The Play Ethic

Curating "FutureFest" for Nesta, London, Sept 28-29, 2013

 

From March 2012 to the end of September 2013, I was asked by Geoff Mulgan, the CEO of Nesta (the UK's innovation agency) to lead-curate a massive festival of the future called, appropriately enough, FutureFest.

The plan was to occupy Shoreditch Town Hall in London, over the weekend of 28th-29th September, and fill its Edwardian municipal grandeur with visions, arguments and demonstrations of the near-future (with an implicit mid-century horizon of 2050). 

Well, we finally executed the plan - and it was an extraordinary event, the speakers, discussion and performances fully captured on the legacy FutureFest website (video, podcast and blogs).

Over these three blogs (one, two, and three) I explain my curatorial vision - but these paragraphs give you a flavour:

Go back to any of the great expos, or even to the earliest futurologists – like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), with its longevity drugs and flying machines, its robots and clones – and it sometimes seems that modernity has always contained the same set of yearnings about the future: stronger, faster, more automation, more communication.

The acme of this might be Walt Disney’s mid-fifties EPCOT (Experimental Community Of Tomorrow), a theme park in which cosmic exploration leaves behind a happy planet of harmonious cultures and sociable, zip-suited citizens.

Well, it’s 2013, and of course we’re wiser and more civilization-weary than all that. Those intricate techno-sciences we devise and set running? They end up rattling our economies, fighting our wars, bombarding our attention spans and challenging our bio-ethics around birth, health and human potential.

And some of the more massive trends heading into the future – the inexorables of population growth and global warming, emergent economies and regions with their own claims to truth and justice – would seem largely resistant to the glittering technical fixes that future-types of the past have put their faith in.

But it’s 2013, and of course we can also imagine – because that’s what humans irrepressibly do – how this progress towards the mid-century might be quite different.

Radical innovation could well find us a combination of energy sources that mitigate the impact of a heating planet. Our computers and devices could as easily amplify our natural capacities for invention and community, as unravel or stymie them.

Over only a few decades of bioscience, our “new normal” could be closer to that menagerie of mutants and cyborgs that you see in the average Star Trek street-scene, than it might be to the mutton-chopped visitors to the Crystal Palace.

How to capture all of these possibilities, in a particular time and place? And in city where the weight of the past, and the chaos of a globalised future, can easily be mapped from the top of a giant glass shard? The principle of a festival – with its tolerance for enthusiasm, dissent and experiment – seemed like the only way it could be gathered together and curated.

FutureFest takes place in Shoreditch Town Hall, London – a building which itself brims with Victorian progressive self-confidence (its motto on the stained glass windows is “more light, more power”). In its cavernous rooms we will be deploying three different methods of thinking about the future.
Firstly, great minds and practitioners (some writing in these pages) will give short but powerfully focussed takes on our options heading towards mid-century, and beyond – everything from the future of religion and altruism, to the future of eating and manufacturing.

Next, we’ll offer immersive spaces in which participants can literally “meet and experience” the future. Real – or at least, artistic and creative – humans will conduct a variety of performances, installations, social games and even banquets, that will leave visitors in a delightful space between “now” and “next”.

And finally, we’ll allow people to go deeper into the future, with a range of forums, seminars, makeshops and technical expos from organizations like the Oxford Martin Institute, Arup, the BBC, Berg, Dyson and many others. (Pat Kane, "Making the Future Dance", Futurefest site).

We had a sell-out on the day, saw millions of interactions around the #futurefest hashtag on Twitter, and with any luck FutureFest will become a regular event in the cities of the UK for years to come. Certainly one of the most satisfying creative endeavours I've yet directed. 

Some of the most notable press included the Observer "FutureFest" supplement, Peter Aspden in the FT (podcast and article), Pat Kane interviewed for the Monocle Podcast. 

And here's some breathless highlights of the two days:

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 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.

Ghosting into the machine - "rise of the robots" piece for The Scotsman

Been fascinated by robots - technology, culture and politics - since I was a small boy (and as a young man - see this Guardian piece).

Another bite at that problematic for The Scotsman. 

 

Ghosting into the machine

Pat Kane

The Scotsman, 17 March 2012

[Original pre-edit text below: Scotsman published version here]

Go into almost any high-street supermarket today in Scotland today, and you will almost certainly be faced with a friendly neighbourhood robot. The self-operating checkout tills that have broken out like a rash across the sector over the last few years may not immediately seem like cousins of the killer androids from science-fiction. 

But anyone who’s used them knows the robot moment. One absent-minded act - for example, passing an item from basket to bag without scanning it properly - and the screen equably notes that there is “an unscanned item in the bagging area”. And won’t let you go any further until you remove it, and scan it again. 

Sometimes you - and the robot - both get confused, requiring a real live meat-machine to come over and help you. But when you get up to speed with it, you quietly marvel at its ability to sense exactly what item has been placed in your placcy bag. 

My emotions are mixed before this machine. On one level, I can often enjoy the activity itself - there’s an element of self-help and dexterity about it. But on another level, I look over anxiously at the human-staffed tills. Should I be depriving some student, part-time mother or new immigrant to the country the chance of a living wage? 

Or should I be happy that the relentless tide of automation is liberating workers from meaningless labour? Wouldn’t I rather deal with a robot, than suffer the experience of someone so bored by their routine they’re half-alive anyway? 

Economists and academics would say that any angst about the human-replacing effects of automation is historically faulty. Every technological innovation that’s enabled us to increase efficiency and productivity, to do more transformation of nature with less human labour, has led to an increase in the general sum of happiness - by making products cheaper, by forcing us to create new jobs and sectors that turn out to create value in new and different ways. 

That’s what humans are like with technology, they say. Look at the exponential rise that innovation has brought in living standards, longevity, material comfort. We can’t, and shouldn’t, be Luddites. 

But what happens when these innovations start to simulate the very mental and skills-based agility that supposed to define us as essentially human? When they can begin to understand language, and see the world, as clearly as we do? When they have infinitely better memories, and can make connections and see patterns much more powerfully? 

We are already in an age where some the most unique human capacities for knowledge and decision are being gradually and casually automated. It’s no news that chess grandmasters are regularly humbled by data-crunching mega-computers. Last year, the two human winners of the US general knowledge quiz show Jeopardy were trounced in live and direct competition with Watson, IBM’s latest silicon brain. 

The case-crunching and research that lawyers bill for can now be substantially carried-out by computer programs intelligently looking for patterns or precedents. We heard last year that sports journalists are even under threat: algorithms can now pull together perfectly serviceable prose from a string of facts reported from a game. 

But one of the most startling mental robotisations might even be the process of scientific discovery itself. A group at Cornell University have created a computer program called Eureqa (available now, and for free, on the web). If you feed Eureqa enough data, it will eventually formulate the kind of natural law that previous took humans like Isaac Newton and William Hamilton to do. 

Last year, Eureqa was given a whole load of information about the dynamics of a bacterium cell. After crunching through billions of equations, chucking away the irrelevant ones like failed species in Darwinian evolution, it came to what its makers call a "beautiful, elegant equation that described how the cell worked, and that held true over all new experiments". 

The trouble was they had no idea how the machine had gotten there, or what underlying principle the equation expressed. “It was like consulting an oracle”, says Micheal Schmidt, one of its makers, quoted in the online magazine Slate. Schmidt thinks it’s possible that such computers may discover laws - derived from the unimaginably numerous interactions of genes, neurons and perhaps even markets - that we simply won’t be able to understand. Eureqa, or its successors, will be in the position of “trying to explain Shakespeare to a dog”. 

“Robot-assistance” is the friendlier face of automation. Surgeons are now finding that, in certain kinds of sutures and probings, a robot’s hand or instrument - though still guided by a doctor - is much more steady and precise than a human hand. The surgeon can even be thousands of miles away, guiding it via an internet link. When looking for abnormalities in cervical smears, mammograms or coronary arteries, computers can now perform what’s known as “double reading” of scans - two doctors looking at the same results, in order to better detect problems. 

Hospitals are using much more autonomous robots too. Using smartphone technology to locate and guide themselves in busy environments, barrel-like robots on wheels are beginning to appear as useful helpmates in wards and corridors. The new South Glasgow Hospitals Campus in Glasgow has just ordered 22 robots to operate in a subterranean tunnel, tasked to distribute laundry, equipment, food and medicines to the whole building.

Yet we shouldn’t forget where the cutting-edge drive to make robots usable and ubiquitous in our lives comes from - and at least in Europe and America, that’s the military-industrial complex. One company in Boston, iRobot, exemplifies the two-faces of robotics. It makes cute products like Roomba (a disc-like vacuum cleaner that navigates rooms autonomously) and Scooba (which does the same for bathroom floors). But the same tech also enables military robots like FirstLook, mobile video cameras which US soldiers can throw into windows before storming a building. 

The US government’s Defense Advance Research and Projects Agency, or DARPA, is notorious for funding the most wild-eyed robotics research. Look up the LS3 - Legged Squad Support System, being developed for the US Army - and be more than a little disturbed. The LS3’s four legs can negotiate the roughest of terrain by itself, while its body can bear fuel and provisions for soldiers. 

Yet in its nervy, stuttering walk, it looks like a combination of a horse and a cockroach. One of its most infamous promotional videos shows the device cast upon a frozen lake, where its engineers kick and shove at it, trying but failing to overturn the machine. A war horse, indeed - but usefully insensate to pain or abuse. 

A recent TED video showed yet another DARPA-supported project of tiny helicoptered drones, all chattering to each other and flying in formation - grids, figures of eight - and even buzzing out the James Bond theme tune. The drones we know from the wars in Afghanistan are robots remotely guided by humans, thousands of miles away: the writer PW Singer quotes a young air force lieutenant who says "It's like a video game with the ability to kill. It's like ... freaking cool."

Yet what the TED video shows is a spine-tingling degree of self-organisation among these machines. One of the creepier images is where the micro-drones swarm collectively and efficiently though a window, arranging themselves ready for action on the other side. These are robots as pack animals, or an insect swarm - at the fringes of your worst science-fiction nightmare. 

But in another video, we see the same drones arranging themselves to steadily build a columnar construction out of rods, moving to a virtual architectural plan programmed into their tiny brains. It doesn’t take too much projecting to see the near-future possibility of building sites requiring much less workers, and much more machines of this precision, labouring tirelessly 24 hours a day. 

Undoubtedly we need to exercise a public stake in the advance of automation. Applied purely under a commercial regime, robotisation leaves us with massively efficient factories, offices and industries, but hardly anyone with any wages left to buy the products and services they produce. 

The current leaps-forward might compel us to return to those old leisure society arguments again. To what extent should we begin to distribute the gains from our technological ingenuity in a more equitable and collective manner - perhaps with an expanded concept of the “social wage”, and considerably shorter working weeks? 

The joke among radicals these days is that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. But I sometimes wonder if it’s even more difficult to imagine a perspective on automation which would subject it to the test of “benefitting the commonality”, as the original Luddites put it - rather than having us just tumble along in the wake of business, military and academic progress. 

In short, I’d like to feel better about those wee women standing forlornly at the end of the supermarket check-out, watching their economic redundancy played out with every customer scan. 

Pat Kane review of Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' and Palfrey & Gasser's 'Born Digital' for the Independent

 
Very nice to be back on the book-reviewing routine for Boyd Tonkin, the Independent's book editor.

Here's my joint review (unedited version below - printed version here) of two books which thoroughly cover the waterfront of digital culture, but in two entirely differing moods - Nicholas Carr brooding about the net's neurological destruction of our deep reading and attention spans, and Palfrey and Gasser much more enthusiastic charters of the variety of internet usage and culture. 

 

 

The Independent, Arts and Books section, 24 Sept, 2010

Pat Kane

Google announced a new refinement to its search engine last week, called 'Google Instant'. For those of a certain literary era, just beginning to get used to having a Borgesian library at their fingertips, it may prove a drop-down window too far.

Put in "po", on the way to completing the word "poetry", and the company tries to instantly guess what you're looking for - anything from "P&O ferries" to "poundland" to "Pontins". Until you get used to it (and you do), the experience feels a little insane: the spewing-forth of some vast language machine, using Burroughsian cut-up or Joycean word-association as a way-station to that elusive Jamie Oliver Elvisburger recipe.

Nicholas Carr cites this as exactly the kind of scattering of attention, and devolving of mental rigour, that we should be exceedingly alert to in our cyberculture. Described in some American reviews as the 'Silent Spring' of cyberculture, Nicholas Carr's new book attempts to put some scientific and humanistic substance into the headline claim that the internet is, literally, rotting our brains.

But whereas Born Digital is a diligent attempt to chart the digital lifestyle of Millenials, The Shallows is an impressively assembled but ultimately misguided broadside from a former tech-head and business editor. Who, I fear, might be mistaking a subjective midlife crisis for an objective paradigm shift.

Carr's psychological charge against the Net is simply put. The excess of possibilities that an average web page gives us, the way it crowds our short-term memory with scores of relatively inconsequential choices, is reverting us to our earliest human state. The average click-fest in front of our networked screens makes us into twitchy hunter-gatherers: that same propensity to be easily distracted – which saved our haunches from slavering predators on the savannah - is that which makes the hotlink and the Flash animation so compelling. Depth of thought is being sacrificed to our nervy addiction to interaction.

As is the way with evolutionary accounts of the human mind - at the very least, this is not yet a settled science - there are other explanations available. As Carr says, the dynamism of the internet has recapitulated centuries of media change over its brief 15 years. But if we need a socio-biological root for the pervasive, explosive take-up of this medium, there's a survival trait that's just as credible as our distractedness on the paleolithic plains. And that's our playful natures.

The moment of play in human (and higher mammalian) development is almost exactly homologous with the internet itself. Both allow organisms to freely and joyfully act; they create spaces for play that are open, robustly structured but distantly monitored. And both provide a mess of usable materials, by which players can test and explore both themselves and the world.

From this perspective, Carr has been cherry-picking the neuroscience to suit his neo-Presbyterian prejudice. Research also point to the “neoteny” of our brains, a perpetual youthfulness of response, which under the right conditions of surplus and security, can evade all habit and fixed behaviours – stretching way beyond the glorious, growing splurge of childhood into adulthood.

So if you zoom back a little on the internet, putting its daily churn of twinkly adaptations into perspective, it comes to look more like a glorious amplification of the creative plenitude of human nature, rather than a shallowing of our minds. Born Digital might not have the pop-science ambition of The Shallows, but it benefits from at least trying to map the fulsome diversity of lifestyles, enterprises and dilemmas that net culture generates.

Carr's mistake here is that he mistakes second-order questions about the internet for first-order questions: he raises matters of cultural etiquette to the level of species-being. For example, a well-aimed web search produces as much synoptic intellectual excitement as the inquiring student's first scan of the periodicals shelf, or the titles in a university bookshop – and this is surely no surprise, given the scholarly foundation of the internet protocol itself by CERN physicist Tim Berners-Lee. 

Whereas Carr cites research that seems to show academic references narrowing in the internet age, we can all turn to those ideas-portal sites - not just Wikipedia, but John Brockman's Edge.org, or Bookforum's Omnivore – which demonstrate an alternative possibility: that is, the efficient opening-up of the sequestered resources of the academy for public use.

Indeed, you find yourself applying the same principle of independent-mindedness about the web, that Carr describes as a consequence of the “deep reading” available from literature. You have to keep asserting your own positive, privately-gathered experiences, in the face of his too-neatly-marshalled neurological case.

Carr may be genuinely worried about the internet turning us all into “lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment”. But I think he would do better to defend its textual and dialogical potentials, and focus his anxiety a lot more on the crude game-ifying of cyberspace - the addictions and peer suscepitibility that 'casual games' like Farmville tap into.

I know that gamer auteurs and designers are fighting this tendency, appealing to the better avatars of our nature. Carr takes a huge risk in conflating a trashy stage in the development of games culture with the essentially Enlightenment powers of the open Net. He should be more careful about what he wishes for.

Carr makes a half-point that the business model of the 'free' web - you get it for nothing, if we can capture your behaviour and sell it to advertisers - depends on the relentless interactivity of every web page. But there are armies of authors from many disciplines who say that what this intrusive click-commerce proves is actually the dot-communism of the net.

To the continuing embarassment of many, we seem to have inadvertently built a working socialist infrastructure out of code and computers, guided by the principle “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” - and whose exemple is inspiring social change in many other non-digital areas. Again, Born Digital is more satisfyingly comprehensive here, in its coverage of the social and civic movements enabled by the Net.

Upon this commons, say writers like Antonio Negri and Yochai Benkler, capital is at best a parasitic mould, and at worst now an antagonistic subverter. See the alliances now between Google (formerly 'doing no evil'), Verizon and other major communication corporations, all of whom want to stratify the speed of the net according to your ability to pay.

Carr's undoubted fluency as a public intellectual has led him up a strange, sylvan path. What he should be doing is defending the liberal openness of public networks (the “net neutrality” issue). Instead, he's thumping his leather-clad classics against his palm, deep in the forests of his new Colorado home. Carr closes his screed by citing that dodgy old purist Martin Heidegger on the “frenziedness of technology...entrenching itself everywhere”. Heidegger: never a good moment in the old quotation game.

I saw Nicholas Carr at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where net evangelists and sceptics were both happy to swarm around a Georgian architectural utopia from am to pm, joining in the general unstoppable proliferation of book festivals across the islands. I didn't see much twittering, but all the speeches were podcasted for future enjoyment, and the local literary blogosphere was vibrantly a-hum. As those born digital might say: Whatever. It's all good.

So nothing to worry about, because plenty to worry away at, like the inescapably semiotic mammals we are. As the dearly departed Scottish national makar (or poet) Edwin Morgan would have said, there's “nothing not giving messages”. It's a shame that Nick Carr seems to be so tired of the carnival of communication, whether it comes as inert wood-pulp-and-ink, or flickering glass and plastic.

And as for the cluttered web page inhibiting our reading? I just saw a button in my browser called 'Reader', which turns a busy site into an elegant screen-full of Times New Roman. You have to admit: as an infernal desire machine, the Net always seems to be on permanent 'recieve'. They'll give us the Google Dilatory option, eventually.

Cyberspace ≠ big bad wood: children and the Net

Update: found a great symposium on Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law and Play Online - video presentations. Supporting blog from Terra Nova. 

* * *

Here's an essay I wrote for my old employer, The Sunday Herald in Scotland, on children and the internet (the uncut version is below, here's the edited version). I was commissioned under the headline, "Who's afraid of the big bad Net?", so it begins a little more luridly than I'd like. However, I think it grapples with a lot of the phobias about the topic pretty well, and suggests some creative (rather than just regulatory) proposals towards how cyberspace might exercise a "duty of care" to children. 

Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Net?

Pat Kane, Sunday Herald, 22 Nov 2009

You're hovering at the door, and your beloved has turned back to her machine, a moon face in the monitor's glow. You've been what they call in the instant-messaging world a "POS" (Parent Over Shoulder) – asking about this online game and that customisation, smiling at the Twilight obsession and the LOLcat video sitting side by side on her social networking site. 

So far, so early-adolescent, so familiar. Yet you know that, at this age, there's a genuine need for privacy with her friends: a space to work out who she is, who she wants to be. So you close the door and leave her, for her allotted 45 minutes, as she taps out incomprehensible mixes of mnemonics and icons into a message box.

The question in the mind is: have you sent her off to a virtual version of the local playpark – with good facilities, chatting to friends in the sunlight, in a well-run, somewhat monitored space? Or have you left her to wander into the gloomy, unpredictable woods of cyberspace, where duplicitous wolves, terrible visions and worse lie in wait? 

There's no doubt that the latter metaphor describes most of the tabloid headlines about our children's relationship to cyberspace. If the internet service provider TalkTalk is to be believed, more than half of UK parents believe the internet is a more dangerous place for children than the real world. In other words, it has replaced the deep, dark forest – where Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel confronted their demons – as the locus of our most visceral fears. And even as an evangelist for the networked world, I'd be the last to minimise the issues.

The recently revealed operation by Central Scotland Police, sweeping social network sites like Bebo, Facebook and MSN, identified some alarming numbers – like 1700 men involved in 4000 sexually explicit chat logs with children over the summer, a small proportion of which led to arrests in the UK and abroad. Bebo itself has just announced what they call a "Panic Button" for their websites. This links directly to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) Centre, allowing any user, child or adult, to report their worries about online activity to child protection workers.

And it's the predatory monsters called other people's children that cause almost as much popular anxiety. A report on 'cyber-bullying' in England and Wales last week identified that 22% of schoolkids had reported being harrassed or intimidated via internet or mobile phone. 

Yet some aspects of these stories deserve an instant reality (and history) check – mostly around the degree to which an age of networks merely amplifies existing social disorders. 

Play, Potentiality and the Constitution of the Net

Here's the content of my presentation at the Digital Labor conference in New York, 14th November, 2009 (my profile page there). (You can also see a fully footnoted and referenced version (MS Word file). And the Powerpoint presentation on the day is below.

Here's a preview video that was made before the conference began

The Internet as Playground and Factory - Pat Kane from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo

Play, Potentiality And The Constitution Of The Net - Pat Kane at www.digitallabor.org from Pat Kane

 

PLAY, POTENTIALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NET 

PAT KANE

[DRAFT version, presented at 'The Internet as Playground and Factory", 14 Nov 2009]

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In a 1999 CNN article (still available online), Tim Berners-Lee answers what now seems like an antique organisational question: What role do network managers serve in the Web-based computing environments of the future?

Network managers need to get out of the way and not be seen. The user's job is not to use the network, it is to do whatever they do. Network managers need to create systems where they are not needed for users to create new files, new workgroups or new directories. They should not get in the way of people's creativity. You might want to filter what goes out to a public Web site. But within a company, you need to let people use the Web as a play space. 

As we now know, post Web 2.0, the 'Web as a play space' has truly burst the boundaries of the company. And there is something intriguing here about Berners-Lee's sensitivity to the need for organisations to manage their public net profiles, while internally retaining the Web to encourage a culture of occupational creativity (perhaps a hangover from the peer-to-peer, pure-science conditions at the CERN laboratories where hypertext was birthed). 

Ten years later, in Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky describes the rise of "insanely easy group-forming tools" after the first wave of web services and development at the turn of the millenium. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Groups or Ning allow for "people's creativity" – not awkwardly "using the network", in Berners-Lee's words, but freely "doing whatever they do" – to slip under the floor of traditional organisational structure, and fashion their own, low-cost, constituency-seeking projects. 

Shirky's title is taken from the leitmotif ("HCE") to James Joyce's mind-wrenchingly ludic and aleatory final novel, Finnegans Wake.  A vision of web culture as exactly this overwhelming, overlapping, polymorphous torrent of forms, driven by all the available human forces of desire, identity and technique, is Shirky's (and many others') neo-naturalist view of the Net. His closing metaphor makes this explicit: charting a course for the development of web culture is not like driving a car round a route, but a matter of keeping a kayak stable, in a turbulent stretch of river not of one's choosing.  

Between Berners-Lee's early (and curiously constrained) vision for the web as a kind of organisational sandpit-meets-toybox, and Shirky's near-surrender (similar to that promulgated by Kevin Kelly ) to open digital networks as a new domain of second nature to which we must continuously adapt and exapt, the question of whether the internet is "factory" or "playground" - or some unholy fusion of both - is acutely posed.  

Much of the heat of the discussion in online forums like the Institute for Distributed Creativity  laments the evident shift from active to passive technical consciouness that is underway in Berners-Lee's quote, and fully realised in Shirky's book. For some digital activists, to be a "network manager" (or a "sysadmins op") is not an impeding layer of organisation to be smoothed away by more amenable interfaces and interaction designs: it is a necessary critical understanding about what constitutes our networks that needs to be recovered, and more widely distributed.  

These activists would read Berners-Lee's moment of organisational double-think ("you might want to filter what goes out to a public website") as an early indication of the underlying control logics that drive the creation of 'insanely easy' social tools. In the case of a Web 2.0 enterprise, the intra-company 'creativity' that Berners-Lee concedes could easily be directed towards the fine-grained marketing analysis of user data. Shirky and Kelly may flirt with the idea of the user's experience of Web 2.0 as being like a responsive organism in a fertile, niche-generating ecology. But critical digital theory sees behind this the true exploitative ingenuity of the net-capitalists. 

On the iDC list, Mark Andrejevic asserts that the goal of harvesting hard data from avid users is about "discerning a dominant feeling tone" around products and services. They aim at "a kind of gestalt reading of the data flow: a means of seeing the whole without necessarily having to read through all the discreet data, that is reminsicent of the new spate of attempts to privilege gut instinct, first impressions, body language, etc".  

Brian Holmes notes further that, after rational homo economicus died in the financial Crash of 2008-9, social cognitive neuroscience now aims to "get closer to what makes Jane investor and Joe consumer really tick". If this intellectual strategy towards shaping human nature – aiming to discern "neobehaviorist reflex-arcs originating in the autonomous nervous system" - then shapes the design of our interfaces and apps, the effect will be "the manipulation of people for the usual purposes of naked greed and subliminal control". 

For many critical digital theorists, this is a pernicious nexus. Interaction design encourages a 'naturalised' user response to the environment of the web – where our species-specific sociability and symbolic creativity find a new means of expression and extension. Yet our conviviality-with-digital-tools provides market and state enterprises with an ever-subtler flow of psychometric data. 

This sustains the accumulative momentum of a capitalism that is now fully focussed on the manufacture of needs as much as of goods, on the commodification of consciousness as much as nature, on the exploitation of our communicative as well as our physical powers. There may be some ambivalence among these thinkers about whether this "biopower" is a pervasive act of dominion, or a permanent potential for resistance (the work of Antonio Negri expresses the confusion particularly).  

But there is little doubt in their minds that for all our avid embrace of the platforms and interfaces of Web 2.0, for all its organisational upheaval and institutional corrosion, the process is shaped by an underlying rationale of exploitation – our clicking, posting and gaming a "free labour" that allows corporate power to analyze our sentiments, and refine their commercial strategies.  The games theorist Julian Kucklich, in an unlovely but penetrating phrase, describes our input into the mainstream social and content networks of the current web as one of "playbour": our experience is that of free and unalienated interaction, but the reality is that our activities are being used to add value to a communication-based capitalism. 

Our joyful play with and in networks is, essentially, the new opium of the people. Or as Scott Retburg puts it: "Play becomes a manifestation of our interpellation in  he world of 24/7 real time labor/consumption (consumption having  become an aspect of labor and labor an aspect of consumption)….Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for  the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill."   

Internet as Playground and Factory (4): burning down the house (to build a new one)

Another one of my postings to the Institute for Distributed Creativity's mail-list, leading up to the Digital Labor: internet as factory and playground conference in New York this month. It's a little embroiled in debates, but I've provided links to most of the references - and I think the main points stand. I'm debating a very brilliant and very radical thinker called Brian Holmes:

Brian you talk of the "tawdry narcissism of networked environments organized to promote the delusion of transparency and community". Is this part of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the DiLampudesa strategy - the power elites of globalised capital "changing everything, so that nothing changes"?  You tend to think so. But Wallerstein says clearly that it's democratisation, over the pass of the last two centuries, which has been instrumental in re-addressing basic allocations of wealth and accumulation of capital.

I do value your hands-on accounts of avant-garde network activisms which are prefigurative of a future society (David Graeber) and are 'expressively' democratic, in Negri's terms. That countervailing pressure is required. But like Michel Bauwens, I do despair of the panoptical trance that you and other critical theorists on this list get into when looking at corporate social-media networks. 

Can't we be a bit more capacious than that? Can't we BOTH support the field of autonomous system-and-tools-making that Michel so brilliantly maps out, AND use the passions and commitment of hacker values to keep a civic pressure on extremely user-sensitive commercial networks? And maybe deploy them, as far as one can take them, to keep up that democratic pressure Wallerstein talks about? You can argue for better libraries, AND leech off the coffee-driven commons on your local Borders to read and take notes on your latest political tomes: I do it all the time. Isn't it the enduring power of the public sphere that shapes both these private and public enterprises? And doesn't that map over to social media?

As I go about my daily wage/rent-labours, I'm standing in the ruins of two industries - news journalism and the music business - and am utterly aware of how intrinsically decommodifying open digital networks are. Music will take care of itself: like play, it's an anthropological constant. But now disconnected from its classified-ads scam by our good friend Craig Newmark, the funding of a newsroom - which could help us maintain a beady eye on those victims and perpetrators of neo-liberal economics - is a really moot issue. This is not to say that journalism was perfect - too much of it was PR-driven automatism, it needs a Coaseian organisational shake-out and a return to its best professional ethics, as Clay Shirky says. 

But the net-driven crisis of journalism is an example of how we need transitional as well as radical strategies to make the most of the new societal ontology of networks. What comes after the net destroyed the newsroom isn't just a moment for anarchistic fecundity - though it should be - but there should also be space for thinking about how a revenue stream might fund future 'afflictions of the comfortable, and comforting of the afflicted'. Seymour Hersh brought us the Abu Ghraib pictures - Western power's enduring semiotic wound - out of the bowels of Conde Nast, via the New Yorker. Future tricky alignments of capital and ethics - around philanthropy, tax breaks, company law - will be necessary to maintain that kind of journalistic process. I can't, and won't, eschew them because they have a corporate locus. 

In order to multiply and ramify that democratisation process Wallerstein talks about, we should be confident enough in our analysis (and consciousness) to use any tool necessary - however tainted by data-tracking or commercial behaviourism (which, as Goldhaber correctly says, is often hubristic and presumptious in the extreme). Yes, we have to encourage those roving posse comitatus, Brian - the times are too fluid and open to constitutive power for creative activism not to flourish. But on the same savannah, some of us would like to use existing institutions/organisations to get towards new institutions/organisations. And in any case, one has to praise a space like iDC for demonstrating that conversations can happen between avant-garde and reformist elements in a movement.

The Internet as Playground and Factory (3): play, cybernetics, Twitter, Iran

More musings on play, politics and technology generated by my involvement in the iDC list discussion for the Digital Labor (sic) conference in NYC in November. The original post has been amended slightly so that it makes public sense - but please refer to the full discussion. (And note Brian Holmes' eloquent response to this post.)

Internet as Boho Art-Space and Heaving Public Square: play, Iran, Twitter, cybernetics 

Yes, Julian and Brian, play is a primordially ambiguous domain of human responsiveness. Indeed, in terms of its evolutionary role as maintaining a sense of energized possibility for the organism, the darkest power-plays as well as the most bucolic festivities have to be part of its repertory of simulations, repetitions, games and laughter. (I often, and no doubt contentiously, say that if the work ethic can take a bad trip and end up at the sign over the gates of Auschwitz, the play ethic can also terminate in the boudoirs and rape/torture chambers of the good Marquis).

Indeed, our multidisciplinary ludi-guru, Brian Sutton-Smith, would be the first to assert that the too-idealised zone of child's play is a pulsing phantasmagoria of transgression, insurrection, corporeal anarchy - if only adults could hear it. Part of my definition of a 'play ethic' is partly that the sheer non-moral openness of play compels us to think "ethically", in that Foucaultian sense of ethics as a practice of freedom. It's too powerful in our lives not to take, as it were, deadly seriously. 

So Julian, I do think I acknowledge play's murkier potentials - I'm not one of those legions of blithe boosters about its effects that appear in management circles, play as a toolbox for positive psychology. But you will know that  that the final words of Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, when he lays out his evolutionary thesis about play, is a confession that "despite my extensive criticisms of the rhetoric of progress,  I have now invented yet another form of it, although this time as only the potentiation of adaptive variability".

I keep my eye on play theory for the same reasons, I think, that Deleuze and Guattari kept their eye on fractal mathematics, non-linear systems theory, or neuroscience. That is, as a resource to confirm my assumptions about an immanent creativity in the human condition (which of course for D&G was part of that greater, concept-strewn plane of materiality). It's certainly about counterposing a more open and unpredicable subject than the "Homer Economicus" of behavioural economics, that coming governmental logic in Euro-America, which erects upon our evolved psychosomatic equipment some miserably limited (and easily governable) consumer-citzens, "nudged" this way and that ahead of their savannah atavisms by a mandarinate of "liberal paternalists". Some of you may think it's dangerously positivist to engage in the "politics of human nature" this way: I feel the opposition is too powerful not to.

But to the "play-labor nexus". I urge you all to read Brian Holmes' very elegant essay on play, link previously posted here - http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/games-corporations-distant-constellations. And I want to take seriously Brian's, Ulises', Trebor's and others ludo-scepticism: That the absorption-in-possibility which defines the play experience is, through interaction design, a mechanism of identification with the social order - and one which could be, at worst, a willful mystification of our relationship with real-world exploitation ("Web 2.0 as ideology itself", as Brian says). In his new essay, Brian tries to establish some kind of opposition between play-as-identification, and play-as-disidentification. It's worth quoting at length, just for the prose:

.... Will a repressive hush fall back over the emergent world society, as the postmodern tool sets are gradually outfitted with surveillance mechanisms and encumbered with intellectual property laws, while dissident behaviors are pacified and normalized within corporate frames? Or will a resurgent artistic activism learn from its historical failures, and launch new and more effective techniques for the free and open transmission of countercultural knowledge? How to enlarge the circle of initiates? How to increase the possibilities of active participation? How – and where – to extend the terrains of struggle?

...The procedures of deskilling and deconditioning, the anti-disciplinary revolts deployed by the early vanguards against the remains of a bourgeois ideal of ennoblement, then by mid-twentieth century artists against the quality standards and technocratic abstraction of the corporate capitalist societies, are only understandable as a struggle within this dominant politics of culture, conceived in Schiller’s terms as the psychic vector of a social status quo: “free play” as the intimate and voluntarily cultivated instance of the state. This is what we are up against, if we seek, like the Situationists, to invent “an essentially new type of games.

... Now the urgency of deconditioning makes itself felt once again in vastly expanded cultural circles, even as the patronage of imperial capital exerts increasingly stronger channeling and framing effects. How to introduce a subversive “free play” into circuits of exchange that have been built up on the dogma of dematerialization, liquidity, liberalism? How to twist the grids of expression outside the control of the managerial elites? How to eliminate the brokers?

Behind this is his reading of Schiller's theory (which he shares with Terry Eagleton) casting the play-drive is the ultimate civic seduction, the ultimate embourgoisifier:  "The revolutionary individual is not to be crushed, but should ultimately become the new regime".  Yet I do think we get into hard politics here. And I do have some sympathy for John Sobol's blast against "the experts in theoretical revolution, who have insisted that capitalist networks are inherently anti-revolutionary, inherently anti-human, anti-inspiration" – particularly in the light of those furiously using Twitter, Friendfeed, Typepad and every other corporate platform they can get, to sousveille and maintain the momentum of the Iranian uprising.

In short, can one be a reformist in this discussion, as well as a revolutionary? And can play be developmental, as well as disruptive? Progressive as well as liminal? Bauwens' constant refrain on this list is that an autonomous digital counterculture can "fight/hack for user rights, open standards, free network service principles" with the commercial platforms: they can establish a 'social contract' (a social democracy?) from a strong base in which they build their own "radical distributed infrastructures". I go with Pekka Himanen that hackerism is the first real instantiation of a 'play ethic' in the network society. Isn't it this counterculture which presses externally and internally upon organisations like Twitter and Google? And hasn't hackerism deeply enabled - indeed, "conditioned" - the openness and iterability of the platforms currently being used by the Iranian people?

And yes, there is a degree of yada-yada-yada about our ritual invocation of the Italian autonomists here. But surely one of the things they get right is that our new sense of collective power (see Kevin Kelly's 'New Socialism' thesis in Wired) is more than just a by-product of an increasing cyberneticized fabric of society. Techno-potboilers like James Harkin's Cyburbia try to claim that cybernetics is the core, militarily-originated episteme that keeps us phatically and pointlessly chattering to each other, over brightly-coloured networks. But as Micheal Hardt puts it (http://www.vinculo-a.net/english_site/text_hardt.html), interactive machines aren't just "a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds", but also "a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves". This presumes a seer-through-the-lens - meaning, to some degree, a subject who can gain some Enlightenment-style purchase on their embroilment in protocol and code. An autonomous, passional, strategic player, not just the heteronomous, befuddled and processual played.

To bring it back to the moment of play: The point about the 'ambiguity of play', its necessary potentiation and proteanism, is that it encompasses (as Sutton-Smith says) both extreme agency and extreme envelopment. Play-as-fate-and-chaos, yes, the play of being caught up in cosmic mechanisms way beyond ones power to control or influence - but also play-as-progress, play-as-imagination, play-as-freedom. Cybernetics is indeed subtle and pervasive in its harnessing of human differentiation and singularity - but I'd content that play is more powerful, more generative and more constitutive of said difference and singularity. Because it is the 'difference engine' of our species, it always gives us enough cognitive and affective headroom - not just to generate better antagonisms to systems, but better systems as well.

Which is what Brian Holmes, to me, exactly does at the end of his playpiece, when he invokes the map-makings of personal and political potential conducted by Felix Guattari: that is, he points to a better system to support richer play. Radical creatives might want to disidentify from the interactive funfair of the entertainment-military complex, asks Brian - but where, other than the metropolis as a stage for "processual social events" and "punctual encounters", can they go to practice, let alone theorise,  their counter-play? I am touched by Brian's answer:

The art circuit today – including not just museums, but the enlarged and diversified networks of experimentation, debate and display – can function as a public site of initiation to this kind of reading, making it a new form of common knowledge, too broad and unpredictable to remain under corporate control. In this way, art can help reactivate the suspended promise that sixties’ thinkers saw in the expansion of free time. If it can avoid capture and “ennoblement” (or conversely, brutal repression) by the pervasive powers of the corporate capitalist state.

The artworks before your eyes appear irreducibly singular, tangential, distant; and everything else that gives consistency and dynamism to dissenting subjectivities – the discourses, the technologies, the territories of intervention – is necessarily elsewhere, displaced into another space. Yet even within the seeming calm and neutrality of the museum, these constellations of distant universes are inviting you to play an essentially different kind of game.

This reminds me so much of that powerful essay that Habermas wrote about George Bataille in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (Google Books wont show me the relevant page - Bauwens' Chartists, advance!). But from misty memory, it's something about how Bataille's transgressive and illimitable practice – which is hard-core, radically-potentiating play - is good for the steering systems of modernity, in that it reminds governance that there will always be challenges to its complacency about meeting human needs and desires. Art institutions need artists, system needs lifeworld (even at the Bataillian limit), and networks need play (and players), to develop, form and reform.

We should be vigilant over forms of interaction labor that canalise the full spectrum of playful possibilities, yes. But it's a more exciting moment for systemic development, of all kinds, than a counsel of "control-society" despair. Precisely because we're players, and not laborers, in these playgrounds.