the Slidecast presentation below.
I think the best sustained discussion forum has been 38 Minutes, Channel Four's new media community site in Scotland, where Stuart and I have had some detailed exchanges. See for yourself what the discussion has been like - strong and varied - but I thought I'd edit and present Stuart and I's exchanges here. I'll update if we barney some more (Joan McAlpine has also joined the conversation).
This is an important debate about the role of public media in Scottish life, among good people, worth arguing to a standstill, I think. And as I always say, all play needs its ethic - tv documentary no less. All comments welcome.
PAT:
The defining sequence in the second episode of The Scheme [first episode here] is where junkie Marvin's girlfriend Dayna is standing on the green beside a cameraman. The shot dips towards the grass for a moment, showing the cameraman's silhouette for a moment, then rises up just in time to catch one of the neighbours socking Dayna shockingly in the face. Now does anyone *really* believe that the camera was simply "documenting" this kind of violence - or were they actually eliciting this kind of behaviour by their presence, like some overly-resourced happy-slapping phonecam video?
This is the gold, the money-shots, that these documentary makers were panning for - the dog shit in the hallway, the wee daughter fingering the condoms on the shelves - as much shock-horror about the failure of the moral character of the poor as they could string into one episode. If you talk to social workers who deal with cases like Marvin and Dayna's, their aim is to get them to "re-story" their lives - to construct a narrative about how they'll progressively head towards a better life, small step by small step.
By turning the chaos of their lives into such a public strip cartoon - Sorcerer's Apprentice sound track and all - the documentary makers rob the poor of the right to control the story of their own lives, which is a fragile, tentative and patience-intensive process best conducted privately and supportively. There's a regrettable faux-lumpen mentality in some stretches of the Scottish creative classes - eg below, "marvin cannae watch the Scheme cos some cunt's nicked his Plasma" - which is actually a way of denying the extreme structural inequality in Scottish life: don't sweat it mucker, we're all heiders together.
No we're not: some of us have the power and responsibility to help the post-post-industrial classes to articulate their visions and regain their autonomy. And some of us are ok with them being antic entertainment, ratings-winning displays of character collapse. Sorry, folks, can't post-modernise this one away.
STUART:
Yes they were selecting and highlighting for effect like every other form of media and communication from literature to film - really surprised you are so startled and appalled by this Pat
Observational documentary is among one of the most selective and narratively chosen forms of media why would it not do those things?
You can say its clunky in style but to be shocked that it happens is bizarre. Surely you don't believe that this form of television is any more or less about form and convention than other forms of television, like history-reality shows or light entertainment. You can't 'naive' that one away
The Scheme - Clunky Observational Documentary that uses underclass Scotland as its raw material.
Sweet Sixteen - Bitter-sweet Ken Loach feature which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
Rab C. Nesbitt - Hyper-panto comedy series which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
Greyhounds for Breakfast - Great hyper-real literature using underclass Scotland as raw material.
David Gillander's utterly brilliant photojournalism which won the Getty Prize and uses underclass Scotland as its raw material.
Channel 4's Knife Crime Commission - discursive current affairs that uses underclass Scotland as its raw material
Billy Connolly's The Crucifixion - Comedic parody of the Bible which uses underclass Scotland as raw material.
All of the above cultural producers enjoy successful careers and to my knowledge live in very comfortable homes.
So for me the real issue is not whether form should sue unedrclass Scotland as Scotland - that is a time-honoured creative tradition. What is at stake is one of two things - quality or formal construct? Either the form of observational documentary or the quality of the series?
If you hate it as telly that’s fine – I’m not sure I really care to defend that - but get it into some perspective please. To object to film-makers creating a cultural product from this raw subject matter is bizarre, self-defeating and against the grain of history.
PAT:
Stuart, not remotely denying any documentary maker the right to edit, narrate, shape reality, any of that - silly point. But do you remember a show from the early Channel Four, called Open The Box? They did an item where they filmed a camera crew filming a working class couple, decent but not too articulate, and showed how they were herded around, patronised - the director David Cohen even said at one point, 'never work with children or animals'.
Your channel at its most subversive - showing the objectifying, class-ridden character of so much media production - time for some of that media critique back I think. Here's a commission for you, suggested by a one time resident of Onthank (now a think-tank director): why don't you give the residents of Onthank a few HD cameras, an editing suite, some expertise, and get them to follow tv production folk around for six months?
And yes, you're right, the BBC did have a tradition of community video programming which they let completely fall away. Why don't we revive that in our brand new Scotland? Or can we really imagine the broadcasting Lubiankas on the Clyde really opening their doors to the contextualisng community? We probably need a Media Panther fan-out into the community, Chavez and Gilberto Gil style (and you're writing about Detroit 1967 at the moment, surely you validate that kind of activity?). We need at least two dedicated scottish digital channels to give us some space for different voices, other editorial policies on the reality of Scottish life, to be heard - and more importantly, practise their street-media craft.
But please don't try to deny the loop between a 'punchy', 'character-driven' bit of drama-doc on the broken poor, and the general shift towards 'behavour management' and 'workfare' that's been the legacy of Thatcher-Blair-Cleggaron. This edit sets up the undeserving poor in a way the Victorians would happily recognise, and no doubt Ian Duncan Smith will glory in. (Possibly deliberate? Commissioned at a time when it looked like a Tory victory was inevitable? Just saying...).
I even hate the term underclass we've all fallen into using - a semi-eugenic term from the American neo-conservative right. I think the gaze of this programme, the "casting choices" they've made makes me more disgusted with them everytime I dwell on it. I mean, poor poor Marvin is so emaciated he almost looks like a different species. I'll admit that what does come through their sub-anthropological gaze is a real crisis of masculinity - apart from the patriarch of the Crees, all the men in the first two episodes bear all the pain and distortion of two generations of worklessness, while the girls and women are all mostly ebullient glamazons.
I've no problem about cameras trying to capture the physical reality of poverty - and as many have said here (and to me privately), the sheer witness of the camera in The Scheme might do some good in reviving our collective shame and responsibility about poverty in Scotland. But that'll be in spite of its leering, prissy aesthetic, not because ot it. Where are the Frederick Wiseman emulators in the Scottish documentary commuity?
STUART:
Tom says: “Oh, and can we stop referring to them as 'characters'. They're real. Aren't they?"
Pat says:”...not remotely denying any documentary maker the right to edit, narrate, shape reality, any of that - silly point."
Far from being silly I think that is the deep core of the debate and the real reason that 'reality Tv or 'reality ob-doc' divide opinion so virulently. We seem more relaxed about forms where the lines between the 'real person' and the 'character' are more clearly drawn. Frank in Shameless is clearly an actor playing a character, the residents of the Big Brother house are real people who have agreed to partcipate in an entertainment game in which they assume the role of 'characters', programmes like X Factor are talent shows in which 'characters' like SuBo surface from the real world to seek fame. The trouble with the scheme is that people are less willing to accept the finer and less obvious lines between real people assuming 'character' status in something so close to 'documentary.'
What is so special about the documentary form that it alone cannot be transgressed - they were real people, with 'characteristics' and in some cases were promoting their 'character' or as some people have sauid 'acting up for the camera'.
In an era where cameras surround us daily why are some people allowed to 'act-up' and others not?
PAT:
We all "assume character status" in the service economy - we're all asked to construct an attractive, performative self in order to fit in to various service behaviour scripts (whether svengali Simon Cowell's or the training dept of Marks And Spencer's). I'm sure that why all forms of reality tv, either entertainment or community-based, resonate with Britons - it frames, and sometimes unravels, the the process of 'front' (or bullshit if you're feeling negative) that a large chunk of the working population is involved in daily. Not so much 'acting up' as 'acting out' the role that HR departments lay down for them.
I do think there's a deep attraction among the service workforce in watching the couch-dwelling, quilt-hugging wastrels of The Scheme (which is why it's hurtling around their favourite medium, Facebook at the moment). The Schemies are on a permanent sickie, rather than the temporary one that so many take as a respite from the grinding of their soul (and which causes employers such continuing consternation). They are the spectre that Brown used to aim his workfare at - "lying about all day, watching tv, doing nothing" - and that IDS is cranking up the benefit police on.
I guess, Stuart, you think that if all the world these days is a Truman-Show-like mediated stage, then why shouldn't the work-shy poor of the Ten's have their unashamed moment performing themselves in the spotlight, in the same way as two upper-working-class 80s boys from Coatbridge thought they could make music like Quincy Jones?
But it's not the same, is it? If you're an artist - and I'd have to say, if you were the writer and director of Shameless or Rab C. Nesbitt, undoubtedly writing from their own experiences - your performance is an expression of mastery or skill or vision, or at least an aspiration towards that. You also at some deep level want your 'performance' to tie together some aspects of the human condition, touch some deeper truths. Do you really think Marvin and Dayna are being 'artists of their lives', that they are enjoying their rights to 'act-up' their incoherence and incompetence at daily living, in the same way?
A working-class artist writes their script, or their song, and feels empowered, enlarged - they've conducted an act of poiesis, they've made their mark on the world. What psychological impact do we think this media spectacle of their ruin, however 'acted-out or up' it is, will have on the more heartbreaking participants in The Scheme - and do the documentary makers even care? Or as some of us keep saying, are they basically just raw fodder for a media which is exploiting the status and performance anxieties of a too-competitive, too-marketised nation, by showing them either redemptive or cautionary narratives of self-construction?
That's why I keep coming back to a rethinking of community tv - and why 38 Minutes is a good place to have this discussion. Do we always need be trapped within the editing suites of Tellyworld when we think of a media that empowers those who need to be empowered? With social media, it's not about the right to edit or perform, but the democratisation of the means and skills of editing and performance.
I know this all sounds 'back to the future'/early 80's - but perhaps our world of ubiquitous, cheap and powerful media was exactly the infrastructure those community video makers were dreaming of. Enable that, Channel Four, and you eventually might get the documentary equivalent of a Kelman, coming out of nowhere predictable, rather than these well-fashioned penny-dreadfuls like The Scheme. Let people ACTUP, in the manner of the 80's aids-activist moment, rather than just 'act-up'.
It's not the middle classes who congregate around The Scheme and set up facebook groups about Marvin's plasma telly. It's other working class people - most Scots are just a generation away from a council house and still have family on schemes. The voice of the breezeblocks has no problem getting itself heard thanks to social networking. The faceboook fans of the show exchange anecdotes about the drug addicts and neds making their granny's life a misery in Drumchapel/Kilmarnock/Greenock or wherever. They recognise the Onthank "characters". But the views they express about benefit dependence, poor parenting and methadone prescription, are far more judgemental than anything the programme makers would dream of saying. They make a Daily Mail leader seem overly liberal. (If I may be allowed my own Daily Mail moment, why the hell was poor Dayna on a methadone programme at the age of 18? Was there really no alternative? It was the social workers, not the programme makers, who did that.) Unlike Pat I think the programme was fair and showed the complex side of many characters - particularly that of Gordon Cunningham, trying to raise his family and make amends for his own past mistakes. The only ethical issue I have is with the young child Kendal who was unable to give informed consent and who doesn't really need this difficulty added to the other burdens in her life ie her hopeless mother.
One aspect of The Scheme's popularity that has been overlooked in these discussions is it's uncompromising Scottishness. We hardly every see slices of contemporary Scottish life on telly, or hear people speaking this language - the skeletal, linguistic remains of Burns' Kilmarnock Edition. When we do, we find it hilarious. That's why the character's "catchphrases" are now being printed on t-shirts. Mark is right to compare it to the John Smeaton moment. But what does our excitement and hilarity on hearing Scots enter the mainstream say about our attitute to the language we still speak on occasion, and which our parents and grandparents used unselfconciously? We love to hear it, but we simultaneously cringe. It's fit only for comedy shows. We mock these characters because, unlike us, they are unable (or unwilling) to adjust their speech patterns for the occasion.
Pat says about the nature of people 'performing' But it's not the same, is it? If you're an artist - and I'd have to say, if you were the writer and director of Shameless or Rab C. Nesbitt, undoubtedly writing from their own experiences - your performance is an expression of mastery or skill or vision, or at least an aspiration towards that. You also at some deep level want your 'performance' to tie together some aspects of the human condition, touch some deeper truths. Do you really think Marvin and Dayna are being 'artists of their lives', that they are enjoying their rights to 'act-up' their incoherence and incompetence at daily living, in the same way?
I entirely agree with this there is a difference and there is a qualitiative gulf between the two things. But I am reluctant to say that Paul Abbot's right to recreate his families failings as the semi-autobiographical author of Shameless - a series I care a lot about, therefore prevents others from authoring their lives even if it is with less creativity. If that were the case a lot of created culture would fall away. Is 'showing off' in The Scheme so markedly different from say being drunk at a local karaoke, or being so incoherent you actually can't perform which is what I've seen from both Gil Scott Heron and The Pogues over the years. I'm nervous about a hierarchy that says some have permission to 'perform' via the mass media and others don't and that the permission will be granted by those that already enjoy the privilege of success in life.
PAT:
Stuart, yes, I guess I'm making an artist's critique of the kind of "presenting" and performance that's going on in The Scheme. Kimberley's dance competition was utterly fantastic - like an irruption of Rio and Berlin into the middle of Ayrshire. (Away with yir El Sistema - I could have done with a whole documentary about that event). But apart from that, are there no local bands there, no hackers into technology, no menshie wall-sprayers? What courses, therapies, classes were happening at the community centre that WAS built? No joiners/decorators/sparks who were applying their compulsive ingenuity to local projects, house extensions? Looking at poor communities through the lens of what craft and skills they have gives a different result than picking off the worst or near-worst families and turning them into self-subverting strip cartoons. We know the old names to guide us by - Paulo Friere, Augusto Boal, recently Richard Sennett - and there are a few new ones too (Simon Yuill's history of bringing notational skills into tough communities comes to mind).
My youngest bro told me of a call he heard on Real Radio - a guy claiming to have been covered by The Scheme's makers for six months, in which he built up a help website to aid diabetes sufferers, and got married to his childhood sweetheart. He'd been told he hadn't make the cut - "maybe my story was too boring", he'd said. I know from my correspondence that there are many more, subtler stories to be told about Onthank than we're getting here - to grant this edit the generic title of 'The Scheme' is a complete misnomer about life in these communities. I hope one of the consequences of the stushie around this show is that we could perhaps get a web-enabled 'Stories from The Scheme' - stories not used, longer testimonies from people, interesting sideline material, follow-ups on the fate of individuals. And perhaps BBC could revise its editing policy, and invite those filmed into the heart of the production process - an education for both sides, very possibly.
Joan, you're right about the Scots-language element not being remarked upon - thought as a veteran of the Poll Tax wars, you'd probably want a Scots that had a lot more militancy and political consciousness than here. But on methodone and housing - we just don't know what stage of care any of these characters are at, how well others are doing round about them: it's a snapshot of the worst families entirely shorn of any of the systems that are undoubtedly trying to handle them, part of my beef about the prurient selectiveness of the series - showing the pathology, not the sociology. Something less pornographic (yes, still using the term) and fetishizing of the poor wouldn't get the Facebook groups frothing.
A speedily-written op-edfor my old paper, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, on an extremely egregious new reality show called The Scheme, focussing on poor communities in Scotland. Written in anger, but all the more direct for that. Buried deep inside is a politics of the play ethic that rejects both "producerist and consumerist" identities as the only legitimate scripts of purposeful, self-determined social behaviour. All comments welcome.
Op-ed for Sunday Herald 'Opinion' section, 23 May, 2010
by Pat Kane
Poverty porn, it’s been called: Scotland’s own new addition to the genre of horrified bourgeois gazing at the undisciplined classes, represented by Wife Swap, Supernanny, How Clean Is Your House and a host of others on satellite channels with three numerals.
BBC Scotland’s The Scheme, a series about a council-housing estate in Kilmarnock, has already invoked the ire of the bustling Cathy Jamieson, new Labour MP for the area, who fears “it will not address the community spirit and all the good work that has been going on”. So far, going by the domestically defecating dogs, broken junkies, teenage mums and severely desocialised boys that careened through last Tuesday’s first episode, the East Ayrshire Council PR department will have to redouble its branding efforts.
The first thing that this show deserves is a decisive jab in the kidneys from a half-decent media studies lecturer (well, I’ll do my best). Like all of these reality shows, there’s one fundamental condition that enables the viewer’s sumptuously Dickensian view on the squalor and disintegration of the post-post-industrial classes: namely, some tightly binding legal documents, signed by willing and possibly paid participants, who surrender both their privacy and their rights to a say on the final cut of the show.
So whether the documentary-maker is aiming for a prize at Cannes or a re-run on late-night Bravo, those who are giving up their experiences will have little or no power over the final shape or feel of what appears in the media spectacle. You could imagine a radically different relationship between community and camera – say, the kind of participative media literacy currently being practised in the more left-wing South American republics. But that stuff’s for the subcontinent, grant-aided conceptualists and the early, experimental days of Channel Four. Nowadays, we need character-driven narrative and a prurient, affluence-confirming superiorism from our non-fiction TV.
For those with cultural references (and capital) to spare, there are many to-die-for semiotic tingles to be had from The Scheme. Is it any coincidence that this grim suburban grid happens to be called Onthank – only one opening vowel away from Alasdair Gray’s benighted realm in Lanark?
The musical score is especially offensive. Every time the sadly shattered heroin couple Marvin and Dayna totter through their ups and downs – him welcoming her home to his faeces-strewn hallway as she writhes under her Asbo bracelet; both of them mourning each other’s absence after Marvin has a night in the cells – cod-heroic strings saw away. When Marvin finally applies himself to his floors with a mop, they actually play Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Look at the Mickey Mouse junkie in his domestic Fantasia!
We know this ironic-prole sensibility in Scotland quite well by now. Via comedy, it used to have a liberatory feel. Remember the thrill of seeing Billy Connolly temper his diction enough to have them rolling in the aisles on Parkinson with his shipyard anarchisms? Note also the Comedy Unit’s various waves of demotic levelling: Rab C Nesbitt as the Diogenes of Govan or Chewin’ The Fat’s human one-liners. Limmy, the Unit’s most recent urban fool, dips deeper into the spaghetti of unravelling psychologies so crisply edited for our consumption in The Scheme – self-loathing jostling with stone-cold contempt.
But there’s no comic logic to shock or disrupt stereotypes in this show. No, this is all well-fashioned material to justify small-c conservative social reformers to wade into the lives of the hollowed-out ex-proletariat. A mother who takes the waifs and strays of Onthank acceptingly into her house also lies to the police and roars the C-word in front of a six-year-old. The patriarch who sheds tears at his son’s prison sentence gives him advice on how to smuggle his tobacco behind bars. In this first episode, every self-possessed or “respectable” behaviour is shown to be subverted by one moment of madness after another. These are HG Wells’s Morlocks fused with, not opposed to, the happy, playful Eloi: a hermetic, perplexing underclass you’d vote in every election to keep your distance from.
BBC Scotland have covered the ground of the socially dysfunctional before, in their series on social workers in the mid-2000s. It was no work of genius, but it did attempt to show there was a painstaking route towards minimum autonomy for the poor, depressed and addicted: a route paved with much patience and attention from social services. Now, in pursuit of format-friendly ratings winners, we have real poverty shaped to be as entropically entertaining as Channel Four’s Shameless.
Will we ever see a media response to Scotland’s yawning divide in life chances, and even life expectancy, that’s remotely adequate to the task? Where is the close listening that might elicit the real tragedy of those adrift in our country’s schemes? Who will describe the journey of the souls who live in what commentator Gerry Hassan calls “forgotten Scotland”? That journey from the worker’s solid identity brutally forged by heavy industry, through their confused sons and daughters adrift in their parents’ unemployed grief, to their sons and daughters tethered only to celebrity, interactivity and thrills – with the vampire of drugs waiting to jump when their media-driven aspirations predictably hit the wall.
We need the dots joined up if we are to tell the story of poverty in Scotland. We also need those suffering those conditions to be encouraged to dream of a future that lies beyond producerism and consumerism; where self-determination at the most everyday level is diversely encouraged. So far, The Scheme shows the walking wounded of Scotland dodging work and prison, and embracing every other distraction: a cartoonishly lost cause.
The thing about porn is that it’s easy to watch, you know what you’re getting, and the payoff is instantly satisfying. Poverty porn is no different. They, and we, deserve much better than this.
I dived into the melee of souls at Summit Series in Washington DC yesterday, and was glad I did. I began with two lean, intelligent, multimedia chancers from LA, and ended about four yards away from Bill Clinton in full, post-presidential flow. (After that, the reggae band from Sierra Leone in the lobby just fell off my exhaustion list).
In between – and not to put it lightly - I'd have to say that I had a direct experience of the next wave of American commercial and organisational power. For all those who believe that the coming century belongs to some new, non-Western socio-economic model - for example, the kind of Chinese-led corporate Confucianism vaunted by UK writers like Will Hutton and Martin Jacques - well, I think they should keep an eye on these “dudes”, as they most regularly describe themselves.
What if the new model combined the same non-Western sense of collective responsibility to each other (or in Clinton's terms last night, “interdependence” and “communitarian values”) - but also retained that itch to invent, to make a mark on the world? An energetic, open-minded pragmatism that calibrates its “solutions” and “cool services” to match every need, in what Fareed Zakaria has called the “post-American” world? Yesterday, in the best traditions of developmental play, I thought I saw a generation simulating and rehearsing for exactly this future. Whether I'd want to get on board is another matter. But right now, to adapt the metaphor of one of the Summiteers' favourite “revelries”, it's exhilarating to stand in the middle of their whitewater.
My day began with a breakfast meet with Max Lugavere and Jason Silva – my conduits to this event, as already described in a number of posts (here, here and here). I told them I recognised a pair of LA “chancers” (to use the Glaswegian term) when I see them – but it's rare to be able to explain how much I love that phrase philosophically: a light-hearted mode of being that's open to possibility and opportunity. (They got it).
And with their CAA management deal, their fistfuls of contemporary theory, and their t-shirted Starsky-and-Hutch-meets-Radiohead-meets-Carl Sagan hustler vibe, Max and Jason have every chance of doing what I remember doing with my brother 25 years ago, in the pop business of the mid-to-late 80s: using mainstream appeal to amass enough reputational capital to then pursue whatever creative and intellectual agendas they want.
What was just as interesting was the lifestyle details they revealed about the organisers: a crew of young men who decided to live in a series of rented properties around the Americas and Europe, throwing themselves into organising their Summits. Relieving themselves of the usual post-graduate trajectory baggage - finding their place in a profession or organisation, beginning the ladder-climb – they threw themselves into a 'network' life.
Of course there's a life-stage element to all this – no evidence of children or fixed partners, a youthful “promiscuity” towards all things and people. But I think these twenty-somethings are also perceiving the managed world differently. They presume they live in precarious times in terms of jobs and careers, but know there are tools (education, the Net, their own self-aware performativity) to help them build enterprises and projects aligned with their passions and ideals.
Are these the “soulitarians” I wrote about – pretty speculatively - in my Observer Play Ethic article ten years ago? It would seem so. But I'd have to say that the sociology of these particular soulitarians is still pretty murky. As mentioned in the last post, it's predominantly a male cast-list at the Summit Series: the deeper I got into the conversation around the tubs of iced beer yesterday, the harder and less open it got, a kind of Mad-Men-like, what-gets-measured-gets-done tough talk. And judging by the pageant of relentless beauty, height and articulacy on display, I'd guess that there's a lot of bourgeois (or perhaps, to use David Brooks old phrase, bourgeois-bohemian) privilege being exercised and extended here. That's the impermissable question in American meritocracy, of course – and no, I'm not asking it over these few days. I'm trying to be on receive, not transmit.
The average Summit Series day is something like a 360-degree civilizational radar search to find almost every possible opportunity for American enterprise. On the grungified ground floor of this very establishment Marriott, where the Summit Series has set up camp, I was faced with three possible morning sessions: Memories of A Boy Soldier, where the extraordinary Ishmael Beah was telling his inspirational story to a packed house of developmentally-oriented social entrepreneurs (more on them later). I couldn't get in there, so I flipped between two sessions that were literally exploring outer, and then inner, space.
One top table had a male and female astronaut and two ex-Nasa guys, promoting commercial space-travel in the Branson style, which took me back to my childhood days of James Burke excitedly gushing about Apollo 11 (but which otherwise just looks like the ultimate Xmas present for the plutocracy). And right next door was a session on 'The Greenest Economy' – no, not nostrums about the Green New Deal, but business models for cannabis production. An extremely alternative looking man in bowler hat and tightly-braided pigtails (see clips below) was warning that, with cannabis legalisation (in his view) imminent, there needed to be a defense of the community-minded grass dispensaries versus the “corporate sellers only interested in market share”.
As he proceeded lucidly through his presentation, it became clear to me for the first time how much the discourse of social entrepreneurship has become a new language of power in Western societies. It's a way for almost everyone to talk to each other about their “project”, through a vocabulary of “action steps” and “routes to implementation”, that brings what could seem the most marginal or threatening of lifestyles or behaviours into a clear relation with governance and markets. Is this a good or bad thing? Is it the establishment of a new, looser, but more dynamic social contract (again, the UK Tories' “Big Society” concept would feel at home here), or is it the siphoning-off of anger and dissent away from systemic critique, towards “can-do” activities that are manageable, accountable, perhaps even commercial at some point down the line (Zizek's point, no doubt)?
For the first time in ages, I'm simply not sure of what the right “line” is. What stops me taking an automatically left-sceptical position is the sheer diversity, energy and focus of many of the attendees here: out of this multitude of purposes and intentions, surely some progressive innovations will emerge. Again, the fact of Summit Series is consistent with a lot of my recent play theorising. Any healthy development, whether organism or organisation, comes through “adaptive potentiation” - and for that you need a safe 'ground of play' on which to explore those strategies and simulations, a 'festival' or 'carnival' space which loosely but robustly supports experimentation.
If the theory is right, then it's perhaps no surprise that sport, play, games and humour themselves become such an explicit theme of much of the community-minded social enterprise these Millenials want to pursue. I've already met more than a few intense young men who are using streetsports like basketball and soccer as the basis of their social action in American ghettos and the Middle-east: our most interesting discussions were sparked off by Nike 'Joga Bonita' campaign (which I've already blogged on). Nike deployed the Brazilian street game of “Joga” (smaller ball, three-a-side) as a branding exercise for the last World Cup, encouraging kids from local UK communities to compete (the “Mustapha 3” playing in Trafalgar Square is one I recall with particular joy).
Where is their campaign now? Once the aim of keeping sales high during a football festival is achieved, does the corporation have any responsibility to the collective commitment they have engendered? Is there a social-enterprise response that could not just sustain that commitment, but perhaps also co-create new games with poor communities, maybe even help to secure their ownership of such games, so that their street-level invention can be less easily co-opted?
It was a great conversation, and it's good to ignite minds and see eyes brighten. All the conversations that comprise an event like are a kind of possibility engine – but as I say, I'm radically unsure about what new societal order the realisation of even some of these possibilities will bring. Staying with that ambiguity about the future, not prejudging its outcome, is no doubt one of the lessons that Summit Series is teaching me.
Some of the sessions, to be honest, were about as core-American as they come. I felt I had to attend the music-biz discussion, and was immediately transported backward to an L.A. experience in Don Was's house in 1986, crisping visibly before the open furnace door of an American radio-plugger. As someone who's lately embraced the ideal of the 'artist-entrepreneur' with Hue And Cry, it was fascinating to see just how paternalistic the “music industry” (and they recognised the stigma of the label) still were about their artists. “I mean, the reason why you don't see some of the more established artists move into a realm of self-management and do it yourself”, said one bullet-headed but charmingly direct music business lawyer, “is that their lives are so chaotic they need a whole team of people to get them up in the morning”. Discretion was his valour, unfortunately.
There was also a packed room for Tim Ferris, the author of The Four-Hour Week (who immediately disputed the achievability of his own book's title), in which hordes of males heard something close to a Benjamin Franklin-meets-Andrew-Carnegie style homiletic about making yourself a sovereign in your own life. It's all about “making a hierarchy of your priorities”, delegating and outsourcing brutally, building your own status to reduce your workload, and (a message most avidly consumed) ensuring your woman's happiness. Not much about, er, “giving back” here.
Between that and the Clinton lecture, there was a very enjoyable “Live Market Venture Competition”, where ebullient young men (and wow! Two women!) pitched their mostly new-media projects for a $50,000 prize. We prodded away at our smartphone apps, raising and shorting their stock price, and eventually gave it to the (female) founders of something called Profounder.com – a site where individuals can crowdsource funds for their projects (one of them is also the creator of Kiva.org, which enables microlending in the US). One of my favourite encounters over the last few days has been with Ian Spector, a young neuroscientist/humorist/e-marketing consultant (now there's a skill-set) who posted up this video on his blog last night parodying the jargonese of the Web 2.0 huckster. (Ian has also had a NYT bestseller based on the fictional wit & wisdom of Chuck Norris). Apologies to all those earnestly pitching, but it is incredibly funny.
Satire aside, Profounder is, of course, thoroughly consistent with the New American Model I think I see here: raising capital not from the old monoliths of power and money, but from communities and networks of interest in the broader society. Two benign cultural spectres are hovering around them, from my view: one, the Obama campaign's fusion of community politics, networks and financial contribution. And two, George Bailey and the old 'Savings and Loan' in It's A Wonderful Life - particularly the end scene where the community brings together its savings, tiny amount by tiny amount, to save a beloved local financial institution.
And as I hung onto my second-from-the-front-row seat, we waited for President Clinton to grace us with his presence. As you'll have seen from the video at the top of the page, Clinton looks older, but still iconic: his delivery is more grave, but his content is still thoroughly consistent. He's been quoting a favourite author of mine, the game-theorist Robert Wright, for years; and he quoted him again at the beginning tonight, particularly from the book Non-Zero: the logic of human destiny.
Wright takes an extremely optimistic view that humankind, as the communicating, interelating animal par excellence, has been heading towards globalisation and the internet for millions of years: as our media of communication develop, so our circle of empathy gets wider, and the possibility of a “communitarian” society – not just nationally, but globally – becomes possible. This powerfully-enabled “interdependence” - Clinton's great theme tonight – reduces the chances of war, and increases the chances of benign, creative reciprocation between the peoples and cultures of the world.
But Clinton's a Beltway warrior, and all the time tonight raised a wetted finger to the winds of contemporary politics to test his thesis. What else were the Tea-Partiers than white males who feared the whirlwind of change that the interdependence of globalisation and networks were bringing to them? How to reassure them that they mattered, that they had a stake, in this fluid environment?
He's a class act, and it was a privilege to watch him perform. But you look at Clinton, and at fellow 'Third Way' leaders the departed Brown and Blair, and the conceptual landscape of their political minds does intrigue you. Does the man who abolished Glass-Steagall and liberated a whirlwind of destructive financial innovation, who pushed poor Americans into workfare programmes which hardly lessed their burdens of stress and depression, not think that perhaps he played a major part in causing the social pathology of some of his “fellow Americans”?
If he does - and he's clearly too bright not to - I think there an explanation in his regular invocation of Wright, and his teleology of increasing social complexity. Does Clinton perhaps believe, deep down, that his contribution to neo-liberalism (and let's not forget Al Gore's “information superhighway”) was an evolutionary step towards a better, more interconnected planet – that it somehow built the infrastructures and cultural behaviour to enable the next step? As he said in his closing advice to the room of rapt young entrepreneurs, “the communitarian model is the right one, you gotta build up the positive and reduce the negative forces of interdependence”.
Within such conditions of complexity – both Gore and Clinton have more than a passing acquaintance with systems theory – the best way to “reduce those negative forces” is to act, and keep acting (or in the technical language of systems theory, “iterate and keep iterating”). You know your ability to predict your outcome in this environment is limited, but you're still hopeful that in some way your projects will answer and assuage needs and anxieties. Thus his ringing advice to a room of militant can-doers: “Don't forget to answer the 'how' question – we have so much information on so many topics, but what we often lack is the strategy and techniques to implement solutions.”
An extraordinary day, in many ways. At some moments I felt like a mature, wise and contextualising adult, able to perceive how small initiatives fit into a bigger, more systemic picture: but sometimes, I felt as if there was a logic of a new society emerging, rooted in imaginative activism and networked/digitalised commercialism, and that it would be best to simply stand aside and let it through, or at least not hinder it.
Immanuel Wallerstein's question about whether this New American Model of governance and business is in fact a DiLampudesa strategy for US supremacy - “change everything, so nothing really changes” - won't leave my mind. And Zizek's caution about “liberal communism” (funny to hear that from 2006, in the light of the Tea-Partiers' socialist charge against Obama) is still worth considering. But I'd like to hope that another possibility from all these bright faces is that they change everything, so that some things really do change. Still observing, still observing...
Ok, the Obelisk of the Washington monument has been tantalising me out of my hotel window for two days now. I'm off to fantasize about great American movie moments before I descend into the final day. As usual, all comments more than welcome.
A fascinating first day at the Summit Series in Washington. I have to say it was a somewhat minatory beginning. The SuperShuttle bus takes you on a long drive from Dulles Airport to Pennsylvania Avenue; and on the way to the classically-architected government buildings, poking up through the forest, you pass the tombstone office blocks of the military-industrial complex, ushering you into the seat of American power. (For the record, by increasing order of proximity to the White House, it goes Gruman Northrop, Oracle, Unisys, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin).
Which means that when you arrive at the MT Marriott, the scenes of loose and happy youthful revelry are quite a relief. Summit Series began as a 90-strong charity fund-raising ski-trip put together by a young events organiser called Elliot Bisnow: with Mercedes Benz, Microsoft and Blackberry as main sponsors, the entertainment-industrial complex is driving the bacchanal.
New York Times described the first two Summit Series as “MTV meets Davos”. And as you can see from my little iPhone captured mood-video above, there's a distinct anthropological behaviour to be described there. So far, it's tribes of handsome young beta-males (I'd say gender split was 80% masculine, and all aiming to match the Platonic idea of Jake Gyllenhal on the cover of the complementary GQ), gripping their beers in tricked-out bars and velcroing themselves to passer-bys, who bear equally sandwich-board-like conference passes. The encounter ritual involves about five minutes of elevator-pitching on their commercial or social enterprise, then a click of our MingleSticks to exchange contact information by infrared (intended to replace the bizcard, but only if you fill in the template: I'm sticking to wood-pulp-and-ink for now), and then falling back into the melee.
Is this the kind of hellish networking nightmare I'm usually dialling a helicopter to be lifted out of? No, not really. To be fair to the organisers, they've set out a list of very communitarian guidelines for behaviour here – “go on a learning safari, be cool, make lifelong friends, embrace Summit Series”. The excited hubbub of the evening reminds me forcefully that the Millenial generation, for all their technologically-enabled distance from, and discrimination about, the old demands of the work ethic, still need collective experiences to affirm their freelance status, their post-organisational lightness of being. There is a pleasing openness to most of the participants here – an implicit sense that everybody here is to some degree in process, rather than commandingly authoritative. I actually like it (even though, as my play-self struggles with my residual Catholic-Calvinism, I can't always respond equally).
The social enterprise mantra of “doing well by doing good” is absolutely presumed here. As you'll get from a sample of the video above, the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons switched unconcernedly between R'n'B-inflected corporate ambition (“yeah I got a Maybach, I'm selling my financial services company, I build brands”), hard-core spiritual inquiry (he works with David Lynch to promote Transcendental Meditation), and a range of education-oriented good works in the ghettos of America and Africa.
On an education panel, the soul singer and social entrepreneur John Legend [bit blurry in the vid, but you can hear him] came over to me as what we would recognise in the UK as an educational conservative – keen to “root out bad teachers”, as if educational attainment was only about poor pedagogy (Micheal Gove may be on the line to you soon, John). As a spectacle of African-American enterprise leadership in the age of Obama, Simmons and Legend were indeed something to see. They were a challenge to this surrender-monkey European social-democrat, though I suspect entirely consonant with the new UK centre-right government, with its enthusiasm for social enterprise over the state.
But there's one other thought in my mind I'm struggling with as I get ready for the second day (my panel is at 12.00pm, EST). The outrageously leftist but critically useful Slavonian philosopher Slavoj Zizek once wrote an article in 2006, observing the Davos circus at its peak. In it he called the emancipatory pronouncements of the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros (and no doubt, tonight's Bill Clinton) as a kind of “liberal communism”. Zizek sums up their mantra:
1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.
2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.
3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.
4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.
5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.
6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.
7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.
8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.
9.You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend
10.You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.
I'd guess that these principles would be taken up as a rallying manifesto by the vast majority of these participants (I quite like it myself). But Zizek, ever the demystifyer, thinks this is the most seductive and enveloping of smoke-screens. The emphasis on philanthropy means that you have to get it all before you give it away, thus keeping basic structures of general exploitation in place (meaning the outsourcing of manual labour, developed “us” “helping” under-developed “them”).
There is a dimension of this at Summit Series – seminars from frankly creepy people like David Rubenstein from The Carlyle Group, at least two session on “outsourcing your life”, and of course the great and troubling triangulator himself, Bill Clinton, speaking tonight. But what's interesting about this particular event, and what sets it apart from the grim, pinched determinations of a Davos-style elite, is that it also embraces a vision of human material abundance accessible to all, which any trad Communist – even Zizek – would surely approve of.
The technologist and futurist Ray Kurzweil did a keynote on the Singularity at last night's dinner (some of which is on the video below). Now no matter what you think of the solidity or reliability of Kurzweil's predictions about the inevitable and exponentially-explosive power of technological innovation – and there are dissenters – he undoubtedly draws our attention to that most human of faculties: our linguistic, rational powers of transformative invention. We are gripped in a great paradox, a version of which Jeremy Rifkin tries to point at in his new book The Empathic Civilisation. Exactly at the moment where environmental limitations may enforce upon us something which at best could be Tim Jackson's “Prosperity without Growth”, and at worst something much more brutal, we may be about to witness a convergence of biological, nanotechnological and computational powers that redraw the very boundaries of what we understand as “energy”, “materials”, “sustainability”,”health”, “nutrition”, even “consciousness”.
My conduit to this community, Jason Silva (who I'm just about to meet, I better hurry) urges us to remember the old Whole Earth mantra: “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it”.
I've always agreed with that. My own struggle – which the phrase the Play Ethic sums up, and which I'm increasingly concerned with in my writing and research – is to reconcile our innate human powers of transformation and invention, our ability to “melt all that is solid into air” as Marx said, with the kind of robust collective structures that can ensure the good, inclusive society (see my previous post here).
So I'm going into the second day with an open mind, looking for clues (and fellow soulitarians!) with whom I can have these conversations. Any Summitteers who get this post from the internal tweets, I'd love to hear your responses, and seek me out if you'd like to talk at [email protected]
It's cool to be asked by creative renegade Hugh McLeod to write a guest blog for Gaping Void. But as it finally appeared on his site, I realised that it's actually a great thought-piece to launch me into Summit Series DC10. Hope you enjoy it. (And thanks, Hugh, for the opportunity). BTW, Jason Silva's futurist column for Vanity Fair is a very nice complement to this piece.
“No ‘occupation’ or ‘vocation’ or ‘craft’ or ’sector’ is ever going to be stable and predictable ever again.”
The first phrase that came into my head considering the title ‘remember who you are’ is the Marianne Williamson line: “Your playing small doesn’t serve the world”. Indeed not.
“If God had formed us of the stuff of the sun or the stars”, wrote Calvin, “or if he had created any other celestial matter out of which man could have been made, then we might have said that our beginning was honourable. But we are all made of mud, and this mud is not just on the hem of our gown, or on the sole of our boots, or in our shoes. We are full of it, we are nothing but mud and filth both inside and outside.” But as Roszak says, cosmology tells us we are indeed formed of “the stuff of the sun and the stars”. So to refute the old moan, our existence is thus intrinsically honourable.
Remembering who I am, at this stage in the game, is about remembering the conceptual, artistic and emotional breakthroughs I’ve made in my life as musician, writer and lover (of change, people, and everything in between). And these breakthroughs have essentially been about recognising that illimitabiity – so foul to Calvin, so joyous to the cosmologists – at the heart of the human condition.
When I was a wee child, it was about the infinite possibilities of Lego, comix, fevered dreaming. When I was a young man, it was the endless variations involved in creating a new piece of music, or the excitement when a great thinker blasted my existence into a new context, penetrated to the heart of the obvious and made it new and strange.
As a father, it was realising that a daughter who seemed to be set to repeat her parents’ choices (media/culture) decided to answer her own call and do something completely different (eco-engineering at MIT) – the beautiful though obdurate fact that you bring them up to be autonomous, and you shouldn’t be surprised when they exercise their autonomy.
And as an adult maker, it’s being struck by the vertiginous realisation – in the age of nano, bio and cogno, the Kurzweilian trinity – that no ‘occupation’ or ‘vocation’ or ‘craft’ or ’sector’ is ever going to be stable and predictable ever again. And right here, right now, it’s understanding that the playfulness you began your human state with is the playfulness that will keep you adaptive and resilient, as you move through an age of endemic transformation and crisis.
But there is real profoundity and paradox in the play scholarship – which I obsessively sift through at http://www.theplayethic.com. From biology, ethology and psychology, it is that we play best when we stand on a ground of play: when we are some distance from hunger, when we have a surplus of materials we can play with, when there are distant guarantors of our security while at play. To be clear about this: play doesn’t pull you up by your own creative bootstraps; play needs some security to truly flourish.
And I think that understanding is a real challenge to those in the creative industries and sectors who might too easily fall into Darwinist fallacies like “out of competitive chaos, new order reigns”. Our playful illimitability, in short, depends on limits – the prior necessities of care, health and strength that we would be foolish not to attend to. (As a father, nurturing my girls into full self-possession, how could I ignore the relations between care and play?)
The fashionable term now is ‘neoteny’ – that extension of juvenile characteristics into maturity that defines us as humans. But that flexibility and openness that makes us creative and response-able is also a vulnerabilty and a fragility. At the very least we need to think about a social safety trampoline, never mind a safety-net, if we are going to commit to the high-wire act of a performative, creative life.
For example, might not an American people collectively freed from the fear of falling into ill-health generate even more innovation in products and services? Might they not have some emotional and psychic headroom to lift their heads above the grind, and see real entrepreneurial possibilities in an everyday life which seems amenable to their purpose, rather than treacherous and dangerous?
So remembering who I am, right now in 2010, is about remembering my own affiliations to a tradition of collective progress (call it socialism, if you wish, and I leave Obama out of that one), and trying to reconcile that with the fissible, morphing, transformative networked society we live in right now. How do I make a buck out of that? Not easy. But when you stand face to face with your personal truth, nothing is.
[Besides being a Glasgow-based "musician, writer, consultant, play theorist, activist" and the author of "The Play Ethic", Pat Kane was lead singer of one of my favorite bands,when I was a kid growing up in Edinburgh.]
Now here's an adventure... I've been invited to speak on a panel, and hang about for three days, at an invitation-only event called the Summit Series in Washington DC. May 13-16th 2010 - here's my session, titled “Media for Change”.
It has a pretty high-powered cast-list. From the heights of the US power structures (Bill Clinton, Ted Turner, the MD of Carlyle Group David Rubenstein, a clutch of White House “innovation officers”), through scientists and gurus (from the edges - long-life techno-advocates Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Gray – to the founders of Craigslist and Second Life, as well as quite a few health and yoga masters), to a decent sprinkling of Tinseltown glamour (R'n'B titans John Legend and Russell Simmons, Peter Petrelli from Heroes, the MD of Variety, an Estee Lauder 'spokesmodel').
But the driving force of the event is the twenty-something organisers' belief that they are the “Millenial leaders” - a generation born in the 80's, but getting ready to take power (see this NYT article which captures their culture well , and their press page). Their agenda seems (from this event) to be a heady mix of social and tech- entrepreneurship, dreams of human life extension and techno-utopianism, and a lot of 'playing hard' - they have a 'Revelry' strand which involves hip DJs and jam bands, 'altruistic' dating casinos and paintballing.
My entry point is through the inimitable duo of Jason Silva and Max Lugavere, hot young anchors of Al Gore's Current TV network (and known in the US press as “Al's boys”) - both of whom are big fans of my ideas, and particularly Jason, who's something of an ardent transhumanist and futurist. Here's his Huff Post columns, and below is a teaser for his forthcoming documentary (in which I am planned to appear) called 'Turning Into Gods' (from the old Stuart Brand saw, "we are as gods and we might as well get good at it").
I'm going to write about this event in some form or other over the next few months, and will gather much material while I'm there (interviews, podcasts, etc), as well as blog from the event.
But I seems I am being caught up - from my Glasgow/London perch, sending out memes about the Play Ethic - in a new wave of Gen Y/Millenials-era public entrepreneurship in America. They are naturally globalist in outlook, completely native to the internet society, optimistic about growth (but in a green- and socially-centred way), and seek a new justification for their enterprise which gets beyond the Puritan work ethic (which is, I guess, why I've been invited). And (of course) they're inspired by Obama's victory, which has given them a new political horizon of successful activism.
On the eve of a UK election which has possibly registered a million extra younger voters, will we begin to see the same urge here for a generation to identify themselves as "millenials" quite so self-consciously?
I was asked by my old paper, the Sunday Herald, to reflect on the non-appearance of the Internet Election in the UK's current political drama - and the resurgence of the Television Election. Never enough time, or resources, to address these issues properly - but it's still fun to gather together your thoughts for a Sunday morning performance (here's the paper copy, below is unedited version). All comments welcome.
This was the Television Election (but the Internet one is still to come)
Sunday Herald Essay
2 May 2010
By Pat Kane
"Bigotgate" may well have brought the career of Kirkaldy's grumpiest son to a Shakespearean, character-fated end. But it's not the first time that a well-produced tv clip, featuring a solid and redoubtable working-class lady, has seized the nation's voters.
Before Gillian Duffy with her red lapels, of course, there was Susan Boyle in her knitted twinset. Granted, SuBo's homely (though exquisitely edited) defiance of the powers-that-be resulted in one victorious plebiscite after another - not to mention considerable direct payments to Chancellor Cowell's private treasury. But who knows what wild storms of democratic upheaval Mrs Duffy's perfect montage has unleashed?
Yes, both clips were thunderously amplified by the vast echo-chamber and copy-machine that is the internet. But as the nations of these islands once more gathered round the flat-screened hearth on Thursday night – this time to watch the slow decomposition of a middle-aged Scotsman, live on BBC 1 – there is a moment of truth coming for some of us surf-monkeys. Despite all the cyber-predictions, from YouTube this to Twitter that, 2010 has become not the Internet Election, but the Television Election (and maybe even the Newspaper Election).
With some irony, all the stats on this are readily available in the blogosphere. Last Thursday's BBC debate was slightly down on ITV – but the average over all three was 8.094 million viewers, a 31.1% audience share. By comparison, according to a March survey, Twitter has 132,000 UK users per day – slightly less than the circulation of the Independent – and only one in five of those are defined as 'active'. Another survey notes only 45% of MPs have a Twitter account, and their average number of followers is 614 (the average UK constituency, by the way, is 74,000 registered voters).
Numbers don't capture the quality of the interaction, of course: and in places the Net has been both useful and fun in this election. Websites have been hacked together to allow surfers to lampoon the more egregious of political posters. Voter registration organised through Facebook racked up 450,000 downloads before the deadline.
And when the Tory press turned on Nick Clegg after his showing in the first debate, social networkers responded with ironic Twitter crazes like “#nickcleggsfault” (where he was blamed for everything from volcanic ash to venereal disease), or the 150,000 strong Facebook group “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!” If the majority of the estimated 1 million extra vote registrations do turn out to be younger voters, the Net will have played its organising part.
But the reality is that cyberspace has only been an amplification of the main event. And that was 270 minutes of advert-free, quietly parliamentary talk TV, conducted between six middle-aged blokes in suits (including the hosts), fielding carefully polished questions from well-behaved citizens. If this was the X-Factorisation of British politics, these were three extremely dull versions of the game-show. No oohs and aahs from a banner-waving, braying crowd; no buzzer-pressing potentates giving their instant, risible assessments; and as for the performers, each of them was a steady hoofer - no over-adventurous wailings, no missed dance-steps or styling disasters.
At the very least, we can hope that the success of these restrained formats will restrain Cowell's stated ambition to extend his format to political debate. (The Tick-Factor on capital punishment is one I'd particularly like to avoid). And we should remember that the debate comes only months after the BBC's own controversial Question Time episode, where the BNP's Nick Griffin was brought into the heart of a mature and sophisticated institution of political television.
Griffin was meticulously disassembled live on air, by a panel that was in general a credit to the diversity and intelligence of public life on these islands. It would be a delight if the success of these debates meant a minor revolution for television itself - where jaded tv execs might now see a ratings-and-commercial opportunity for the patient exposition of policy options on prime-time television. I'm not holding my breath.
Yet while the Gillian Duffy incident was never explicitly referenced on the Thursday night debate – no-one wishing to seem vindictive towards the grey-skinned PM, as the telegenic logic dictates – it represents the darker potential of television's restored status as mediator of the national conversation. And by implication, the Net's weakness before, and dependency on, old media.
In the way that the expenses scandal was a triumph of old-fashioned source-based print journalism, “Bigotgate” was tv news at its most powerful: fleet-footed but organised, quickly turning a drab event into a killer story.
As you compulsively watch the Duffy news items on the web, pulled together from the media's own Truman-Show-like omnipresence on the campaign trail, you witness something more in the thick of it than The Thick Of It could ever be.
The all-seeing eyes and ears of real-time television catches the kind of on-stage, off-stage hypocrisy that is the most perfect self-destruction in an age of personality politics. And the journos did their job superbly well: chasing Mrs Duffy down the road to get her reaction shot, snatching the camera feed in a radio studio as Brown was lost in his own private hell, stitching it all together as a coherent two minute epic of one man's meltdown.
What was the role of the Net in the face of this brilliant, doubtless award-winning moment of broadcast-news professionalism? A passive parasite, mostly. Copying it, sharing it, maybe eventually belching up a Downfall-style mashup. But essentially the Net's role will be to install this perfectly destructive reputation-bomb into the collective memory of our digital hive-mind. I hold no brief for Brown or New Labour, but I did shudder on his behalf. A confluence of old and new media effectively ripped his human integrity apart on the broadest possible stage; a tragedy now permanently available to anyone with a will to Google his emptiness.
Even when television isn't in love with the brutal arts of montage, editing and voice-over, and just sticks like a live-to-air limpet to its political target, the effect is just as humanly corrosive. And the Net can just be a supine mediator. While doing some professional chores last week, I sat watching one of those very “walkabout” live feeds – on my wifi laptop, naturally – which did Brown in. This time it was the sainted Eurocrat Clegg, swishing about some industrial hangar or other, joshing with apprentices.
I don't think I've ever seen such a flesh-crawling example of that old sociological classic, the presentation of self in everyday life. Clegg wore his populist identity as awkwardly as the plastic armour of a Star Wars trooper, all chafing edges and black calculation beneath.
Watch too much of this stuff, and you could easily get extremely depressed. It seems like a perfect demonstration that, in an age where every occupation is “performance reviewed” on the stage of the service economy, the very mechanics of character are buckling and coming apart. It could be that our recent glee in showing the bullshit that cakes our MPs and representatives is a kind of displaced disgust at our own increasing artificiality. Pull them down as grafting, self-interested, speak-your-script robots, so that we don't have concede that too much of our own lives is lived under the same conditions of venality and fakery.
To me, it's no surprise that the coin which has probably pushed Brown over the edge of the political arcade-game was a supreme moment of reality tv. Stay with me, but I think there's a deep continuity here between Thatcher, New Labour and the possible coming Cameronism. Remember her famous dictum: “economics is only the method - the object is to change the soul”. For New Labour, bureaucracy was the method to change the soul – all that cheesy, second-hand managerialism that dominated public services, with its plethora of micro-managed targets and prescriptions.
The cultural expression of this was the rise of what I've called a “television of manners”: everything from Big Brother to Supernanny to Wife Swap to Jamie Oliver and his various culinary missionary positions ... No corner of our affective lives has been free from the surveillance of our so-called behavioural betters (whether in lifestyle television or under CCTV in the streets). Brown caught out as a Fabianesque, prole-sniffing fake proves that if you live by the Truman Show, you die by the Truman Show.
The New Tories, with their love of "nudge" thinking and liberal paternalism, will be picking up this baton with great enthusiasm (after all, they started it). Going by the foul intolerance of anything other than a Gradgrind work ethic in the last debate, the new Toryism will now be behaviour-control minus any funding to soften the social ordering-around. No doubt, at some point over the next few years, the Etonian suprematism of the Cameronites will viciously break through the pleasant surface of their media management. And no doubt Web 2.0 will play some part in digging up the truffles that indicate their innate sense of privilege.
But I think the televisuality of politics at the moment may be pointing to something more profoundly, structurally worrying: the unravelling of the legitimacy of almost all kinds of public representation. When too many people start to think that democracy itself is a con, perhaps even a rigged game show, then we will be in real, and familiar, trouble.
It would be nice at this point to be able to turn back towards internet idealism. You know the story: the one that says this is a medium which can revive the democratic spirit, that can make active and engaged those who are currently passive and entranced. Well, possibly. As social media expert Joanne Jacobs says, the staid parameters of political television obviously restricts the kind of questions the public can ask of politicians – never mind what politicians can ask of each other. (The failure to construct even one debate that could encompass the constitutional diversity of the United Kingdom will surely come to haunt the British broadcasting authorities)
But those questions, says Jacobs, “can be taken online to blogs, forums and social-networking-oriented conversations. This is where the internet has its power; the 'last mile' of political manoeuvering for the digitally connected is happening between friends and connections online. And voters are still more likely to value the opinion of those they feel they know over the rhetoric of televised debates.”
We saw a little example of this strategy from the Scottish political blog Bella Caledonia. Over the last few weeks, they started a successful campaign to ensure that the phrase “scotlandspeaks” was the most popular “trending topic” on Twitter during each of the leaders' tv debates. There is a growing determination among the Scottish “NatRoots” (to adopt the American term from the last few Democratic campaigns), that activists should stop bemoaning the media, and start becoming the media.
It's all-too-possible that the SNP won't hold any negotiating cards in a hung parliament, in which repatriation of broadcast and media powers to Holyrood might have been some part of the deal. It was fun to watch Salmond do his usual sonsy performance on the Question Time panel after the last BBC debate - but he did seem like a moaning wannabe at the big new table of top-down political television. Perhaps he needs to be reminded of his own radical commitment a few years ago: that Scottish media reform should be about building an “architecture of participation” in the country – not just getting your appointed slot in a spectacle of authority.
But waiting for the top tables to shove the seats over and give your bum the warmth of power is perhaps not just a waste of time, but also a misdirection of whatever popular political energies you're trying to channel. If the uber-televising of politics has the unintended consequence of making us ever more grouchy and despairing about the very idea of politics itself, then perhaps the powers of social media may yet really come into their own. Vigorously pursued in Scotland, internet tools might enable a peer-to-peer conversation between friends, family and colleagues about our political futures – a 'networked' rather than 'national' conversation that might have even more unpredictable and emergent results than the appearance of one shiny new face in the old Punch and Judy show of political television.
In short, the Internet Election might not have turned up this time. But it might well overturn the next time.
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