The Play Ethic

"Radical Animal: Constructing the Creative Self" - Pat Kane, King's College Lecture

My lecture delivered on Oct 12th, 2016, at King's College Arts and Humanities Festival, "PLAY". All shares and comments most welcome. 

"Radical Animal: Constructing the Creative Self" - Pat Kane from Pat Kane

Enchantment, Telepathy, Divinity: three guides for a digital future in 2020-2050

 

Contact me at: [email protected]

Notes from my speech at the Readie conference in Berlin, today, 11 October 2016

* * *

I'm a writer, musician, curator (of FutureFest), activist - my interest is in cultural, social & human-development drivers of digital tech 

I also am a researchsr & theorist of play - which is a very primal & ancient & nonhuman form. So I tend to see dynamic new changes as often having vsry old roots, in the history of imagination. 

So here are some very old terms to prepare you for 2020-2050

Enchantment, Telepathy, and Divinity

 

ENCHANTMENT

- VR (Oculus - Mark zuckerberg yesterday, demonstrating VR meetings)

- AR: PokemonGo - but also Magic Leap 

Real-time human experience about to change - a digital layer across our perceptions

Max Weber disenchantment of the world - this is a reenchantment. 

But under whose spell? 

See the Keiichi Matsude video, Hyperreality (On Vimeo). A simulation of 5 mins in life of a precarious worker in Medellin, Colombia - but from the point of view of her smart glasses. 

An image both oppressive - everything flashes with adverts, health and performance indicators, dancing commercial logos - but also, frankly, hallucinatory - something a shaman might experiences under the influence

The challenge here for people in government is respecting the perceptual integrity of the user-citizen - how to manifest yourselves in people's perceptual fields?

The challenge here for commercial operators - how do you curate a pleasing, useful, comforting digital layer, as comfortable as Apple? 

 

TELEPATHY/COMPATHY

At FutureFest this year - we had the first ever Cybathlon - one of the sports was Brain-Computer Interfaces - severely disabled and immobile players who could move virtual or robotic avatars with thought (last year we had Neurosis - the world's first ever neuro-driven thrill-ride)

Mark Zuckerberg World Economic Forum this year - wants to "be able to capture a thought and share it with the world"

There is a post-egoic tendency, a transpersonal tendency, in digital culture - due to its webbedness, its network nature - and I think Zuckerberg is entirely correct in presuming that a techno-telepathy is the ultimate next platform or medium. 

Technotelepathy is a horrible word - empathy seems too familiar - let me suggest a new word: 

COMPATHY (an old word - meaning "feelings, happiness or grief shared with others" - and medical term - about sharing other physical distress). 

"Com" in Compathy is to emphasise how brain-computer interaction is an extension of our current communication cultures--

--but also to suggest that the kinds of community and group-forming that digital networks encourage may be about to go to a different level.  

 

DIVINITY

"We are as gods and we might as well get good at it" - Stuart Brand

 Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus is the latest version of this (here's my review for New Scientist)

The baseline for what you imagine to be the predictable behaviours of digital audiences looks like it is about to radically morph and differentiate itself

Nudging is about to be decommissioned...

The challenges are both at the level of machine learning - where a new practical wisdom will enter the world---

--And at level of neurochemical - neurotechnological intervention (the "Army attention helmet" & Panksepp's GLYX-13 drug - inducing play to beat depression (see my Nesta essay on this))

Harari: very strong claim of humanism is that we realise our inner natures - we dig deep down & express who we are. Human-centred digital design. But what if we are able to choose, select & edit those desires? 

 

Calls to action to prepare for your possible future?

- Come to me and I'll send you a reading Twitter & blog list!

- Stay with two areas of practice - 

- Mind/brain science  

- & experimental/contemporary techno-art practice - much forging of future lifestyle/habits/behaviours going on there (for example, my curation of FutureFest) 

 

Ends