The Play Ethic

Space, stuff and speed

...is what we (Westerners) chiefly need. But can 9 billion have it on the face of the planet? Micheal Lind argues that yes, we might be able to.

Providing stuff, space and speed to 9bn people without putting serious strains on the global environment is possible, but not inevitable. A planet of crowded slums, extreme inequality, devastated ecosystems and rising atmospheric temperatures is a frightening possibility. To avert such a future, campaigns for political and behavioural reform, at both the national and international level, will be necessary to supplement the development of new technology - no argument there. But political and moral campaigns should take the preferences of people into account and they should be based on sound reasoning. It makes no sense to counsel individuals and nations to adopt austerity in cases in which there are technological solutions to problems created by technology. Sometimes there really are technical fixes.

A Good Walk Problematized

You know you're in the presence of a real eclectic when he makes you interested in a subject about which you are cosmically indifferent. Steven Johnson - author of Emergence - has blogged about his experiences on the golf course, titled When Is A Golf Course Unfair?. Apparently they've been complaining in golf land, at the highest levels (see Tiger Woods), that certain golf courses are too difficult and random - allowing non-top-flight players a shot at victory. And counter-intuitively, Steven sides with the pros:

In my mind, the debate shouldn't be about unfairness. It should be about randomness. There is a certain point of difficulty where the course stops distinguishing between good shots and bad shots, and thus fails to reward players who are performing well relative to their peers. Imagine a course set up like a pinball machine, where balls land in the fairway and then bounce fifty feet in the air in random directions. Winning in those conditions would be a matter of pure luck -- the score would simply be a register of who got the luckiest bounces.

Willing Slaves or Unwilling Players?

My friend Madeleine Bunting has brought out her powerful polemic against the overwork culture in the UK, Willing Slaves - some extracts in the Guardian for free here. I'm midway through it at the moment, admiring her passion, clarity and research, and essentially agreeing with her big policy recommendation - a 35 hour week, conducted under state regulation.

But I don't think that all the values she identifies as suckering people into an over-work culture - of innovation, self-direction, and techno-idealism - are such handy tools for manipulative managers to crank up the work-hours. Technology hasn't brought about a Leisure Age, true - but is leisure what we want in life? I agree that we need, as she says on R4 this morning, a care ethic - but as the point where our play ethics become a different kind of "response ability": a response to the weakness and fragility of others, as well as their capability and strength. It's responsiveness that needs to be the continuum of our lives, not work and leisure - on that we agree. But I think there is a potential in our information societies for a purposeful and productive responsiveness - what I would call play - to replace what we regard now as 'work'. To largely damn the network society, and all its tentacular oppressions of family, community and happiness, is not sufficient to the reality of the times (though I understand the sentiment entirely).

A dismissive early review from the New Statesman comes from Richard Reeves, who wants us all to admit we secretly love our work anyway, so there's no surprises there.

Cash from Order

As follow-up to the post below, here's my Independent book review on Louis Barfe's Where Did All The Good Times Go?, a somewhat boring read about the hard retail and distribution end of the music business. I must have been feeling dyspeptic that morning:

Musicians have miserably failed to use the chance for a direct relationship with their fans that broadband and download affords. Is that because most music these days is a kind of precisely targeted demographic therapy - Norah Jones for fearful adult homebirds; Blue and Busted for the new child consumer; Franz Ferdinand for punks young and old - whose message sits all too comfortably with controllable formats? Is music still a medium whose impact might demand a different mode of distribution and reception? It would seem that documentary-makers such as Michael Moore are more rock'n'roll than any of the artists currently tugging their forelocks to MTV or Clear Channel.

You're Playing With My Mind!

From Fast Company. Great item on a new game, Mindball, invented by the Swedes, which monitors the brainwaves of competitors to generate its plays. But dontcha love what you have to do to win?

Mindball is played on a 4-foot-long table by two people with electrodes taped to their foreheads. These biosensors detect alpha and theta brain waves--generated during intense concentration and deep relaxation--and correspondingly instruct a computer inside the table to move a rubber-coated steel ball via a magnetic sleigh below the surface.

The object is to roll the ball from the center spot into your opponent's end zone. The more focused and relaxed you are, counterintuitively, the faster you win. Competitiveness and aggression are counterproductive. Strategy, decision making, and hand-eye coordination count for nothing. "You compete by being calm--a complete contradiction," says Hannell. In Mindball, you attack by relaxing even more, and you react by not reacting.

Zen paradox! You win by not trying to win? You lose when you try to win? All hail long winters and Scandiavian social democracy! And a snip at $18,000 dollars.

You'll Have Had Your Cheat Code

A regular correspondant, Ren Reynolds (a blogger on Terra Nova, which is the 21C equivalent of an Edinburgh coffee house in the 18thC - full of enlightenment and strange new paradigms), has reminded me that the Old Lady is also host to the Edinburgh International Games Festival this August. And as befits the old capital of rationalism, there's a discussion on virtual economics with Edward Castronova. It's going to be a great month...

Play Ethic @ Edinburgh Book Festival

Very pleased to announce that my event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival is now available for online booking and perusing:

Pat Kane: Work and Society
Location: Studio Theatre
Date: Wed 25 Aug, 8:30 PM
Ticket Price: £8.00
Concession Ticket Price: £6.00

Boldly rejecting the work ethic, which keeps British workers chained to their desks for ever-increasing swathes of their lives, Pat Kane, musician, journalist and thinker, proposes a Play Ethic instead. In his manifesto for a different way of living, he urges us to become players, seeking pleasure in all aspects of our lives.

Erm, don't think I'm quite that hedonistic, but I know what they mean. There will be piles of the book to buy there, I am assured. Much else being prepared in the way of promotion, I'll keep you posted. Be great to see some of you there at Edinburgh.

Desperately Seeking Paradise

Great to see my favourite Muslim playa, Ziauddin Sardar, being well reviewed for his new book on his personal search for an Islamic moderntiy. Zia features in my spirituality chapter of the Play Ethic, as an example of someone who has a take on human creativity which doesn't automatically endorse the modernist free-play of liberal capitalism. Here's a long extract from Desperately Seeking Paradise:

Nothing remains "contemporary" for ever. Islam has to be rearticulated, understood afresh, from epoch to epoch, according to the needs and requirements, the specific demands of geographical location and the circumstances of the time. What changes is our understanding of the constants. And as our understanding develops, Islam of one particular epoch may not bear much resemblance - except in devotional matters - to Islam of another epoch.

The Lite Ages

Thought-provoker from an interview with Peter Lamborn Wilson, otherwise known as the 'ontological anarchist' Hakim Bey:

I would say that I think there really does have to be a refusal of what's called "information" on behalf of what we might call "knowledge," or even "wisdom" if you wanted to use dangerous words. My personal response to this is to refuse the data. You know, how much more do I need to know? Do I really need to know over and over and over again that governments are bad and that human beings are made to suffer? Do I need to know a thousand new details about the ways in which poor humanity is being stepped on once again? Is that really news? It's also a psychological truth that information that you don't work for, that you don't go after, that you don't struggle to get, really doesn't mean very much to you on a deep level. So when you can press a button and get 6,000 hits -- and you saw the same thing happening after 09/11, it doesn't take any work at all, not the least bit of effort, not even physical effort -- so what is it going to mean ultimately, to the development of your higher consciousness shall we say? I don't think it means very much. In fact I think it can have a paradoxical counter effect, which is that the more of this information you take in, the darker things get. I call it the "lite age" as opposed to the dark ages. A situation where you have all the information all the time -- completely accessible -- where in other words there are no secrets, or there's a perception that there are no secrets, that there's no information that we can't get. This kind of false omnipotence, this superman of information.

Too Virtual for Comfort

We know that movies are already deeply in a phase where nothing on the screen that seems like a photograph of the real can be presumed to be so. But MIT's Tech Reviewblog makes the interesting point that we may be exercising some fastidiousness about how much we can simulate real humans on computer games and movie screens:

Depending on whom you ask, researchers have already done 80 to 99 percent of the work necessary to make CG humans indistinguishable from real ones. Only that last bit remains. So what are we afraid of? That they’ll never get there—or that they will?