The Play Ethic

Blogging for Hera's "Cultural Encounters", Dubrovnik, 1-2 October, 2013

One of the most deeply enjoyable gigs I did last year was to be the opening facilitator, and conference blogger, to "Cultural Encounters" - a meeting of 22 cross-continental winners of European funding for humanities projects, organised by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area), based in the University of Galway, and funded by the European Commission.

The final event, on 1-2 October 2013, was held in Dubrovnik's Hotel Palace - here's an archive of the presentation slides given. And the domain leader, Sean Ryder, writes an excellent introduction to their strategy and intent. 

A blog accompanies the process, and I wrote three entries leading up to and reviewing the conference. As I note in the blogs, for me this was an exciting return to an engagement with humanities scholarship that I began over 25 years ago, doing English and Film/TV studies at Glasgow University (I've explored this intellectual history here).  

I chaired an event on "Knowledge Exchange" in Dubrovnik: but the whole conference was at pains to show how the critical and historical understanding of culture had great relevance to the societal challenges of the future (HERA is part of the European Commission's Horizon 2020 research programme).

I explore some of these issues in the following writings:

PK Hera Blog 1) Humanities and the Public Intellectual 

PK Hera Blog 2) Encounters Inside Europe, Seeking Answers From Beyond

PK Hera Blog 3) The Power of Terminology

PK Hera Blog 4) A Natural Consilience

PK Hera Blog 4) Knowledge Exchanged, and Critiqued

Review of "Bleeding Edge" by Thomas Pynchon for the Independent

Delighted to be commissioned by the Independent to review the latest book from one of my literary gods, Thomas Pynchon - but disappointed that the book was so laboured and even predictable, the late and lazy work of a great imaginative power.

Bleeding Edge By Thomas Pynchon

Reviewed by PAT KANE

For The Independent, Friday 20 September 2013

''A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Quite the opening line, from Thomas Pynchon's 1973 masterpiece set in the Second World War, Gravity's Rainbow.

On a Glasgow morning, 11 September 2001 – after I had slowly put down James Harding's hopeful business article in the FT about the "counter-capitalist movement", then stared at the first screen images of the punctured North Tower of the World Trade Centre – Pynchon's words were the first thing that came to my mind. And they remain there still.

So for this ardent Pynchonist, the advance hype reporting that Bleeding Edge was to be his long-rumoured "9/11" novel is a little moot. The carnivalesque pursuit of rocket power that makes up the action of Gravity's Rainbow, with Nazis and Allies alike intoxicated by dreams of annihilation at an abstract distance, was always the darkest possible wit. Post 9/11, and now with killer drones remotely flown into far-off lands by youths wielding joysticks (joysticks: how Pynchon does it get?), the book feels near-oracular.

To enter fully into Thomas Pynchon's literary imagination is to be in a dangerous playground of world-systems and implicit orders – those systems and orders mostly gaming among themselves, occasionally toying with us, or (worst of all) revealing how much of our inner lives is actually their external scripting. Gilles Deleuze once called this our "dividuality", our susceptibility to wider control via our aspirations towards self-control.

For the 1968-ers it was desire that gave us escape routes from, or even just wriggle room within, this ensnaring social kudzu. For Pynchon, it's comedy. Extended moments of farce, cheesy songs and talking dogs, emblematic characters and place names (Benny Profane, San Narciso, Webb Traverse, the escapist webspace in BleedingEdge called DeepArcher): all of this anticness grants us an inch of real autonomy, amidst the choking over-determination. Much more than his immediate American peers – the analytical realism of Philip Roth, the apocalyptic fabulism of Cormac McCarthy, the chilled code-surfing of Don DeLillo – Pynchon relies on humour, in the classic Rabelaisian manner, to keep options open in an enclosing world.

And in the 40th anniversary year of the literary watershed that is Gravity's Rainbow, we can now see how Pynchon has continually tried to write his way beyond the shadow of that giant, oneiric book. One strategy has been to push pretty far back into American history, and undergird the familiar chronicle of events with a wild new logic of fantasy, radicalism and excess. Mason & Dixon (1997) subverts the American Enlightenment's metric confidence ("Who claims Truth, Truth abandons," as its narrator the Rev Cherrycoke quips), mobilising a menagerie of singular humans and even odder animals. Against The Day (2006) deliriously posits utopian anarchists, renegade boffins and underworld explorers, to countervail with railroad barons and warring imperialists at the start of the 20th century.

It's hard not to put these along with Rainbow as the best American attempts to pick up the ludic, mythic and polymathic gauntlet thrown down by James Joyce with Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.This is authorial style as a cosmos, vital and entire unto itself.

But in order to get there, over the past few decades, it seems to me that Pynchon has had to get lesser (though still characteristic) works out of his system – as if Joyce had handed in a few Flann O'Brien-style farces between his monuments. For Pynchon, his "Third Policeman" is the stoner hippy – Zoyd Wheeler struggling with 1980's Reaganism in Vineland (1990), or Don Sportello as an original late-1960's furry freak in Inherent Vice (2009). And while both novels set counter-rebels against mysterious authorities in the familiar Pynchon mode, the style tumbles through cultural references in an almost dutiful, tick-box way – as if Pynchon was both reassuring himself, and us, that he was an authentic hipster of that era.

So it's sad to report that Bleeding Edge takes this tendency to an annoying and tiring extreme. The New York of the late 1990s dotcom boom-and-bust, frittering away into the violent event-horizon of 9/11, is adequately captured by the title – but only adequately. Indeed, it seems beneath Pynchon to be to so painstakingly geeky about the socio-linguistics of this thin, weightless, credit-extended period – its luxury-pad fittings, its designer shoe labels, its bloviating biz-speak.Compared to the techno-fictions of William Gibson – for years, an author happily scuffling around on Pynchon's giant shoulders – Bleeding Edge's digital shenanigans are, to be honest, a little vicar- at-the-disco-ish.

Early commentary on the book has tried to laud the prescience, in this post-Snowden and PRISM moment, of its plot mechanics. A wise-cracking fraud investigator called Maxine is slowly revealing a virtual world (DeepArcher) designed for robust privacy, in a climate of increasing state incursion into the data-flows. And it's true that Pynchon understands our pressing anxieties about communication power, life in (and under) the Cloud. "Call it freedom – it's based on control," says Maxine's father Ernie. "Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you've got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable."

So Pynchon follows his nose, and invokes some expected players of this system – variously, cornball mafiosi, value-free dot-moguls, the jetsam of post-Soviet wars; never mind vaguely time-travelling CIA agents, or half-ghostly kidnapped children. For the first time in my life as a Pynchon fan, I must reluctantly demur. The targets are clearer than that. Those in charge of Google – the most ambitiously panoptic of digital companies, aiming to "organise the world's knowledge" – are pretty explicit about their android-aspirant, robo-inflected motivations.

DARPA, the US government's military research arm, is actively building a science-fictional near-future, under the battlefield imperative of achieving "full spectrum dominance". Of all writers, I would have least expected Pynchon to be sentimental here, beginning and ending Bleeding Edge with a mom's tender meditations on the school commute. But invoking our better angels is not adequate to the real, non-human spookiness of the coming epoch of super-intelligence. Not when Google's driverless car will be coming to pick up those kids in a few years' time.

Pat Kane is the lead curator of Nesta's FutureFest at Shoreditch Town Hall, London EC1, on 28 and 29 September (futurefest.org)

Reviews of "Who Owns The Future?" by Jaron Lanier, and "To Save Everything, Click Here", by Evgeny Morozov

Another second chance at an author review - this time two authors. I had already covered Jaron Lanier's I Am Not A Gadget I'd reviewed for Scotsman, and Morozov's The Net Delusion for the Independent.

As a mild Net enthusiast - for deep reasons, see here - I enjoy reading Net sceptics, as a useful corrective against boosterism and woods-not-seeing. But what's great about both these new books is that they are essentially political economies of the net - something an Enlightenment Scot recognises...

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
To Save Everything, Click Here by Evgeny Morozov

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, Friday 15 March 2013 (unedited version below, Independent version here)

For both of these writers, manifesting their manifestos in splendid chunks of wood-pulp and ink, the days of digital enchantment are over. Critical friends like Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier - the first a political scientist, the second a hardcore digeratus - provide a service to all network idealists. Caught up in our hypnotic loops of design and interaction, they remind us that “the internet” (a total concept that Morozov rejects in any case) is a particular construct of power, money and technical decisions, rather than some state of cybernature.  

In particular, Who Owns The Future is an undeniably impressive feat of rhetoric, argument and bully-pulpitry - what Lanier himself calls “speculative advocacy” - on behalf of the middle-classes of the 21st century.

Applying information to automation creates a giant, implacable flow of efficiency, of doing more for less. What’s valuable about Lanier’s book is that, in the course of trying to make the torrent manageable, he provides a tour d’horizon of what we’ll have to cope with in the near future - beyond the usual candidates of the music business and media blown away by the free web, or financial services dissolving economies in an ecstasy of computation.

White van men (and their entire industry) will be destroyed by driverless cars; whole production and distribution systems will be unravelled by 3-D printing of objects in local communities. Surgeons and nurses, lawyers and teachers - all manner of professions - will feed their tacit skills into ever more adept robots and expert systems.

As someone who founded one of the more destabilizing fields of net hi-tech, Virtual Reality, in the 90s, and who is currently grinding the software cogs at Microsoft Research, Lanier could never be cranky about future-tech. Yet he does invoke the more sophisticated cry of the original 18th-century Luddites, when they objected to machinery only when they judged not to “benefit the commonality”.

The commonality that Lanier wants to erect defenses for are what he calls, with a particular American resonance, the “middle-classes” (a term which, translated into UK terms, seems to include hard-working aspirers as well as Waitrose-bothering professionals - Miliband’s “squeezed middle” comes close).

These middle-classes have been constituted by what he calls “levees”: barriers and structures that diffuse and defuse the firestorm of capital and technology, and make it into a livable landscape - whether those barriers be unions, welfare states, academic tenure, copyright. In the face of what, taken in the round, seems like a epochal leap to a different level of productivity, Lanier wants new levees to be constructed - but ones that are “graceful and ordinary...strengthened, not weakened, as more and more people embrace them”.

His solution, simply put, is to turn the open, endless copying-machine commons of the web into a pay-per-click (and get-paid-per-someone-else’s-click) phenomenon - a marketplace with a near-neuronal density and ubiquity of financial transactions. In what Lanier regards as a perversion of the original ideals of network pioneers like Ted Nelson, he believes we currently cavort in a false free-for-all of content and interactivity.

This bounty is provided by giant companies like Facebook and Google, who make huge profits out of what he calls “spying operations” - devising ever-more seductive interfaces to encourage our garrulous, sociable and sharing natures, and selling the patterns of that behaviour to advertisers. In To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov usefully places this within a wider and broader history of what he calls “solutionism” - the engineer-driven idea that most phenomena (including the sheer quiddity of human behaviour) can be quantified and data-crunched.

Lanier has impish science-fictional fun extending the implications what he calls these “Siren Servers” into coming waves of technoculture. Would we want to be surrounded by a world of smart objects we get free or cheap access to - a Google Reality - as long as allow them to transmit data about our activities to their databanks? Morozov equally imagines all kinds of control-society horrors: how about medical-care discounts brought about by your real-time healthy-living data - or conversely, penalties for bingeing on cream-cakes?

Lanier wants us to realize that behind every abstract unit of information stands a real human being, either ultimately generating it or affected by it. As we perch on the brink of a vast new wave of info-powered automation, it’s urgent for him that we humanize the process by putting ourselves, as identifiable economic actors, back into the process.

Yet Lanier falters when specifying the exact structures and protocols that would shift us from an “internet” to what could be called an “econonet” (or maybe just a “moneynet”). At times it does seem like a contractual nightmare - in which he admits that accountants would become superstars, and lawyers (or robo-laywers) could crawl over every potential infraction of a nanopayment.

Lanier’s explicit identification of his system with a bourgeois interest is also useful - as an alternative Marxist explanation is easily to hand. The forces of production are about to take another enormous leap forward, while the relations of production are straggling far behind. Perhaps our argument with Siren Servers (and the wild new manufactures and automatons about to connect with them) should be more about whether they are like public utilities in waiting, ready for accountability and transparency as railroads and water systems once were. And if global warming demands a reduction in carbon-generating consumerist frenzy, is this best served by a new planetary network which makes every click an commercial transaction? Will expanding the cash nexus to every clickable corner of our lives help or hinder?  

Morozov would recoil at any Marxism - as a Belarusian exile, for good reason - but it is striking that To Save Everything, Click Here is almost silent about the enterprise dimension of the internet. Indeed, as a brand of Luddite, Morozov is much more interested than the techie Lanier in literally sticking a sabot in the cogs. One of his suggestions for cultivated our net disenchantment is something called “adversarial design”, where we let devices into our lives that frustrate our appetite for frictionless info-fun. For example, the Natural Path, a software system that kills off real plants, if you use it too heedlessly.

Somehow, the idea of strapping on the digital equivalent of a cilice doesn’t feel like the best path to enlightenment about our true cybernetic reality. But both Morozov and Lanier are to be generally congratulated for the clarity and brio of their technorealism. It’s a better basis for moving forward with this extraordinary “extension of man”, in McLuhan’s old words, than either technophobia or technophilia.

Review of "Future Perfect" by Steven Johnson

One of joys of my reviewing career for the Independent over the years is that you can often get two chances to sample an author's work. I covered Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad Is Good For You" in 2005 (about which, I'm surprised to find myself so sniffy).

And the prospect of a Romney victory (thankfuly thwarted) hangs over this review of Johnson's latest, an attempt at political intervention (of a geeky kind), which has curious echoes of the UK's "Third Way"/"Big Society" projects. But an "elegant" (argh, I use that word twice over two reviews!) writer, of great pleasure and utility.

Future Perfect: The Case For Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, 17 November 2012 (Unedited version below, Independent version here)

To be called the “Darwin of Technology” by Steve Jobs’s biographer, Walter Issacson, is a blurb quote to die for. Over the years, the American author Steven Johnson’s elegantly-phrased combinations of history, cultural critique and complexity theory have carved out a solid niche for him in the “big ideas” stretch of the bookshelf.

Yet with Future Perfect, Johnson is putting a pause on tracing connections between slime molds and 19th century city maps, or Joseph Priestly and Gaia theory. He’s bringing his status to the bully pulpit, as his compatriots might say, and proposing a political movement (called “the peer progressives”) in which the geeks inherit the earth. Or at least, lift their entranced faces from their OLED screens, and begin to assert their knowledge-worker clout in government and the public sphere.

For all his characteristic, science-and-humanities-spanning polymathery in this book, what Johnson is describing is the moment where (as that old bearded contemporary of Darwin’s might say) the netheads and creatives become not just a class in themselves, but a class for themselves. That is: aware that they have interests, a particular claim on power and resources, and the confidence to mobilize in that direction.

That direction is one that would have been familiar to the Big Society Tories, in the first flush of their idealism a few years ago. Johnson’s American peer progressives would enthusiastically sign up to Cameron’s axiom (now bromide) that “there is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same as the state”. They’re wary of top-down government control, and enthusiastic about “civic accountabilty and participation in public-sector issues”.

They want “choice and experiment” in state schools, and think teaching unions “hinder innovation”. They think markets and open networks are great at keeping new ideas flowing, but are suspicious of corporate governance and political over-regulation of the flows.  

To UK ears, it has a familiar recent ring: Burke’s small platoons and Hayek’s catallaxy, as rendered by the proselytizing of the smarter Conservatives like Jesse Norman and Philip Blond. But it’s given a Silicon Valley shimmer by Johnson’s internet experience, both as observer and entrepreneur.

It’s not that Johnson is misdescribing the “network society” that Manuel Castells identified and predicted in the mid-nineties, for centre-right ends. The social transformation of the Net is undeniable, founded in Paul Baran’s idea of the “distributed network” - where power comes not from hierarchy, nor from insurgence, but from the marginal contributions of many, building up a rich commons of information and practice, usable by all.

Johnson is correct to identify that this pervasive system of communication has made new kinds of value communicable, beyond just money or bureaucracy - and that this shakes up, or at least shows up the gaps in, our old institutions. Newspapers can’t compete with how social media allows us to recommend and annotate the news of the world (and our neighbourhoods) to our friends and peers. Big corps can’t compete with smaller, stakeholder and “employee-owned” companies, inspired by the inclusiveness and transparency of the Net (Nick Clegg rather alarmingly cited here), whose peer-oriented work cultures actually deliver better returns long-term.

In the most interesting chapter, Johnson shows how our transatlantic frustrations with representative democracy - whether the malaise of US political funding, or Westminster centralism - could be answered by looking at something pioneered by the anti-copyright Pirate Party, called “liquid democracy” (or more mundanely, “proxy” or “delegate” voting).

Socialism’s problem is that it takes up too many evenings, as Oscar Wilde once put it. But a more active, plebiscitary democracy might actually work, if we could easily pledge our vote (or as easily retract it from) a “peer” who we recognized as expert or passionate in the field. Sounds complicated? Perhaps no more so than participatory budgeting so prevalent in leftist Latin American - or the elaborately coordinated voluntary labours that go into Wikipedia. Yes, Johnson admits, they’re all structures open to gaming and abuse. But we’re happy with the endemic stasis and near-corruption of our current systems?

As many of the illustrative initiatives in this book come from the Obama administration - clearly, the geeks made the White House - there’s a rather poignant tremor running through the prose. The Romneyverse, if it transpires, looks like falling a little short in stakeholder virtues. But Johnson has written a fascinating book. Let’s see if it’s an elegy for a failed intellectual consensus.

Review of Andrew Smith's "Totally Wired"

Andrew Smith's writing has come my way before, in his garrulous yet also moving interviews with surviving moon astronauts, Moondust, which I reviewed. But his book reminds me of a mid-90s era when I was also involved in the early ecstasies of dot-commery (and wrote about it for the Independent too). His style, a little too reckless for the astronauts, totally matches the gonzo-digital tale of Josh Harris.

Totally Wired: On The Trail Of The Dotcom Swindle, By Andrew Smith

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, 22 September, 2012 (Unedited version below, Independent version here)

One can imagine the elevator pitch that would sell this rumbunctious account of the madness of the nineties’ dot-bust to Hollywood: “The Social Network meets Hammer of The Gods, via Warhol’s Factory”. Mark E Smith’s The Fall clattering out beneath the titles. I’d go: wouldn’t you?

Andrew Smith, whose previous book Moonshot has come to mind again in the wake of Neil Armstrong’s passing, has written a similarly humane and garrulous account of space exploration. But this space is the one that opened up between computers and networks twenty years ago. And whereas at least some men actually got to the moon and back, Totally Wired is mostly about how these early dreams of cyberspatial utopia were frustratingly thwarted.

Yet in his tale of Josh Harris, a brilliant though damaged screenager whose digital company Pseudo encompassed the best and worst of the “creative age” of the nineties, Smith wants to alert us to the roots of our current unreality - where the mediations of “confidence” and “reputation” define the fate of stock-markets, national governments and over-valued social network companies (naming no names).

In a charming style which could be described as gadget-dad gonzo, Smith captures the tulip-tinged froth of 90’s cyberculture with great accuracy. I wrote for this paper in 1997 about my time with a parallel outfit in London, Microsoft’s Blizzard, which laboured in the same Sisyphean fields as Pseudo - trying to attract punters onto an exclusive network, with over-ambitious content that could barely sputter down the available phonelines. [FYI: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/click-and-im-a-microserf-1265773.html]

Yet while both our audiences were tiny, at least Harris used his venture capital to host fantastic, gilded-era Manhattan parties. Propeller-headed Truman-Capotes orchestrated polymorphous, performance-art revels - which were filmed, live-cast and contractually captured as “property of Pseudo”. Sound familiar, reality tv fans? Smith sticks with this flakiest of uber-geeks - and the writer is dogged, trailing him from his fly-blown hideaway in Ethiopia to the bullshit lounges of the Sundance Festival in Colorado - because he believes Harris was a pioneer of the communicative omni-trance of our current smart-phoned, i-playing, big-brotherly era.

However genuinely prescient Josh Harris was, the accelerando of digitality continues apace, making the extraordinary ordinary. In terms of function, Skype and Google Hangouts can now do everything that Pseudo and its chemically-fuelled net-heads were trying to squeeze through their tiny Nineties pipes. Except now, it’s as quotidian as a tool for hobbyists and activists on your high-street clever-phone.

Even Harris’s Matrix-like paranoid fantasies - about social media softening us up for “mental harvesting” by some mysterious power - are only wrong about the mystery: we know who they are. As the current nostrum has it, if you pay nothing for your net-service, then you are the product. Google or Facebook enable you to be your own multimedia channel - but the cost is a panoptical tracking of all your input and clickery, the better to target a micro-pitch at your innermost consumer desire.

“Harvesting” isn’t too bad an agrarian metaphor: but the appropriate resistance is closer to that of the Diggers or the Chartists against enclosure, than battling the otherworldly “Ticklers” generated by Harris’s DMT’d delusions.

But Totally Wired is an account of financialization, as well as intoxication. For a self-confessed economics rube, Smith is very clear about how the liberalisations of the Fed - and all those 401K pension funds sloshing around the 90‘s US market - meshed toxically with the euphoria of the early dot-coms. Smith also believes that these net-idealists were the victims of a “heist”, shafted by market-fixing bankers in a shares scam known as “laddering”. Such financial innovation, he suggests, paved the way for the sub-prime chicanery that led to the 2008 crash.

Smith is a little too wired himself at times, occasionally taken by the ecstasies of communication in a manner that many po-mo types will rather shufflingly remember. And when things get too capitalistically vertiginous, it’s nice to recall that Harris stole the idea of “pseudo-names” from the public-sector network Minitel, launched by that lumbering democratic-socialist dinosaur France in the early 80s.

There’s a Net that’s as close to the public library, or the town square, as it is to Burroughsian experiment and quantitative easing: Wikileaks and the Arab Springs barely make a mention here. But Smith does us a service in reminding us how total wiredness can so easily lead to total weirdness. And that the off-switch is right over there, just a finger-stretch away.

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)

Review of 'You Are Not a Gadget' and 'Googled'

Here's a recent review for Scotland on Sunday of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget and Ken Auletta's Googled - ridiculously small word-count, so apologies for the compression, but I will be elaborating on both in a bigger post (and doubtless later presentations & consultations) later on. The Lanier book is brilliantly and provocatively wrong - I want to engage with it in terms of the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, and what an technologically-friendly artist's perspective should be on the debate. Later! [This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on April 04, 2010 - below is the unedited version]

YOU ARE NOT A GADGET Jaron Lanier (Allen Lane, £20)

GOOGLED Ken Auletta, Virgin Books, £11.99

Reviewed by PAT KANE

In case you hadn’t noticed, the war for the future of the internet has reached the peak of battle. On the shimmering plains of cyberspace, Rupert Murdoch and the music multinationals are sandbagging themselves against the oncoming waves of news-surfers and file-sharers. Paywalls are being erected, the regulatory arm of Peter Mandelson is being seductively bent - anything to get a regular buck off those rapacious, intellectual-property-despoiling hordes.

To the philosophical rescue of hacks and A&R men, in a tangle of dreadlocks and perched on a silver surfboard, comes Jaron Lanier. Lanier was a pioneer of virtual reality in the early 90s (remember those goggles?) and is now the author of a carnaptious yet brilliant denunciation of The Way We Network Now.

You Are Not A Gadget is hardly a Luddite tract from some defender of old technologies and even older monopolies. There’s not many non-fiction “talkers” that plausibly invent an entirely new form of human discourse (“postsymbolic communication”, if you must know, seemingly a fusion between software and the behaviour of octopi) in the last few throwaway paragraphs.

So when Lanier says that our beloved Twittering, YouTubing and Facebooking is about reducing our personhood to fit the limitations of software, about “becoming a source of fragments exploited by others”, we should at least put the devices to sleep and pay attention.

Happily for Rupe and the satin-jacket brigade, Lanier says that one of the ways that technology can express a “digital humanism” is to allow musicians and journalists to make a middle-class living again. How? By turning every current (and neutral) click on the internet into a tiny monetary transaction between seller and buyer, enabled by a very deep change in the internet’s operating code. For Lanier, this would clean out the witterings of what he calls “the hive mind”, and allow those who live by their craft and skills in symbols to flourish in the Net, rather than see their royalty cheques reduce to zero.

Lanier notes the paradox that an exponential rise in broadband and computing power hasn’t resulted in the cyber-equivalent of a Mozart, an Orwell or a Thelonious Monk, but much more culture-as-nostalgia – the “YouTube” evening watching classic tv clips, or Spotify as a rummage through three generations of record collections.

As someone who plays between both of the industries that Lanier focusses on in this book, music and journalism, I can appreciate his Romantic angst about the dimunition of originality. Yet I think he’s wrong to suggest that a more closed, narrowed-down and marketised internet will foment genius or even just excellence.

Creativity is as much about reading and listening, as it is about writing and composing – and my own creative experience with the new digital plenitude, in all its cost-free ubiquity, is that of swimming in a sea of permanent inspiration. The end of the old business models means that both music and journalism will have to boil down to what is enduring and scarce in their professions: the live performance and the heartfelt, self-produced song; the necessary investigation and the unfettered comment. Rather than the hype, flash and churnalism that clogged up too much of both professions in the good old days.

The point is to use the wild and free internet to connect these moments of cultural integrity to communities who only have time for the best: and then, eclectically figure out how to monetise their intense interest and commitment. It can be done.

Something that Lanier refuses to do – but which exercises the Digger greatly – is to condemn Google as the cuckoo in the nest of content. Ken Aulietta’s meticulous account of this huge company’s fundamental geekery should encourage Lanier that the basic infrastructure of this new era is being driven by insanely creative individuals.

And Googlers know fine well that they’re in the position of the old railroads and private utilities of the 19th century - in the queue to be nationalised when they become too big and infrastructural to fail us. Our future might not be the "digital Maoism" that Jaron deplores – but something more akin to a digital social-democracy. Let’s have a debate about that vista, rather than worry too much about Kevin the teenager in his downloading frenzy. A war against enthusiasm could hardly be more pointless, or less winnable. 

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com) and one half of Hue And Cry  

Steal this post! Or, the troubling possibilities of the electronic book

Update: Powerful post on Computer World which predicts that next year is the year of the e-book - not just for books, but for many other bits of print media. I'm nearly convinced. And here's the killer quote: "If you'd like to get a stark view of the relative economics of electronic vs. paper newspapers, check out a blog post on the Silicon Valley Insider. The blog did the math and determined that the New York Times could buy every single subscriber an Amazon Kindle e-book reader, and it would still cost them half as much as it will cost them to send paper newspapers for just one year."

* * *

Everybody has their favourite play material. Mine is the book. Leave me in front of a well-stocked domestic bookshelf, or in one of the great world bookshops - like say New York's The Strand (or the extremely lamented Compendium Books in Camden Town, London) -and I'm effectively back in kindergarten: smile on the lips, lost in the flow, needing only occasional watering and nutrition. 

The only property fantasy I've ever had is that of a proper domestic library, worthy of the six or seven thousand books I have scattered across two houses and two garages. (When my band Hue And Cry gets the Bond theme - hey, it's only a matter of time - I'll post you on my progress). 

So discussions about 'the future of the book' - and they are multiplying at some rate - are profoundly interesting to me. And mostly because I am fearful about whether technological change is going to enrich or deprive, expand or contract, my biblio-play.

Nicholson Baker wrote a warning book a few years ago, when the trend for major libraries to digitise their book collections (with some of them throwing away the physical originals) started to pick up speed. Though his tone was high-alarum, some points stuck with me. What about software obsolescence - the book-images encoded in a particular file format, which would be increasingly difficult to read as future document systems evolved? 

And what about the usage question, elaborated later by Lawrence Lessig in various books. Do we want to get into a situation where a digital book might be rented rather than owned? Where the freedom to read the object you possess (or give it away) as you wish, is placed by a 'right of access' to a tightly-copyrighted and -controlled piece of software - access which can be changed on the terms of the publisher? (Unless, that is, you know your friendly neighborhood crypto-hacker). 

Lessig's conclusion was clear: we need to use the law to ensure that we can own a digital copy of a book, in the same way as we can own a physical copy of a book. If I have a digital book, in my digital reader, I want to be able to mark it, annotate it, lift quotes from it, gather it together with others books, and - most importantly - give or lend it to my friends and colleagues as I wish. That's the way I play with my physical books: and as many neo-Luddites say, you can do that with your wood-pulp-and-ink, no batteries (or e-commerce encrypted connection) required.

But as I've blogged recently, this would put the publishing industry in the same position as the music industry. Digitisation means potentially infinite copies of anything - and so the whole 'scarcity' model of publishing falls down (here's an object that costs money, available from shops now). As you might expect - see iTunes as the music biz's most coherent response to this - code has to be deployed to impose that scarcity again. 

Though from reports I've read of Amazon's Kindle, it's much tighter than iTunes in terms of how much cultural material can be shared. iTunes at least allows you to pass their DRM'd stuff to a few people: unless you lend people your Kindle, you can't pass on (and certainly not sell, or even Oxfam-gift) your Kindled book-purchases. This feels wrong, and oppressive, and I expect the Luddite resistance to it will be easily mustered.

Yet as a biblio-player, do I dream of the ultimate digitised book-and-text system? Indeed I do. And the way it might fit into my lifestyle and productive choices is fascinating me. 

The presumptuous taming of reality: John Updike

photo: micheal mundy  Enjoyed this weekend's obituaries for John Updike. Like so many novelists, he's someone I'm saving up for a later, more easeful life, after having been gripped by Rabbit, Run and wanting to know more about this Joyce of the American suburbs. But there's an Updike quote that's been barrelling through the various pieces - and it's about as eloquent a definition of playfulness as I've read in many a month. It comes from his memoir, Self-Consciousness:

So writing is my sole remaining vice. It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world -- it happens to everybody. ... Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light -- in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it -- approaches blasphemy.

Substitute "playing" for "writing", and the passage still makes beautiful sense. For me, this brings something new to the classic definition of play - as outlined by Friedrich Von Schiller, Huizinga and others as "taking reality lightly". In the Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith hazards his final definition of play as "the mimicking or mocking of reality", as a means of anticipating and thus surviving reality's unpredictable nature. S-S's further defintion of play as "the stylized performance of existential themes" would seem to sum up Updike's entire oeuvre!

But what I didn't fully realize, until reading Updike's quote, is just how much the fear of death must lie behind play's endless rehearsals and experimentations - particularly for we humans, so full of "self-consciousness". And that our play (in which I'll easily include fiction-writing) - where we loosen the grip of the world in our minds, so we can grapple with it better - could be a kind of "blasphemy". A semiotic two-fingers at the inevitable finitude of our lives. 

Play is then natal, in Hannah Arendt's term, rather than mortal. Or as Bob Dylan put it, more crisply: "he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'". Thanks for the Monday-morning stimulus, Mr. Updike. Rest in process.

Always living 'elsewhere': the new intraviduals

The splendidly urbane On Point podcast (from Boston's WBUR) informed me this morning about a new social-issues 'talker' from America, called "Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety" by a New York sociologist called Dalton Conley. 

For a book that's all about how much the old social opposition of work and leisure is being broken down by, amongst other things, 24-7 connectivity, I'm faintly ashamed to relate the context in which I was listening and taking notes. That is, cradling my iPhone, in an empty coffee bar at 10.00am in the business end of Glasgow, with some decaff and bacon roll by my dilatory side. Undoubtedly performing an act of 'weisure', in one of Conley's unlovelier coinages.

Though there's the suspicion that Conley is angling for Malcolm-Gladwell-guru-status in some of his pronouncements, there's also much food for thought in his spiel. Some choice quotes:

Changes in three areas — the economy, the family and technology — have combined to alter the social world and give birth to this new type of American professional. This new breed — the intravidual — has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously...

Leisure? The 'good life'? What are those? Work is the central aspect of our lives. We are lucky that it is fulfilling work — work that we will probably continue to do until we are no longer capable — but it is, unlike that of my parents, all-consuming work. There is always an email to answer, a paper or memo to read, and a lecture to give or receive. Success in today's professional world doesn't mean retiring at fifty to play golf in Florida, it means working more and more hours as you move up a towering ladder of economic opportunity (and inequality). Socializing usually revolves around professional colleagues.

Sound familiar to you? The 'intradividual', flexibly responding to a demanding social world, certainly sounds like the 'self-in-and-at-play' that I've been talking about for years. (Deleuze talks about 'dividuals'in his final essays). Yet the second passage ties that player to a universe of endless leads, tasks, items of interest, possibilities of advancement - where the difference between 'friendship' and 'networking', or say 'family time' and 'surfing time', is completely elided. 

The image on the cover of his book - with a family arranged around a table, three with laptops and the other one plugged into her iPod - certainly horrified the admirable On Point host Tom Ashcroft, who pushed Dalton to take a negative line on this networked family (he refused, calling himself a 'social describer' than critic).

Yet I'd have to be honest and confess that I saw that scene regularly over the holiday period - an 11 year-old, a 14 year-old and an 19 year-old each with respective wireless laptops (one regularly purloined from parents), sitting around an old Dutch family table. 

The delightful aspect was that the periods of silent surfing were regularly punctuated by long, giggling interludes of You Tube inspired show-and-tell ('Downfall' mash-ups, lauguhing babies, and Fonejacker were the favourites). Sometimes there would be spontaneous dancing or harmonising to a particular track; and sometimes one would shout up from their browser, having found a particularly cute exhibition or film they wanted us all to go and see. Was this any different, in essence, from a classic family pastimes scene, with the copy, paste and link of their operating systems substituting for the magazines, glue and scissors of old?

To develop Dalton's coinage, we were all intra-viduals easily flipping into being inter-viduals - the fun, laughter and mutual benefit involved in sharing the resources contained in each others' networks. And if the parents are net-friendly (as we are), then this doesn't feel like some alienated gathering of functional schizophrenics, but actually a lovely, rich, memorable time together. 

But this happened in the holiday season - those rare moments when parents and children can hover around each other, untethered from their institutions (whether school, work or portfolio). Doesn't free-time, even in the digital age, still help cement emotional bonds? In the show, Dalton addresses this directly, by noting that in America, at least, the historical fact of mothers working more has not been complemented by the phenomenon of men working less (by comparison, Scandinavian legislation compels the sexes to take equal parental leave). 

He also talks about the psychological self-subversion of current American (These-Islands, too) anxieties over work, which he reckons is impervious to recession or boom. When it's bad times, you'll over-work because you want to hang on to what you've got; when it's good times, you'll over-work because you're comparing yourself with the rapidly advancing Joneses. Either way, you're anxious about not filling every minute with some moment of career-building interactivity. This is a kind of cul-de-sac perspective on human potential (bolstered by behavioural economics - see recent post) which I don't accept. There's more to the human condition that fear of failure, or resentment of success. 

And I still think we need to listen to some real radicals (here and here) on this matter. If the economic health of society now partly depends on our collective willingness to interact, to be creative and expressive with our social tools, don't we need to nourish that "mass innovation" (as Charles Leadbeater calls it) through new types of welfare and regulation? To be an "intervidual", to be a player, is exciting but exhausting: we need a complementary politics of time and care to help us repair and restore ourselves for this active, creative life. Which means sleep, holidays, sabbaticals, shorter-working weeks... you know my litany. 

But always scanning the horizons for other suggestions...