The Play Ethic

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

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

Interview with Pat Kane for Viewpoint magazine, November 2012

Why do you think play is gaining currency right now?

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

What’s your philosophy on play?

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

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

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

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

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

How has digital gaming influenced play?

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

How do you see the role of play evolving?

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pat Kane, The Guardian, 14 Nov 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotsman essay: Knights of the working world need our support

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

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

 

Knights of the working world need our support

Pat Kane

Published in The Scotsman on Wednesday 28 September 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting Play/Game Right and The Consequences For Comms: PK at Creative Social, 5/10/11

My presentation to Creative Social's Fanboy series, at an event titled "Mania of the Geek"  My prez's title is "Getting Play/Game Right and The Consequences for Comms" All comments welcome. 

GETTING PLAY/GAME RIGHT AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR COMMS

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The Play Ethic and the Financial Crisis - my chapter in "Learning From the Global Financial Crisis: Creatively, Reliably, Sustainably" (Stanford)

Delighted to recieve the final draft of an essay I contributed to a forthcoming Stanford University Press volume, Learning from the Global Financial Crisis: Creatively, Reliably and Sustainably, edited by Paul Shrivastava and Matt Statler.

 You can download the final PDF here - and my original, unedited text is below the fold. 

Pat Kane review of "Free Ride" by Robert Levine

This is my review (for the Independent) of the Robert Levine book Free Ride: How The Internet Destroyed The Culture Business, And How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. The book is fascinating, detailed and dogged in its defence of intellectual copyright in the digital age - but I think it lacks a wider societal context, to explain the take up of the "open web" and its distinctive attitude to the sharing (rather than the purchasing) of cultural artefacts. 

I didn't really explore this angle in the review, but I am brewing up a proper Socratic exchange with the Scottish writer Ewan Morrison, whose clarion-call to prevent "The End of Books" at this years Edinburgh International Books Festival caused quite a fuss. Ewan is embracing and endorsing Levine's argument completely - and we've begun our detailed exchange on this Facebook post. But watch this space, because I think we'll be announcing a more engaged, and public, discussion about this soon. Meantime, all comments welcomed below. 

How To Sink The Pirates of The Web 

Unedited Review of Robert Levine's Free Ride in The Independent, 2 September, 2011 (edited version)

By Pat Kane

 

My eldest geek daughter and I were helpless with laughter the other night, rapt at our screens before another webcast discovery. 

We had found a brilliant “mash-up”: footage of the Sesame Street character Cookie Monster, lip-synching precisely to the Tom Waits song “God’s Away On Business”. (Really, get thee to a search engine now: your day will be beatified). Such a diverting, obsessional labour of love is what we celebrate about the internet - amateur energies coursing through democratic tools, coming to mass attention from nowhere. 

But what might the respective intellectual-property lawyers from Henson Enterprises, or Waits’s record label Anti, have to say about such a wisp of joy? According to Robert Levine, they should be fully empowered to discourage such irreverent bricolage, with all manner of punitions and legal threats. 

In this comprehensive but relentless book, Levine (an ex-editor of US music business bible Billboard) wants to make us realise that the internet’s facilitation of “free culture” - or a world of piracy to some - has to come to an end. His case is that technology companies have built their businesses - whether web-based and advertiser-driven, or integrated device companies like Apple - on the basis of unpriced (or underpriced) content, made possible by the open (or more precisely, under-controlled) web. Levine has made an very authoritative attempt to substantiate the content creators’ fightback. 

But his angst for the good old days of the music business (roughly the early to mid 90’s, before those subversive, system-wielding geeks came to spoil the party) also reveals some rather grisly commercial assumptions. For example, one of his problems with iTunes, even though it’s a monetised service, is that it “unbundles” the album. The consumer is now able to spend less money picking off favourite tracks - rather than, as before, having to spend more money on a complete magnum opus (including those interminable urban soundscape tracks on the second CD). 

Yet Levine has no appreciation for how this unbundling allows listeners to create their own stimulating playlists, refining and amplifying their musical enthusiasms. Would this ultimately result in more spend per consumer? Levine cites studies that say no, against others that say yes - but he also admits there is a general failure of objective market research in this area. Yet it’s indicative of the overly corporate, pro-bottom-line tone of this book that even Apple’s brilliant, integrated and mostly successful effort to commercialise the infinitely copyable is worth his sustained grouch.  

What would a “functioning market” for digital culture look like for Levine? A balance of stick and carrot, entrepreneurship and regulation, which he calls “blanket” or “collective licensing”. The carrots are well-designed content “services” (the current exemplar is the music-streaming service Spotify). We receive a bountiful - but licensed - downpour of music (Levine thinks it could be extended to other media, like tv and journalism) to our various screens and headphones. 

It would “feel like free”, because the user experience is the same click-frenzy as present: it wouldn’t be free, however, because our actual payment would be subsumed into the rental fees we pay for our information devices. (Levine predicts that we would have to accept some price rises in these rents). 

The “stick” part is that licenses, obviously, have to be enforced. Performing Rights Society inspectors already go round radio stations, restaurants and cafes, making sure these establishments are paying their dues for playing music. So a software equivalent would regularly monitor the usages of these services across the networks - ensuring that some agreed proportion of revenues is returned to the rights-holders (be they corporations or individual musicians).

Levine hopes we can redefine copyright, “the right to copy” - an unenforceable absurdity after ten years of the vast copy-machine known as the Web - as copyrisk. Like traditional actuaries gathering together pools of money to insure against the inevitable risk of shipwreck (or car accident), the content business needs to find a way to collectively compensate authors and creators for the healthy turbulence of internet usage. 

You almost feel sorry for Levine, in all his mercantile passion, when he discovers where these “collective licensing” agreements are already proving most successful: in Northern Europe, from Ireland to Germany, Denmark to Finland. That is, in national cultures where “they socialize any number of expenses that others would view as private. And as anyone involved in health care can tell you”, he continues sorrowfully, “what works smoothly in Scandinavia can start fights in the US”. 

His call for a “statutory approach” in his own country, as the American polity gyres and gambles on its various fundamentalist axes, seems rather forlorn. 

Ian Hargreaves’ constructive recent Digital Economy report in the UK would seem to chime with this European approach. He suggested a one-stop Digital Rights Exchange, which would help make intellectual property somewhat more trackable - and thus licensable - across the expanding wilds of bandwidth. 

 And away from the heavy-metal clangour of “thieves” and “property-owners” (oh enough of that, for the moment) it’s the filigree of patient, intelligent policy - forged through a boring old stakeholder-driven commitment to a well-regulated mixed economy - that will bring stability to these debates. Which labours, to his credit, Levine fully endorses.

Incidentally, Hargreaves’ report makes an astute and charming proposal: we should recognise the rights of parodists and satirists to recombine digital material, without Matrix-like IP lawyers swooping down to exterminate them. It looks like, at least in this jurisdiction, that Cookie Monster Tom will continue to flap his gums freely. Our house will be pleased.  

Swings & Roundabouts in Whitehall: Pat Kane article for Play England's Play Today

 

This is a short piece I wrote for Play Today, the regular journal of Play England, the advocacy charity for children's play (original PDF is here).

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Pat Kane, 'Swings and Roundabouts in Whitehall', Play Today, Issue 72, Spring 2011

These are tough times for those trying to guarantee the grounds of play for children, adults and communities. Michael Gove’s cancellation of the playground building programme last year (though a brutally stripped-down version has survived) came as no surprise to those familiar with the Gradgrindery of his general educational philosophy, all history and Latin lessons. In the light of this, it's worth remembering just what an unlikely triumph the programme was for the previous administration.

It is true that when the then children’s secretary Ed Balls announced close to christmas in 2007 that over £200 million was to be earmarked to build 3,500 playgrounds, and then followed it through in the subsequent two years, advocates of play were pinching themselves.

New Labour, with various invocations of a renewed work-ethic for the work-shy and a notoriously exacting measurement culture in education, did not seem the most propitious sponsor of the value and benefits of play; oblique, messy and experimental as play is. Ed Balls did not join up his thinking when he rejected the Cambridge Primary Review in 2009, which showed conclusively that an extended period of kindergarten-style play up to the seventh year was the best developmental start for school children.

But there it was; alongside play initiatives from the lottery fund and echoed throughout the devolved parliaments, a commitment to building playgrounds as a step towards rethinking how we regard the activity of children in our public spaces, town and cities. It’s tempting to say that in a similar way to our shifts on climate change, the scientific consensus on the health, the cognitive and social benefits of more play in our lives - both for children and adults - was becoming indisputable.

A staple in the rise of neuro-psychological and biological accounts of human nature over the last twenty years has been the role of play: joyful experimentation, imagining and gaming with others as the best exercise for the growing human mind. Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood and Stuart Brown’s Play are at the summits of research here. The UNICEF report on children’s well-being in rich countries in 2007, which placed the UK at the bottom of 23 industrialised nations, was an embarrassing wake-up call for a government which had made the welfare of children one of its moral back-stops.

Whatever the determining forces, it was certainly the feeling among the community of play workers and advocates that a line about the legitimacy of play as a key part of human development throughout the life-span had been crossed. Given such positive support and signals, much ingenuity, commitment and invention has been pouring into this area in Britain.

The Coalition has made sure it will not let a crisis go to waste, taking the opportunity to brutally shrink the state to pre-new-Labour levels. As a result, the playground building programme goes in its entirety; not even shrunk or trimmed, but dumped wholesale.

If you wanted to find "an inch in which to live" (as the great 60's play advocate Richard Neville put it) between the Tories and Labour - and for that matter, any of the left-leaning devolved polities - a play policy for children would be that inch. Enabling good conditions of play is an investment in the ultimate long-term health and capacities of future citizens, a crucial and dynamic element of the “sure” start promised to children in the UK after the harshness of the Tory years.

Of course, play policy should have been extended beyond childhood to teenage-dom and adulthood. There is too much evidence – ably pulled together by Daniel Pink in his new book Drive – that the most creative and profitable modern organisations ensure “play” time for their employees. A small zone of self-determination increases overall productivity and effectiveness by considerable degrees. Shouldn’t we be socialising our future creative workers to expect a degree of creative play in their lives?

There might be some wriggle-room for play advocacy in the Coalition's big idea of the Big Society. According to one of its theorists, Jesse Norman, the "active, creative self... fizzing with possibility" is at the core of its vision - a citizen aspiring towards "mastery, autonomy and purpose", and expressing that through free voluntary activity.

Yet this glowing civic vision runs into the wall of a brutal deficits-justified contraction in public sector budgets. And as any playworker would tell you, the anxiety and fear which mass redundancy will generate are the least likely circumstances for such a playful, active self to flourish.

The Labour government managed to join up the dots between play, well-being, health and employment. Facing the contradictions and confusions of the current government, play advocates must take a deep breath and restate the case for the power and potential of play. The game, as they say, is worth the candle. 

Time to Care, Time to Play: Wellbeing, Social Work and the Shorter Working Week

Here's my presentation to the ADSW (Association of Directors of Social Work in Scotland) conference at Crieff Hydro, May 18 2011, which had the stirring Leninist title "What Is To Be Done?". In this I'm returning to my interest (along with my partner Indra Adnan) in social work reform and social care issues in general, as expressed in our Reimagining Social Work project for the Scottish Government in 2005-2006 (and continuing). Always great to talk to SWs, wise, capable and caring people. All comments welcome below, any direct contacts please mail here. (Picture above by Links)

Time To Care, Time To Play: Wellbeing, Social Work and the Shorter Working Week

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The State of "The Play Ethic", 2011: my interview with Greece's Konteiner magazine

I did an interview with Daphne Dragona for the Greek culture magazine Konteiner at the end of last year - it's just come to me via Google Alerts - on my current thinking about The Play Ethic. Really great and generative questions (I'd also throughly recommend diving through the Personal Cinema site it's been republished on: great interviews around the politics of play/game with Ken Wark, Trebor Scholz and Raoul Vanegeim (in French)). The whole thing succinctly summarises where I am with it, and points towards my new "book-net" project Radical Animal. Hope it's all of interest .

 

Play Ethics: An Interview With Pat Kane

From Konteiner #11 (here and here)

Let’s start from the basics! Could you tell us what the “play ethic” is and how you locate it in today’s society and culture?

Simply put, the play ethic is what comes after the work ethic. If the work ethic is the mindset that enabled generations of communities to accept their position, and perform their duties, in the industrial system, the play ethic is the mindset that gets modern people ready for living in an age of information, networks and everyday globalisation.

Play is an adaptive faculty of experiment, flexibility, optimism and resourcefulness for complex mammals, and supremely so for humans. It's exactly these faculties that our current age of incessant change requires from us, as paradigms of production, environment and culture continue their transformation in the 21st century. In my view, the great promise of play becoming our dominant way of doing, being and creating value is that it keeps us open towards, and energetic about, fundamental reform of our systems and structures. As players, we are much more aware of the rules of the systemic games we are embedded in, and the possibilities that they might be amended, abandoned or imagined anew.

In your work discussing play, you very often refer to the “soulitarians”, the bearers of the play ethic as you say, the new generation of workers who are culture’s active soulful players. “Not proletarians, but soulitarians”… the ones who “were allowed to download their lives for free” and share it without second thoughts, to travel around the world with cheap airlines and base their lives on their emotional and communicational capabilities taking advantage of the possibilities the digital era offers. Is this the charming side of the new creative, affective and precarious class that emerged in the oughties? At the turn of the decade how would you now comment on their role?

Yes, I think it's true that part of my aspiration for the "soulitariat" was infused with an early-2000s moment of techno-optimism - and that nowadays, they are as much a "precariat" as a "soulitariat". I may be wrong here, but I have a specific take on the student and generational unrest in Greece (and elsewhere). Does this unrest indicate that the "expanded souls" of the digital generation (or Millenials as they are described elsewhere), forged in open networks and with a joyful experience of digital plenitude at their fingertips, has run into the reality of scarcity-and-hierarchy-dominated Western economic life? I was already quoting from people like Antonio Negri and Paulo Virno when the Play Ethic book came out in 2004, who posit a communicationally-formed "multitude" that's gradually coming to realise the power that it holds, as an affective and cognitive collectivity. These ideas really informed what I called the "soulitariat": those who retain their "soul" (the interiority and conviviality that communicational capitalism needs to function), and redeploy that in order to imagine and live out new lifestyles, or (maybe now, in more straitened economic times) protest against the limits and false promises of the existing order.

I'm also beginning to think much more than I did five years ago about how this playful techno-capacity will respond to a low-carbon horizon for societies. Can this experience of ingenuity and digital making be translated into other zones of self-production? Or do we need to be aware of how playful interactions with software platforms can be engagingly programmed to distract us from this climate crisis? I'm exploring this relationship between play and sustainability in my next book.

In your writings you clearly emphasize on the importance of the work of the psychologist Brian Sutton- Smith , The Ambiguity of Play (Harvard, 1997) and in particular on the significance of the “adaptive potentiation” of play he is talking about . What does this element mean? Would you say that play may help us to adapt, to recover, to be less vulnerable in times of uncertainty?

That is indeed the function play has for complex mammals, and other organisms with more developed brains and rich social networks - it's a zone of experimentation and simulation which helps us to rehearse and test out our social lives, our cognitive visions, without these experiments costing us too much, in terms of risk of injury or waste of energy. I have been talking recently about the "ground of play" that seems to be shared between the lion-cubs frolicing on the savannah, and our performances within the end-to-end network of the internet. A complex-mammalian ground of play is 1) loosely but robustly governed, 2) ensures a surplus of time, space and materials, and 3) is a zone where failure, risk and mess is treated as necessary for development. The point of describing this zone is to get away from the overly individualist conception of the "adaptive player" that often comes through from self-help or business literature - some tensile, labile creature leaping from niche to niche in the capitalist jungle. For me (and forgive my teleology!), the evolutionary story of play points towards a societal arrangement - which the social-democratic settlement first demonstrated, but which may take other forms - where liberalism and security, risk and governance, exist in fruitful and healthy tension. Again, returning to the low-carbon reformation that's required in the next few years, a play-oriented policy-change might well be a wholesale, all-sector reduction of the working week (heading towards 21 hours), combined with a social wage policy, which would unleash a great flourishing of social and cultural experiment, moving us away from positional consumption to engaged poiesis and production. Again: governance, but of a loose yet robust structure - that's the real evolutionary power of the play moment.

 You often work as an advisor for institutions, organizations and companies, introducing play in their work system and structure. Embracing the inventiveness, the liveness, the openness of play you seem to argue that it will form healthier and more sustainable institutions. You are actually also talking of an “open source” leadership. How feasible is this? Could you give us some examples?

It's not easy to find that many! My experience with organisations has largely been that public sector and educational institutions are more amenable to a "zone of play" opening up within their operations - they often already see the need for occupational and professional development, putting their employees on away-days and training courses. My provocation to them is to imagine that these temporary, revivifying "play-days" can actually begin to affect the existing structures of the organisation. Initially this might be about giving employees much more self-determination and autonomy within their particular functional area (a version of the Google 20 per cent rule, where their engineers get one day a week to follow freely their on-job enthusiasms). But ultimately - and this is where I haven't been successful! - the aim would be to indeed devolve and "open source" the very strategic direction of the enterprise itself. In the private sector, my work with creative start-ups and arts/cultural organisations has been much more fruitful. They're aware that their best commercial moves are sustained and enriched by a hinterland of lifestyle and sensibility - which they have to devote time, space and resources to developing and nuturing. The worst experiences have been with large private corporations, for whom the play ethic is mostly regarded as a way to retain bright sparks in the 'war for talent'.

Can an openness then driven through play break down certain hierarchies and borders? Because a major issue for every period according to its different features lies upon inclusions and exclusions. Who gets to play? Who gets to decide the rules of societies’ games? If play can form tactics against games’ strategies, if play can be political, could a new common decentralized playground arise for today’s multitude?

Possibly. For me the rise of play as a civilisational keyword, and as a mode of action and thought, in the developed West has been the result of two things: the persistence of post-Sixties counter-cultural values, and the rise of a communicational infrastructure - the internet - which provides tools for the realisation of those values, resulting in new kinds of groups, organisations, networks and movements. Play becomes the emotional overtone of the awareness that, as the 90's anti-globalisers put it, "another world is possible", demonstrated by their "carnivals" against capitalism. I would point your readers to the work of Michel Bauwens and his Peer-to-Peer Foundation (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/) - he has worked out very carefully how we transition from a capitalist to a more collaborative economy and society, and factors different consciousnesses (including the openness and improvisation of play) into that transition.

For myself, I believe that the positive valuation of play in areas of policy, research and advertising is a sign that a shift of values is taking play - overturning, at the very least, the Puritan bias against intrinsically-motivated, joyful activity. It sits alongside positive accounts of precarity, or slow living, or idle cultures - all of them demonstrating a profound disillusionment with the idea of heteronomous work, and a desire for a more integrated and satisfying life. Of course play subtends all human existence and arrangements, our neotenic advantage over other animals. But we may be getting closer to collective and productive arrangements that allow it to be the true seat of our social nature.

ends

Journalism/Networks/Ontology: my presentation to Media140 Barcelona #media140

Update2.0: Rachel McAthy's reports on my speech on Journalism.co.uk, here and here. 

Update: Jay Rosen's 8-tweet presentation, 'The Great Horizontal', had a lot of overlap with mine below - and a lot more lucid too (I think I'm a bit too ludic...). 

Original post: Here's the presentation I've just delivered to the Media140 conference in Barcelona - hi to all the attendees, and I'd be delighted to hear your responses in comments below. If you want to talk to me directly, please mail here.  BTW, the Twitter hashtag for the conference is  #media140 or #media140cat. 

Journalism, Networks, Ontology: Pat kane presentation at Media140 barcelona

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Some great questions afterwards - I've built and developed my original answers. 

Q: In Castells' era of mass self-communication, how do we ensure that there isn't so much noise that noone can hear the crucial information?

A: This is my point about the editorial function - it has to be more ambitious, as a scarce expertise in an overloaded information environment. But perhaps professional editorial should not be tied to the old business models, bemoaning falling paper sales, shrinking classified ad revenues, and pining for a remonetisation of their sales through mobile and tablet devices. Perhaps they should be talking to charities and NGOs, or thinking about establishing trust funds with philanthropists to secure long-term editorial functioning. Yes there is the public service media option - but I would also like to think futuristically about that too. 

Q: But doesn't reasserting the editorial function just mean that we're going back to the old, pre-internet days of gatekeepers and institutions of information authority?

A: No - because as Clay Shirky says, the costs of creating such an editorial institution are much lower than they ever were, given the "insanely easy group forming tools" that the Net provides. Take the range of ex-Wikileaks employees who are setting up what they regard as better services for handling leaked information (see Open Leaks). I also think that editorial skills becomes something that gets spread through the citizenry. That will pluralise the idea of "objectivity" that is often, in reality, hides an unacknowledged and unconscious world-view among many journalists. 

Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity? My piece for Open Democracy

Delighted to be able to contribute to Open Democracy's Happiness debate series, commissioned by Potlatch's William Davies. Here's the published piece, full text below.

 

Can we become 'happy citizens' in a climate of insecurity?

 Pat Kane, Open Democracy, 6th April 2011

At the start of this debate series on the potential of happiness to shape political discourse, William Davies hoped that it would return our attention to production - or more specifically, how our experience of work in organisations is a crucial determinant of our wellbeing and life-satisfaction. A long history of economic thought in the 20th century had led up to a moment where the consumer was sovereign, and the producer his willing slave: workers' conditions were always ultimately malleable - flexible, just-in-timed - in the retail service of this whim-laden desiring machine.

Of course this machine, as Davies plaintively says, was often a worker too. Can't our politics encompass producer as well as consumer identities? Buttressed by the The Spirit Level and the happiness science of Richard Layard, Davies wonders if might there not be a new political appeal to the "workers" available to Ed Miliband's Labour Party. A health-oriented, moral-political rhetoric that could render bad employers (and the paltry labour market regulations binding them) "toxic" and "polluting" - perpetrating injuries upon the bodies and souls of their employees as mendaciously as cigarette vendors, or nuclear-powerplant owners. (And who knows, perhaps just as vulnerable to class-action litigation on the basis of prior knowledge of harm?)

I'm fascinated to observe the battle raging between the major UK parties for ownership of the new sciences of the "social animal" or "social brain". They're all struggling to realise their own political capital from the intellectual collapse of utility-maximising "economic man", in the face of consiliences between neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, epidemiology, network theory and more. And not forgetting a financial crash that caused its architects to doubt their own intellectual edifice.

Read Conservative MP Jesse Norman's ideas-tour of The Big Society, and then read some of the papers coming from the Compass group of the Labour Party. Both of them cite the same sources - particularly Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's work on capabilities - to claim that a "social recession" has been occurring, regardless of economic recession. They share a figure of the healthy, happy citizen as needing "meaning, mastery and autonomy" - a purpose, goal or shared cause; an avidity for learning and new skills; the freedom to choose one's engagements in life.

In the midst of my own creative consulting practice, I did a double-take recently, when this trinity of capacities popped up in a discussion of what makes for a truly satisfying video-game. Yet surely it's all too obvious what the differences are between a PS3 "player" and a Big-Society "creative, active self". The former pursues meaning, mastery and autonomy (MMA) as a voluntary and joyful act, under conditions where there is a surplus of time, space and materials, essentially socially secure. The latter is being asked to become a "fizzing bundle of energy" (in Jesse Norman's words) under conditions of social insecurity, with extreme deficit-driven cuts slashing employment in public services. As far as my expertise in play tells me, these are not the most enabling conditions for MMA.

It's very easy to see The Big Society as an attempt to gull the aspirational and "creative" classes into supporting widescale privatisation, by talking their beloved language - specifically, appealing to their desire to achieve personal wellbeing through pro-social activities. But the Big Society falls down on its own terms, unravelled by the Oscar Wilde one-liner about the problem with socialism: "it will take too many evenings".

One might imagine that there could be a joyful, playful volunteerism to be pursued - if the Conservatives got tough with business and regulated for a shorter working week (say 30 hours), without a directly proportionate wage reduction. This would provide a rich systemic support to all that volunteering which, of course, has already been going on (one of the sharpest objections to the Big Society is that it's an opportunistic re-branding of what already exists). But a Conservative party that's brazen enough to preach democracy in Egypt, while hawking arms to Arab autocracies, is hardly going to take that kind of stand against squealing employers.

But while it's easy to critique a Tory philosophy on happiness which over-emphasizes voluntaristic "risk" and "creativity", and under-values the collective "security" and infrastructures which give a platform for the "active self" - you'd expect them to do that - I am doubtful that the Labour Party will find a better balance between these two in the modern workplace. How much of the sense of meaninglessness that pervades work in the commercial services sector, for example, comes from an awareness that much of what occurs there is the excitation, administration and sustenance of false needs, or delusory social-positioning? How much MMA can really be achieved by employees in hyper-consumerist industries based on the exploitation of guilt, shame, envy and anxiety?

At least the Green critique of current working practices, as exemplified by think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation and writers like Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor and Jeremy Rifkin, has the urgency of carbon-reduction and global warming at their backs. "Meaningful work" - which could as easily be fully-engaged, hacker-like play, or absorbed, intrinsically-motivated care - is what they hope will substitute for the planet-crisping satisfactions of lifestyle consumerism.

In a low-carbon economy that takes itself seriously, "flourishing" in the form of participation, self-provision and conviviality will have to compensate for "growth", "wealth" and its mountains of stuff. But no party will be able to preach the benefits of plenitude-without-trinkets, the happiness that comes from relationships, mindfulness and autonomous labours (see the five virtues extolled by the NEF's Happy Planet Index), while the financial plutocracy cavorts freely and unemployment rolls burgeon.

Cameron's plan for happiness began in the blithe financial-bubble-bath of the mid 2000's: pursued in these brutal conditions, it seems more like an idee fixe than a thought-out component of political hegemony. For Labour to succeed with its own version, some guarantee of greater security has to be offered - but it'll be through bold proposals on labour-market regulation, new networks of public goods, visible restorations of income equality - and an honesty about how our indicators of progress and prosperity will have to change. And not, I'd suggest, through workplaces the majority of whose enterprises contributes toward the consumerist tumult that guarantees unhappiness.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic and one half of the band Hue & Cry.

My Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken

Here's my Independent review of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, her long-awaited opus on how computer games can motivate global change - about as pure a manifestation of The Play Ethic as it's possible to express. A short review, nowhere near adequate to the content of the book, but hopefully it'll jar you to buy it.

 

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change The World

Jane McGonigal (Jonathan Cape)

Reviewed by Pat Kane, The Independent, 25 Feb 2011

 It has been strange to read a book which claims that reality is listless, uninspiring and broken compared to computer games as the Arab revolutions swarm across our screens. We watch real citizens defy real riot police in order to achieve real control of public space and institutions. At this moment, it's not that easy to hear Jane McGonigal tell us that immersion among the trolls and space warriors of virtual worlds is a way to recover our sense of epic idealism and heroic altruism. 

But even in the blazing context of the new Arab dawn, McGonigal might have a point. One of the cheekier posters held up by the Tunisian youth in their mass protests was "Game Over": and we know generally how much cyber-culture enabled the fall of Ben Ali.

Even though Mubarak in Egypt was sharp enough to hit the off-switch early, it didn't seem to matter anyway. Digital-era protestors were already planning to play around with the oppressive reality of Egyptian public life. Remarkably like the "alternate reality games" that McGonigal has created in the streets of major cities for corporate clients, young activists began to stage creative protests that subtly reclaimed their streets. They flash-mobbed in city centres to sing the national anthem; they dressed in black and stood silently beside the Nile.

Egyptian street tactics for the initial "day of rage" on 25 January - in the words of activist Ahmed Salah, aiming "to be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces]" - sound exactly like the kind of collaborative, laterally-thinking play that McGonigal (and others, like Steven Johnson and Tom Chatfield) celebrate as the core cognitive benefit of computer games. Sociologists, here's a brief: how has interactive culture shaped a new sense of civic confidence among Arab youth?

Reality Is Broken is the most powerful justification yet for computer games as one of our central literacies - parallel to literature or movies in the way they connect our motivations and energies with the challenges of understanding and intervening in our social worlds. As with literacy in the first Enlightenment, the huge popular embrace of this medium provides a rich test-bed for new grand theories about human nature and society.

Armed with an impressive bibliography in psychology and neuroscience, McGonigal makes the claim that the huge rush towards gameplay is a kind of exodus from what Theodor Adorno called "damaged life" - work that doesn't satisfy, relationships that don't persist, societies that don't find a place for hope or ambition. She brilliantly links the growing scholarship on happiness to the gimmicks and tricks that commercial game designers devise to engage their febrile audiences. Games help us get off the "hedonic treadmill", in which our consumer choices are fated never to satisfy us, and help us build up what she calls hedonic resilience.

The tough challenges we willingly embrace in computer games generate an internal sense of satisfaction that spills over into other areas of our lives. For example, and counter-intuitively, she cites numerous studies that heavy social gamers display greater levels of community-mindedness than non-gamers.

Ambitiously, McGonigal wants to take that emerging swell of human engagement and connect it to the solution of real-world problems. She has been involved in games about peak oil and other global instabilities, where the fun comes from playing out possible futures, using comic strips, web videos and elaborate avatars.

McGonigal begins and ends her book with Herodotus's tale of the Lydians, who turned to dice games to help them get through their 18 years of famine - and then played one final, giant game, drawing lots to choose which half of the population would leave the country to seek prosperity elsewhere. Her point is that games can both raise spirits and build collective understanding, particularly at moments of extreme crisis.

As Arab activists grapple with the grown-up difficulties of a free public sphere, they may currently have a less-than-ludic take on their "broken" reality. But there was an imaginative component of these protests which took its cue from something other than the usual verities about civil rights. As McGonigal might say: watch this game-space. 

Pat Kane's 'The Play Ethic' is published by Macmillan

Why The Big Society Should Be A Playground (But Isn't): Presentation to The Young Foundation, 1/03/11

 

Why The Big Society Should Be A Playground (But Isn't) - Pat Kane talk for The Young Foundation - 1:03:11

Double update: Here's the Young Foundation's own page on this, with podcast and slides and nice pix (see left)

Update: Above is the full podcast of the talk below. You can download as MP3 (63Mg),  or subscribe iTunes or Feedburner, 

Below are the slides to my presentation to the Young Foundation, a social enterprise think-tank in London founded by Micheal Young, exploring the concept of the "Big Society" - the UK Conservative Party's big idea for its Coalition government - in relation to my evolving theories about play, human nature and governance. 

The slides may need a little context. My subtitle as announced on the day was "48 hours in the life of an London ideas merchant". The day before my Young Foundation presentation I'd had a meeting with a commercial digital agency to see if we could devise some useful strategies about convincing advertisers and marketers that they should approach a game/play based approach to their expenditure. We cited the work of game analyst Sebastian Deterding, from whom the test of a great game experience is that it allows "meaning, mastery and autonomy".

That evening, while preparing for next day's presentation, I was reading the Conservative MP Jesse Norman's The Big Society on my Kindle - when I came upon a passage where he talked about the Big Society's motivational drives being that of "autonomy, mastery and purpose/meaning"... Thus alerted to a synchronicity in the world of ideas, I tried to follow through the consequences...

All comments welcome below. (An extended article will be available over the next few days). 

Why The Big Society Should Be A Playground (And Isn't)

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My Indepdendent review of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion

My review for the Indepdendent - unedited version in this post. All comments welcomed -- PK

The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World

By Evgeny Morozov

(£14.99, Allen Lane)

Reviewed by Pat Kane

In the world-theatre of geopolitics, where hubris sometimes seems like the only hit production running, Hilary Clinton's 'Internet Freedom' speech of January 2010 deserves some kind of special critics' award.

Drawing a parallel between the Iron Curtain of the Cold War and the "information curtain descending across much of the world", the US Secretary of State praised "viral videos and blog posts" as "the samizdat of our day... We need to put these tools in the hands of people around the world who will use them to advance democracy and human rights".

Wiki-oops! Since then, of course, we've seen April's "viral video" of trigger-happy US soldiers killing Reuters journalists in Iraq. And over the last few weeks we've been reading the world's most incendiary collection (so far) of "blog posts", a recent selection from a vast cache of secret US diplomatic cables spanning the last forty-odd years.

In one of Evgeny Morozov's three cursory references to Wikileaks in over 400 pages of the The Net Delusion - ah, the perils of papery publishing schedules! - he notes that the American political elite "can't be calling for imposing restrictions on sites like Wikileaks" (already being proposed earlier this summer) "and also be disparaging China and Iran for similar impulses".

Quite so. Yet it's strange to read this truculent but extremely well-informed critique of "cyber-utopianism" and "internet-centrism" - with its demolition of such phenomena as the Iranian "Twitter Revolution", never mind Clinton's vapors about digital freedom - in the aftermath of the structural shock-waves that Wikileaks has set off around the world.

Morozov builds up an almost unarguable case that the internet is easily deployable by authoritarian states to serve the time-honoured oppressors' trinity of censorship, surveillance and propaganda. Much of his book is a useful tour d'horizon of the ways that the security regimes in Russia, Iran, China, Turkey, his homeland Belarus and many others are matching, mimicking and populating the best of Web 2.0 - all those idealised "social tools" from the coding labs of California.

Yet we've seen an American establishment successfully putting pressure on some of the poster-boys of the network society - be it Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and now Apple - to cut off the digital and financial supports of Wikileaks. Federal employees and students have been blocked or banned from visiting the site; prominent politicians and columnists have called for Wikileaks' founder, Julien Assange, to be assassinated.

It's getting a little difficult to discern one repressive cyber-regime from another these days.

One wonders whether Morozov's dull antennae towards Wikileaks' potential in this book (though ironically enough, he's making up for it now, in his unstoppable stream of tweets at @evgenymorozov) comes from his own institutional conditioning. From his days as a scholarship schoolboy, Morozov has been sponsored by Soros's Open Society institute, on whose board he now sits. This has clearly been an entree to fellowships at Stanford, Yahoo! and the New America Foundation, generating bylines at the Economist, the FT, the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek.

And throughout The Net Delusion, Morozov shows a degree more sympathy for the kind of diligent, time-and-people-intensive democracy promotion of the diplomatic classes revealed by the Wikileaks cables, than he does for the crackers, hacker and platform-makers of digital evangelism.

Indeed, his central caution is that the unthinking Western promotion of cyber-tools as enablers and organisers of dissent under authoritarian regimes - sometimes driven by Cold-War nostalgia, sometimes by a lazy and mistaken search for "diplomatic efficiency" - can sometimes make things worse for those concerned.

Encouraging dissidents to use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook or mobile texting - even if those services protect the identity of users and don't cave under state pressure (whatever the state) - still provides a stream of social data which can reveal networks of activists, or alerts regimes to protests and concerns well in advance.

The powerful "sentiment analysis" software required for these tasks is being provided to regimes by Western tech-corps like IBM, Cisco and Ericsson - an amoral info-commercial complex about which Morozov is enjoyably robust: "we don't just need a wikinomics, but a wikiethics as well".

Though his demolition job on the embarrassments of Cupertino-driven "internet freedom" is comprehensive, Morozov does have more than a few positive suggestions on how Western powers can fashion information networks to give power and voice to those who need it most.

Encryption and security protocols are high on his list. He suggests they are a "win-win" for Western tech giants, who might both placate the increasing data-privacy concerns of their domestic customers, as well as give dissidents a much safer medium for informing and organising themselves.

Of course, security is at the heart of Wikileaks' offer to whistle-blowers everywhere. As Assange said in an interview with David Frost on Al'Jazzera recently, their extremely secure upload technology means that they cannot know the identity of any particular wikileaker to their service in advance.

Indeed, Assange's insurance policy - against heaven knows what depradations from the American state - is an encryption key that will unlock the complete archive of Wikileaks' documentation to the world, unfortunately described by his lawyer as "the information equivalent of a thermo-nuclear bomb".

Yet Morozov, no doubt directly informed by the particularly fustian nature of Belarussian oppression, reminds us that hammering in your safe code at a keyboard is only a secreted micro-camera away from revelation. And apparently, it's not yet possible to use long-range audio equipment to tell what characters are being distantly tapped out on a laptop (for that, some small mercies).

The Net Delusion is most useful as a reminder of how fleet-footed, rather than leaden and second-rate, many authoritarian regimes are in their cyberpolicies. China is a veritable powerhouse of disinformation-technology - not only building effective mobile, social networking and gaming platforms in which users trade off efficiency for surveillance, but also inducing the required netiquette on those services.

The Fifty-Cent Party, for example, is an army of blog-commenters who get paid for every dissident blog they snow with patriotic, party-approved rebuttals. And more subtly, China encourages blogging that highlights local corruption or poor services, while keeping a ceiling on more ambitious political critiques.

It's also a delight to be reminded that, in their search for ever-better propaganda techniques, a most honoured guest of the Central Party School in 2001 was one Peter Mandelson, there to "share his insights about the re-invention of the British Labour Party". China is inspiring the same burst of innovation in many other regimes: and Morozov usefully reminds us that loyal nationalism and patriotic service can be as much a motivation for the young socio-technical operative as the bohemian anarchisms of Julien Assange and his pals.

Which makes it imperative that the demonisation of Wikileaks stops, and a clear-sighted engagement with the shift in power that it heralds, begins. Morozov himself set out the options in a superb Financial Times editorial recently: these info-hackers, present and future, could become either a new "Transparency International" or a new "Red Brigades".

That is, their desire to be a new "fifth estate" - true to the spirit of the American "First Amendment" which holds a free press to be the best friend of accountable democracy - can be steadily answered by a non-panicked establishment. Or if things go pear-shaped (or bloody) for the likes of Assange, an info-insurrection may be unleashed that could leave considerable swathes of our comfortable, well-functioning knowledge society in ruins.

"Internet freedom", in short, is a valiant sword with a number of blades, existing in several dimensions simultaneously. As we go down the rabbit-hole of Wikileaks, Morozov's humane and rational lantern will help us land without breaking our legs.

Playing well: ten years of The Play Ethic

Before the year ends, I should post up an essay I wrote for the D8 design consultancy in Glasgow, celebrating ten years of talking about The Play Ethic (my chosen anniversary date was the appearance of my major essay in the Observer newspaper in October 2000). It's not a heavy theoretical read, has some clues towards my next burst of intellectual activity. All comments welcome. 

Playing well: ten years of the Play Ethic

Pat Kane

There's nothing like the tenth anniversary of your own cultural meme to help you mark the passage of time.

My Observer magazine cover article on The Play Ethic, titled "Play For Today", first appeared on October 22, 2000. The dot-bust was just reaching the peak of its fall-out, but had still left us all living in a new, weightless, connected world. Blairism was in its high pomp, heading for another New Labour landslide; meanwhile, a brand-new Scottish Parliament was stumbling to its feet.

And I was hoping that walking out of a well-paid editorial job with a brand-new newspaper, The Sunday Herald - and betting on a zeitgeist change - was the right thing to do.

I'll never regret the last minute panicked call to the editor: "make sure the website address is at the bottom of the piece!" A bit bemused, she assented. And thus my own meeting-place for thousands of global souls (or whatever over 220,000 page views translates to), increasingly intrigued by the power and potential of play over the last decade, was founded. (And yes, the web address will be at the end of this piece). It's been a fascinating lens through which to peer at some of the civilizational tumult of the Zeroes.

In a sentence, the Play Ethic was intended to be what comes after the Work Ethic. Whereas the latter was a legitimating creed for the duty, routine, steady production and social self-restraint appropriate to the industrial era, the former was a mentality to help us get the best out of the informational era. 

I wanted a new generation of "soulitarians" to exult in the flexibility of new kinds of employment, to be excited about the transformative power of digitality and networks, to recover a child-like sense of optimism and creativity that could now express itself in the mainstream of our lives. Even in the ruins of the Dot-Bust, and in defiance of the weird "new work ethic" promulgated by the even weirder Gordon Brown, it seemed to me like a major shift in the common-sense of our public and private lives was underway.

And then halfway through the write up of the Play Ethic book, in September 11, 2001, a screaming came across the sky... That delayed the book, which finally published in late 2004. But what it also had to change was a sense - something that I've been struggling with ever since - that the "playfulness" I'd been counterposing to a stiff, commanding-and-controlling, experiment-fearing world of organisational orthodoxy was perhaps too culturally specific.

My first year of the Play Ethic had seen me fielding major advertisers like Bartle Bogle Hegarty and Lowe Lintas, or esteemed organisations like the British Council and the Cabinet Office - all of them part of the blithe, post-Fukuyama 'market-democratic' over-confidence of the times. And all of them looking for the next new sexy idea to help them govern electorates, or sell to consumers.

But with the Twin Towers bomber Mohammed Atta's suicide note in my ear - "the time for play is over and the serious time is upon us" - I realised straightaway that to think about the role of play in the human condition was to do more than provide some fizzy buzz-words for some corporate business strategy.

When Will Hutton reviewed The Play Ethic in the Guardianⁱ, he fascinatingly bundled it in with books on idleness and slowness, and then connected it to Joseph Nye's concept of soft power. These visions of squashy, messy, bucolic, non-coercive Western-ness, concluded Hutton, "might be doing their small part to help our image and limit the appeal of al-Qaida... The happier we are, the better - not just for ourselves, but as a reason to be copied rather than opposed".

Mebbes aye, mebbes naw, as the magister ludi Kenneth Mathieson Dalglish might have pronounced. But in any case, I hit the book-stands with a sprawling monster that felt it had to consider the Buddhist network path as seriously as New Labour workfare; the indeterminacy of the quantum on a par with the elegance of the Lego brick. No, a mega-bucks period of zeitgeist-surfing at Malcolm-Gladwell speaking rates did not quite ensue for me. 

But what did ensue was points of contact with a growing constituency of people for whom "play" became an important keyword, signifying a crisis of meaning or purpose in their domain. For example, I've talked to so many educators and the educated over this period - everyone from Australian and British government ministers to Kilmarnock play workers and teachers, from New York academics to Bristol primary school kids. 

I have no real idea what impact these conversations have had - but it has been a delight to see the growing importance of playful experience to educational reform. Until the Con-Dem coalition slashed it for deficit reduction, there were hundreds of millions of pounds being devoted to playparks in the UK - the rationale based on the kinds of multidisciplinary studies of the health and neuronal benefits of play that I'd highlighted in the book. 

And almost every educational establishment now gets the benefits of extended kindergarten, or active-learning-through-play, for the development of future learners. It's taken nearly a century and a half, but Dickens' Gradgrind is gradually being evicted from the British classroom.

We're also in something of a "wellbeing" revolution in public policy: no ambitious political figure in the UK, on any part of the ideological spectrum, can now get away without condemning those philistines who know "the price of everything and the value of nothing". And from my commissions and engagements, I'm beginning to perceive that for many people, play puts meat on the bones of more abstract considerations of "happiness" or "quality-of-life". At least in its active, sociable, physical mode, play gives a taste of what the "good society" might actually feel like.

But there are other dimensions of play - what the scholars call "dark" or "ancient" play - which I've become increasingly aware of over the years. One deficiency in the 2004 book, and one which I'm still ambivalent about, is the steady rise to commercial and cultural predominance of computer games culture in the developed world. I've literally watched its rise over the shoulders of my daughters, who have both grown up playing god-games and simulated worlds in the last decade. But I'm not a natural gamer - and I wonder whether it's because games are all too easily deployed to reinforce a rampantly martial and competitive spirit of society. 

My own play-guru, the psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, isolates "contestive" play, or play-as-power, as only one form of play's "taking reality lightly". I'm consulted regularly by games-makers and professionals these days, who sense a crisis in their own burgeoning sector. It's not just in terms of the costs of blockbuster games leading to high risk and bankruptcy. It's also about the narrowness and oppressiveness of the "win-state", "power-up" mentality that so much of games culture generates.

Watch organisations like Hide And Seek, or go to events like Playful, or note games-makers like Jane McGonigal, and you'll see a generation of gamers who want to do for their medium what alternative filmmakers did for French and American cinema from the 50's onwards. But I'm finding that a "play ethic"- a sense of experiment and openness leading to a sustainably good life - is being actively sought out in this community - yes, even by the coders of out-of-control robot soldiers and vengeance-wreaking fantasy trolls. 

Where next for the Play Ethic? One further omission from the 2004 book was any real grappling with environmental limits, or the necessity for a low-carbon future, other than with a kind of blithe hope that technological innovation - fuelled by the best spirit of scientific play, of course - would get us out of our resource hole. I'm now fascinated by play as both a window into the eternal sources of human inventiveness, and as a soft-spot that opens us up to addictive interaction and lifestyle narcissism. 

On some mornings, I wake up and exult in a networked world that's like a giant "ground of play": robust but loosely structured, enabling a surplus of materials for us to freely combine and morph, allowing new parties and voices into the process of building society. On other mornings, I fall out of bed, attend to my flickering smart-phone, and wonder whether I'm holding in my hand a weapon of mass distraction - something that ensnares my character in a matrix of "fun", allowing me to acquiesce in the charcoaling of the planet.

The very energies of play - not exclusively our own as a species, but something we uniquely retain right to the end of our lives - shows that we are a radical animal. Play gives us the capacity to flexibly respond to almost any situation that our environment throws at us. My aim now is still to explore what an "ethic" for play might be - but one which picks through its wide range of potentiating options, and tries to develop the best ones for a sustainable society.

The rise of "maker" culture - what the hackers (who I began to pick up on in the 2004 book) did when they moved from coding to concrete reality - is an example of a dimension of play that could really help us get beyond a wastefully consumerist society.ⁱⁱMakers promote a sociable tinkering, where we use hi-tech to skill ourselves and provide for ourselves more and more, rather than a lazy, brand-directed consumption.

As it seems to have taken a decade for the first incarnation of the Play Ethic to move from the curious fringes to somewhere near the centre of debate about the qualities of the good society, I'm expecting this greener version to take at least as long to get to the same place - by which time it might be called something completely different.

But the principle of freedom and openness that play represents means that, whatever happens, the debate will be rich, inclusive, sprawling and never-ending. It's been a great perch from which to observe the beginning of the 21st century. Let's see where the societal carnival takes us in the next ten years. Leg godt, as the Danish say: play well.

www.theplayethic.com

Notes

iWill Hutton, "Slow down, tune out, make peace", The Guardian, 11 September (!!), 2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/sep/11/sportandleisure.highereducation

iiSee Cory Doctorow's novel Makers, or Make magazine (http://www.makezine.com)

Dougald Hine's New Public Thinkers project - my nominations

The P.T. Barnum of modern British autonomism, Dougald Hine, has come up with a great new project, defined - like many of the best are - by an argument with the establishment. BBC 3, in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, is embarking on a quest to find "New Generation Thinkers" in the UK - meaning public intellectuals who shape debate through writing, broadcasting, blogging and other kinds of intervention.

Nice idea. Only problem is, the rules of the competition are that you have to be a staff academic in some way. Dougald quite rightly points out that not only would this disqualify past great thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, John Berger and Karl Polyani, but it disqualifies many current voices who find the time for critique and research in the midst of non-academic lives - as writers, entrepreneurs, employees, activists, artists.

So, platform-ready as ever, Dougald is going to set up a site called New Public Thinkers (first announcement here, holding page for actual site here), which as I understand it will have at least a wide-open door to those who are publicly intellectualising from a non-academic perch. Many thoughts on the state of public thinking come to mind - but to begin with, D wants some nominations as to who should be on a putative list of NPTs. Some of my favourites have already been proposed, here's some others:

Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk). Now straightaway this gets complicated, in terms of the initial definition. I didn't know much about K-Punk other than his extraordinary blog - which uses the best of radical left theory (Zizek, Badiou, Negri, Deleuze) as tools for writing heterodoxically about music, popular culture, the political spectacle and activism, in a way which for me defines what "public thinking" should be.

But the more you read, the more you realise his own predicament - as a precarious academic teacher, hopping from gig to gig teaching late teens, and thereby gaining an insight into contemporary passivities and pathologies. Keep reading, and his network of pals emerges - voices like Nina Power aka Infinite Thought (a philosopher at Roehampton University), Owen Hathereley's Sit Down Man You're a Bloody Tragedy (freelance architectural critic and lecturer), and Richard Seymour aka Lenin's Tomb (who's a PhD sociology candidate at the LSE). All writing from the theoretically-informed activist left that I value - but with some academic locus.

Should "new public thinkers" also allow for post-grads and employed academics who do carve out time to make public interventions - meaning, they don't keep their heads down and direct all their textual production towards peer-ref'd articles that can improve their research ratings and thus career? I think they should. Otherwise a lot of the new leadership that's coming from the student protests will be unnecessarily ruled out. 

John Thackera (Doors of Perception). In terms of consistency of approach about the importance of "design for resilience" over the last decade, John Thackera gets my vote as a "public thinker". He isn't just a persuasive advocate of ideas about green design, but his "Doors Of Perception" conferences have been great opportunities for the meeting of practical minds across disciplines, under the urgent horizon of climate crisis. I think it's also helpful that a public thinker knows how to write clearly and effectively, particularly if the topic is recondite or specific. John, as an ex-hack, knows how to do that well. A busy man, but I'd love to see his voice much more in the agora of ideas about green economics in this country again. 

Indra Adnan (Downing Street Project, Soft Power Network). Indra has been writing publicly (and from a non-academic perch) for the last four years on the nexus between Buddhism, soft power and the politics of gender and families. In her columns for the Huffington Post and the Guardian, Indra has explored how the crisis of power in the UK - exemplified by political corruption and the financial crash - has a complex relationship with notions of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine': we simply can't make an effective critique of how power structures order our lives if we don't find a way to talk about our deeply-held attitudes towards control, participation, acceptance.

Indra's advocacy and development of Joseph Nye's concept of soft power - from an American propaganda exercise, to a radically compassionate network politics, rooted in conflict-mediation and practised throughout the world - brings new insights about public life (see for example, her ambivalence about Wikileaks on this Huff Post blog). And yes, this woman is my partner, but sometimes the obvious is sitting right in front of you... 

* * *

Already excited, waiting to see a list of these thinkers in one place - feels like a handy new blogroll to look forward to. 

Why Wikileaks should be an asset to the brand called democracy

Followers of the Play Ethic should be interested in my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thoughts on the Wikileaks controversy. A huge moment for net-activists everywhere, where the openness of the web as a structure meets the self-defined boundaries of state power. High stakes, no matter your assessment of Assange. The research references for this column are available on my Scottish-affairs website Thoughtland

 

My Sunday Herald essay: Joyous austerity vs. The X-Factor

This is the unedited version of an essay on the UK tv talent show The X-Factor for my old paper, the Sunday Herald. The theme I'm trying to explore is how the combination of conspicuous glitz and vertical business integration that the X-Factor represents is a response to the crisis of the music business, brought on by the internet and its decommercialising tendencies. But it's not the only model of how to make a living (if not a fortune) in the music biz post the web - and I show how me and my brother's band, Hue And Cry, are using the current landscape to our advantage. All comments, as usual, more than welcome. 

Sunday Herald 'Opinion' essay: Joyous austerity vs. The X-Factor

5 December 2010

By Pat Kane

For the last five years, it's become a thunderous seasonal ritual, with only one blip in the procession so far. From 2005-2008, surpassing even the three year consecutive run of The Beatles in the mid-sixties, the winners of Simon Cowell's fiendishly brilliant license-to-print-money The X-Factor have grabbed the Christmas No.1 spot: Shayne Ward, Leona Lewis, Leon Jackson and Alexandra Burke. So far as the bookies are concerned, they're giving 8/15 it'll happen again.

Only last year, as you may remember, corporate multimedia pop didn't quite rule supreme. As a result of anti X-Factor activism on Facebook, the national yuletide favourite buzzing out of young people's smartphones across the land was Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name, with its invigorating refrain, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!"

The leading candidate this year is called, wittily, Cage Against The Machine. This is another social-network campaign, aiming to defeat Cowell's phalanx of Matt, Rebecca and Cher with avant-garde composer John Cage's 4' 33'' (that's four and a half minutes of total silence). Available on Dec 13th, if you're interested.

So it's all fun and games in the new Roman circus: the emperors with their thumbs raised or dropped, the Christians bleating in their borrowed designer gowns, the vox populi whooping from the hall or voting with their far-off devices. And outwith the spectacle, disgruntled indie-music barbarians sulk in their bars and student halls, or occasionally get it together to throw boulders into the arena.

Is that it for the music business? With the BPI noting earlier this year that pop music has outsold rock music for the first time in decades, and with The X-Factor being credited as the single-handed saviour of the ITV network, is this the new model? Pop ingenues from the street squeezed through a variety of cookie-cutter genres by a series of grandstanding judges, who then shuffle to find their slots in a crowded release schedule run by probably the most cynical cultural operator in Britain?

Many musicians looking at the X-Factor would resist the artistic passivity and audience programming that it revels in. And I say can from my own experience that there's an alternative business model of music-making, where a more mature balance can be struck - a balance between the necessities of getting a money-stream from one's own material and performance, and the communal power of fans as they express themselves through digital networks.

But this is a vision of musical practice that comes much closer to the participation and sharing culture of folk, than it does to the conspicuous and plutocratic display of the X-Factor. Is Cowell's circus the commercial wave of the future, or the last lurid gasp of the hyper-consumerist past - and not just in terms of the music business, but for much of our public life as well?

Looked at from a great height (and yes, other actions could be performed up there) The X-Factor is a clever, comprehensive response by the traditional music business to the challenge of the digital generation- a generation whose mindshare has been scattered to the winds by a zillion media attractions, and whose consumer behaviour has been exploded by ubiquitous broadband and free filesharing. 

From his experience in the pre-internet heydays of the 80s and 90s, Simon Cowell has remembered a few things and applied them ruthlessly. One is the continuing role of television in family life, particularly at a time when everyone's lost in their own media niches. Weekend telly provides a welcome shared experience for work-wearied parents, and children too young to go out themselves - one that won't present any ethical or moral challenges, but will generate some degree of excitement and involvement from the audience. 

But one thing that's infuriating for the average A&R man are the media gatekeepers - producers and researchers - who control access to prime-time viewing. So Cowell created his own tv format: and in this, every element of the pop process - the broadcast show, the brandname, the performers, their rights and royalties, and their final recordings - is under one business regime. (Incidentally, there's not much irony in the name of Cowell's company, Syco. Much of the music business does indeed exist somewhere between psychopathy and sycophancy.)

So whether it's Rage or Cage against the machine, there is clearly a towering new music-biz "machine" before us - and that "all those people who don't seem to like X-Factor", as Cowell ruefully put it last year, are feeling oppressed by its operations.

In the last twelve months, this constituency has been self-consciously active in other areas too. Take the successful campaign to save the digital radio channel BBC 6 Music from rationalisation and closure. Or the (not-so-successful) tens of thousands that signed petitions to protest against the passing of The Digital Economy Bill, which will criminalise music downloaders through new powers of detection and enforcement

We have a Tory-dominated, services-cutting government, a clearly-identifiable musical establishment sunk in luxury and corruption, a general state of anxiety and dread .... So should we expect a 'new Punk' any day now, combining anarchy, technology and refusal? A new movement of street, campus and community music, articulating protest and advocating alternatives against a broken capitalism?

Well, let's see. But there's also currently a middling space between the top-down soul-shredding of corporate pop, and the bottom-up world of wikileaking and militancy about copyright. This is a territory, I would suggest, that most active musicians currently occupy. The question is: how can someone find a sustainable way to make music, for all those good reasons we love - to express what's inside you, to follow your aesthetic joy, to connect meaningfully with appreciative audiences - while at the same time, trying to circulate some cash around the situation?

This is where my own music career, with my brother Gregory in Hue And Cry, has operated over the last few years - and where many others are trying to exist also. There's an axiom we've been using which seems to sum up our the challenge of the sustainable music career in the digital age: use what is ubiquitous to drive people to what is scarce.

Unless there is a huge shift in how the internet is basically structured (and while that shouldn't be ruled out, it doesn't look likely), any recorded content that any musician releases will be able to be copied and recorded by anyone else. And that's no matter how intricate the restrictions placed upon each music file. The internet is a copy-machine plus a telephone - and infinitely so. 

At the moment, even services that have figured out a simple way for people to pay for digital content - like iTunes or Spotify - are largely relying on the laziness of the consumer, as they use their well-designed devices. However, one teenager with a copy of a sound-grabbing program can easily defy every corporate programmer's control codes.

So there's the "ubiquitous" part - your content can be digitally everywhere, largely untrackable and uncontrollable. Deal with it, dude. But given that capitalism only works when you can make a resource scarce, and thus price it, what scarcity is left to the commercial musician? One is, obviously, the musician herself. Unless they've been taking too many illegal substances, even they'd have to agree they can only occupy one point in space and time. And so far, it's still the convention that a gig is an enclosed space, with entry requiring a cash payment of some kind at the door.

The primacy of the gig actually accounts for the relative health of the UK music industry. PRS for Music's 2009 report showed that live income rose by 9.45% that year, where games and DVDs has flatlined. Regionally, the report notes that Scotland "punches well above its weight", with 11% of the UK's music revenues generated from 8% of the population. The reason given is that festivals like T In The Park, Rockness and the Edinburgh Fringe support a lot of tourist-like consumer activity.

But this link between music and tourism can happen at the level of individual bands. This Feburary we'll be doing the second of our Hue And Cry Weekends at Glasgow's ABC venue - this one, tied to Valentine's Day, is called 'A Glasgow Kiss' (naturally). We'll make ourselves available to fans through meets, greets, and soundchecks, provide them with a guide to enjoying the city for a weekend - and get a chance to sing love songs for two days.

There's another other element of scarcity available to the musician: beautifully produced material objects with a personal, customised touch (the very opposite of the immaterial nature of digital music). For example, we have a facility called Songframes, where Hue And Cry fans can order a display frame containing a vinyl copy of a song from our back catalogue, with handwritten lyrics and music, and a personal dedication. It's hard work for us, but we're doing pretty good business; fans are devoting frames to children, spouses, lovers, departed ones. 

I know this sounds like a very old scene of creativity. Craftsmen making objects for bespoke customers. Troubadors cultivating their audience as a community. Music operating as social currency as much as commercial product.

The crucial difference is that the internet allows the artist and audience to exist face-to-face online, building a virtual village square together (although populated by people across this island, and way beyond). In this square, the conversations and sharing come first - and from that collective enthusiasm arise opportunities to sell services and products of all kinds. But not to excess, and with a premium on quality and experience, not disposability and transience.

Does this new music-business model, the musician as community-minded enterpreneur, make you a living? Well, did the music business ever make a living for that many people? For me, it certainly has its place within a portfolio of earning activities - a craft conducted somewhere in the spectrum between professionalism and amateurism, and perhaps alongside some other specialised skill that society finds hireable (in technology, design or education).

Because the music business felt the brutal, de-monetising impact of digitality first, I'd say many musicians have been developing resilience and skills for survival that others could learn from.

Take journalism. Like musicians, journalists exist amidst a community of readers. As the internet unravels their protected revenues and saleable objects, how can journalists use their unique presence and skills to command a fee for services - and for what services, exactly? Also: where are the opportunities to create beautiful, treasurable and customisable objects of journalism? Does the iPad and other tablet readers represent a new way to combine ubiquity and quality - for a price?

The muddle-through (as opposed to top-down or bottom-up) strategies of the entrepreneur-musician might well result in a new stability for the music business. Artists will want to support music services that "feel like free" for music fans - giving users that sense of digital ubiquity that they love, but with some revenue (though certainly nowhere near as much as in Cowell's 80's heyday) collected through subtle licensing and contract agreements.

But the important attitude is to be sanguine and relaxed about these crazy times. It's a time for commercial invention and trying things out - not for panicked scaremongering about piracy and theft, which ends up alienating the most enthusiastic members of your audience.

The much bigger horizon is whether consumer-led economic growth, challenged by our need to achieve low-carbon targets, is actually an outmoded system. Beyond the Saturday night hoopla and the stadium mega-gigs, many musicians have been practising optimistic austerity for years. And that just happens to be the mindset which will enable us to cope sanely with drastic environmental limits on our lifestyles.

Beyond the baubles and conspicuous glitz of the Cowell circus, Generation Zero - preaching minimalist living and post-consumerist virtue - is waiting in the wings. And a participative music business, less concerned with high profit-margins and more concerned with the strong relationship between artist and audience, may be perfectly placed to answer their needs.

The X-Factor is at one level just some weekend fun, of course: no-one's frogmarched to the flat-screen to watch it. But from where I'm standing, some of its bombastic hysteria comes directly from the consciousness of its smug, but undoubtedly switched-on creator: I think he really believes the glory days of the 80's are back-back-back.

I'll certainly be voting to make sure John Cage gets to number one this Xmas. But the more enduring challenge to the X-Factor Machine will come from working musicians trying to figure out their new music business model, building it out across the networks and audiences, one event or recording at a time. For all his cat-stroking, high-waisted genius, I don't think Cowell understands the real X-Factor involved in making music at all.

Hue and Cry's Glasgow Kiss Weekend is 11-12th Feburary, ABC Glasgow. Their new album Bitter Suite, Again is available at http://www.hueandcry.co.uk