The Play Ethic

"Why We Play" at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, 27 March 2013

On Wed, 27 March, 2013, I was delighted to host (and curate) a panel discussion for the Edinburgh International Science Festival, entitled "Why We Play".

This was partly supported by the now defunct Genomics Forum at Edinburgh University, who had brought me in as a "Bright Minds" research fellow for a few months prior, to study play and epigenetics. 

The brief gave me a great opportunity to assemble a properly multidisciplinary panel, from the worlds of natural science, social science and play/games business consultancy. They were:-

• Professor Patrick Bateson from the University of Cambridge, one of the greatest ethologists of his era, and author of (in 2013) Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation (with Paul Martin). [Download Bateson presentation PDF]
• Wendy Russell, a senior lecturer in Play and Playwork at the University of Gloucestershire, who has been a practitioner and advocate for Playwork for over 30 years. Her report to Play England, "Play For A Change", is an authoritative review of the scholarship of play and its contemporary policy implications. She also founded the Philosophy at Play conferences. 
• Alex Fleetwood was founder and director of Hide And Seek, a London-based commercial consultancy on play and games which will close in early 2014. He helped design the "New Year Games" for Edinburgh's Meadows on 1st Jan, 2012. 

The event was opened by the Minister for Children and Young People in the Scottish Government, Aileen Campbell, as part of the run-up to the launch of their Play Strategy for Scotland (vision statement and action plan). The Scotsman ran a preview feature, where I was quoted on the event.

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.

State of "The Play Ethic" 2012: interview with Viewpoint magazine

It's nice to be pulled out of the depths of scholarship and enterprise around play and be asked to do a definitive interview on the subject - it forces me to think and speak in a way that makes public sense of my private musings and specialised consultations. This is from a Dutch magazine called Viewpoint, which is a bi-annual consumer trends journal. I'll be part of a bigger article with a number of ludocrats speaking, which I'll post here in November.

Interview with Pat Kane for Viewpoint magazine, November 2012

Why do you think play is gaining currency right now?

I think play is becoming important because of a number of crises in the way we habitually do things. Certainly in the decade before the recent financial crash, many economists and thinkers were talking about how "the Protestant work ethic" was becoming irrelevant to a networked and game-oriented generation. My 2004 book The Play Ethic suggested that these "soulitarians" would become conscious of their creative power and digital skills, and start to demand changes in social, political and occupational structure. It's hard to look at our current tumult of social-media driven protest, at all kinds of levels, and not see the proof of that. But I think play is also becoming central because it's a component of even bigger arguments about what growth and prosperity mean - on one side from the period of indebtedness we're about to endure, but on the other side from the crisis of consumerism, and the carbon consequences of all that material throughput, that a moment's contemplation on the climate-change statistics would incite. We need to find new motivating narratives in our lives, beyond status anxiety and lifestyle excess. Play, as a planet-friendly, convivial way to bring thrills and pleasures into our lives with others, is a prime element of those new "wellbeing" narratives. 

What’s your philosophy on play?

Always evolving and changing, like play itself. But in recent years I have drawn a lot from evolutionary accounts of human nature in my understanding of play. My great guide on play theory, Brian Sutton-Smith, calls play "adaptive potentiation". Play helps neurologically-complex, deeply-sociable mammals (like  us!) refine and rehearse living with other creatures like ourselves. And given our human capacity for self-reflection and conceptualisation, play in humans - the more distant from raw need and survival we get - becomes more and more the central action of our lives, rather than a practise zone for it. Play is the prime indicator that we are (as the title of my next book has it) a "radical animal" (www.radicalanimal.net) - but that this natural inheritance is dynamic, experimental and inventive, rather than just our savannah-era limitations constantly tripping us up - which is my problem with all this "nudge"-style behavioural economics. Presuming we're Homer Simpson, rather than homo (et femina) ludens.

How is the role of play changing, both in individuals’ lives and in society?

As above, I think play is becoming the central activity (arguably, alongside care) of healthy, better-educated, more self-determining people in the developed (and eventually the emerging) world economies and societies - rather than the degraded Puritan residue that the "work ethic" defines it as. There's also a very strong argument for its social centrality in terms of basic public health. For educationalists, it's a global given now that we must extend the play-moment in early years education, in order that neurological and physiological development happens to their fullest degree (the Scandinavians with their world-beating educational scores proves that, as does the brain science). But this will move beyond the kindergarten, into later years, and eventually out of the school and into wider organisational life. The general paradigm of purposefulness and value-adding activity that comes from gamer culture will get stronger and stronger, as a logic for running companies and organisations. How does an activity satisfy our demands for meaning, mastery and autonomy - as the best games do? Might genuinely committed, actively learning and relatively-free-to-decide employees be a real competitive edge in an economy where consumption becomes less important than experience? 

What do you think of the idea of play being co-opted by brands and businesses?

Play can't really be co-opted by any form of social organisation - as it is one of the elemental processes that lead to any effective social organisation itself. But I'm happy to see play being invoked as a positive term or signifier by corporate brands - as I think it is a term which has radical implications for how we think of time, space and resources in our lives. Genuine playfulness is not leisure, something you do after the daily grind - it's an open, experimental and socially joyful way of being that, if embraced, has incalculable consequences for the norms of how we produce and consume. Play will as easily co-opt big biz!

How has digital gaming influenced play?

Answered at points above, but digital gaming is to the 21st century what printed books were to the Renaissance - it's a fundamental reorienting of how human beings see reality and how its elements interrelate. It's as profound as the shift from seeing one's life as a narrative line, a story running through a book, to seeing one's life as an element in a system, in which one's actions are profoundly wrapped up in others. The question for me now is the degree to which we can teach games-making literacy, in the way that the study of literature encouraged new literary genres - the systems that we enter into with our games are too much scripted from above, it's interpassivity as much as interactivity. But that will come. 

How do you see the role of play evolving?

My small moment of pride recently was the news that my work has been exhibited on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - or to be precise, an axiom about play I've been promoting for years was part of an exhibiton called Century of the Child that showed there this autumn. The axiom runs: "Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the Industrial Age - our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value". I think it's going to be as important to that in our daily lives. 

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.

The past and future of public play: Olympic meditations (keynote for Hide And Seek)

The slides to my opening keynote for the Hide And Seek Weekender conference, 'Playing in Public', at Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, 17.9.12. Any thoughts, responses, questions, let me know. (It's much more legible in full-screen, btw). 

 

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. 

What is a "Constitute"? Prez to HubWestminster, London, 15/11/11

This is a very tentative presentation I made to Vinay Gupta's Truth and Beauty seminar at HubWestminster in London, on a concept I've been toying around with in my mind for a few months now... What is a "constitute" - as opposed to an institute? Or a constitution?

Personally, it's an answer to my anxiety about being drowned in rich and meaningful connections in the social-media age, and not being able to turn even a small percentage of them into resources for action or enterprise (of whatever kind - civic, intellectual, commercial). Do we need to forge a "craft of info-citizenship" or "netizenship", some guild-like or practice-like behaviours or conventions, that can capture the value of the relentless connecting, conversing and curating we do with our networked devices? Similar to the hacker ethic, or agile programming, or the Transition Towns protocols - but at the level of a great conversation in a cafe that we don't just want to let sink into the background of our busy lives? "Ok, this has gone well...let's make this a constitute...." So what behaviours/duties/commitments would that imply?

The word "constitute" points to a need to name a new, network-society subtlety in the relationship between idea and action (of course, there are older and other words like rubric, model, method, praxis, meme... I just happened to notice that constitute wasn't a noun!). And theoretically, it's another one of my journeys into the Italian Marxist tradition, looking at culture and communication as real forces for systemic change in society (but particularly coming from the work of Negri/Hardt, Virno, Marazzi, Bifo). And behind that - always behind that - my 30 year sea-journey with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in which I occasionally, nowadays, glimpse the shore... 

All comments welcome (indeed if you do comment/repost, it becomes a constitute!) 

What is a "Constitute"? Pat Kane prez to HubWestminster

View more presentations from theplayethic

Play's The Thing: London conference (22/23 Nov, 2011) & Guardian comment piece

Something I've meaning to post here for a while - but too busy helping get it off the ground to do so - is my hosting of Play's The Thing: Creative Perspectives on Wellbeing (Nov 22-23, 2011 - yes, next week!). Taking place in Toynbee Studios, London, it's been organised by Escape Artists, a social arts charity, and funded by the European Commission. 

I've written this op-ed for the Guardian (see below for a fully referenced version, and this PDF of the newsprint version) setting out the main argument of the conference. This is the second time I've worried away at the relationship between government and wellbeing in the Guardian. Interesting to compare the two pieces, and my shift towards a greater environmental anxiety, which softens my perspective on the worth of "wellbeing" talk. 

Tickets still available for Play's The Thing, don't delay! And all comments welcome.

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The wellbeing agenda isn't navel-gazing, it's innovation and survival

By putting a price on unhappiness we can understand the need for a gentler response to the economic crisis

Pat Kane, The Guardian, 14 Nov 2011

If you were looking for economic hard-noses among our European national leaders, you wouldn’t have to look much farther than Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron. Sarkozy telling an abject Greece there are macroeconomic “rules that have to be respected”; Cameron unrelenting on his deficit and debt agenda, in the face of the tyranny of the bond markets. Homo economicus, in full pomp.

Yet after the last crash – in Cameron’s case, before – both men were talking a different language of the market. Sarkozy launched a commission in 2009, chaired by the now-sainted Joseph Stiglitz, to explore alternatives to GDP as the primary measure of social progress.

Cameron’s stab at a “GWB” (General Well-Being), first essayed in the blithe and creditworthy days of 2005, has quietly proceeded through the machinery of coalition government. At the start of November, the Office for National Statistics announced its “10 indicators of wellbeing”, which will be used to guide attitudinal surveys in the future.

Snorts of derision over your rye-bread, no doubt, as job creation stalls, unemployment rolls rise and political parties sharpen their claws (and clauses) for contest. Yet as I’ve found in helping to organise a conference on creative approaches to wellbeing, we should try to take a step or two back from the grim financial determinism of the moment.

Democracy only functions healthily if we believe we can imagine conditions other than they are. And wellbeing is an open enough concept, firmly at the heart of government, to allow our policy-brains to stop pressing the panic button.

One of our speakers, William Davies, wonders whether the UK government’s commitment to measuring, and then making policy on, the nation’s wellbeing is one of the biggest own-goals ever perpetrated by the administrative classes.

Take a method called “income-compensation technique” – derived from wellbeing studies and psychological damage assessments in legal cases. Using data on the correlation between happiness and take-home pay, it claims to identify the amount of money it would take to compensate a person for losing access to a free public good (for example, arts events or sporting facilities). A Department of Culture, Media and Sport report in 2010 estimated that the psychological satisfaction derived from a person attending concerts regularly was worth £9,000 of extra income.

This method – putting a price on unhappiness – can be extended to other areas. A Young Foundation report calculated that the psychological injury of being made unemployed would require a compensatory income of £23,000 per month. If the wellbeing mandarins are serious about calculating the “psycho-economic return” on investment, they might be forced to admit that the best returns come from public spending and occupational security, not private spending and labour-market turbulence. As Davies quips, in a Marxian way, “a spectre is haunting liberal economics”.

So wellbeing indicators, taken seriously at government level, could justify a gentler, more Keynesian response to the national deficit and global economic crisis. But in these systemically shaky times, the charge of irrelevance and navel-gazing is easily raised.

Rather than angsting about general ill-being, shouldn’t we be firing up the raging energies of "mathletic" entrepreneurs – coding, designing and splicing new markets into being? In the face of Asia and South America, implacably ascending their development curves to middle-class prosperity, don’t we need more edgy disatisfaction and nervy, competitive ambition on these islands – and indeed, this continent – not less?

For figures such as historian Niall Ferguson, the wellbeing agenda is an example of Europeans as “the idlers of the world”. We’ve wrapped ourselves in a wet blanket of psycho-socio-babble, recoiling from the creative destruction and disruptive innovation required to lift us out of a static economy.

Yet when you gather together the tribes of wellbeing, you hardly discover a lack of enterprise or innovation. The question is the nature of the “new” that’s being sought. The other “spectre” that haunts liberal economics – other than the lingering unhappiness that its happy-clappy consumerism generates – is the broaching of planetary boundaries for survival. This was forcibly restated in last week’s report from the International Energy Agency, which referred to the extreme climatic urgency of de-carbonising our industries and economies.

Yes, let’s fund primary science to keep open the possibility of radical innovation around energy and efficiency. Let’s retain a Victorian-style ambition about constructing grand new infrastructures to answer our needs for mobility, housing, communication.

But what also needs to happen is precisely the kind of innovation around lifestyles, cultures and values pursued by those at the eco-minded end of the wellbeing agenda – seeing a low-carbon society as an opportunity for social excitement and behavioural novelty. For who else will build the mindsets, and communally forge the habits, that prepare us to cope with radical change – both the changes we invite, and the changes we’ll have to endure?

And in terms of leading people out of their consumerist echo-chambers and into engagement with these prospects, play’s the thing. Take architect Indy Johar, who founded HubWestminster in cavernous empty office space behind the Institute of Directors. It’s a new incarnation of the Institute for Contemporary Arts 1947 slogan, “a playground for the mind”. Go there any evening if you want to sample the nexus between Occupy St Paul’s and the “big society”.

In this milieu, people with ideas are driven to create new practices, not just deliver papers. Writer Marek Kohn is advising the Sunshine Bank, which hopes to turn the desire for mutual recognition into an alternative currency system for communities and companies. Alice Taylor, ex-head of games at Channel 4, is building a new platform for toys that combines virtual play and local manufacture, aimed at fomenting craft values and ideas of non-disposability among kids. Tech entrepreneur Dougald Hine has a sideline deploying local bohemia to revive moribund retail outlets, such as the revitalised Brixton Village.

At our conference, we also have Buddhists and neuroscientists, radical artists and improvisers – people who have always found a way (mostly internally) to maintain their mental and social resilience in the face of endemic change. The point is that a real diversity of input is essential to thinking and feeling our way beyond the cyclical hysterics of capitalism.

Wellbeing is the kerchief in the top-pocket of the suited men striding through the current economic drama. We should give it a good tug, and see what comes out.

Pat Kane hosts www.playsthething.org.uk, Nov 22-23, at Toynbee Studios, London 

Scotsman essay: Knights of the working world need our support

This is an essay I wrote for the Scotsman's op-ed on the fate of the freelancer in the current economic crisis - with questions on whether there can be an infrastructural and social-policy support for their chosen work- and lifestyle. 

The picture to the left is, I believe, from the movie of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, in which the term "free lancer" first appears... 

 

Knights of the working world need our support

Pat Kane

Published in The Scotsman on Wednesday 28 September 2011

"Thanks to the bustling times, a man of action will always find employment.” These are the words of the Norman knight Maurice de Bracy in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), after introducing the phrase “free lance” to the English language for the first time.

A mercenary warrior – unsworn to a lord, and able to take payments for his slicing and dicing – is what Scott strictly meant by a freelance (the European Renaissance called them condottiere, the Japanese their ronin).

But De Bracy’s opening line sums up pretty well the necessary energy and optimism of the freelancer, right down to the present day. If modern “knights-errant” have a heraldic crest on their breastplate, or laptop lid, it might be that beautiful line from Bob Dylan’s Masters of War: “he not busy being born is busy dying”. Or more succinctly: “life before death”.

The freelancer – and I speak as an incorrigible example of the species, having swashed my sword around liberally for the last 25 years – has become a significant economic category.

A 2008 report from Kingston University suggested that “skilled professional workers who are neither employers nor employees, supplying labour and services on a temporary basis under a contract, for a fee, to a range of business clients” comprise as many as four million people, making up 8 per cent of UK national turnover. More than 60 per cent are men, and the skill set ranges from heavy construction to flower arranging.

In the US, the Freelancers Union currently flourishes, aiming to organise and provide services for what the State Department defined as a third of the American workforce. Sara Horowitz, the president of the FU – how apropos! – calls it the “industrial revolution of our time”.

The two hurricanes that blow in the age of the freelancer are that familiar pairing of neo-liberal globalisation and new technology. The first chucked many professionals out of their company cubbyholes (and barred entry to as many) as global competition compelled outsourcing abroad and managerial leanness at home. And the second, partly the cause of the first, gives these professionals new tools (such as the internet and mobile and social networks) to turn their talents and skills into useful and valuable services and products.

There are groaning shelves of books which celebrate the rise of the “free agent nation” (Daniel Pink in the US) and the “portfolio worker” (Charles Handy in the UK). Some, such as the sociologist Richard Sennett, bemoan the “corrosion of character” caused by continuous, stable occupations and professions coming to an end. Some, such as myself, argue that we’ve needed to prepare for a “play ethic” to come after the “work ethic” for quite a while, and that freelancers are the pioneers of such a shift in values around productivity and purpose.

Yet if the creativity, flexibility and exuberance of the freelancer brings such tangible value and benefits to our societies and economies, they often come at a cost – and not least to the freelancers themselves. More often than not, freelancers have made a conscious trade-off between economic security and existential freedom (less of the first, more of the second).

Artists, actors and musicians have been acutely aware of this trade-off for centuries. If they are performers, the lifestyle has to be itinerant, taking satisfaction in changing locations or in the company of fellow players. Guaranteed fees are usually secured from venues, but who knows how big the next tour will be, whether the audience will appear again? And if it’s about producing objects, again there’s no stable relationship between the sculpture or song you make, and the vagaries of public (or even elite) taste, season after season.

Of course, the experience of autonomy – of getting up in the morning and deciding how to do what you’ve chosen to do – is for many artists (and freelancers) enough tangible wealth in itself. The artistic template for freelancing rests on the psychological distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: you get a surge of wellbeing from regularly aligning your vision with your action. This is ultimately preferable to the disalignments of normal occupational work, where your alienation from your own deeds is comforted by your increased ability to participate in consumerist society.

Yet some realities have to be faced by the truly free worker. Where one lives, and how one moves about, often has to take a few steps back from the new car, mortgage and flatscreen norm aspired to by most traditionally employed workers. Living spaces tend to be shared rental or (if one has the patience for the housing list) a sole residence in a tougher area.

Places such as East Berlin, and lately Detroit, become havens for the wilder end of freelance life: rents are lower, and the rentable spaces – the empty urban hulks of an industrial or communist era – allow for residence and creativity to happen in the same location.

Cities provide another basis for the freelance life, in the richness and robustness of their public space. A half-decent transport system is like the blood vessels of the body civic, taking you cheaply and sustainably from one meeting to another.

And the locations that freelancers and their peers or clients meet are increasingly in “third places” - not just the crush of coffee shops, but plush interiors such as the Mitchell Library in Glasgow or the Wellcome Institute in London. All are suffused with low-cost or free wi-fi, allowing the benefits of an office table without the rental costs. And with ace caffs usually attached, you are deep within the “bustling times” that De Bracy the knight exulted in.

Are urban planners responding well enough to the challenge of the freelancers? In this post-property crash moment, we have an overcapacity in commercial building in cities, and some freelance advocates are figuring out a way to open these spaces up for use.

The activist Dougald Hine runs the Place Makers Agency, which brokers between creative workers, property owners and councils to re-use office spaces and market areas. A giant new Hub in Westminster, London, is opening before Xmas 2011, on a peppercorn rent, welcoming hordes of the metropolis’s freelancers. We need more of this kind of convivial enterprise north of the Border.

We live in a Scotland whose immediate future will be defined by a sharp debate over the job-creating powers of a full national parliament. So the question of how top-down governance can encourage a bottom-up culture of enterprise and initiative is highly pertinent.

Freelancers present some interesting answers to this question, as they represent an extreme on the spectrum of flexible workers. For example, should we be exploring and developing what Europeans call “social flexicurity”? In this idea, it’s presumed that people will work episodically, from project to project – but that doesn’t mean they should be subject to “workfare” restrictions on social support between gigs.

We muse on tax breaks for quicksilver multinational corporations, but perhaps we could also look again at the (recently expired) Irish and French fiscal experiments for exemptions to creative workers. Aren’t quirky, unique Scottish businesses – and the mavericks who might start them – worth structural support too?

The incessant challenges of new technologies, new global economic players and new climatic limits on growth and development can drive people to distraction – maybe even, as can be seen in recent Scandinavian election results, xenophobia. We need to imagine subtler, more resilient platforms of social security for daily lives that we have to accept will be increasingly defined by “social precarity”.

Freelancers know all about “precarious” (and some of us went there willingly). We have a lot to tell you about how “men and women of action” can make the best of “bustling times”. Errant knights may have their wider uses, after all.