The Play Ethic

Playing well: ten years of The Play Ethic

Before the year ends, I should post up an essay I wrote for the D8 design consultancy in Glasgow, celebrating ten years of talking about The Play Ethic (my chosen anniversary date was the appearance of my major essay in the Observer newspaper in October 2000). It's not a heavy theoretical read, has some clues towards my next burst of intellectual activity. All comments welcome. 

Playing well: ten years of the Play Ethic

Pat Kane

There's nothing like the tenth anniversary of your own cultural meme to help you mark the passage of time.

My Observer magazine cover article on The Play Ethic, titled "Play For Today", first appeared on October 22, 2000. The dot-bust was just reaching the peak of its fall-out, but had still left us all living in a new, weightless, connected world. Blairism was in its high pomp, heading for another New Labour landslide; meanwhile, a brand-new Scottish Parliament was stumbling to its feet.

And I was hoping that walking out of a well-paid editorial job with a brand-new newspaper, The Sunday Herald - and betting on a zeitgeist change - was the right thing to do.

I'll never regret the last minute panicked call to the editor: "make sure the website address is at the bottom of the piece!" A bit bemused, she assented. And thus my own meeting-place for thousands of global souls (or whatever over 220,000 page views translates to), increasingly intrigued by the power and potential of play over the last decade, was founded. (And yes, the web address will be at the end of this piece). It's been a fascinating lens through which to peer at some of the civilizational tumult of the Zeroes.

In a sentence, the Play Ethic was intended to be what comes after the Work Ethic. Whereas the latter was a legitimating creed for the duty, routine, steady production and social self-restraint appropriate to the industrial era, the former was a mentality to help us get the best out of the informational era. 

I wanted a new generation of "soulitarians" to exult in the flexibility of new kinds of employment, to be excited about the transformative power of digitality and networks, to recover a child-like sense of optimism and creativity that could now express itself in the mainstream of our lives. Even in the ruins of the Dot-Bust, and in defiance of the weird "new work ethic" promulgated by the even weirder Gordon Brown, it seemed to me like a major shift in the common-sense of our public and private lives was underway.

And then halfway through the write up of the Play Ethic book, in September 11, 2001, a screaming came across the sky... That delayed the book, which finally published in late 2004. But what it also had to change was a sense - something that I've been struggling with ever since - that the "playfulness" I'd been counterposing to a stiff, commanding-and-controlling, experiment-fearing world of organisational orthodoxy was perhaps too culturally specific.

My first year of the Play Ethic had seen me fielding major advertisers like Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Lowe Lintas, or esteemed organisations like the British Council and the Cabinet Office - all of them part of the blithe, post-Fukuyama 'market-democratic' over-confidence of the times. And all of them looking for the next new sexy idea to help them govern electorates, or sell to consumers.

But with the Twin Towers bomber Mohammed Atta's suicide note in my ear - "the time for play is over and the serious time is upon us" - I realised straightaway that to think about the role of play in the human condition was to do more than provide some fizzy buzz-words for some corporate business strategy.

When Will Hutton reviewed The Play Ethic in the Guardianⁱ, he fascinatingly bundled it in with books on idleness and slowness, and then connected it to Joseph Nye's concept of soft power. These visions of squashy, messy, bucolic, non-coercive Western-ness, concluded Hutton, "might be doing their small part to help our image and limit the appeal of al-Qaida... The happier we are, the better - not just for ourselves, but as a reason to be copied rather than opposed".

Mebbes aye, mebbes naw, as the magister ludi Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish might have pronounced. But in any case, I hit the book-stands with a sprawling monster that felt it had to consider the Buddhist network path as seriously as New Labour workfare; the indeterminacy of the quantum on a par with the elegance of the Lego brick. No, a mega-bucks period of zeitgeist-surfing at Malcolm-Gladwell speaking rates did not quite ensue for me. 

But what did ensue was points of contact with a growing constituency of people for whom "play" became an important keyword, signifying a crisis of meaning or purpose in their domain. For example, I've talked to so many educators and the educated over this period - everyone from Australian and British government ministers to Kilmarnock play workers and teachers, from New York academics to Bristol primary school kids. 

I have no real idea what impact these conversations have had - but it has been a delight to see the growing importance of playful experience to educational reform. Until the Con-Dem coalition slashed it for deficit reduction, there were hundreds of millions of pounds being devoted to playparks in the UK - the rationale based on the kinds of multidisciplinary studies of the health and neuronal benefits of play that I'd highlighted in the book. 

And almost every educational establishment now gets the benefits of extended kindergarten, or active-learning-through-play, for the development of future learners. It's taken nearly a century and a half, but Dickens' Gradgrind is gradually being evicted from the British classroom.

We're also in something of a "wellbeing" revolution in public policy: no ambitious political figure in the UK, on any part of the ideological spectrum, can now get away without condemning those philistines who know "the price of everything and the value of nothing". And from my commissions and engagements, I'm beginning to perceive that for many people, play puts meat on the bones of more abstract considerations of "happiness" or "quality-of-life". At least in its active, sociable, physical mode, play gives a taste of what the "good society" might actually feel like.

But there are other dimensions of play - what the scholars call "dark" or "ancient" play - which I've become increasingly aware of over the years. One deficiency in the 2004 book, and one which I'm still ambivalent about, is the steady rise to commercial and cultural predominance of computer games culture in the developed world. I've literally watched its rise over the shoulders of my daughters, who have both grown up playing god-games and simulated worlds in the last decade. But I'm not a natural gamer - and I wonder whether it's because games are all too easily deployed to reinforce a rampantly martial and competitive spirit of society. 

My own play-guru, the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, isolates "contestive" play, or play-as-power, as only one form of play's "taking reality lightly". I'm consulted regularly by games-makers and professionals these days, who sense a crisis in their own burgeoning sector. It's not just in terms of the costs of blockbuster games leading to high risk and bankruptcy. It's also about the narrowness and oppressiveness of the "win-state", "power-up" mentality that so much of games culture generates.

Watch organisations like Hide And Seek, or go to events like Playful, or note games-makers like Jane McGonigal, and you'll see a generation of gamers who want to do for their medium what alternative filmmakers did for French and American cinema from the 50's onwards. But I'm finding that a "play ethic"- a sense of experiment and openness leading to a sustainably good life - is being actively sought out in this community - yes, even by the coders of out-of-control robot soldiers and vengeance-wreaking fantasy trolls. 

Where next for the Play Ethic? One further omission from the 2004 book was any real grappling with environmental limits, or the necessity for a low-carbon future, other than with a kind of blithe hope that technological innovation - fuelled by the best spirit of scientific play, of course - would get us out of our resource hole. I'm now fascinated by play as both a window into the eternal sources of human inventiveness, and as a soft-spot that opens us up to addictive interaction and lifestyle narcissism. 

On some mornings, I wake up and exult in a networked world that's like a giant "ground of play": robust but loosely structured, enabling a surplus of materials for us to freely combine and morph, allowing new parties and voices into the process of building society. On other mornings, I fall out of bed, attend to my flickering smart-phone, and wonder whether I'm holding in my hand a weapon of mass distraction - something that ensnares my character in a matrix of "fun", allowing me to acquiesce in the charcoaling of the planet.

The very energies of play - not exclusively our own as a species, but something we uniquely retain right to the end of our lives - shows that we are a radical animal. Play gives us the capacity to flexibly respond to almost any situation that our environment throws at us. My aim now is still to explore what an "ethic" for play might be - but one which picks through its wide range of potentiating options, and tries to develop the best ones for a sustainable society.

The rise of "maker" culture - what the hackers (who I began to pick up on in the 2004 book) did when they moved from coding to concrete reality - is an example of a dimension of play that could really help us get beyond a wastefully consumerist society.ⁱⁱMakers promote a sociable tinkering, where we use hi-tech to skill ourselves and provide for ourselves more and more, rather than a lazy, brand-directed consumption.

As it seems to have taken a decade for the first incarnation of the Play Ethic to move from the curious fringes to somewhere near the centre of debate about the qualities of the good society, I'm expecting this greener version to take at least as long to get to the same place - by which time it might be called something completely different.

But the principle of freedom and openness that play represents means that, whatever happens, the debate will be rich, inclusive, sprawling and never-ending. It's been a great perch from which to observe the beginning of the 21st century. Let's see where the societal carnival takes us in the next ten years. Leg godt, as the Danish say: play well.

www.theplayethic.com

Notes

iWill Hutton, "Slow down, tune out, make peace", The Guardian, 11 September (!!), 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/sep/11/sportandleisure.highereducation

iiSee Cory Doctorow's novel Makers, or Make magazine (http://www.makezine.com)

Dougald Hine's New Public Thinkers project - my nominations

The P.T. Barnum of modern British autonomism, Dougald Hine, has come up with a great new project, defined - like many of the best are - by an argument with the establishment. BBC 3, in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is embarking on a quest to find "New Generation Thinkers" in the UK - meaning public intellectuals who shape debate through writing, broadcasting, blogging and other kinds of intervention.

Nice idea. Only problem is, the rules of the competition are that you have to be a staff academic in some way. Dougald quite rightly points out that not only would this disqualify past great thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, John Berger and Karl Polyani, but it disqualifies many current voices who find the time for critique and research in the midst of non-academic lives - as writers, entrepreneurs, employees, activists, artists.

So, platform-ready as ever, Dougald is going to set up a site called New Public Thinkers (first announcement here, holding page for actual site here), which as I understand it will have at least a wide-open door to those who are publicly intellectualising from a non-academic perch. Many thoughts on the state of public thinking come to mind - but to begin with, D wants some nominations as to who should be on a putative list of NPTs. Some of my favourites have already been proposed, here's some others:

Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk). Now straightaway this gets complicated, in terms of the initial definition. I didn't know much about K-Punk other than his extraordinary blog - which uses the best of radical left theory (Zizek, Badiou, Negri, Deleuze) as tools for writing heterodoxically about music, popular culture, the political spectacle and activism, in a way which for me defines what "public thinking" should be.

But the more you read, the more you realise his own predicament - as a precarious academic teacher, hopping from gig to gig teaching late teens, and thereby gaining an insight into contemporary passivities and pathologies. Keep reading, and his network of pals emerges - voices like Nina Power aka Infinite Thought (a philosopher at Roehampton University), Owen Hathereley's Sit Down Man You're a Bloody Tragedy (freelance architectural critic and lecturer), and Richard Seymour aka Lenin's Tomb (who's a PhD sociology candidate at the LSE). All writing from the theoretically-informed activist left that I value - but with some academic locus.

Should "new public thinkers" also allow for post-grads and employed academics who do carve out time to make public interventions - meaning, they don't keep their heads down and direct all their textual production towards peer-ref'd articles that can improve their research ratings and thus career? I think they should. Otherwise a lot of the new leadership that's coming from the student protests will be unnecessarily ruled out. 

John Thackera (Doors of Perception). In terms of consistency of approach about the importance of "design for resilience" over the last decade, John Thackera gets my vote as a "public thinker". He isn't just a persuasive advocate of ideas about green design, but his "Doors Of Perception" conferences have been great opportunities for the meeting of practical minds across disciplines, under the urgent horizon of climate crisis. I think it's also helpful that a public thinker knows how to write clearly and effectively, particularly if the topic is recondite or specific. John, as an ex-hack, knows how to do that well. A busy man, but I'd love to see his voice much more in the agora of ideas about green economics in this country again. 

Indra Adnan (Downing Street Project, Soft Power Network). Indra has been writing publicly (and from a non-academic perch) for the last four years on the nexus between Buddhism, soft power and the politics of gender and families. In her columns for the Huffington Post and the Guardian, Indra has explored how the crisis of power in the UK - exemplified by political corruption and the financial crash - has a complex relationship with notions of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine': we simply can't make an effective critique of how power structures order our lives if we don't find a way to talk about our deeply-held attitudes towards control, participation, acceptance.

Indra's advocacy and development of Joseph Nye's concept of soft power - from an American propaganda exercise, to a radically compassionate network politics, rooted in conflict-mediation and practised throughout the world - brings new insights about public life (see for example, her ambivalence about Wikileaks on this Huff Post blog). And yes, this woman is my partner, but sometimes the obvious is sitting right in front of you... 

* * *

Already excited, waiting to see a list of these thinkers in one place - feels like a handy new blogroll to look forward to. 

Why Wikileaks should be an asset to the brand called democracy

Followers of the Play Ethic should be interested in my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thoughts on the Wikileaks controversy. A huge moment for net-activists everywhere, where the openness of the web as a structure meets the self-defined boundaries of state power. High stakes, no matter your assessment of Assange. The research references for this column are available on my Scottish-affairs website Thoughtland

 

My Sunday Herald essay: Joyous austerity vs. The X-Factor

This is the unedited version of an essay on the UK tv talent show The X-Factor for my old paper, the Sunday Herald. The theme I'm trying to explore is how the combination of conspicuous glitz and vertical business integration that the X-Factor represents is a response to the crisis of the music business, brought on by the internet and its decommercialising tendencies. But it's not the only model of how to make a living (if not a fortune) in the music biz post the web - and I show how me and my brother's band, Hue And Cry, are using the current landscape to our advantage. All comments, as usual, more than welcome. 

Sunday Herald 'Opinion' essay: Joyous austerity vs. The X-Factor

5 December 2010

By Pat Kane

For the last five years, it's become a thunderous seasonal ritual, with only one blip in the procession so far. From 2005-2008, surpassing even the three year consecutive run of The Beatles in the mid-sixties, the winners of Simon Cowell's fiendishly brilliant license-to-print-money The X-Factor have grabbed the Christmas No.1 spot: Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke. So far as the bookies are concerned, they're giving 8/15 it'll happen again.

Only last year, as you may remember, corporate multimedia pop didn't quite rule supreme. As a result of anti X-Factor activism on Facebook, the national yuletide favourite buzzing out of young people's smartphones across the land was Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name, with its invigorating refrain, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"

The leading candidate this year is called, wittily, Cage Against The Machine. This is another social-network campaign, aiming to defeat Cowell's phalanx of Matt, Rebecca and Cher with avant-garde composer John Cage's 4' 33'' (that's four and a half minutes of total silence). Available on Dec 13th, if you're interested.

So it's all fun and games in the new Roman circus: the emperors with their thumbs raised or dropped, the Christians bleating in their borrowed designer gowns, the vox populi whooping from the hall or voting with their far-off devices. And outwith the spectacle, disgruntled indie-music barbarians sulk in their bars and student halls, or occasionally get it together to throw boulders into the arena.

Is that it for the music business? With the BPI noting earlier this year that pop music has outsold rock music for the first time in decades, and with The X-Factor being credited as the single-handed saviour of the ITV network, is this the new model? Pop ingenues from the street squeezed through a variety of cookie-cutter genres by a series of grandstanding judges, who then shuffle to find their slots in a crowded release schedule run by probably the most cynical cultural operator in Britain?

Many musicians looking at the X-Factor would resist the artistic passivity and audience programming that it revels in. And I say can from my own experience that there's an alternative business model of music-making, where a more mature balance can be struck - a balance between the necessities of getting a money-stream from one's own material and performance, and the communal power of fans as they express themselves through digital networks.

But this is a vision of musical practice that comes much closer to the participation and sharing culture of folk, than it does to the conspicuous and plutocratic display of the X-Factor. Is Cowell's circus the commercial wave of the future, or the last lurid gasp of the hyper-consumerist past - and not just in terms of the music business, but for much of our public life as well?

Looked at from a great height (and yes, other actions could be performed up there) The X-Factor is a clever, comprehensive response by the traditional music business to the challenge of the digital generation- a generation whose mindshare has been scattered to the winds by a zillion media attractions, and whose consumer behaviour has been exploded by ubiquitous broadband and free filesharing. 

From his experience in the pre-internet heydays of the 80s and 90s, Simon Cowell has remembered a few things and applied them ruthlessly. One is the continuing role of television in family life, particularly at a time when everyone's lost in their own media niches. Weekend telly provides a welcome shared experience for work-wearied parents, and children too young to go out themselves - one that won't present any ethical or moral challenges, but will generate some degree of excitement and involvement from the audience. 

But one thing that's infuriating for the average A&R man are the media gatekeepers - producers and researchers - who control access to prime-time viewing. So Cowell created his own tv format: and in this, every element of the pop process - the broadcast show, the brandname, the performers, their rights and royalties, and their final recordings - is under one business regime. (Incidentally, there's not much irony in the name of Cowell's company, Syco. Much of the music business does indeed exist somewhere between psychopathy and sycophancy.)

So whether it's Rage or Cage against the machine, there is clearly a towering new music-biz "machine" before us - and that "all those people who don't seem to like X-Factor", as Cowell ruefully put it last year, are feeling oppressed by its operations.

In the last twelve months, this constituency has been self-consciously active in other areas too. Take the successful campaign to save the digital radio channel BBC 6 Music from rationalisation and closure. Or the (not-so-successful) tens of thousands that signed petitions to protest against the passing of The Digital Economy Bill, which will criminalise music downloaders through new powers of detection and enforcement

We have a Tory-dominated, services-cutting government, a clearly-identifiable musical establishment sunk in luxury and corruption, a general state of anxiety and dread .... So should we expect a 'new Punk' any day now, combining anarchy, technology and refusal? A new movement of street, campus and community music, articulating protest and advocating alternatives against a broken capitalism?

Well, let's see. But there's also currently a middling space between the top-down soul-shredding of corporate pop, and the bottom-up world of wikileaking and militancy about copyright. This is a territory, I would suggest, that most active musicians currently occupy. The question is: how can someone find a sustainable way to make music, for all those good reasons we love - to express what's inside you, to follow your aesthetic joy, to connect meaningfully with appreciative audiences - while at the same time, trying to circulate some cash around the situation?

This is where my own music career, with my brother Gregory in Hue And Cry, has operated over the last few years - and where many others are trying to exist also. There's an axiom we've been using which seems to sum up our the challenge of the sustainable music career in the digital age: use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce.

Unless there is a huge shift in how the internet is basically structured (and while that shouldn't be ruled out, it doesn't look likely), any recorded content that any musician releases will be able to be copied and recorded by anyone else. And that's no matter how intricate the restrictions placed upon each music file. The internet is a copy-machine plus a telephone - and infinitely so. 

At the moment, even services that have figured out a simple way for people to pay for digital content - like iTunes or Spotify - are largely relying on the laziness of the consumer, as they use their well-designed devices. However, one teenager with a copy of a sound-grabbing program can easily defy every corporate programmer's control codes.

So there's the "ubiquitous" part - your content can be digitally everywhere, largely untrackable and uncontrollable. Deal with it, dude. But given that capitalism only works when you can make a resource scarce, and thus price it, what scarcity is left to the commercial musician? One is, obviously, the musician herself. Unless they've been taking too many illegal substances, even they'd have to agree they can only occupy one point in space and time. And so far, it's still the convention that a gig is an enclosed space, with entry requiring a cash payment of some kind at the door.

The primacy of the gig actually accounts for the relative health of the UK music industry. PRS for Music's 2009 report showed that live income rose by 9.45% that year, where games and DVDs has flatlined. Regionally, the report notes that Scotland "punches well above its weight", with 11% of the UK's music revenues generated from 8% of the population. The reason given is that festivals like T In The Park, Rockness and the Edinburgh Fringe support a lot of tourist-like consumer activity.

But this link between music and tourism can happen at the level of individual bands. This Feburary we'll be doing the second of our Hue And Cry Weekends at Glasgow's ABC venue - this one, tied to Valentine's Day, is called 'A Glasgow Kiss' (naturally). We'll make ourselves available to fans through meets, greets, and soundchecks, provide them with a guide to enjoying the city for a weekend - and get a chance to sing love songs for two days.

There's another other element of scarcity available to the musician: beautifully produced material objects with a personal, customised touch (the very opposite of the immaterial nature of digital music). For example, we have a facility called Songframes, where Hue And Cry fans can order a display frame containing a vinyl copy of a song from our back catalogue, with handwritten lyrics and music, and a personal dedication. It's hard work for us, but we're doing pretty good business; fans are devoting frames to children, spouses, lovers, departed ones. 

I know this sounds like a very old scene of creativity. Craftsmen making objects for bespoke customers. Troubadors cultivating their audience as a community. Music operating as social currency as much as commercial product.

The crucial difference is that the internet allows the artist and audience to exist face-to-face online, building a virtual village square together (although populated by people across this island, and way beyond). In this square, the conversations and sharing come first - and from that collective enthusiasm arise opportunities to sell services and products of all kinds. But not to excess, and with a premium on quality and experience, not disposability and transience.

Does this new music-business model, the musician as community-minded enterpreneur, make you a living? Well, did the music business ever make a living for that many people? For me, it certainly has its place within a portfolio of earning activities - a craft conducted somewhere in the spectrum between professionalism and amateurism, and perhaps alongside some other specialised skill that society finds hireable (in technology, design or education).

Because the music business felt the brutal, de-monetising impact of digitality first, I'd say many musicians have been developing resilience and skills for survival that others could learn from.

Take journalism. Like musicians, journalists exist amidst a community of readers. As the internet unravels their protected revenues and saleable objects, how can journalists use their unique presence and skills to command a fee for services - and for what services, exactly? Also: where are the opportunities to create beautiful, treasurable and customisable objects of journalism? Does the iPad and other tablet readers represent a new way to combine ubiquity and quality - for a price?

The muddle-through (as opposed to top-down or bottom-up) strategies of the entrepreneur-musician might well result in a new stability for the music business. Artists will want to support music services that "feel like free" for music fans - giving users that sense of digital ubiquity that they love, but with some revenue (though certainly nowhere near as much as in Cowell's 80's heyday) collected through subtle licensing and contract agreements.

But the important attitude is to be sanguine and relaxed about these crazy times. It's a time for commercial invention and trying things out - not for panicked scaremongering about piracy and theft, which ends up alienating the most enthusiastic members of your audience.

The much bigger horizon is whether consumer-led economic growth, challenged by our need to achieve low-carbon targets, is actually an outmoded system. Beyond the Saturday night hoopla and the stadium mega-gigs, many musicians have been practising optimistic austerity for years. And that just happens to be the mindset which will enable us to cope sanely with drastic environmental limits on our lifestyles.

Beyond the baubles and conspicuous glitz of the Cowell circus, Generation Zero - preaching minimalist living and post-consumerist virtue - is waiting in the wings. And a participative music business, less concerned with high profit-margins and more concerned with the strong relationship between artist and audience, may be perfectly placed to answer their needs.

The X-Factor is at one level just some weekend fun, of course: no-one's frogmarched to the flat-screen to watch it. But from where I'm standing, some of its bombastic hysteria comes directly from the consciousness of its smug, but undoubtedly switched-on creator: I think he really believes the glory days of the 80's are back-back-back.

I'll certainly be voting to make sure John Cage gets to number one this Xmas. But the more enduring challenge to the X-Factor Machine will come from working musicians trying to figure out their new music business model, building it out across the networks and audiences, one event or recording at a time. For all his cat-stroking, high-waisted genius, I don't think Cowell understands the real X-Factor involved in making music at all.

Hue and Cry's Glasgow Kiss Weekend is 11-12th Feburary, ABC Glasgow. Their new album Bitter Suite, Again is available at http://www.hueandcry.co.uk