The Play Ethic

Parenting the Play-Kids? A "play ethic" for the BBC

This is a paper for the BBC's R&D department called "Parenting the Play-Kids?", which is my suggestion of what a "play ethic for the BBC" might be (I've already made a stab at this a few years ago). It's triggered by some academic research the Corporation did on youth engagement with their online services (the papers are hotlinked in the essay below). The final "newspaper" (available here as PDF) also has some splendid contributions from online experts like Bill Thompson and Stephen Heppell (you can also e-mail request a physical copy). As ever, all comments welcomed below.

PARENTING THE PLAY-KIDS?

The net is one big playground for kids, a space where they can productively fool around with ideas, identity and media. Should the BBC join in? What can Auntie do for the Playful Generation?

For any modern parent, it's a familiar scene. You stand over your children's shoulders, however covertly, watching as their nimble fingers flutter over the keyboards, nunchucks and touch pads of their digital devices. An Arsenal-themed Powerpoint sits under three separate browser windows – one for chat, one for music sharing, one for Bebo or Facebook.

Someone's sending links of pics for the Powerpoint; fingers flutter back a rebuke, adding their own snippet of information-plus-emoticon. (The mobile intrudes regularly into the exchange, an angry buzzing fly trapped in a tin). And like some kind of domestic water-feature, the sports or cartoon channel shimmers, murmurs or explodes at the other end of the room, the tv merely an ambient input – or waiting to be turned into the full spectacle of a console game.

Yet strip out the flashy and mutable interfaces of these technologies, bracket off the sheer plenitude of material available to the digital child, and what kind of behaviour do we have here? Nothing too far, I'd suggest, from the classic moment of play – that developmental scene present in most human societies that have achieved some distance beyond scarcity or sheer survival, and can thus provide a surplus of toys and materials for their irrepressibly ludic young ones. 

Despite the hi-tech means, collages are still being made here, songs are still being sung and learned, teasing and hazing is still being conducted (across the input boxes), intensely imagined worlds of heroism and camaraderie are still being constructed and explored (frame by frame, level by level).

It's not that our children aren't 'digital natives', whose amateur (i.e. passion-driven) literacy and facility with ICT presents such a challenge to less hyper-mediated educators, broadcasters and parents. It's more that play, in the very way it constitutes our basic, complex-mammalian humanity, has itself always been digital – if by 'digital' one means the ability to compose and recompose culture and experience, with absolute combinatorial freedom, using abstractly redefined elements and materials.

The evolutionary urge and animus of play is to serve what the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith calls "adaptive potentiation". The very principle of variation that play seems to stand for – all those ways of 'taking reality lightly' that stretch from the crudest jokes to the most elaborate glass-bead games, from dressing-up to situationist art – functions to aid human survival and flourishing.

Our play moments generate hypotheses and possibilities, rehearsing us for the complex business of getting along with other complex, linguistic and self-conscious human animals. But play also delivers an emotional payoff, primarily optimism and hopefulness. We get a surge of positive, coping feelings from the games we construct, enlist others to, and try to succeed at ourselves. We are energised by the simulations we build by ourselves and with others to address some deficiency, or mitigate some challenge, in the real world. This child-like, but not necessarily childish indefatigability (or "neoteny", as the academics have it) is a particularly essential survival trait.

If this is the deep meaning of play in human socio-biology, then what becomes particularly powerful about our digital platforms and technologies is that they actually match, map and mimic the essential variability of play to an unprecedented degree. These children may be such 'digital natives' because they might well be the first generation of humans whose 'playful nature' has been given such powerful and appropriate tools of virtualisation, recombination and communication. Their phantasmagorias of play can now be made into robust worlds and environments, in which the playmates are numerous and global, and the experience can be as physical (eg the Wii console) as it is pixellated.

This will certainly be a generation of children who expect to manage their company's inventories via game consoles, or do their five-way business meetings via smart mobile phones. But their natural embrace of networks-and-digitality may have deeper, perceptual consequences. As the futurist and programmer Marc Pesce said in The Playful World a few years ago,

our children will have a different view of the "interior" nature of the world, seeing it as potentially vital, intelligent, and infinitely transformable. The "dead" world of objects before intelligence and interactivity will not exist for them, and, as they grow to adulthood, they will likely demand that the world remain as pliable as they remember from their youngest days.

A generation demanding that their material and social world remain as pliable, as infusable with imagination and desire, as their childhoods: is this a step-change to be welcomed or feared? It seems, at least, to be a possibility we should be prepared for.

Blogging and "informationalism" - interview with Murray Newlands

I did quite a useful interview with Murray Newlands, the social media consultant, for his blog the other month - now available here. We cover my long history with blogging - that's micro-, macro- and meso-blogging - and how that fits with my general analysis of culture, economy and technology as expressed in the Play Ethic book. An exchange:

Where do you see growth in the blogging field?

Again, I think micro-blogging (a la Facebook and Twitter), particularly conducted through rich portable media devices like the iPhone, has taken some of the burden off traditional web-based blogs to be these instantaneous places of self-expression. For me, blogs are now an opportunity for you to step back a little from the cybernetic loop we can so easily get caught up in with mobile, locational and real-time media. However I think that micro-blogging can itself develop a little more, up and away from the “140″ character limitation. My presentation at the Media140 conference in London suggested that a ‘meso-blogging’ might be possible. (Which allows for my kinda blogging to be ‘macro-blogging’, I suppose). If we’re not just reading newspapers on street corners, but now producing news on street corners, are the devices, networks and platforms were using really up to the task yet? I’m using and trying out everything in this field (AudioBoo my favourite), but I still think there are slightly richer on-the-move blogging experiences to be had than the ones afforded by a telecom engineer’s casual addition to the design of his device…

What new ideas are advertisers coming up with to take advantage of new trends?

As Clay Shirky says, we’re in the space between the death of the bad old things and the birth of the good new things - meaning that online advertising is not yet an complete replacement for the kinds of ads that a collapsing old media used to serve up. And perhaps they never will be. I wonder whether the whole relationship between someone who makes a product or service that they think might have users or consumers, and the deeply demanding conversations and transparencies that characterise online behaviour, means that advertising will have to completely rethink its function - and by association, the manufacturers and service providers themselves. Add to that recession and eco-crisis, and it may be that online advertising and its clients will have to become part of the toolbox of living sustainably. lightly and well - clearly seen to be adding to the solution, not wasting and problematising our precious time.

Social Media and Informationalism blogger and author of The Play Ethic, Pat Kane an Interview

The Man in Our Mirror: Michael Jackson

This is a piece written 24 hours after Michael Jackson's death, and commissioned by my old newspaper, The Sunday Herald in Scotland.

MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAN IN OUR MIRROR

By Pat Kane

Sunday Herald, 28 June 2009

THE misty black-and-white clip has been opening most of the televisual retrospectives for the last few nights, and to me it's the alpha and omega of Micheal Jackson. We're somewhere in the mid-sixties, and someone's on their knees with a camera in a murky Motown audition room. The band's cropped off at the chest, and all the universe is looking at this motion-blur of a boy. 

He's a compressed James Brown, in almost every way: the box-shaped 'fro, the tight tailoring, the carnal mathematics of the dancing (part robot, part boxer, part libertine). And that voice – impossibly percussive, a rythym section unto itself, wringing melody out of the tightest of corners. 

But in any of his early performances, you have to look closely at young Micheal's eyes. They are large brown pools of stillness, uncreased by any of the tell-tale signs of excess passion or abandonment, even as he throws out those startling extemporisations of larynx and limb that rightly took him to global fame. 

Look at this most naked of talent-in-the-meat-factory moments - with his ruthless father-exploiter Joe Jackson behind him, and the relentlessly aspirational regime of Berry Gordy's Motown ahead of him. Look at Michael. Right at the heart of this briar patch of virtuosity, ambition, brute commerce, punishing self-discipline - you're wondering who's looking out of those eyes. Is he utterly calm and self-possessed? Or is he utterly null, his soul the property of others? 

Cut to his last ever recorded interview, with an ABC news reporter only a few days ago, on the planned O2 concerts in London. "To do this you have to sacrifice your life, your childhood", he enunciates clearly, the timbred voice of a fifty year old evident through the crackle. "It's giving up your life for the medium". 

As the narrative begins to coalesce around Micheal Jackson's death – that of a weary, chronically unwell, stressed-beyond-imagining mature man, whose body finally rebelled against the regimens of performance and enhancement it had been subjected to for far too long – we need to keep in mind that lithe, strange little android, shimmying across the rehearsal tape. 

What was it like to be Micheal Jackson, from the beginning to the end? To "give up your life" – from that very tenderest of moments where his self was beginning to form, till the end of his complex, wracked adulthood – "for the medium"?

The internet as factory and playground (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.

Organization Man 0wnz Soulitarian Blogger

It's brutal, o so brutal, but I am laughing:

(Thanks to @charlesarthur)

The internet as factory and playground (2): beyond the 'play-labour nexus'

Here's the second 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 at the end of the year. I was specifically asked by the Institute's director, Trebor Scholz, to think a bit about the relative definitions of "play" and "labor" (I'll go with the US spelling for now). It's been edited slightly so that it can make some sense for public consumption (well, here's hoping - it's the academic/theory side of my activity). 

GETTING BEYOND THE 'PLAY-LABOUR NEXUS'

[...] So much of this discussion is rooted in a Marxist/post-Marxist framework about the nature of labour as 'exploitation' and 'alienation'. I want to try and step back towards some roots of the Marxist analysis, and attempt to link that to current multidisciplinary understandings of play.

In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (see link below) Terry Eagleton devotes a chapter to Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man – one of the most important theories of play ever (and much quoted by Johan Soderberg in Hacking Capitalism). Eagleton notes that Schiller's evocation of the importance of play – what he called the 'play drive' – allowed Marx to envision the kind of rich, fully-extended humanity that exploitation and alienation would damage and distort. "Marx's critique of industrial capitalism is deeply rooted in a Schillerian vision of stunted capacities, dissociated powers, the ruined totality of human nature" (http://bit.ly/rcBx).

 

The "play-drive" for Schiller is also the ground of possibility of all human action: it suspends the destructive tendencies both of our appetites ('sense-drive') and our reason (form-drive), and creates a zone of "free determinability". From this sublime experience of possible states of being (which Schiller terms 'aesthetic'), we will be able to assess the best, most "graceful" options for personal and social action.

 

So Schiller's vision of the play-drive is that of a space of potentiation in the human condition – and I guess Marx's radicalism was to see that this protean, self-creating force at the heart of our species being needed a revolutionary redeployment of resources to come into its own. But what is interesting about the study of play since Schiller, right up to the present, is that so much biology, zoology and psychology confirms his characterisation of play as that zone of possibility in the human condition.

 

Play is 'adaptive potentiation', as the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith puts it. By this he means all those experiments, simulations and virtualisations that we recognise as play, but which clearly serve an evolutionary purpose - namely, to aid our survival and flourishing. How? By helping us rehearse strategies for dealing with our complex social worlds, composed (as they are) of other linguistic and richly emotional human beings. (On Sutton-Smith's latest formulation of this, see http://bit.ly/wQTwp).

 

So play is deeply constitutive of human sociality: we know this from child development. And that productive adulthood has been about the 'soul's play-day being the devil's work-day', or the 'putting away of childish things', is a Puritan truism that any student of Weber knows about. And any other student of E.P. Thompson also knows how relentless was the campaign needed to subject the pre-capitalist culture of festivals and 'Happy Mondays' to disciplinary, workplace rule.

But here's what might be the truly revolutionary fact of our digital and networked lives: Its symbolic and immaterial plentitude, and the participative design of its tools and platforms, helps adults to recover, and then extend and develop, that constitutive experience of play. As many of the Italian Marxists say, particularly Paulo Virno in his recent 'Multitude' books, there might be a new anthropology required to cope with a world in which the most protean of human faculties – language, affectivity and symbolic analysis itself – becomes the basic productive infrastructure of organisational, community and personal life.

 

Does this deep link between species being and our digital-and-networked 'extensions of the human' (to smarten up McLuhan), around the axis of play, have consequences for how we arrange our productive lives? At the very least, one can point to the amazing diversity of web-initiatives on the iDC list – every "adaptive potentiation" from a mark-up language that encodes the working conditions of its sites, to an iPhone app that helps you do voluntary info-work for charities, to Ned Rossiter's 'organised networks' as the successor to trade unions – as indication that an extraordinary creative energy is being tapped. 

Clay Shirky tells us that it's a matter of insanely-easy group-forming networks opening up space below traditional organisations, but there's more to it than that. To explain this fecundity, I keep finding myself turning away from sociology or economics, and either turning to philosophy – the creative ontology of Deleuze, Negri, Virno and others – or to what has to be called (with some tentativeness, I concede – but only some) the 'socio-biology' of play. (Maybe biosemiotics – see http://bit.ly/SvDT5).

 

In a recent presentation, http://bit.ly/RGjlU, I talked about the common conditions for a 'ground of play'. Cubs cavorting on the savannah, children having fun in a playpark, adults interacting with the Web: each of these playgrounds have 1) loose but robust governance, 2) ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff, 3) treat failure, risk and mess as developmental necessities. I went on to cite Google's 20 percent rule – where its engineers are encourage to devote 20% of their work time to projects that don't follow company imperatives – as a rare example of a mainstream company trying to recreate those constitutive conditions of play for their employees. (I've also been delighted to dive into Fred Turner's archive, triggered by his contribution to this list, and find this brilliant essay on Google's embrace of Burning Man culture, which corroborates my point http://bit.ly/AvFUZ).

 

Does Google, or any of the 'netarchical capitalists' that Michel Bauwens talks about, in any way exhaust the organisational possibilities available? In no way. And can the engaging interactions that we have upon these 'grounds of play' be pointed towards socially progressive ends? Well, I'm looking at the Extraordinaries app on my iPhone at the moment (though I'd like to have more to do than tagging the Smithsonian's pics). And we know from people like Jane McGonigal (http://www.avantgame.com) how much gaming has the possibility to improve governance, foresight and collective wisdom.

 

We need to keep carefully attending to the design of our networks, protocols and interfaces – immersing ourselves in an "aesthetic craft" which Schiller and Marx would both have recognised as the authentic practice of autonomous, non-alienated labor. (And which playcraft Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman locates as the very conditions of citizenship http://bit.ly/nQTS). As Soderberg rephrases Schiller in his book 

"If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom". Both adherents and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that flow from the "beauty of the baud" and the play with source code in the computer underground.

Like Michel Bauwens, I see this playfully-driven moment of infrastructural and organisational creativity as an opportunity for civic enterprise on a number of fronts (and niches), rather than as one more version of the 'bigger cages, longer chains' tradition of left pessimism. Building good, generative playgrounds is noble labor indeed.

 

But for my neo-Marxist friends in this discussion, I respectfully suggest that the irrepressible creativity of the internet might have its roots in the way that digital networks articulate a long-repressed aspect of our species being. Femina et homo ludens, as a mainstream and self-conscious identity of developed-world citizens, may be exactly who the bearded one was waiting for.

The internet as factory and playground (1): the travails of 'fan labour'

This is the first contribution I've made to a fascinating group of thinkers and activists called the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC), whose organiser Trebor Scholz is organising a conference in New York in November on 'Digital Labor: the internet as factory and playground', which I hope to attend. It's a fertile space, generating much thought and insight, so I'm going to share my postings here. (Apologies in advance - it's an academic space, so Specialized Jargon Will Be Deployed Occasionally). 

THE TRAVAILS OF FAN LABOR*

In terms of a debate about whether users' interactivity with net platforms is a form of exploitation of labor (in the Marxist sense), I'm aware that I might be living a somewhat schizophrenic life. In one domain, I'm a working musician who is part of a UK "legacy" act from the 80's, Hue And Cry. Since our relaunch in late 2008, our strategy has been to use the enthusiasm of online fandom to reanimate our "brand", by using flexible and media-rich social networks (particularly Ning) to capture the passions raised both by our new music, our live performance, and other traditional outlets of media exposure (radio, TV, press).

 In these sites – particularly the Music Club- we actively encourage and facilitate all kinds of 'fan labor' (cultural note: our biggest hit was called "Labour of Love" in 1987, more inspired by Gramsci than Bateson). This can include: cam-phone audio-visual recording from gigs; giving fans the opportunity to suggest and vote on songs they'd like us to perform and record; allowing fans to upload their own covers of our songs. 

But this doesn't include a lot of emergent, spontaneous activity that comes from the users' own ability to generate sub-networks and forums of their own, within the Hue And Cry Music Club site. We don't charge subscription fees to the site (like many other bands), and we have a programme of regular updates of audio-visual content produced by my musical partner and I – again, freely streamed. 

There's much to say about this experience – which I hope to share at the NY conference in November. But in terms of kicking off this debate, the core point might be that our presumption has been that we're dealing with a radically counter-commercial audience and environment – one in which digital networked distribution of music has driven its price point to effectively zero, and in which that music has almost become a kind of 'community currency'. By that I mean a system of exchange whose value accumulation is fan enthusiasm and commitment, rather than straightforward monetary rent from IP-identified saleable objects. (Although as Spotify, Last.fm and other outfits show, a licensing system may be a possible recommodifier of music consuming habits, though with the pressure of 'free' keeping overall revenue much lower than the heydays of CD sales). 

So in terms of making a living, we have fallen upon the maxim "use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce" – ie use the ubiquity and tending-towards-free circulation of digital content to raise awareness about those real-world moments of spatio-temporal enclosure (the gig, the meet'n'greet, the music workshop) whose boundaries can be controlled, and thus commodified. (Our refinement on that is to create our own 'ubiquitous' commons of Hue And Cry music within the Music Club – 'reterritorialising', to no doubt misuse Deleuze, the deterritorialised flows of digital culture).

It's not that we don't try to sell recordings anymore – we do, and we are doing so, though the objects these recordings are attached to are way beyond the old CD, and are more lifestyle/luxury products with music inserted, an extension of our "brand" across non-musical physical objects. But our working presumption is that recorded music, because of digitisation, networks and their innovations, is always under a huge gravitational force dragging it towards free usage.

And just to be clear, I come at the question of what value is being realised by commercial platform owners by the free labor of users from a small-business perspective – as artists seeking some kind of income from our endeavours and enterprises. We are rights-holders in our own small company, who seek to use non-commercial, part-commercial (the usual social platforms) and fully-commercial (ie larger distributors and syndicators) networks to promote our music, both recorded and performed.

Commercially, I should be agnostic-ironic about what networks are best for that purpose. But civically, I'm a supporter of the 'innovation commons' of the Net a la Lessig, and would resist any attempt to tamper with the basic end-to-end architecture of the Web (ie, to create tiers of net access with protocols restricted, for whatever reason). 

I guess I have to stake out my petit-bourgeois, mixed-economy, social-democrat traders' identity at the beginning. And what I'm looking for from a conference/discussion on 'the internet and playground and factory' is a new political economy of the Net that can find a place for creative and sustainable cultural enterprise, within this complex landscape (as Yochai Benkler says in the Wealth of Networks) of market, state and 'sharing' economies. 

I feel that the answers may lie as much in welfare and social policy. That is, what kind of social provisions and support can be made for a 'general intellect' now active throughout society, as the Italian Marxists say? Does a four day week or a citizens' income more effectively answer our anxieties about our affective and cognitive 'lives' pouring into these networks, than a discourse about how our free labor benefits Google's bottom line?

*with concessions to the American linguistic imperium

Pat Kane's keynote at The Economist's 'Opportunity in Adversity' Conference, London, June 2

Welcome to all those who heard my presentation at the Economist's Opportunity in Adversity conference today, on 'The Play Ethic'. The slides are available below for watching and download. If you've any questions or further enquiries, or you'd like me to speak at your organisation about play, please contact me on any of the email or twitter links on the top right column of this site. 

best, pat kane

The Play Ethic: lessons from play in an adverse economic climate

View more Microsoft Word documents from theplayethic.

Pat Kane keynote at Media140: the challenge of Twitter to News Media

Update: two great precis of my presentation at the first Media 140 conference in London yesterday, from The Guardian and Journalism.co.uk. Media140 have also posted up a video too:

Pat Kane - Media140 Keynote - 20th May 2009 from media140 on Vimeo.

The challenge of "140" to News Media

View more presentations from theplayethic.

A Welfare System For Players (1): The Spirit of Informationalism

A blog about a "play ethic" can't always be about favourite bands, fun software and festive practices throughout the world. I wasn't directly inspired to write the Play Ethic book by cavorting rejuveniles in gaily-coloured clothes (though there's enough of that in the music business), but by a line from the Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells.

Castells asked: If the "work ethic" could be described (by Max Weber) as the "spirit of capitalism", what might the "spirit of informationalism" be? In the late 90's I thought I knew what "informationalism" was. It wasn't just a "knowledge economy": after all, the Roman Empire was a knowledge economy, from its sanitation strategies to its legal code. Informationalism meant a social order that was deeply shaped by computer networks – and was thus a very flexible, unpredictable and mobile society indeed.

It struck me that the answer to Castells question was that the spirit of informationalism was obviously a "play ethic". If the "work ethic" made industrial workers duteous, time-keeping, diligent and self-disciplined, a "play ethic" would just as effectively shape informational workers to fit their system. That is, it would make them resourceful, able to shift tasks and learn new skills, willing to deploy their imaginations to solve problems in their organisations.

As writers like Richard Sennett have been mordantly pointing out for years, those were the psychological habits demanded by the new capitalism – demands not just driven by computers and networks in themselves, of course, but by the new pressures of global competition that they enabled. In his view, these habits resulted in the very "corrosion of character" itself. A strong character, according to Sennett, was composed from those traditions and practices that people derived from apply themselves to their trade or occupation. The new capitalism literally tore those old occupational identities to shreds, and then expected people to compose and recompose themselves from the fragments.

Yet I always resisted the idea (also promoted by critics like Zygmunt Bauman) that such 'players' were just the bright-eyed, endlessly malleable jack-rabbits of super-capitalism. This scepticism almost certainly came from my experience as a musician. There's no shortage of lifestyle and career flexibility in that realm. But within and around your art, you were free to make critical statements about politics and society – statements that would surely not be encouraged in any usual market-facing organisation, where your smarts and adaptability tend to be harnessed to serve "world-class competitveness", first and foremost.

When I discovered hacker communities (primarily by way of Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic), I found some kindred spirits. Hackers were as joyfully committed as musicians to their symbolic craft (making code rather than music, though of course both are notation in some way). And they were even better at deriving an ethics and politics from their practice.

Why was I interested in the politics of such players? Partly because the "work ethic" has always implied its own politics: from Paul's biblical injunction in Thessalonians that "them who shall not work, shall not eat" all the way up to the welfare-for-work proposals of New Labour and New Democrat governments in the 90's. 

The "dignity of labour" didn't depend on what that job was, or to what degree it expressed the talents, aspirations or desires of the worker, but mostly on the fact that they were willing to submit themselves to work – something that proved their "character", in Sennett's sense. And as long as everyone else agreed to work under these conditions, you could presume a kind of solidarity-in-privation: together we're all alienated, or at least relatively disatissfied, with what we're doing with our waking lives.

There were two compensations for this lack of essential autonomy over your productive life. On one side there were wages-for-consumption – money to buy the weekend/holiday hedonism of leisure and lifestyle. On the other side, at least in Europe, there was a welfare state which promised to repair you if you broke under the strain of labour (health), skill and re-skill you for the relevant slots in the labour market (education), and ensure you warmth and shelter in any eventuality (public sector housing).

The story of how that political arrangement fell apart (partly because of all those wider and deeper changes that Castells gathers under the title of 'informationalism', partly due to internal tensions – between the contrary pulls of consumer hedonism and producer self-discipline, for example) would take me into another thousand words.

But what I've always wondered is whether a "play ethic" – if it ever became dominant in a society - could generate its own political arrangements, its own social compensations, to match those of the work ethic. What would a welfare state be like that could support (or in the old Marxist sense, "reproduce") the intrinsically flexible, necessarily imaginative, endlessly communicative lives and selves demanded by our current model of capitalism? And if that ever came to be, how transformed would capitalism be as a result?

Over the next few days, I'm going to explore some notions floating around my various networks at the moment that might make up a "A Welfare System for Players". Heaven knows, I'm no social policy expert! But as a member of the precarious class of players, I have a direct interest in what reforms could be implemented. All comments and forwardings, of course, entirely welcomed.

Hiding from the apocalypse (in the Great Pagoda of Funn): On Donald Fagen

I fear that if I start writing about Donald Fagen/Steely Dan here, I won't stop for days… But in order to extract this particular tune from my brain, I think I'll have to do some blog-therapy (otherwise known as 'the typing cure'). 

This song – which, just to compress the argument, is the most meticulous and moving post/pre-apocalypse pop song I've ever heard – is Fagen's The Great Pagoda of Funn (lyrics), from his recent Morph The Cat album. (And thanks to the neo-comm glories of current music culture, you can hear it streamed here on Spotify. Or you can buy it, if you're that way inclined. Go on! Play capitalism - it's a cool game!). 

I'm under no illusions about why I generally love Fagen's work. For one thing, if your own deep musical conditioning is split three ways between post-be-bop jazz, organic 70's rock'n'soul, and classic Brill Building songwriting, then Dan/Fagen brings them all together for you perfectly. (You also have to trust a guy who says "my idea of a great gig is four guys on stage in cheap suits blowing away with their backs to the audience".) For another, beginning with the name – Steely Dan was a large mechanical phallus in the William Burroughs novel Naked Lunch – Fagen (and his writing partner Walter Becker) give you the nod that they are going to be extremely literate and ambitious in their lyrics. 

And thirdly… well, I'm 45, and I'm pining for certain ultra-sophisticated experiences I once had in New York and Los Angeles in the 80's and 90's. And no-one does the ennui arising from East and West Coast big-city ultra-sophistication like Donald Fagen. Listening to that snarky, adenoidal whine, I am immediately returned to wise-guys, lounge-lizards and merciless conversationalists that I once knew, feared and sometimes loved, in streets called Melrose and Bleeker. 

But this song, The Great Pagoda of Funn, actually gets under my emotional plates (not an experience actually encouraged in the poised, sometimes ruthless world of Fagen's lyrics). It's best seen in the context of Fagen's solo albums over the last two decades, which are a beguiling trilogy. The Nightfly in 1982 was a dreamy, synth-jazz vision of his young adulthood (yet with some sharp satire – 'New Frontier' was about making out in your father's bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden). 1994's Kamakiriad was a sharper, funkier SF fantasy – the usual tangle of implacably mysterious women and penthouse-meets-pavement shenanigans, set in some future-topolis that sounds like it was designed by Al Gore (cars powered by hydroponics, where "the frame was out of Glasgow… the tech is Balinese"). 

Yet go forward 12 years to Morph the Cat, and the mood is much darker. The cover artwork tells the story. On the Nightfly, Fagen's having fun pretending to be a DJ at the foot of Mt. Belzoni. On Kamakiriad, he's a pouting video projection in his techno-car. But on Morph the Cat, he's sitting morosely in what I assume is his New York apartment, the light falling on him from outside the window, which he seems unwilling to look through. 

Yes, it's a post 9-11 record, very explicitly. And though many of the songs directly address the experience of living in the America of Homeland Security (state surveillance and coercion in "Mary Shut the Garden Door" and "Security Joan"; coping with a climate of fear in "Morph the Cat" and "The Night Belongs To Mona"), it's "The Great Pagoda of Funn" that's the artistic triumph for me.

Oh, it's a weary, weary song. It starts up with a compendium of Fagen's favourite musical moves – a boom-chick four-on-the-floor beat, with his usual Ellingtonian layerings of horns and chords – but the mood is very sombre, funereal. Over this stately procession comes Fagen's usual ironic squeak, but carried by a melody that's very close to the kind of elaborate construction you'd get from a Billy Strayhorn or Shirley Horn. We're deep in the shades of historic Manhattan here: Fagen's channelling the more elegant aspects of this city, as they sail through that apartment window. 

But even though "summer's over, there's a strange new music in the street". And Fagen isn't alone in this room: he's secreted there with a loved one. They're trying to do the John Donne thing, make that "one little roome/an everywhere" – because outside, in the world after the fall of the Twin Towers, all is disordered and alienated in their beloved city. The citizens of Gotham are going through the motions of normality, staring and grinning "to help maintain the state we're in". In Fagen and his lover's eyrie, they "make up their own storyline" – but it's a precarious project. The effort required to keep this "house of light" illuminated is enormous: one careless word can unravel their Decameron against the darkness.

And what happens when that happens? It's at this point you know you're listening to a master songwriter/arranger. The song soars into a pristine modulated doo-wop: they've failed, the flame's gone out, and they're now in the world of

poison skies
and severed heads
and pain and lies…

…of psycho-moms
and dying stars
and dirty bombs…

You can barely hear the semantics of this, so lovingly wrapped in harmony and sheen are the vocals: it's a desperate beauty, a hipster wrapping his taste and sophistication around the very worst, aware of how doomed to failure his efforts will be. The chorus completes on chords that (I'm sure) are deliberately trite, and on a line ("Let's build a world together/in the Great Pagoda of Funn") which neatly combines sheer sentiment, and painfully self-conscious wackiness. Fagan and his love are holding themselves together with fantasies and caresses, in their bemused, enfeebled (and enfabled) state, however many stories up in their tall, ultimately indefensible Manhattan tower. 

Around all this, of course, there is the usual Fagen-esque foliage of virtuosity - for some a vice, for me always a virtue. Soloists on guitar and trumpet get their chance to participate in the song's overall conversation, and their evident thoughtfulness and awareness of the themes they're playing to increases, for me, with every listen. 

Nothing can be solved in a pop song - but a pop song can open up the world, can at least help us to feel how important the problems are. There are a few artists who try to do that with their music (Costello, Waits, Cohen, Mitchell, Prince, Radiohead): they're the ones I return to, time after time, for sustenance in murky times. And Fagen sits on the top of the pile, like a dyspeptic, Pynchon-reading monarch. A play-ethicist supreme.  

"To play and to fight": what's half-right about El Sistema

This column in the Guardian today has jolted me into writing about the phenomenon of El Sistema, the Venezuelan initiative that uses the personal discipline and collective commitment of orchestra-playing to raise the ambitions of impoverished kids. Here's a summary of their approach taken from the website of the forthcoming documentary movie. It refers to the educational methods of El Sistema's founder, the deeply charismatic José Antonio Abreu:

According to [Abreu's] approach, musical perfection is not the first priority; instead, from the first day on, what’s important is being able to play together with others. The children are integrated into orchestras from the very beginning, and the older children pass their knowledge down to the younger ones. Abreu’s intention and philosophy is concealed behind this simple concept: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about togetherness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another. The purpose of the work is the integration of the children into a united social structure, in which each individual assumes responsibility and contributes to a commonly achieved result.

Charlotte Higgins' column is trying to say that the British system of youth orchestras could borrow from Abreu's communitarian idealism (indeed there's two initiatives abroad already, in Scotland and England). But I'm intrigued by some of the comments to Higgins' piece, which confirm some of my anxieties about the transferrabilty of El Sistema. 

I'm completely for the union of play and craft. But shouldn't we also validate those who make elaborate journeys into sound through pop music - who use, calibrate and master their synths, samplers, turntables and software? I wonder also whether El Sistema's slogan - tocar y luchar, to play and to fight - derives its particular edge from the passion of those in the impoverished South to fight for the right to claim ownership of the European classical tradition. (And whether it's this that ensures such adulation from the likes of TED, the developed North's elite at its most expansively inclusive, as Jaron Lanier has written). 

I don't doubt for a second the positive impact that such a journey into mastery (and self-mastery) has had on the hundreds of thousands of kids that have gone through Abreu's youth orchestras: this commentor on the Guardian article confirms how magical the experience is, deep in the heart of the barrios. And I support the initiative in the UK of stern musical modernists like my countryman, James Macmillan, to make the encounter with orchestral music as ubiquitous as possible in contemporary schools. 

I've also worked with too many jazz musicians in my life - some attendees of schools like Berklee and the Guild Hall, some just obsessive practicers and fingerers - who are entirely committed to their technique, and its progress. Artistic excellence I'm not opposed to. 

But I think the lesson to be drawn from El Sistema is that we should seek to build 'systems' of social action, that can extend the collective and individual joys of cultural mastery. I just think we should be open-eyed and eclectic about where we establish those systems. 

For example: Shouldn't the compulsive gamer from the wrong side of the tracks who might want to be a compulsive games-maker also be able to find a supportive environment like Abreu's orchestras? An environment based on respect for collaborators, adherence to excellence, the transmission of knowledge down the generations? And the same for the fashion designer, the chef, the poster-maker, the social-network builder... I've always been struck by the way that hackers and free software advocates evolved a "hacker ethic" - excellence-meets-mutual-support - around their constructions, which seems as 'classically orchestral' as Abreu's vision. 

In short, let's praise El Sistema for its tactics and philosophy, but not necessarily for its content - and particularly not the idea that its content implies the philosophy, imputing some kind of higher improving power to the European classical tradition. (And again, to be clear: one of my biggest buzzes in life is to listen to a live classical orchestra - I'm not being inversely snobbish here). Abreu has said: 

Originally art was made by a minority for a minority. Then it became art by a minority for the majority, and now we are at the beginning of a new era, where art is intended by the majority for the majority.

Bravo, maestro... as long as we are suitably flexible about what kinds of elaborated cultural practices count as "art". 

Shaken in the big warm fist of leisure: the extremes of Thorpe Park

I've been to Thorpe Park – the UK's third biggest thrill park - several times now with my various children. This time I decided to sit it all out, and devote my remaining funds to my two young thrill-seekers, who each got a FastPass and thus threw themselves upon every vertiginous spiral they could find, several times each. Thanks to judicious monitoring of food input, there was no chundering or heave-ho-ing as a result, and they left the park six hours later distinctly weary, but with whirlpools faintly visible in their eyes. 

What I like about Thorpe Park, as opposed to the perfume-scented, suburban totalitarianism of the DisneyVerse, is that it's mostly about the physical thrill. There are some desultory attempts at 'themeing', all on an American-Graffiti early-fifties shtick (god knows what that meant to the Grime-listening young masses that day). And there is, of course, the Saw ride – thrill-riding for a post Abu Ghraib world (of which more later). But generally, rides like Stealth, Nemesis: Inferno or Colossus are all about being held very tightly and securely, and then being thrown around violently at high-speed.

For someone interested in play as a phenomenon, it's this precise experience that gets you. These are children, young adults and adults reliving that experience of being thrown around by their parents – the swinging round, the sudden dropping down, yet tightly controlled by a mother's or father's arms (represented by the sheer engineered solidity of the harnesses, the unfailing safety routines of the red-shirted employees). 

What's interesting is that this isn't the elemental mammalian scene of play – parents watching at a distance while the cubs test themselves out – but something much more direct in terms of power and control. The tingle here is "don't drop me daddy". And the cast-iron, road-bridge-style enormity of the Thorpe Park rides gives you security that they won't fail you, even as they're corkscrewing you at 60 mph. 

This is a precisely calibrated art, as Brendan Walker from Aerial, a 'thrill engineer' who presented at the Cambridge conference (previous post) wittily demonstrated. Walker even presented a 'thrillological' equation and graph, showing how ride designers manage the sweet spot between risk and predictability. 

But it's the deep passivity of the experience that I suppose was making me melancholic in the Staines sunshine, as libidinous teenagers cartwheeled about me (yes, that might also have contributed to the gloom). 

It's not that vertigo and great leaps into space aren't part of the play experience. This was the insight of Roger Callois, the French Surrealist-fellow-traveller, in Man, Play and Games. His games of ilinx were

based on the pursuit of vertigo and consist of an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind. In all cases, it is a question of surrendering to a kind of spasm, seizure, or shock which destroys reality with sovereign brusqueness.

Yet compared to the street-running/parkour boys we saw doing their stuff at the South Bank in London a few weeks ago – measuring carefully (and not without some evident fear) their jumps from roofs to the wall of a walkway, with a 30 foot drop below – the ilinx of the Thorpe Park experience is scripted, almost bovine. Even with FastPass tickets round their wrists, enabling them to get four or five shots each at the scariest rides within the course of the day, my kids ended up in a state of mild ennui. Their last-minute pining for the cheap wall-climbing feature was equivalent to that Xmas day moment when the toy's ignored, but the packaging compels.

Well, go to a climbing park then, you might say, if you don't want to be spatially chucked around by the oppressively padded fist of themepark leisure. I have watched my youngest – a natural thrill-seeker – swing about 100 feet above me in Glasgow's X-Scape leisure park: she was securely harnessed, but still able to step gingerly through thin air. It got so bad to watch I had to bury  myself in half a movie while she was up there. But in terms of the government's advice that we should allow more physical risk in children's lives for their developmental benefit, I do feel like a good citizen when I see my precious youngest throw herself into tree-climbing and wall-walking – and don't over-fuss her about the inevitable injuries.

I didn't feel remotely like a good citizen when I agreed to queue up for about 90 minutes (no FastPass here yet) to get onto Thorpe Park's big summer draw – a ride based on the "Saw" series of horror movies. I'm tempramentally opposed to these movies – been hanging around with too many loving-kindness advocates these days – but was surrounded by one kid (14) who'd already seen it (it's an 18 certificate), and my daughter who is compelled, in a Grimm Fairy tales way, by anything gothic and creepy. So, we got in line, hoping that conversation and iPods would get us through the wait. 

  

I haven't been as discomfited by a leisure experience in years. Like all theme rides built on a franchised brand, the Saw ride aimed to materialise the screen experience. So we were slowly funnelled though a maze of chain-mail fences, topped with fake-but-convincing razor wire. We shuffled along our path like sports-wear-clad concentration camp victims, heading for the vast corrugated-iron storehouse that contained the ride. As we went along, we passed by seemingly random chunks of machinery – clamps, spikes, saws - sitting in stagnant brown pools of rust. "That's the stuff the evil puppet uses to torture his victims", said the older boy, sotto voce, even though my daughter was lost to Lady Ga-Ga. "Really, you don't wanna know." The musak in our ears was fragments of panicked American voices trying to get out of traps they seemed to have invited on themselves.

And over all this, screens showed images of Billy the Clown, the mode of communication for the movie's serial killer, Jigsaw, with the invitation: "let the games begin…" I've looked up the premise of the Saw franchise, and it seems to be part of a trend of movies entitled "torture porn" (I've seen the billboards on buses, and usually avert my eyes): many critics place them within the context of domestic terrorism, Abu Ghraib, the increased sense of daily extremisms generated by our Gulf Wars. Even in the queue, I began to realise Saw had a ludic premise. Jigsaw, a figure made murderous by his own losses and ailments, seeks to subject his victims to various self-mutiliating "games", all of them tied to some lifestyle or character defect deemed by Jigsaw to be in need of remedy. (And if they don't fix it, they die). 

I've mused before on how the dark-side of play – that "taking reality lightly" which allows for all kinds of possible actions, all realisations of the imagination – is startlingly visible in the Abu Ghraib photographs: the hapless Lynndie England and her cohorts, jovially making living piles out of supine and naked Iraqi prisoners. The ludic as servant to sadism was here too: as we shuffled towards the ride, Billy the Clown started to appear on a video loop, incanting his pestilential version of a play ethic (or perhaps more accurately, play homiletic). 

I was about to get grimly pessimistic about the ability of hyper-capitalist life to turn anything into a commodifiable experience - self-mutiliation, character reform, even the creative potential of games and play. I stopped when I realised I was in a queue almost entirely composed of teenagers: those constantly mutating monsters who, at the very least, have an alarmed relationship with the fleshy eruptions of their own bodies. You know, this may pre-date commercial society by quite a stretch...

I also recalled that only a few days earlier, I'd been listening to an In Our Time radio documentary about the Brothers Grimm – and how their original 'family tales' contained as much decapitation, dismemberment and grisly transformation as any torture-porn movie. Bruno Bettleheim once wrote of the "uses of enchantment": the way that these often gruesome, despairing fairy-tales gave children a symbolism for grappling with their own anxieties about being in the world. 

As I relentlessly and volubly deconstructed the whole experience leading up to the actual rollercoaster, for the benefit of a daughter getting visibly more freaked out, I was genuinely worried that the ride itself would be a trauma too far. Actually, for all of us, it was a moment of bathetic relief: one stagey animatronic of the nasty puppet, a few unexpected blasts of air and water (a la the old ghost train rides of my youth), and in the end an all-too-briefly-vertigious rise and fall in the comfy-tight cradle of our carts. 

And what did my wards think of it? Their responses have to be recorded precisely: "Totally scary… totally brilliant!!" Compared to the routine convolutions of the other rides, they'd been energised and made positively chirpy by the Saw experience. What came to my mind was Brian Sutton-Smith's latest thinking on the meaning and function of play, in the American Journal of Play:

Play begins as a mutation of real conflicts and functions thusly forever afterwards. Play was always intended to serve a healing function whether for child or adult, making it more worthwhile to defy the depressing and dangerous aspects of life.

As we gabbled away between us, walking out of this chintzy horror-fest, it was clear that we'd experienced exactly that form of play. We'd occupied our tight cradles of thrilldom, and defied about as much symbolic "depression and danger" as you could imagine. (Though there were indeed limits to those symbols - there was specific carnage churnng away in the minds of those who'd watched the movie). 

The only suitable response was to head for the ice-cream stand, and laugh about how shoogly the "scary" puppet was. And for me to quietly shake my head at this topic of mine, the sheer complexity and ubiquity of play, and how much of life it encompasses.

Taking Reality Lightly: the challenge of play to metrics of creativity

I had a deeply stimulating session with the academics at Cambridge University's CRASSH initiative the other day, discussing the fascinating topic of how much research in the arts, humanities and social sciences can really transfer over to more commercial, creative-industry areas. 

As someone who's tried to smuggle all kinds of high-theory into his pop-song lyrics for years now - even if only metaphorically (see paper in extended entry bellow) - I had quite a lot to say about this.

My thanks to Lee Wilson and James Leach, the organiser and chair of the event. The presentation below isn't exactly written according to the most disciplined scholarly standards, but I did avail myself of the university context and cavorted freely and happily in the fields of theory... So casual readers of play, be warned. (And don't worry: the Thorpe Park post is coming soon.)

Painting the kettle: more thoughts on play, protest and the G20

There was one report from the recent City of London protests against the G20 summit that really struck me. As the crowds brandished "Hang the Bankers" posters, shouted that "Nature doesn't do bailouts", and paraded their raggle-taggle Four Horsemen of the Eco-calypse, the financial workers decided to respond in kind:

Slogan of the day, accordingly, must be awarded to the sign reportedly glimpsed in a bank window: "While you are here protesting, we are repossessing your homes." We also liked the four cricket bats - a fitting choice - lined up by the door at the Bishopsgate restaurant L'Amina in a bid to deter any rough stuff, though it's just possible this was not meant as a joke.

An honourable mention, however, to the bankers spotted by the Associated Press waving tenners at the protesters from their upper windows - who could tire of that old joke? (Though you can tell we're in the midst of a credit crunch surely they used to be £50s?) The crowd, in response, shouted "Jump!" How festive.

How festive indeed. Even though the "kettling" of the crowd by the Met Police resulted in its inevitable frustrations and violence, reports like the above are trying to characterise the essentially "good-humoured nature" of the tension between protestors and their targets (as the man from the Financial Times, of all organs, was at pains to point out).

As my last post highlighted, it's a matter of principle for many of these protestors that their occupation of public space has a playful element. As Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her history of collective joy, Dancing In The Streets, this is a tradition stretching from medievality to modernity – the lords and ladies of misrule doing their turns in the crowd, tipping the conventions of the world upside down to make collective action feel even more transformative and charged. (Though carnival can also be a yearly or seasonal safety-valve, a ritualised letting-go of social frustration from below).

But I also liked the comments from Richard Seymour of Lenin's Tomb, scratching his head a little (from his hard-left position) at the point of it all:

I'm still not clear on what the strategy is behind these mini-spectacles. It's great to see thousands of people turn out to protest against capitalism, despite all the media hysteria and off-putting threats from the police. We need far bigger protests in the future, ideally coinciding with a general strike or something. But it seems as if the idea at the moment is to have a carnivalesque parade, wind up in one spot and get penned in only to have the police mess with you if you try to have a drink or some weed. I don't want to be a negative nelly, but that's not reclaiming the streets, it's getting owned by the cops.

In terms of anti-capitalist direct action (if that's what you're looking for), Seymour is surely right that the current European (and American) wave of factory occupations is way more effective than some diddy hurling a projectile through a Royal Bank of Scotland window.

But there's something about the conviviality and creativity of these protests (which the Climate Camp maintained honourably in Bishopgate, until being rather brutally swept away by the riot police) that I think is worth preserving and developing. I kept thinking of the iconic images of sixties protest – the hippie inserting a flower in the barrel of a gun. Or even more effectively, Abbie Hoffman (the Yippie) scattering money over the trading floor of the NY stock exchange, and watching them scramble for the notes.

Short of a state of sheer totalitarianism, there is a point where authorities are vulnerable to collective ridicule and derision. Remember the experience in the Velvet Revolution of Czecheslovakia, where (as Ivan Klima recalled) the appearance of satirical cartoons and slogans in the windows of houses and shop-fronts became completely ubiquitous, subtly infusing the streets of Prague with civic confidence.

If the tools of humour and wit are prominent in a social struggle, might change come more profoundly and elementally – the possibility of change appearing more everyday and accessible, if "reality is taken lightly" (the nutshell definition of play that I've been using for some years now)? The Italian thinker Paulo Virno has elaborated this in his recent book on wit and innovation: the linguistic explosions of humour constantly remind us that we can play around with the rules of social existence. (Which explains my obession with Bill Hicks, I guess – and why comedians can often be so scary-thrilling).

Compared to the testosteronal anger that often marks labour-movement militancy, the carnivaleers against capitalism are trying to reimagine the spaces and places where intransigent power often feels at its most settled and complacent: a nuclear power plant, the building of an airport runway, the tidy streets of a financial district.

If you look at those images of the Climate Camp, and its little micropolis of tents (and doubtless passionate discussions within them), you can see them using the "tools of conviviality" to change how we might think of public space. The City of London can be more than an orderly space for carbon-burning, money-circulating business as usual – but an opportunity to demonstrate a flavour of the cooperative lifestyle changes that might be required in order to stave off eco-catastrophe. 

I don't think that creative anarchism (or "expressive democracy") like this is in any way a leading edge of change. If anything, our clear and present eco-danger reinforces the need for national and international governance. But it's incredibly important that this grass-roots passion and commitment exists. As the Americans say, someone needs to "hold Obama's feet to the fire". 

And yes, the grand irony of all of this? That a few miles away, the Community-Organiser-in-Chief himself was gladhanding and cajoling a set of bristling, well-padded leaders into the minimum set of regulations and investments required to keep their capitalist (or now, Keynesian) show on the road. Did the Barry Obama who hung around with socialists and Chicago radicals as a community organiser twenty years ago cock an ear to the street protestors? While the Climate Campers try to seed the City, Obama and his family dig up the White House lawn to grow designer herbs for their chef. 

There are some strange parallelisms at work on the stage of world politics at the moment. And although I may be the man with the hammer who can only see nails to be bashed, the ethics of play does always seem to me to be hovering around the scene.

Alter-globalist, meet benign capitalist: the encompassing attractions of "creative play"

My journey back to Scotland had me furiously ripping articles out of today's Guardian, in a chain of play-ethical topics I just couldn't ignore. Forgive the cognitive leaps, they were irresistible...

Carnivals against banksterism

My first example is Katherine Ainger's op-ed on how the anticapitalist movement of ten years ago is gearing up for a comeback, timed to the coming G20 conference in London. It reminded me of some of my political aspirations in the Play Ethic book (which I'm re-reading with a macabre interest at the moment). I'd hoped that between the 'work ethic' espoused by orthodox, growth-oriented government and companies, and the 'protest ethic' coming from the streets and the South, a 'play ethic' could perhaps be a mediating argument - translating the idealism and utopianism of the latter into new institutions and policies for the former.

It didn't look like anything like that was happening in 2003-2004. But if the ethical and civic vigour of the social software movement in the UK and the US is anything to go by (with Obama's election, if not quite his government so far, the best example of their effectiveness), it looks like those connecting tissues are being formed now - tissues partly made up of the playing, gaming and enterprising nature of net-enabled activism. And not just technological networks, but societal networks too.

Ainger's piece also reminded me of my book's quotation of anarchist David Graeber, who I've mentioned in a recent post (scroll to bottom). Here's Ainger's relevant and fascinating words:

The solutions the "alter-global" networks have developed offer a way out that is based on whole systems thinking. Fundamental to this vision is an economy that meets the needs of everyone on a planet of finite resources.

Which is why the climate camp in the city, with its slogan "Because nature doesn't do bailouts", is one of the most interesting of all the movements coalescing in London next week. It's a potent mix of seasoned anti-globalisation activists who are skilled in creative direct action and a new generation that is energised and refreshingly undogmatic. 

The camp has taken a key component of the globalisation movement - the temporary autonomous zones of street parties and convergence centres liberated in cities during summit protests - to a new level, creating a transformational space which prefigures the world they want, featuring everything from wind turbines and composted waste to decentralised decision-making and creative play.

There's no doubt that 'reclaiming the streets', in a playful, carnivalesque and collaborative spirit, is a powerful experience - both for participants and the onlookers it's intended to challenge.¹ And if a play-ethical perspective isn't open to new forms of democratic creativity, it's isn't worth the invocation. As ever, one hopes that it's Ainger's idealism that characterises the protest. And that the usual marginals out for a bit of cathartic urban confrontation or destruction get reined in by her more "seasoned" activists. 

Doing well by playing well: Lego 

The other piece in today's Guardian that talks about play's power and potential is a lovingly written cover piece by Jon Henley on Lego - pegged to the information that the Danish company is doing especially well in the teeth of this recession, with its sales up 51% in the UK last year.

 

With the creative passions of the alter-globalisation protestors in mind, it's intriguing to read this account of this thoroughly Scandinavian company (who regularly top reputation indexes for corporations), and their seemingly universally beloved product. 

Ainger might talk about 'whole systems thinking' (this kind, I guess). The "Lego System of Play" was introduced in 1955, and Henley relates lots of kindly tales about the founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, compelling his son to repaint toy ducks because he'd put on only two layers than three, or citing the company slogan about quality control for children's toys Det beste er ikke for godt (Not even the best is good enough). And though it's true that Lego did catch some of the brand intoxication of the 90's - expanding into theme parks, movies, clothes, software, thinking they could be as sexy as Apple - they've since returned to their core business of making toys. 

At the moment, Lego's next new frontiers are fusing virtual and physical game-play ("imagine if kids were telling their playmates, 'Hey, guess what - if you clip a set of shoulder pads onto this guy, he gets three times as many strength points online!' That's the holy grail"), and moving into the world of board-games (Lego Ludo, anyone?). There doesn't seem to be much to object to a company whose aim is to make a toy that gives such a sense of imaginative mastery to children (and as Henley writes, quite a few obsessed adults).

Even if you go online to find any alter-globalisation dirt on the company, there seems to be very little. I found this extensive response to a parent's worry in the company's forum pages, about the extent to which Lego were using sweat-labour in China to make their toys (very little, it seems). And in a toy business conference on safety I spoke at last year, the company's head Jorgen Vig Knudstorp was clearly the poster-boy for an industry which had been badly fouling its own nest, with lax safety and labour-standard practices in the far East.

It's not much of a "full disclosure" to say that I've spoken at Lego conferences, collaborated with their Serious Play consultancy, have met their CEO a few times now, and generally approve of them and their works. But if we're also thinking of a playful critique of current capitalism, it is interesting to consider how much Lego, even as a capitalist multinational, is a product of a certain Scandinavian sensibility. One in which a commercial enterprise regards the pro-development, pro-community values of its products as being its crucial competitive advantage - with these values reinforced by the company's strong base in its place of origin. (Usmir Haque's recent lectures on Constructive Capitalism are relevant here). 

Yes, there are always questions to ask about any company who seeks to extract value from children (or their parents' wallets). Some of their lines still seem pretty badly gendered (there's slashing Bionicles for certain boys, and Belville horse farms for certain girls - though they have reestablished the unisex fire-stations of old. And Spongebob Squarepants' "Good Neighbours at Bikini Bottom" looks, frankly, covetable by children of all ages). 

But I'd like to know from the net-rades in the coming G20 Climate Camp whether they have a positive vision of any company that might fit their "alter-globalising" criteria. (Not to dismiss their critique of existing institutions - but it would be interesting to know). Would Lego fit the bill?

Update: From a few Google searches, I have a troubled answer. It seems the climate campers have indeed used "creative play" to create a "transformational space" - in Legoland, Windsor (see pic at the top, and video below). 

Originally I thought the protestors had constructed the whole thing. But having looked at it closely, Legoland has clearly already built a smoking nuclear power plant (with evident sponsorship from the not-very-well-behaved energy company E-On). The Climate Campers have climbed in wearing company shirts, attached a Lego-sized protest banner, and placed Lego-sized protestors on its polluting rim... 

Now, an activism that makes you broadly smile can't be entirely off the mark. If it makes Lego think harder about their environmental associations, it was definitely worthwhile. And an example of the necessary tensions that need to exist between Ainger's playful radicals, and even the most ethically-playful organisations. We live in inescapably interesting times...

 

NOTES

¹ And we shouldn't forget that they were having their effects. Some dates and places you'll never forget: 8.30am, Sept 11th, 2001, Glasgow. Buying my Financial Times and looking forward to reading its four-part series on "the anti-globalization" movement. "It is wide in its tactics and ambitions, violent and revolutionary on the edges, peaceful and reformist in the main. It rushes in often contradictory directions, anti-corporate and entrepreneurial, anarchistic and nostalgic, technophobe and futuristic, revolutionary and conservative all at the same time", wrote a clearly enamoured James Harding (now editor of The Times). And then, at 8.46am in New York, a screaming came across the sky...

The 'green work ethic'? A player's (slightly disgruntled) thoughts

As unemployment heads for 3 million in the UK, I've found a rash of newspaper features about the meaning of work - most of them citing the pop philosopher Alain De Botton's new book, The Pleasures And Sorrows of Work. The observation they share is how historically specific the idea of a 'work ethic' actually is – in which work is not just the means whereby one resources one's life, but also provides us with meaning and status. 

But I'm wondering whether this ethos is about to see a bit of a revival, in this new moment of crisis - and on whose terms it will revive.

In the Sunday Herald, DeBotton ties the work ethic to the European Enlightenment - and notes that the idea of the 'nobility of labour' emerged there at the same time as the idea of 'a marriage of love' (rather than of financial or procreative convenience):

We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human.

Peter Conrad in the Observer also cites the Greek disdain for work: 

The 12 labours of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labour-saving gadgets - not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.

Much to chew on here, including this: Advocates of play have to grapple with the elitist, even aristocratic overtones of many self-consciously 'playful' or 'leisured' cultures of the past. This has the logic of evolution behind it. Play thrives for complex mammals in zones where scarcity or danger is held well distant from daily life. And in terms of adult play, beyond its compulsiveness in youth, it's only been aristocracies and elites who have had (or commanded to themselves) the resources to enable that. The servant class is usually presumed.

But I've always questioned myself: do contemporary play advocates sometimes substitute automation and networks for slaves and homesteads? I was noticing this morning, while re-reading my Play Ethic book, that so much of its argument depends on an assumption that Westerners already live in an environment of technology-and-science-enabled plenitude. The target of much of my critique is against the Puritan (and Enlightenment) 'work ethic': after William Blake, I claim in the book that the work ethic is a 'mind-forg'd manacle' which ties us to hierarchy and conformity in overly disciplinary organisations. 

A 'play ethic' might allow us to think anew about our social order, if we presumed (as a player does) that our true 'human nature' loves self-expression, self-realisation and invention more than the dullness of routine. Applying a play ethic might help us to identify jobs, occupations and services that we don't really need to do, and imagine and forge new purposes and practices that better express our creative human nature. 

All this presumes a society of excess resources - where productive technology gives us enough material surplus to be able to make those choices. This is one of the oldest "modern" stories. For 150 years, one strand of the labour movement has argued that productivity gains should result in shorter working weeks for constant wages. This fulfills Marx's idea (and socialism's idea generally) that humans come into their own when they move beyond the 'realm of necessity'. And what did the Left imagine those workers would do with their 'realm of freedom'? Sometimes that's a horrific answer. I prefer the Adolf Loos quote: "The difference between myself and a Bolshevik is that I want to turn everyone into an aristocrat whereas he wants to turn everyone into a proletarian."

Yet are we coming to the end an era where we blithely assume we have, literally, enough resources to play with? Not just in terms of the inevitable contractions and expansions of capitalism, but in terms of the looming horizon of ecological crisis? 

The Next Journalism (2): the citizen as co-journalist, & the joy of reading on street corners

Yesterday I sat down to ingest a pile of recent analyses of the imminent 'end of the newspaper' (see list at the bottom of this post). As I said in my Monday post, apart from my night job, I'm an ex-editor and occasional journalist; and I wanted to take a day or two to get my head round the fate of my old business. It's been clarifying for me - hope it's useful for you.

Here's the core points:

1) How particular the old, 20th century business model was. Paul Starr's calm and comprehensive piece in the New Republic makes it clear that when a commercial newspaper provided a 'public good' - for example, accurate and investigative reportage on the doings of those with power and money, or foreign reporting, or detailed arts coverage - it could do so because it had a strong claim on the majority of classified ads in its locality. Because of this, newspapers couldn't be dominanted by one or a small group of advertisers, which allowed them the freedom to fund the best journalistic principles - for muck-raking, "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable". The coverprice was only ever one element in the financial mix that supported the journalistic enterprise. (Of course, newspapers could also be run by avaricious and ideologically-explicit moguls or corporation, salting away their high margins. But the papers' stranglehold on a certain kind of advertising revenue meant that the possbility of resourcing 'responsible journalism' was always there).

Nowadays the internet (as well as the rest of our exploding media-verse) is a much more powerful intermediary between advertisers and consumers than the old newspaper: the Web provides both more targeted marketing (Google), and extremely low-cost marketing (Craiglist). As the ad dollars leave the newspaper, its editorial latitude tightens.

As Clay's piece says, some newspapers had seen the writing on the wall for ages. Ten years ago I recall my own past papers in Scotland (the Herald) frantically setting up as many online classified ad-sites as they could, yet weirdly not plastering them with the paper's brand (eg, S1Jobs). Yet the digital tsunami is now sweeping away many of those who haven't managed to set up online intermediaries that could be as effective to their localities as Google, or E-Bay, or Craigslist. Add recession to this picture, and this explains the implosion of newspaper titles in the US and UK.

2) Company structure is still so important. Too many of these articles cite the Guardian Media Group as a possible model to follow - not just for their enthusiastic, long-term embrace of digital media, but also because of their status as a trust (the Scott Trust), which insulates them from shareholder-driven, quarterly-report-style performance pressures. Yet as we all know, the Guardian and Observer are loss-making operations, which get cross-subsidized from other GMG media properties like tv production, local radio and notably Auto-Trader, a long-standing 'intermediary' for buyers and sellers in the UK. (See this Guardian Media Group mogul's speech for how it all hangs together).

Certainly in the Scottish context which I know best, the large corporate owners who have recently taken over the major quality titles - Gannett and Thompson Press - are pushing for very high returns-on-investment, which has resulted in the usual reductions in staff, pagination and editorial reach of the product. (BTW, here's a suggestion for an online-savvy plan to rescue the quality Scottish titles). Yes, the internet has caused an irreversible upheaval in how people get and want their information. But it's difficult not to look at the persistent rapacity of commercial owners - who in the past, because of their advertising monopolies, enjoyed amazing profit margins of up to 30%, yet who hardly returned much of that as "R&D" for the future of journalism - as part of the cause of the current fragility of newspapers.

3) It's not clear how much people value news anymore. Paul Starr cites some interesting research into the impact of cable and satellite channels on news values. They seem to have caused a real polarisation - with some audiences rushing away from news altogether, into the arms of permanent entertainment; and some rushing towards the constant streams of dedicated news channels. As Starr puts it, we are increasingly dividing into "news-dropouts" and "news-junkies". What the professor laments in this scenario is the possible loss of the "general newspaper reader" - someone who buys their half-decent paper, reading (or at least noticing) some news about a world disaster or local corruption, as they make their way to the sports, lifestyle or jobs/property pages. With the death of the traditionally-balanced and inclusive paper, warns Starr, we get a potentially un-democratic gulf between the under-informed and the over-informed.

In response, Yochai Benkler (and supportively, Steven Johnson and Clay Shirky) point out that as old journalist institutions totter and fall, new ones are beginning to appear - ones that will be able to fulfill the "servicing of the public good" that rested on the largesse of the old ad-supported, locally-monopolistic city paper.

We should be conscious, says Benkler, that this is a shift from an industrial to a networked model of news production - from one where an enterprise dominates its market place making relatively stable revenues, to one which embraces "market and non-market, large scale and small, for profit and non-profit, organized and individual ways" of reporting news. A model which, by implication, brings in considerably less money overall. (Benkler is known for his big social theory which posits a third political economy of sharing, revealed by the internet, which we must now add to market and state economies)

Benkler has a list of "next-journalism" examples to watch for. Take what he calls "small-scale commercial media". These are net enteprises (currently mostly blogs) that have ascended the power-law curve of attention like Talking Points Memo, and use their slowly building online ad revenue to fund a small but intensely muck-raking and focussed journalistic staff. Is this journalism as it was - just as well-paid, with similar conditions and benefits? Probably not. But if you want to do what you'd regard (coming out of journalism school) as "proper journalism", this might be a new (if idealistic) haven.

Starr also calls out to philanthropists, asking them to put some of their civically-minded money into online investigative operations - Propublica being the obvious poster-child for this. I bet this gets some response on both sides of the pond. And it was fascinating to read recently that $5 billion of an endowment would ensure the perpetual running of the New York Times's newsroom, currently costing $200 milllion a year. (For newsrooms costing less, you could obviously scale it down). Isn't this an open-goal for our remaining tech-plutocrats? Will we see the new dot-com Hearsts fund their first serious paper in this way?

Another development Benkler urges us to note are the "new, volunteer-driven party presses" - like Daily Kos or Huffington Post on the American liberal left, and Town Hall and Drudge Report on the right. (The UK equivalents might be ConservativeHome, or Lenin's Tomb.) These sites will certainly dig up scandalous truffles on their ideological opponents - and cumulatively, that contrarian vigour will to some degree supplant what the political correspondants on newspapers used to do. Of course, this implies a net-era readership that is willing to actively sift through and assess all this flak, in order to get to the facts - rather than, as before, implicitly accepting the judiciousness of the political journalist.

The most fascinating signs of the future comes from what Benkler calls "newly effective nonprofits" - examples like the Sunlight Foundation, who use collaborative techniques to keep tabs on corruption and nest-feathering in American politics, using social-software tools to burrow through, and see patterns in, available public information. (The various projects coming out from MySociety in the UK are a parallel).

As Shirky has often asserted, this kind of 'many-eyes-solve-all-bugs' process might be, at least, a useful complement to the old Sunday Times 'Insight' ideal of investigative reporting - and perhaps, at best, a new model for collective vigilance over politicians and moguls. It makes me wonder whether there's a sweet spot here for newspaper operations that can hold their nerve in this crisis.  Could they design their investigations in an open-source, Wikipedian way, inviting mass participation in the process, and as a result showing advertisers that there can be online enthusiasm for this kind of editorial? At the very least, it strikes me that journalists need to be talking to code jockeys and hackers a lot more, whether as part of their newspaper's internal strategy or not. Maybe the current spates of layoffs will result in some interesting mid-morning coffee conversations...

Starr's nostalgia for the newspaper as 'microcosm of the world' may persist with the bigger titles - the Guardian's, New York Times's and Die Zeit's that people will turn to for synoptic and highly-intelligent overviews of the world. And Starr articulates a real anxiety about the health of our democracies - with the demise of local journalists, who will hold local power to account? But it seems clear that what's coming to replace that is going to be a sprawling, messy but fertile new eco-system - involving a mix of underemployed journalists, new media and a wider citizen participation in the composition of what we regard as news. (Unless journalists go over to the 'dark side' of PR - where wages and conditions may match what's left behind, but at what ethical cost?)

4) There might be a solution in device-meets-retail. But there's probably not much time left on that one. Shirky makes a great point about the difference between an iTunes for news (Walter Issacson's pitch) and an iTunes for music - which is that when people buy an Arcade Fire track (or hey! a Hue And Cry track!), they want to listen to it over and over again. It's unlikely people would do that for a news article - it's much more "fungible" than music. (And which makes the argument for e-books, by comparison, pretty strong).

The next journalism (1): a retro-futurist view from 1998

The most stimulating topic coming through my various feeds and streams in the last few weeks has been the 'future of journalism'. Some of my favourite thinkers on media and technology - Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, Yochai Benkler, Nick Carr, Jeff Jarvis and others - have been pitching into the debate, as the stories mount up of major newspaper enterprises thudding to the ground in the US and UK.

As someone who still writes occasionally for compressed-tree outfits, was once editorially involved in the commercial start-up of a (Scottish) national Sunday newspaper, and who's been surrounded by scruffy journalists since his student days, this subject gets me in the heart and the head. I care about journalism, no matter what medium it appears in - and I want to take a few days (and posts) to dwell on it, both personally and institutionally.

But as the economics of the business go up in flames, ignited by the twin-sparks of the internet and the recession, I wanted to begin by sharing a bit of personal retro-futurism. About 11 years ago, while columnising for the Herald newspaper, I was asked by the then managing editor Gus MacDonald to start up some "game-changing" pages within the Saturday paper. I came up with a think-tank called E2 (short for Second Enlightenment, very Scottish) and a kind of 'Talk of the Town' editorial called Scotgeist (yep).

After eight months of wild free-wheeling (where one executive said, "this is journalism for the 31st century, rather than the 21st"), I was poached to help start the Sunday Herald with Andrew Jaspan. But I'm proud of the legacy. And one project I particularly recall was our two broadsheet pages on "Digitality and the Newspaper", first published in June 8th, 1998. My initial desire was that I could show you the actual pages in crystal clarity from an online PDF - but my only access has been via a microfiche-reader (steampunks, contain yourselves), two b/w A3 photocopies, and some shaky iPhone camera shots as the copies lie on the floor of the Mitchell Library, in weak Glasgow sunlight:

The original text is in extended post below, and it's been a bit of a scream to go back and read my crystal-ball gazing into the future of newspapers.  But before I gloss that, let me explain what the right-hand side pictures are. Along with my graphics partner Roy Petrie, this was our smudgy attempt at imagining what a networked news-reading device for 2028 would be - we called it 'The Herald Slate'. I apologise in advance for the cheesy Scottish-speculative editorial on its cover (available below). But apart from the fact that its design anticipates some of the clunkier e-book readers (never mind the new Kindle) I'm fascinated by how much we got right in 1998, in terms of anticipating what needs the device would satisfy, and which what functionalities.

....The Nokia Communicator - a little clam-shell containing a mobile phone and an net-surfable mini PC - is rightly derided as little more than a gimmick by tech writers. But its principle is surely correct.

Modern information workers will not be tied to any one office, will move flexibly between home and work spaces, will require ever more comprehensive means of communication to organise their complex, busy lives. So they will increasingly want to bring the network with them - something popped into their handbag, briefcase or satchel, as useful as a wallet or an umbrella. Whoever brings together the elements of the PC, the Internet, the mobile phone, and the newspaper/database into one object will have created the Model T Ford of digital culture. The Apple Mac will not be the last great leap forward in computer innovation.

....In a world where connections can easily be made between individuals far distant in space and time, it will seem more and more perverse that the world can only be surfed from a fixed point - that is, trapped before an office or domestic PC, frozen into the typists' perch for hours on end.

The newspaper or magazine - in its portability and flexibility, its sheer physical satisfaction as a transmitter of information - will become one of the main design precedents for the new age of personal computers. For the new display technologies will allow people to handle computers like their daily paper, rather than be trapped before them like keyboard slaves. Our tablet or "Slate" is one design answer - a flexible screen, connected to a networked computer equipped with speech recognition, the screen's surface able to function as a touch type keyboard if necessary. But there might well be many other answers.

... In the First World, certainly, this means that our social spaces will be filled by a thick web of perpetually updated, invisibly transmitted information - a data-environment for which personalised tools will undoubtedly be developed. Again, portability and practically will be the competitive advantages - ones which the newspaper/magazine model already exemplifies.

... The prizes will go to those providers of products and services who provide reassurance and a sense of history: those who can make the new information era seem like (in McLuhan's words) an extension of man, rather than a replacement or modification of him. And nothing could seem more traditional than the network computer rendered as a newspaper, or a journal - or even more anciently, as a combination of personal oracle and parchment. In a sense, the more microscopically powerful our information technologies become, the more we should be able to spend our time designing tactile, practical ways to make them livable.

As I'm pasting and writing all this into the window of a blog template on a lap-top (and that's pretty continuous with 1998), I'm looking at my iPhone on the tabletop. Not only does it threaten to become the "Model T Ford" of my digital universe. But it also has a lovely app from the New York Times - which makes all its content available with beautiful clarity in my palm, with adjustable font and e-mail-to-a-friend option (mimimal social tools, but they'll surely get better).

I'll go into the wonderful business-modelling of the post-newspaper gurus above in the next few days. But I have to say that if there's ever been a slam-dunk product waiting to be launched, it's a tablet-sized version of the iPhone/iTouch (here's some fantasizing). Something which gives the ergonomic, haptic and tactile pleasure of an iPhone (as I imagined over a decade ago) but at a physical scale which rewards the reader of newspapers and magazines. There might even be some kind of income stream for established newspaper brands - who could start to think of themselves as more like super-functional apps to be purchased or subscribed-to, than fearful newsrooms who don't want to give too much away to the free commons.

Isn't there a beautiful brand synergy between the big newspapers and the Apple eco-system just waiting to be forged, by the right combination of iNews and iTablet? And can't you see telecoms retailers bundling such a device with the rental income-streams of other devices? Maybe newspapers should be talking to the telcos as well as Apple.

It's not always a good idea to dig up your prognostications. But I'm pretty happy with my late nineties' musings (though I think the future it anticipates is coming about a decade earlier than 2028). As the old dinosaurs of content capitalism thump into the swaps, it's fun to be a little creative mammal, scurrying for long-term survival.

James Harkin's 'Cyburbia': PK review for The Independent

Here's my unedited review of James Harkin's book Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That's Changing How we Live and Who we Are, printed in the Independent this morning. And here's a pull quote:

Harkin makes a convincing case that cybernetics - the study of how systems (mechanical or organic) hang together through flows of information – is the birth-discipline of the internet. But he constantly asks us to keep in mind its own founding moment: as a solution (devised by MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener) to help British guns shoot German bombers out of the sky in WWII, improving their accuracy by speeding up the input of enemy data to the gunners.
 
The great interest of Cyburbia, despite all its overly-familiar citations (Wiki-Google-YouTube-blahblah), is in Harkin's dogged pursuit of this abstract and etiolated methodology, as it has infiltrated all manner of events over the last seventy years.
 
What's particularly interesting is that cybernetics seems to inspire and way-lay in almost equal measure. Those who are gripped by it seem to fall into a visionary trance about the ability of information flows to make a better world, by keeping all its members "in the loop".