The Play Ethic

Play, Potentiality and the Constitution of the Net

Here's my draft paper of my presentation at the Digital Labor conference in New York, 14th November, 2009. Here's the fully footnoted and referenced version (MS Word file). And the Powerpoint presentation on the day is below. All comments very welcome.

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

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PLAY, POTENTIALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NET 

PAT KANE

[DRAFT version, presented at 'The Internet as Playground and Factory", 14 Nov 2007]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Internet as Playground and Factory (5): We refuse to die of boredom...

Enjoying responding to the mailing list around the forthcoming Digital Labor conference - apologies if it's overly-academic, but that's the kinda place it is..... here's my response to Andrew Ross's piece on Digital Labor  Andrew is author of No Collar and Nice Work If You Can Get It. 

Original mail post here

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Beautifully argued, as ever, from Andrew, and I can't respond to everything, but a few caveats:

ROSS: These violations of work standards occur in the sector of old media that is most clearly aligned with the neo-liberal ethos of the jackpot economy. It’s an ethos which demands that we are all participants in a game that rewards only a few, while the condition of entry into this high-stakes lottery is to leave your safety gear at the door; only the most spunky, agile, and dauntless will prevail, but often at high psychic cost–witness Susan Boyle’s recent return to the spotlight after a long bout of medication and institutionalization.

I'm scratching my head here at what you're defending: the unionized rights of tv workers to produce decades of passivity-inducing pabulum, and worse than that (as Brian Holmes has dubbed it), a cyber-marketing "Neilsenism" which locks the viewers into a sad loop of uneasy identification, leading to restless consumerism? Didn't Paddy Chayefsky nail all this in Network in the mid-seventies?

And from a play studies perspective, one has to immediately relativise and historicise your linking of this particular 'game' of culture to neo-liberalism. As Sutton-Smith reminds us in Ambiguity of Play, agonism - play-as-contestation - is an enduring modality of play, functionally deep in our evolved condition, alongside others to be sure. I doubt whether Simon Cowell's various spectacles are qualitatively different from other symbolic expenditures of power in other, certainly pre-modern eras. The point about social media, in or out of the clutches of parasitic corporates, is whether we can use it to tap into more expansive, enriching, sustaining games, simulations and rituals.

To my eyes, though these shows successfully commodify the 'interpassive' dimensions of the network society - phone/text votes, branded forums, cheap shows (the X-tra Factor) on multiple channels - they are also vigorously subverted by a fourth estate (amplified by social media) which is still doing its job. Witness the recent convulsions of both ITV and BBC in the UK about game-show rigging.

ROSS: Yet the labor infractions I have been describing are only visible because they take place against the heavily unionized backdrop of the entertainment industries. In the world of new media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the formula of overwork, underpayment, and sacrificial labor is entirely normative. The blurring of the lines between work and leisure, the widespread use of amateur or user input on the social web or in open source, and the systematic expropriation of Tiziana Terranova first described as “free labor” has prompted some commentators to ask whether the experience of digital environments should direct us to rethink entirely our basic understanding of labor and enterprise. [2] While skeptical, I am certainly open to such inquiries and look forward to any such discussion.

Do you have no perspective on the Italian autonomists' (and in recent times, Andre Gorz's) response to the spectre of free labor - the horizon of a 'guaranteed income' or 'social wage', which would recognise that we are cognitively and affectively producing in our generality? I don't know that this is necessarily such a utopian horizon, or so disconnected from policy processes. One of the arguments about the nature of creative work I'm hearing in the UK and Europe is that it may well demand a new conception of welfare/well-being support - what has been called (and I think precipitately rejected) by Rossiter and Lovink as 'flexicurity'. (for a rather watery version of how this might work in terms of state allowance see http://www.newdealofthemind.com/?page_id=1329). This is the commons-ization of cultural production as a consequence of open digital networks (and remember how it could have been different? Ted Nelson and his hypertext micropayment system?).

Never mind recompense for unionised tv workers - the whole field is de-monetizing (or at least re-monetising, but at a much lower level). And there's a bigger ecological horizon about the extent to which we need to move away from (heavily) material consumption - wherein the rush to (relatively) immaterial prosumption, production or interaction, as our psychic compensation for being Northern, late-modern 'flexible personalities', might be one kind of answer. I don't know that agonising over the labour conditions in making trash tv is the right zone in which to deploy one's critical energies.

ROSS: Subsequent ethnographic studies of knowledge and creative industry workplaces show that job gratification still comes at a heavy sacrificial cost–longer hours in pursuit of the satisfying finish, price discounts in return for aesthetic recognition, self-exploitation in response to the gift of autonomy, and dispensability in exchange for flexibility.

And for most creative workers, the alternative is...? A career in advertising, where a satisfying finish, aesthetic recognition, autonomy, and flexibility in the job are indeed handsomely rewarded - but towards the end of numbed and dumbed mentalities? You seem to have an angst for a pre-digital, almost Mad Men style world of cultural employment, where symbolic analysts did at best mediocre, at worse mendacious work, yet at least managed a serene martini in comfortable surroundings at the end of an 8-hour day. Are sectoral employment deals on residuals and recompense going to be enough, when (as you say further on) the dream of semiotically-active, mass-innovative citizenry has now come true, in all its copyright-busting fecundity? And further: Will all art and culture become folk-art and culture in a steady-state economy - and is the mass embrace of interactive tools an anticipation of this shift?

ROSS: for the business entrepreneur, the outcome is a virtually wage-free proposition. There are costs involved for bandwidth, hosting, and maintaining commercial platforms, but as far as the monetizable product goes, it is the users, or prosumers, as industry strategists call them, who create all the surplus value (which could be described as the difference between the value such free services offer to users and the value they create for business).

I'm one of those entrepreneurs, using (though not owning) one of those platforms, encouraging that kind of fan labor (http://hueandcry.ning.com). I can tell you our anxiety is that we have built a fan community upon a platform whose advertising-convertible interactions won't be substantial enough to maintain the functionality of its social tools (whether through its own bankruptcy, or a takeover leading to reduction of service). At the very least, Ning's ability to allow you to export your data-base as a file, and measure some degree of customer behaviour through Google Analytics, means that this small-trader has the possibility to start again if his platform fails. But there is no doubt that the free-culture expectations induced by net behaviour has shaped Ning till now - and its combination of power and low cost has given us (and I'll bet many others) the possibility to conduct our cultural commercial enterprise *without* a sell-out of our art to corporate interest, and with a direct relationship with people who want to give us money - for our performances, at least (if not to the same degree our music).

I would say a net-preneur has to have, at best, a tragic perspective on the permanence of the institutions and networks which sustain their enterprise. What I'd like to know is: if there are dimensions of the private banking system that are too big to fail, which of our commercial social networks might also fall under the same category? Or alternatively: what is the public infrastructural stake in robust open networks? Or: was Minitel really *that* silly?

ROSS: Technolibertarians who have consistently viewed cyberspace as a haven of free being are notoriously oblivious to the impact of the cut-price labor economy that is its default mode. The flourishing of self-publication and amateur content has been a clear threat to the livelihoods of professional creatives whose prices are driven down by, or who simply cannot compete with, the commercial mining of the online, discount alternatives to their services. Print journalism is only the most recent, well-publicized example of a profession trampled underfoot as advertisers and owners switch to online assets. Indeed, it’s ironic to see how media critics who are more accustomed to proclaiming that the “press is free only for those who own one” have lately been defending these bastions of information gatekeeping as stable sources of valued livelihoods.

As I said in previous post, I think there's a good ferment of thinking about how journalism as an ethical, professional practice is sustained in the digital meltdown of company and organisational models. Could be legislation to support new, with- or non-profit company structures; could be some new maleficent integration of device, software and e-commerce (wait to see the deals that the iTablet has cut with publishing houses). But in any case, and to repeat myself, it could be that journalism becomes (has already become?) one of the many operations of the 'General Intellect' in necessarily steady-state economies, in a sousveillant mode. Rossiter and Bauwens' separate calls for 'organised networks' might well be a template for what succeeds the big-city, ad-driven newsroom. But no Martinis in the wood-panelled bar at the end of the day, I would hazard.

We (the self-consciously creative/cognitive classes) will be poorer in the post-capitalist economy: however, we may well be more alive. What did Vaneigem say? "We refuse a world where the guarantee that we will not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom...We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'

This is a piece I wrote for the charity Working Families, as part of their 30th anniversary celebration, marked by the publication of Tomorrow's World, an anthology of perspectives on work-life balance. 

Most of the pieces are well worth reading (apart from a few politicians posturing), and I decided to stay within their paradigm of the tension between "work" and "life", partly to speak honestly about my own 20 year history of balancing productivity, play and parenting. But regular Play Ethic readers will see my familiar agendas surfacing at the end... As usual, all comments welcomed. 

Work, family and the dance towards a 'play ethic'

Pat Kane

I guess I won't be the only contributor to this volume who's writing this piece under the very same wobbly conditions of 'work-life balance' that is our chosen topic.

In my case, I'm getting to grips with this piece as the school holidays begin: I'm four days over what (I hope) was a soft deadline. My daughter's been getting out of school at 12.15pm the last couple of days (was that a surprise announcement? Yes!). So I've had a few frantic mornings trying to master the inbox of self-managed tasks that face the average cultural freelancer. At the very least, this lifestyle demands clarity and efficiency when you actually do sit down in front of your interface.

After years of good and bad experiences, I've realised that I'm happiest when I can devote my energies fully to either 'work' or 'life' – however unsatisfactory those terms are - with as little overlap between the two realms as possible. Meaning that when my daughter emerges from the school gates, or after-school club, all of my affections and attentions are hers. And the best way to ensure that psychic commitment is to ensure that the anxieties of one's project-driven life are actually - or if necessary, forcibly - abated.

The necessity of a calm and tranquil mind (and heart, if possible) in the face of one's children also comes from a somewhat bumpy personal road. Post our separation eight years ago, my ex-wife and I made a binding pact to ensure that our children never had any sense of lacking access to either parent. We split our fortnight of care equally, weaving between each others' nearby households, allowing each other evenings and alternate weekends to sustain friendships and relationships (in different cities – Glasgow and London). But we've come together to ensure that none of our children ever returned to an empty house.

Das Karneval, London, October 2009

Better out of your iPhone than in, I say...

Playing at Spies (for fun and profit)

...but the signs on the wall don't lie (ie, it's all handholding) Taken at Queen Street Lower Station, 29th October 2009

Ludocrats - a new Play Ethic podcast. First show: Ren Reynolds

Subscribe to Ludocrats at Feedburner or directly at the iTunes store

Listen to Ludocrats 1: Ren Reynolds

A new, hopefully fortnightly feature on The Play Ethic - a series of podcast conversations called "Ludocrats". 

Who's a ludocrat? Someone who's interested in the power and potential of play, as it operates in their lives and their projects - and who also believes that an awareness of play can shape the public realm for the better. Why the podcast? Well, I'm having these conversations anyway - so I thought I may as well record them, smartphone in hand, and share them with the world. 

Our first ludocrat is Ren Reynolds, otherwise known on Twitter as RenZephyr. Ren's day job is helping government get the best deals from private IT contractors. But his day-and-night job is thinking quite brilliantly about the philosophy, ethics and governance of computer and online games (usually through his think-tank, Virtual Policy Network, but also on the collective blog Terra Nova). Ren also advises national and international bodies about how the law and politics should relate to what goes on in virtual worlds - and how not to crush, whether through fear or ignorance, the emerging potential of these global, creative spaces. 

My thanks to Ren (and the clarity of his good Northern tones in the hubbub!). Here's some links that Ren mentions in his piece:

Thomas Mallaby, Against Exceptionalism and Games, Meaning and Bureaucracy

Key quote: "[games are] domains of contrived contingency, capable of generating emergent practices and interpretations.". 

Ren adds: "My argument with Malaby is that I think the definition is incomplete without that game acts are backed by a ludic intentionality. This I think is critical and is not necessarily entailed by his definition."B

Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory (Wikipedia entry)

Richard Bartle's Guardian piece on the triumph of the games generation

Bernard Suits definition of play (and Jesper Juul's summary of it in his round up of game theories)  ]

Raph Koster

30th anniversary this year (2009) of creation of MUD, first online multiplayer virtual world, by Richard Bartle

Jack Balkin - and paper quoted: Virtual Liberty: Freedom to Design and Freedom to Play in Virtual Worlds, 90 Va. L. Rev. 2043 (2004). 

Fable (video game)

Ian Bogost on distinction between code of game and code of its culture 

The Hooker Cheat in GFA - Ren's essay, Playing the 'Good' Game, discusses this. And more on the Cheat (google books).

Fallout 3

A tale in the desert (video game)

Eve Online "the most complex game ever created by humanity"

Dimitri Williams's longtitudinal study on gamers, turning to immediate friends and global news, and away from local news

More references to Ren's writings:

Reynolds R (2009), The Philosophy of Virtual Worlds, in Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, eds Harrigan, P. & Wardrip-Fruin, N. MIT Press 

Reynolds R (2008), Hands off MY avatar - Issues with claims of virtual property and identity in Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds eds Bethke E and Hoffman E,  BookSurge Publishing

Reynolds, R., (2007), ‘MMO’s as Practices’, in DIGRA 2007 Situated Play - conference proceedings (ed Baba, A.), University of Tokyo

...and more at http://www.renreynolds.com

The Power and Potential of Play: presentation to LTS 'Play and Active Learning' conference, Oct 2009

Hi to everyone who watched this presentation at the Learning Teaching Scotland's conference on 'Play and Active Learning', at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow, October 3rd 2009. If you'd like to contact me about anything in the presentation (download it here), please mail me from the link above, or comment on the page below.

Below the Powerpoint, there's a list of article and resources mentioned in or informing the presentation.

Pat Kane: The Power And Potential Of Play

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Links and resources for presentation:

The Play Ethic - book and research

Stuart Brown - Play - book and interview Great synthesis of research on neurophysiology of play - and a lifetime of practical wisdom on the topic

Scientific American cover piece on play - also useful roundup of current research. This New York Times Magazine cover piece casts some doubts about how much the neuroscience backs up a "play theology".

Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play - the greatest multidisciplinary work of play scholarship in the 20th century. And he's still refining the thesis - see this recent article on Play and the Emotions. 

Kevin Carroll with a corporate perspective on 'productive play' in The Red Rubber Ball at Work

America the Ludi-ful: Current TV's Jason Silva & Deep Fun's Bernie De Koven...play ethical

Some welcoming noises from America today. First, an email from Jason Silva, the hot young 'intellectual hedonist', futurist and key anchor of Al Gore's all-access cable channel, Current TV. We've been in correspondance for a wee while - and as you'll see on the video clip below, he's a fan of the Play Ethic:

And secondarily, one of my own play gurus, Deep Fun's Bernie DeKoven, has been disseminating some of my links across his networks, here and here. Add that to my presentation at the coming Digital Labor conference in New York, November 2009, and it looks like the ludic gospel will be heading westwards for the rest of the year. 

Review of Douglas Coupland's 'Generation A' in The Independent

Here's my review for the Independent (UK) paper of Douglas Coupland's new novel Generation A (the title comes from Kurt Vonnegut, objecting in 1994 to the depressive terminality of the concept of Generation X, Coupland's great fictional opener). 

I've reviewed Coupland before for the Indy, in the mid 90's. He's always been the most super-intelligent and hyper-modern of writers, but with a belief that the semiotic chaos we developed-worlders live in can still somehow make for a good-enough society, not just a frazzled and relativistic one. In Gen A, he looks at the coming culture of eco-limits that his compatriot Margaret Atwood scanned in Oryx and Crake (and recently with The Year of the Flood), and does perceive a way through - via our compulsion to tell stories to each other. Sounds simplistic, but he turns it into a real survival strategy.

I always turn towards novelists who try to grapple with the real historical forces of the present - Coupland always tries to do that, however successfully. This is (thankfully) a real success. Recommended.

GENERATION A

Douglas Coupland

(Heinemann, £16.99)

REVIEWED BY PAT KANE

The Independent, 25 September 2009

When a major writer gives you the title of your next novel for nothing, you store away the treasure. In a 1994 commencement address to students, Kurt Vonnegut railed at the media for giving Generation X a name that was "only two clicks from the very end of the alphabet". He then declared his audience "Generation A – as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago".

Douglas Coupland, who took Generation X from a cheesy punk band and turned it into a civilisational benchmark, has clearly waited for the right time to cite the wild-haired master. Generation A  anticipates a shabby, corporate-dominated, environmentally rickety world, where the bees have finally given up on us and buzzed off.

But Coupland deploys his talent for techno-whimsy and semiotic farce to create a delightful Decameron of a book. It's a crazy but happy tale, where the hopeful affinities of friendship, driven by the power of imagination, triumphs (just about) over big business and pervasive controllers of all kinds.

Coupland is still writing from familiar coordinates: those rudder-loose, over-informationalised X-ers have spawned their next generation. And to some degree, they're in their parents' image. Like Gen X, Gen A weave pop culture throught their conversations - Simpsons, World of Warcraft, Abercrombie and Fitch - with as much detailed reverence as old literary critics used to cite Shakespeare and the Bible. They scuttle just as atomistically around the iron stanchions of money and power as their parents did, making and breaking weak ties according to unpredictable pulses of desire and revulsion.

These 'last men and women', as Fukuyama called them, are at least charmingly drawn. Zack from the Midwest, naked on a webcam as he drives his agribusiness harvester, is the kind of all-seeing Priapus that we recognise from Irvine Welsh's fiction. Harj from SriLanka, polite and insistent in his call centre, regards the individualizing dreck of US lifestyle he's selling as ornately beautiful, but spiritually empty.

You have to credit Coupland with consistency. Book by book, as the mass confusions of the new millennium rumble on, he's doing a proper 19th-century novelists' job - building characters that try to persist and cohere, in the best and the worst of times. And with true vocation, his ambition is to capture the totality of a society, to hear the collective plainsong through the static.

Right after Generation X, Coupland was onto the resurgence of religion as a social anchor in Life After God. He's a bit late to the party of eco- and bio-crisis (fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood started that with Oryx and Crake). Now he's here, Coupland crunchily evokes a near-future of shabby limits, intrusive regulators and consumerist disenchantment.

But Coupland always leavens his paranoia with optimism. These representatives of Generation A are doing their dorky, geeky best to raise their brand-strewn minds to the level of the global crisis. One New Zealand girl's hobby is to take photos of an "earth sandwich": her and a pal use their phones' GPS to position themselves on the top and bottom of the planet, daintily pressing a slice of bread to the exact spot.

The bio-scientific McGuffin that Coupland uses to link these six Gen-A'ers to the disappearance of the bees – and their return – just about passes SF muster. It's more of a pretext to allow him to fill half the book with some hilarious and provoking modern fables. In these Coupland captures, with some poignancy, a coming truth about our post-consumerist age of eco-limits. It might well be that sitting around and telling stories to each other, on or offline, is one of the least costly options available to us. 

Generation A takes our pressing realities lightly. But in this real return to form, Coupland's playfulness is rich, educative and even consoling: we might well think, and feel, our way out of this corner.

The Play Ethic in late 2009: my interview with John Williams of 'Creative Maverick'

I like to hammer out requests from authors and bloggers as to 'what is the Play Ethic exactly?' - the quicker you do them, the more you find out about yourself... Trainer and consultant John Williams at Creative Maverick is writing a book for Pearson called 'Screw Work, Let's Play', and I was delighted to do an e-mail interview with him today. For anyone wanting a quick overview of where I am intellectually, emotionally, politically and professionally with The Play Ethic, this should be useful.  

Interview with John Williams, Creative Maverick, 14th September 2009

I like to ask interviewees the dinner party question “What do you do?” (It’s a very worker-oriented question but I’m interested to see the creative ways players find to answer it)

I sing, I make songs; I write reviews, commentary, and theory; I parent, love, and (as the footballers say) try to keep my engine going. 

What is the play ethic?

The play ethic is what comes after the obsolescence of the work ethic. The work ethic is an ideology or belief-system which asserts that any job has dignity and worth, despite how alienated it makes you feel or how disjunct it is from your desires and aspirations, because society recognises this submission to the job as the basis of social order. The play ethic is an alternative belief-system, which asserts that in an age of mass higher education, continuing advances in personal and social autonomy, and ubiquitous digital networks (and their associated devices), we have a surplus of human potential and energy, which will not be satisfied by the old workplace routines of duty and submission. The identity of a 'player' - optimistic, willing to try and experiment, open to participating with peers in a multitude of projects - fits this new landscape, this new social order, much better. But we need to forge a convincing 'play ethic', particularly for organisations and government, which will help them to  change their structures (or make way for new ones) to accommodate the expanding constituency of networked players.

What’s the state of play 5 years on from the publication of your book? How is your mission going?

I feel that my project has contributed its small part to a much wider legitimation of the power and potential of play in mainstream British and American society, particularly in organisational studies, education, social policy and even advertising (I did a lot early consultation with advertisers!). I look at initiatives like the UK government's nine-figure commitment to encouraging play in schools and early development, and I see a lot of the research I was adducing about the cognitive and civic benefits of keeping play at the centre of children's lives being quoted. I know that there are a few initiatives - like The School of Life and the The School of Everything - which were directly inspired by my writing and advocacy. And the continuing invites to speak at events from Sydney to New York, from primary educators to Nokia and Lego, tell me that I have carved out a reasonable expertise, and am having a reasonable impact, on a wider variety of sectors. 

Several of the players I have been interviewing and studying come from a background in the music industry (Tim Smit of the Eden Project, Derek Sivers of CDBaby). What does the world of pop & rock music in particular have to offer to the play ethic?

Making rock and pop regularly gives you an unalienated experience of expressing your passions through technique and technology, in collaboration with other people - which is the definition, it would seem to me, of a play ethic! The trendy management term 'ad-hocracy' was tailor-made for the music business: there, people demand enough time and space to experiment, try things out, follow their noses. And they will construct the situations, however provisional or fragile or flaky, that enable them to get the result they have an investment in. All of life is a 'gig' for a musician - an event where you perform with and before others - and I think that this prepares you for a life of self-starting, flexible working and enterpreneurship. We're all players in the most profound sense - courting possibility, living with its openness, not fearing it. 

If you could get one message through to the worker - someone feeling trapped by the work ethic - what would you say?

Going back to musicians, I would say that you have to accept that there's a price you pay for living a profoundly playful life - which is that there is less stability in some of the more recognised features of an adult existence, but more stability in others. Clearly, if you're chained to a mortgage/big-car/foreign-holidays/high-consumption lifestyle, then you need a constancy of income - which usually only comes from the kind of occupational commitment (one company, one building, one practice) that most players are unwilling to make. If you can downshift some aspects of your life, you can "up-shift" many others - for example, pouring your energies into a practice or project that makes you feel more alive and purposeful than you've ever been; finding more looseness in your life into which can enter new relationships, the opportunity to reinforce old ones. I've come to believe that the players' life is what you could call 'post-consumerist', or participative - and in an age where we might well be looking at ecological limits on consumption, a play ethic might be one of our main hopes for building a sense of positive identity about ourselves, when the status items lose their status.

Social Media has moved on since you wrote the book and is becoming an even more powerful force for change in both business and society. How do you see it supporting the play ethic now? 

When I was completing the Play Ethic in 2003, one could see the new eco-system of networks and participation growing - mostly in cutting-edge hi-tech areas like open source and free software. But the expansion of that into everyday life is extremely encouraging to me. It's almost as if tens of millions of people are voting with their attention spans, when they engage with everything from Twitter to Facebook to You Tube to whatever blogging platform they have. They're asserting their joy in mutual communication, in tailoring their public identities to exactly the specifications they want (and also opening that identity out to commentary by others), right in the heart of networked capitalism - those 'homing from work' behaviours which so infuriate the key-stroke counters of management and business. Organisations should be (and a few are) responding positively to this mass desire for people to enthusiastically build structures and networks around themselves - tapping into this energy in order to make productive life more satisfying, and its products and services more meaningful to both producers and consumers. But it's usually rendered by business leaders as just "playing around". A shame, but that will incrementally change. 

What does the recent financial meltdown mean to both the work ethic and play ethic?

I think the 'ethical' part of the play ethic is about placing the idea of creativity, activity and collaboration - rather than being programmed, being defined by consumption, taking orders - at the centre of a society. I do think this means a shift of energies and commitment from a society with a certain model of growth, to one with a different model of growth - where it's a growth in happiness, or the richness of one's interactions, or the satisfaction in one's labours and projects, that becomes our collective target for the future. I think the coming age of fiscal and financial austerity - the hangover from our days of credit-fuelled consumerism - could provide the necessary conditions for that growth-model to move from the margins to the centre of policy, politics and daily life. We won't have the money to solve our problems and assuage our existential angsts - we'll have to innovate, act and collaborate to fill those holes. I hope the idea of a 'play ethic' is useful in that scenario.

I’m interested in the internal shift a person needs to make to move from worker to player – beliefs to question, habits to transform. What do you think is the biggest part of this?

I'm very interested in that too! The more I deep-dive into the psychology and neurology of play, the more I think that one of the main tasks for the play ethic is to engage in an argument about human nature. So much of the story of play for advanced mammals like us is that it's necessary to keep us adaptive - Brian Sutton-Smith calls play 'adaptive potentiation', the testing-out and prototyping of behaviours and possibilities, so that we can endlessly refine and improve our response to everyday challenges and opportunities. And I think that modern people, living in societies that have many resources to support our actions, can actually bring play as a rehearsal for real life, and real life itself, a lot closer together. But yes, there needs to be an internal shift to match all the external shifts that are inviting us to a playful life. I think we have to try and listen to this deeply-constituted inner dynamic of play in our selves - and I think we can become profoundly deaf to that. I'm certainly interested in meditation, whether contemplative or as a result of some active practise, as a way of getting 'above yourself', so you can see the patterns of life that you're trapped in. I have to say personally, that my life with my children - not just playing with them as they grow-up, but also in terms of the miracle of their autonomy, the glory of watching their gradual self-empowerment - was also crucial to deepening my sense of myself as a player. That's not available for everyone, but it was essential for me.

How does play sit with hard work in your own working life and in the lives of the other players you have met? Can play be hard work?

I like to use the terms of the philosopher and theologian James Carse, when he talked about finite and infinite games. "Hard work", committed labour through a field of activity heading towards a determinate goal, is what Carse would call the 'finite game' - a series of tight victories over necessity and urgency. In my own life, I compare it to the singing practice I have to do every day as a musician - a kind of exacting, pains-taking self-development, a struggle to improve technique and control. But I do that in the service of Carse's 'infinite game' - the game not oriented to victory, but to extending and enriching the game itself, to seeing new horizons and new rules through playing the game itself. If I stay on top of my technique, I will maintain the possibiity of having those transcendant gigs where my voice, my self and the whole room merges - or where something genuinely new and unprecedented pops out of my mouth. But I have voluntarily chosen this 'hard-work', this finite game, because it serves the 'infinite game' of expression and exploration. You can see it as the circle of hard work within the bigger circle of the horizon of play. And incidentally, to reverse those two - to put infinity at the heart of the finite, or to see victory as something to be endlessly toiled for, the intoxication of the 'winner' as worthwhile in itself, is to me (and Carse) a kind of hell on earth. 

Players, it seems to me, will naturally tread on other people’s beliefs and taboos. I’m sure you must have met some controversy and disapproval in your own work. How do you respond to it?

Most of the controversy comes from people who have invested so much in the work ethic, and have suffered the psychic injuries that result from living a heteronomous (not autonomous) life, that you literally pain them when you express or display a players' sensibility or preferences. I understand that rage and annoyance - and often my response is to try and point to long-term social, technological and cultural trends which show that a life of purpose and productivity doesn't have to be lived in a state of grim determination to triumph, or acceptance of one's conformity. One of the things I tried to do in the book was to point out what I thought the complement to play was, in a healthy society. What happens when an exuberant player fails, falls, gets exhausted or broken, runs out of ideas, hits a crisis of health (mental or physical)? So I've been attempting to say that 'care' is what should complement 'play' in the ideal society - not the 'work-leisure trap', or the 'work-life balance', but the 'play-care continuum'. If we grow into our identities as players, we should also value the care that's required when our playful enterprises do not go as planned. And this is real 'care', involving the open-ended use of time and space, not just repairing people to be chucked back into a labour-market which has caused the damage in the first place. One way to assuage the rage of a 'worker' is to say that we need collective regulation to increase these spaces of care - eg, four day weeks, a robust parental and sabbatical culture, a revitalised public provision of housing and facilities - to enable properly the players' lifestyle. That is, everybody should get the benefits - not just jumped-up creative freelancers!

I want to follow your lead and help reclaim the label “Player” as a positive one. From your experience of adopting the word, what do you think are our chances?

I think we have a good chance, John - but I think it has to be founded on a deep and broad understanding of what we mean by play. We already have a discourse about players which is, in my view, narrow and agonistic - the big City "plays" and "players" swinging their dicks in the halls of Capital, the "playas" hustling for supremacy in the ghetto, never mind the empire of sports spectaculars coursing through our mass media. Play isn't just about competition for victory - far, far from it. If we keep people attentive to the dynamic, plural nature of play in our species-being, the aim to reclaim 'player' as a positive term might be worth trying for.

What’s next for you and the play ethic project?

My aim for the next few years is to come to a deeper synthesis of my researches into, and experiences of, play - whether through writing, consulting or just living. It feels like a lifetime interest has opened up for me around this topic - and to walk my talk, I expect to be surprised by what it turfs up next for me!

Play and Transhumanism - article for H+ Magazine

Been waiting for this one... the new Autumn edition of H+, or Humanity Plus, magazine is out (available in PDF , digital reader and good old fashioned paper formats. 

It's edited by the legendary R.U. Sirius, founder of Mondo 2000 and long-standing Californian futurist. H+ is devoted to a transhumanist perspective on life and society (a great overview on Wikipedia here on transhumanism). Essentially they're human-enhancement-friendly, on a whole range of fronts: cognitive, physical, cybernetic, sexual, health, etc. 

I did a long interview with R.U. about five years ago, just before the Play Ethic book came out. A few months ago, he contacted me to write a piece for H+ on the relationship between my understanding of play, and the transhumanist agenda - and I surprised myself with the results (in short, I'm not as radical as I might have expected). The final text is below (but if you want the full design experience, click on the links above). As ever, keen to hear your responses.

PLAY AND TRANSHUMANISM

by Pat Kane

H+ MAGAZINE, AUTUMN 2009

Watch children, or adults, at play. And by "play" I mean the real thing - experimental, messy, reality-shifting and explorative. Not the routinized pseudo-work we call "leisure" or "recreation". 

For kids, their play-world might easily imbue them with strange transformative powers, or equally enchant and animate the objects that surround them.For adults - say a bunch of Google engineers bashing and drilling away on the flats at Burning Man - the point of their play is to simulate, as tech historian Fred Turner says, a "utopia of relationships and technology". 

In either case, when they are at and in play, humans old and young naturally hypothesize about testing the boundaries of human capacities and faculties. The great guru of play theory, Brian Sutton-Smith, describes play's role in human evolution as that of "adaptive potentiation". 

By that he means play as the mimicking, mocking or fantasizing about our situations of survival, within zones of time and space that open up in our daily life. In this way, play helps us to improve our ability to respond to the challenges of living. It's our reherarsal hour for real risks and opportunities.

This is why such a flaky, mutable behaviour and phenomenon as play has persisted in the human condition. As complex social organisms living with others who are just as complex as us, we've needed the imaginative and hypothetical space it opens up in our daily lives, to cope with the strategies, feints and demands of human sociability. We "potentiate" or die.  

So play is our evolved and natural capacity to test limits, suspend conditions of reality, imagine our way out of tight situations. But how does this sit with the transhumanist agenda? Doesn't transhumanism take, as a point of principle, that our evolved nature itself is permanently up for being played with and amended, its limits made malleable and even transcendable? 

There is at least a positive and negative spin available here. Positively, transhumanist ambition could represent the next level of play's evolutionary development within our human condition. Whatever we have done with our fantasies, our flickering simulations, our imaginatively suffused games, we will be able to do with the raw bio-material of humanity. We then enter into the world of Scottish SF writer Iain Banks, and his space-operas describing the civilisational challenges of The Culture. This is, how to live well and ethically in a profoundly post-scarcity society, where we have the ability to "play God" with each others' biology and materality, as a matter of convivial living, and not just upon or over others.

But there's a prior presumption that ethical behaviour will kick in here. The negative spin is that transhumanism might well actually unleash play from its useful psychological netherworld in our species being – that is, as risk and experiment that doesn't have too much direct consequence, something that keeps the channels of human responsiveness from getting too rusty or ossified, from succumbing to their inherent limits. 

The fear could be that if we make our bodies, our intentions and their extensions illimitable, and thus fully expressive of the "phantasmagoria" of play – Sutton-Smith's descriptions of the transgressions and horrors that he often observes in the coping play of children - then we could be in real trouble. 

Play, as it functions in our socio-biology, has to be a-moral/non-moral. That's the underground and liminal job it has do - keeping our "potentiation" open, infusing the constraints of human living with indefatigable optimism and possibility. What beauties - but also what monsters - may be made manifest, with our play-drive connected to the transforming technologies of transhumanism? Is Pandora's Box, in truth, a toy chest filled with Ray Kurzweil's nano-, bio- and robo-technologies?

I wrote a book in 2004 with the pointed title of The Play Ethic. The title was partly aimed at addressing the fact that the sheer playfulness of our coming society – our ability to 'take reality lightly' in so many domains – compels us to think about ethics at the most basic level. How we decide to act humanely in a field of exponentially growing human possibility was, to me, the most urgent of issues – and is an obvious crossover with much transhumanist thought. 

Yet as the Italian Marxist Paulo Virno says, "there is no objective investigation of human nature that does not carry with it, like a clandestine traveller, at least the trace of a theory of political institutions". The Puritan work ethic presumes a human nature happiest with duty, routine, and social conformism – a useful credo for industrial capitalism. A protean 'play ethic' could easily presume a human nature happiest when improvising, being flexible and responsive, exercising imagination: an equally useful narrative, as we know, for informational capitalism. 

Both ethics have their supporting cast in the mind sciences. The work ethic is currently undergoing a new intellectual revival, in the age of Obama and his "economy built on rock than sand", and is bolstered by the new Chicago school of behavioural economics – which claims to identify the new "Homer (Simpson) Economicus" in all of us, and argues for a new paternalism to steer (or "nudge") us towards healthy social and economic outcomes. 

But a play ethic also has its grounding in neuro-research which emphasizes the plasticity of the brain, the deeply-founded creativity that generates our consciousness in the first place. Across the op-eds, blogs and book review pages, those who want to found their "theory of political institutions" in the next wave of Third-Culture science headlines will always have their opportunities. 

Yet transhumanism, it seems to me, almost transcends these familiar political uses of evolved human nature - in the sense that it asks us to squarely face our increasing ability to transform that very nature itself, intentionally and by design. And if play operates as dynamically and unpredictably in our unamended nature as I suggest, we are in a moment where we will have to begin to imagine what kinds of "politics" or "ethics" are possible, when play's energies are given the most powerful of chariots to drive.

The debate in the late nineties between the German philosophers Peter Sloterdijk and Jurgen Habermas – Sloterdijk a partial enthusiast for transhumanism, Habermas a resolute opponent – generated much heat, but much light too. And it begins to hint at exactly what a "play ethic for transhumanism" might be. In his essay, the "Operable Man", Sloterdijk suggests the kind of living-well-together that a profoundly (and materially) playful society might generate:

Biotechnologies and nootechnologies nurture by their very nature a subject that is refined, cooperative, and prone to playing with itself. This subject shapes itself through intercourse with complex texts and hypercomplex contexts. Domination must advance towards its very end, because in its rawness it makes itself impossible. In the inter-intelligently condensed net-world, masters and despoilers have hardly any long-term chances of success left, while cooperators, promoters, and enrichers fit into more numerous and more adequate slots. 

There may be something a little lost in the translation… but the idea that the conditions of transhumanity may lead to subjects that are "refined, cooperative, and prone to playing with themselves" at least splits the difference between the polarities on offer. 

Richard Sennett in his recent book The Craftsman talks of two Greek myths that dramatise our anxiety about technology. It's ether Pandora and her box, unleashing all manner of unstable horrors; or the club-footed Hephaestus, whose diligent labour and craft built the palaces of the Gods. 

But what of Proteus, Prometheus or Bacchus – those shape-shifters, fire-bringers and lovers of sensual conviviality? Is there no place for the energetic, mutable, sociable player in transhumanity? No hope for a livable zone that can assuage the fear that transforming technology generates anarchy, and thus demands order? 

Sloterdijk may be an optimist. But optimism – a deep species-based optimism - fuels the play that lurks in all of our breasts. Whatever transhumanists seek to transform in human nature, they would do well to respect the innate transformativity of play itself. 

Meso-blogging: or, posting between the poles of micro- and macro-blogging

I brought this conundrum to a recent conversation with the estimable JP Rangaswami, and after we parted it became clearer to me. We know about blogging; we know about micro-blogging. But is it time to start thinking about macro-blogging, and after that, meso-blogging?

Macro-blogging for me is a grand(iose) term for how my own blogging, done through a standard publishing platform (Typepad), has evolved. It's become a place where my research, journalism and presentations are "publicly" stored - all the better to enhance my intellectual brand. But it's also become a place where I can "essay", travel forth, into subjects, in a way that satisfies my own editorial sensibility (like now), rather than that of a client, publication or broadcaster. As JP said, micro-blogging - which for both of us meaning sending the same message to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc - "takes the static out of one's blog writing". 

For us both, our blog - or macro-blog - has now become a very Enlightenment-style space, a place for extended publication (and for me, sometimes, textual restitution - saving newspaper pieces from the tender mercies of subeditors). I'm planning my entry into the world of ideas podcasting at the moment: and I would certainly put my 50-minute audio or video discussions in the "macro" category, in more senses than just byte-size. I want people to dwell with this material, to have it operate as the stimulating background to their commute, or housecleaning, or Sunday glass of wine, in the way that traditional media does. 

So like slow food, you could call the content of macro-blogging slow media: the long-read, the long-listen or the long-watch, dwelling with a voice or approach over some duration. I note from JP's blog that Cory Doctorow is putting his new book Makers on his blog, chapter by chapter - which adds "Dickensian" to "Enlightenment" as descriptors for the macro-blogging space. Many authors are using their blogs in this way - as a kind of open rumination and development of their books (Kevin Kelly's The Technium is the most magnificent example of this I know). 

If I want to be aphoristic, or be immediately useful with a one link-reference (which can, of course, be to my macro-blog entry), I go to the land of the Fat Wee Bird. The Moses of the Net, John Perry Barlow, recently described Twitter as a place where "genius last ten minutes... Twitter is casting pearls before mayflies".  Funny, but only half-true: tweet a link from a macro-level blog, and it can operate as a gear changer, moving people down a few speeds from their skittery cybernetic loop. (I attempted a map of some of these subtleties at my keynote at the Media 140 conference in London a few months ago, relating real-time media to old-time media). 

But if we posit the poles of micro- and macro-blogging, there must perforce be many gradations in between - what we could call "meso-blogging". 140 characters is indeed valuable for the concision it imposes, and the haiku-like or newspaper-headling-like editing it compels. It's also a kind of input that, with the right device, can easily happen in the tiniest interstices of a busy day. But what happens when what you have to say spills over that long-lost telco engineer's arbitrary text limit? When you have a small story to tell, or a sequence of sound or movement to bear witness to? How do we gently ease out from the limits of 140, yet still retain our spontaneity, our responsiveness to our environment, our thrill of instant publishing? 

Meso-blogging already has its obvious phenomena - eg, rich media clips generated from a mobile device by the man or woman on their feet (Qik, Audioboo). I've used Audioboo on the iPhone reasonably successfully in the past - but one or two deeply frustrating failed uploads, as the content squeezes and sputters its way through a toiling 3G connection, make me think that the bandwidth isn't really ubiquitous enough for that, nor are the devices (or their apps) properly configured. 

Posterous is clearly intended to fill the meso-blogging gap. It simplifies its input mechanism to the basics (an e-mail - manageable by almost every device these days, static or mobile), but it receives every form and size of file, from photos to MP3's to documents to video. (I've never used Tumblr, though JP made a strong recommendation). Posterous also narrows the gap between creation, utility and publicity by giving all audio its immediate iTunes link - a very seductive integration (though I'll be using Typepad-via-Feedburner). 

One can easily imagine another modality of blogging coming through this kind of platform - one that's more experience-and-affect based. Capturing epiphanies at arts, sporting events or family gatherings; enabling a richer record of holiday, tourism, expeditions; presenting rich, personal and multimedia records of practice or craft. All of this is scattered across various services at the moment, from YouTube to Flickr to SlideShare - which of course the diligent macro-blogger harvests and embeds to garnish her deep-dives into topics and interests (see my Micheal Jackson essay with the opening You Tube clip, and for a supreme master at macro-blogging, Momus's Click Opera). But the idea of creating a service which presents all modes of capturing experience and thought, easily and tidily, seems right on the button to me. As I say: not quite macro, not quite micro, but meso-blogging. 

Yet I still think we're pretty far from a web interface that could adequately express this 'dream-catcher' element of meso-blogging. I've had a great experience over the last 18 months with the Ning social network platform, and particularly with its ability to let you quickly shift blocks of rich media around its front page. In terms of interaction design, mainstream blog platforms need to think more expansively - breaking out of the essentially "one-column-with-fringes" format, and re-conceiving the norm as three, maybe four contiguous columns of rich multimedia content. (I know that there are open-source content-management systems like Joomla and Drupal that could do this for me - but as the King of Pop didn't exactly once sing, "I'm a user, not a coder").

The diverse input that's coming from our smartphones, netbooks and (probably) tablets needs a more polyphonic (or perhaps better, polymorphic) kind of display mechanism on the web. Facebook's endless tinkerings with its interface - still far from right for me - are evidence of how much pressure is building up from the tsunami of user-generated content that's coming from the populace now.

As our devices become smarter and more mobile, and bathe in an ever-richer soup of Hertzian frequencies, we will each have the chance to become 'mini media-moguls' - writers, dialogists, broadcasters, retailers, folksonomists, community and friendship network managers. I'm also wondering whether meso-blogging might also interleave with the long, tottering fall of mainstream journalism. Is the hyper-local, super-specialised media that Jeff Jarvis keeps imagining actually awaiting richer blog platforms and smarter devices - where localities narrate themselves across a range of media streams, and journalists modularise and editorialise these flows (seeking, as ever, the elusive ad dollar...difficult to do with socialist infrastructure, I know...)

Meso-blogging might sound like setting up your laptop over the starters at a Japanese noodle bar...But there's certainly (ahem) a soup of possibilities between where we are with Twitter, and what dignified middle-aged men like me and JP are starting to do textually with their Wordpresses and Typepads. These might not be exactly the polarities you want to measure this field by. But please, choose your own. And when you do, meso-blog me about it.

Jock 'em if they can't take a fuck: review of Momus's The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands

Here's a long-ish essay I just did for the Scottish Review of Books this week, on the conceptual artist, songwriter, blog-mandarin and accursed Bataillean communist Momus (aka Nick Currie). The SRB's text isn't online - but thankfully, I am. (Note: Nick has mailed me with corrections, which I have integrated. And there's a post on Click Opera with some reasonable comments). 

I've been an admirer (and sometimes commissioner) of Nick's writing and thinking for many years. But he's the most untrammelled of players, and thus often intensely troubling, as his two new (and two first) books, The Book of Jokes and The Book of Scotlands - the pegs for this piece - both exemplify. A real ethical wrestle with an uncompromising talent, below. 

MOMUS

The Book of Scotlands (Sternberg Press, Berlin)

The Book of Jokes (Dalkey Archive, Illinois)

Reviewed by Pat Kane for The Scottish Review of Books, Sunday Aug 18th, 2009

If you don't know about Momus, aka Scottish musician, writer and conceptualist Nick Currie, then you need to know about him: for me, he's one of the most challengingly brilliant Scottish minds of the last twenty years.

On the trivial, arts-page level,his CV is impressive. Momus was an early star on Creation Records, home of Oasis, and part of the lineage of the 'Sound of Young Scotland'. His career then became exotic and exilic: Currie has both been a pop writer for Kahimi Karie in Tokyo, a living installation in the Whitney Biennial and a disembodied voice in the Venice Biennale, and a wandering conceptualist in New York and Paris. He has been sued by corporations and artists for his controversial albums of "folktronica", which combine an Eno-like intelligence about music with a lyrical extremism that splits the difference between Leonard Cohen and the Marquis De Sade. Momus has written for both Wired and the New York Times (though recently replaced there by, of all people, Bono). 

He also maintains an extraordinary life-blog called Click Opera. This combines a honest account of the fragility and openness of the modern bohemian life (he currently just about survives in Berlin), with cultural commentary on design, technology, music and politics that rivals any of the greats – Greil Marcus, Paul Morley, Lester Bangs. In short, he's worthy of a Scottish review.

But like Alasdair Gray and the masochistic and misogynist fantasies that suffuse his writing, or Ian Hamilton Finlay and his veneration of the murderous Saint-Just in Little Sparta, you have to grapple with the dark, all-too-playful side of Momus's creativity. His first completed two books are out simultaneously, and I'm glad that the second exists to qualify and contextualise the first.

Abstract for play paper at 'Digital Labor' conference, NYC, 12-14th Nov, 2009

First time I've ever done an abstract for an academic paper - and for the exciting and forthcoming 'Digital Labor: Internet as Playground and Factory' conference at the New School in New York, yet. 

Believe me, when deep in the mechanicals of popular music-making, this is my idea of playful fun:

Taking reality lightly: play and the constitution of the Net 

Pat Kane

In scholarly debates about the nature of our interactions on socio-technical networks, play is often invoked as a descriptor or modifier of existing behaviour. But rarely is there any deeper connection made between the multi-disciplinary zone of contemporary play scholarship – particularly in biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity theory – and the constitutive forces that maintain (despite various enclosures) the openness and creativity of the internet society. 

This paper will explore these connections, and claim that the age of informational plenitude has disclosed a socio-biological 'ground of play', or generic capacities of potentiation, that might explain the enduring resilience and inventiveness of cyberculture. 

The presentation will also draw on the author's direct and daily experience as a web enterpreneur in music and journalism. This will illustrate how the constitutively playful structure of the Net, and its ambiguous and open social dynamics, shapes the development of network enterprises at least as crucially as commercial or governmental forces. 

Two cheers for universality: Pat Kane's review of Rushkoff's Life Incorporated

My (none-too-impressed) review of Douglas Rushkoff's Life Incorporated: How The World Became a Corporation and How To Take It Back appeared on Friday 31st July, in The Independent newspaper. Here's the unedited version (only slightly different) 

It takes a global village to enrich our local lives

Life Inc, Douglas Rushkoff

Reviewed by Pat Kane

The Independent, 31 July 2009

When faced with windy laments of civilisational decline, you can always rely on British popular culture to worm its antic way into your brain. Throughout this overstated thesis in praise of bottom-up community against top-down capitalism, I kept seeing and hearing the frightening visages of the BBC's The League of Gentlemen: "We're local people… doing local things".

Unfair, I know. But Rushkoff is so infuriatingly magisterial in this book that you reach, with some desperation, for the nearest court jester.

It's the right moment to read long-view analyses of our commercialised society. Ruskoff's Life Incorporated is as fluent and well-researched as any of his books – but its target is too large, and too badly constructed, to help us much. In a heaving rush of anti-modern sentiment, Rushkoff bundles together vast and complex trends over the last half-millenium – political, economic, scientific and cultural -  into a monolith called 'corporatism'.

For him, corporatism isn't just a form of commercial enterprise cooked up by 15th century merchants and monarchs to control and standardise the varied social markets of the early Middle Ages – an account he takes, accurately, from the great French historical masters Aries and Braudel. It's also a kind of permanent civilisational war – abstraction, universalism and individualism, versus the face-to-face, the local and the communitarian.

But like a CGI-generated Transformer robot with a faulty program, the monster's pieces just don't hold together. For one thing, not all universalised standards – a brand which Rushkoff sizzles into many hides, from the first central currencies to the latest "flashy" social network – are as implicitly "fascist" as he suggests.

How about that brutal reduction of our oral traditions known as the printed book? A format so standardised, both physically and in terms of the settled national languages it regularly deploys, that it can convey the new verities of the village to audiences all round the world. Rushkoff deprecates the cultivation of interiority and subjective reflection in almost every realm except the one in which he plys his own trade.

So oppressive is the shadow of this corporate behemoth in Rushkoff's mind that the actual historical forces of resistance to capitalism and imperialism (more boring but more accurate terminologies) end up being downgraded or ignored. The Renaissance and Enlightenment is nailed for being an epistemological hand-maiden to domination by distant, centralising powers – its "clean, universal truths [keeping] people's attention and eyes upward, and off one another": a disconnection that allows David Hume to support slavery and democrats to ignore the rights of women.

But what about Romanticism? With its celebration of the organic and the rooted, its passionate feminists and early ecologists, casting off the "mind-forg'd manacles" of industrial society – and fuelled by all that nasty subjectivism?

Rushkoff's attitude to the labour movement as a corrective to the march of corporations is also, as he might say, kinda weird. He often bundles unions in with other "community-minded" groups, whose hands-on, in-the-streets sociability is swamped and subverted by a miasma of capitalist ruses – everything from housing regulations to self-help courses, never mind the obvious traps of easy credit and ad-driven consumerism.

But again, is this really a battle between local, face-to-face virtue versus universal, faceless vice? Rushkoff undercuts his own argument when he supports industry-wide collective bargaining on wages and conditions. Yes, you could see it as part of the Sabbath tradition of holy days of collective rest – but it's also a continuing modern struggle conducted (at its best) in a supra-local way.

That Rushkoff is a sinner in repentance has been evident from his last few books. He turned spy on the marketing industry that initially feted him in Coercion, urged companies to eschew consultants in Get Back In The Box, even attempted to create his own open-source version of Judaism in Nothing Sacred. But there's something particularly galling about a one-time evangelist of 'cyberia' and 'playing the future' (titles of his earlier books) who decides to wizz all over the current vibrancy of social media.

Yes, it's a battleground between the copyright enclosures of the corporations, and the frankly neo-communist behaviours of users, hackers and convivials – but there is a battle of values going on. One which shapes Californian internet platforms so much that they find themselves being used as tools for Iranian insurgents – their locality becoming our world responsibility, through (guess what?) the robustly universal protocols of the internet. In Rushkoff's Tolkien-esque, Mordor-like vision of corporatism, that simply shouldn't have been permitted.

At the beginning and the end of this book, Rushkoff evokes what's wrong and what's right about the community values of his own upstate New York neighbourhood. With children and wife in tow, the writer has been clearly moved to celebrate the immediate, the friendly, and the love-driven, from the place where he lives and nurtures. No argument there. But such bucolia can't justify Rushkoff's gross misreading of the societal structures of the 21st century. It's an ultimately disempowering account, which makes you feel (wrongly) like a deluded dupe for even trying to engage with current realities.

To paraphrase our friends from Royston Vaisey, "universal people doing universal things" (meaning not just corporate elites, but daily cosmopolitans) have to be part of the progressive picture too.

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

Still in the game? Ageing, retirement and play

This is an essay for the op-ed section of the Sunday Herald, the paper I helped found, on the UK government's proposed changes to the laws on retirement. Not a topic I usually grapple with - but it took me into fascinating areas: boomer culture, personal biography, questions about where the agents of change for a post-work society might actually come from. All thoughts and comments welcomed. (The unedited piece is below - here's the article on the SHerald site). 

STILL IN THE GAME? AGEING, RETIREMENT AND PLAY

Pat Kane, Sunday Herald (unedited version), 20 July 2009

The crisis of retirement? As far as this 45-year old is concerned – last of the Boomers, first of the Gen X'ers - the biggest crisis is even having to think about it.

For someone whose cultural inbox is mostly stuffed with cool tech, Obamarama and the latest mind-body innovations, it's more than a bit bracing to have to consider Stannah stairlifts, Micheal Parkinson and the prevention of Alzheimers.

Governments on these islands are currently making their latest great policy heaves to deal with 'the demographic time-bomb' - the basic fact of our ever-increasing longevity. And it's easy to be stunned by all the horror scenarios: a future where nations of oldies are either worked till they drop, or endlessly crumble away in eldercare, whose cost will run into hundreds of billions.

But unless we directly address our underlying feelings and assumptions about retirement – and I will presume this "we" includes a generous radius on either side of my four-score-and-five - we won't even see these thorny facts clearly. And before I even do that myself, I have to contend with the contrary nature of the two retirement stories I know best: Mum and Dad Kane.

The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Some rough but subsequently edited speaking notes for my presentation to the Creative Clusters conference - organised by the Huddersfield Media Centre, and taking place at the stunningly beautiful Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Delighted to meet you all - be great to hear any responses in comments below, or directly.

The Play Ethic and Creative Place-Making: Doing What Comes Naturally?

Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

I'm fascinated by the premise of your event: what makes for a good 'creative cluster', that is, a place, space or locality where cultural industries can flourish?

Certainly as a working musician in Glasgow I know the enabling conditions of a good 'creative scene': a vibrant gig circuit, a density of art schools, music courses and big universities, a non-panicked official attitude to a culture of hedonism, many urban zones for convivality, public display...

But another enabling condition is a sense of trust and reciprocation between musicians: favours and collborations are as much a 'social' currency as money. I think we can look at 'clusters' of hackers/new media, fashion and design, and say the same thing. 

So there are some growing rules and disciplines that guide what makes a creative scene, which can then be the foundation of creative industry - Richard Florida's three t's - talent, technology and tolerance - are to me still pretty good advice.

But I've become interested in the deeper roots of creativity. What justifications can we find in human nature - in psychology, biology and anthropology - for a visionary creative industry policy?

I picked this up from your own Creative Cluster conference website: "businesses that trade in creative goods and services often have a profile that is hard for government and investors to recognise, and their needs can be very different from those that trade in physical goods"

Creative-industry policies may indeed seem to the outsider to be lacking in obvious outcomes, or involve a degree of imprecision or process, or seem to willfully flout a certain disciplined use of space, time and resources.

It's my contention that play's role in human development is a new foundation for much creative policy. In our justifications of creative sector policies to the wider world of financiers and politicians, we need at some point to stake a claim about human nature. That we at least might be able to start thinking of ourselves as not just homo et femina economicus, but also (and perhaps increasingly) homo et femina ludens.

Protean Activism: The Constitutive Politics of Play (for "Tactical Play" conference)

Here are the working notes to my recent presentation to the 'Tactical Play' conference at Birkbeck College, London - rough, but may be of interest. 

Protean Activism: The Constitutive Politics of Play

Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

1. Much recent research in the mind-and-body sciences are beginning to
re-evaluate play as our principle of 'adaptive potentiation' - the life-long experimentalism and simulation needed to survive and flourish in the complex worlds of human society.

2. If play is now understood to found and ground an intrinsically 'transformative'
 human nature, what consequences does this have for our politics, organizations, networks and even ethics? 

3. If can relinquish what C.
Wright Mills called the 'labour metaphysic' in the face of our
constitutively protean natures, what kind of enterprises and projects can now begin to be conceived and pursued?

We can answer this by looking at two quite different socio-biological determinants of a 'ground of play'…

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.