The Play Ethic

Soulitarian Book Club

Got two e-mails this week from two old digital player-pals announcing their new books, and inviting me to their launches.

The one I'd love to just jet to New York to make (ok, take an eco-zeppelin) is McKenzie Wark's Gamer Theory - the book of the website. The one I may well trundle along to is Richard Barbrook's Imaginary Futures: from thinking machines to the global village (see these press releases). More below on both - but the ludic canon is growing apace. Might just have to start myself a 'Play Foundation' to organise it all...

Miliband the player?

I was reading Comment is Free today, and clicked through to this interview with possible-Labour-leadership-candidate David Miliband. The man has never really registered on my radar as anything other than one of these "PPE" boys (that's 'Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford', to the uninitiated), born to manage the under-lettered. But then I'm a bit of a spare-time policy wonk myself, I write about a bit, so I shouldn't have been surprised to read this passage:

Across a range of policy areas, people would no longer be "spectators" of government but "players" in it, whether it was the business of recycling waste or taking part in the local fight against crime. "The notion that the country that succeeds will be the country of players not spectators is a very powerful notion. The audience has gone to the stage," he says.

This follows on from a bit of neat historical periodisation of different attitudes towards personal agency:

Scotland as if the Union had never happened...

And just to complete this run of Jockular postings... Here's a bit of intelligent whimsy from Radio Scotland, an imaginary show (scroll down to 'Sunday' to listen) speculating on what Scotland would have lost (or gained) if we hadn't refused the Union with England in a Union in 1707. (Which in reality, of course, we didn't). I'm mentioned in despatches by my old conceptual compatriot Christopher Harvie as 'Senator Kane' - and towards the end, I do my little comic turn as such. (And I devoutly wish to see the 'Scottish Academy of Comic Strip Art', run by Senator Grant Morrison, by the way).

Shaping up for a new Enlightenment

Just wrote a column for the Scotsman Opinion page, wondering whether there's a 'reverse-brain-drain' going on in Scotland. It's available if you want to pay, but I'll post the text in extending post below. Here's the crucial paragraph:

The challenge is not just to be, say, a 'world leader in stem cell research', but also a world leader in how we think through the consequences of this extraordinary innovation. (Ian Wilmut's changing role - from pioneering cloner of Dolly, to public ethicist about the genetic revolution - is an example.) We shouldn't shy away from the complexity of these issues, but embrace them – and that embrace will attract (and is already attracting) the best minds to this country.

Towards a 'Scottish 24'

Another column for my good friend Fergus Sheppard at the Scotsman, on my notions about the return of media and broadcasting regulation to the Scottish Parliament. Again, you can pay them cash for it, or you can read it on extended post below. The nub of the thing:

It would be wonderful if we could make bottom-up participation one of the arguments for media regulation coming to Scotland, rather than just shouting for the usual 'Tartanising' of the familiar old media institutions. The resultant 'Scottish Twenty-Four' would surely be an appropriate expression of the 'democratic Scottish spirit' we so readily invoke?

Bye Dad

Just to let you all know that John Kane, my father, died suddenly on Saturday 9th March, 8.50pm, from an attack of pneumonia, aged 77. We buried him yesterday in Coatbridge, the town of his birth and life. He leaves Mary Kane, his wife, myself and my two brothers, Gregory and Garry-John. If you want to know a little of what our Dad was like, pages 27-30 of The Play Ethic book will give you a flavour (but only a flavour) of him, and his influence on me in particular. I have posted the funeral eulogy to my father below, in extended post, if you want to know more.

Gregory and I wrote a song for him about 16 years ago (here's the clip). It was occasioned by his retiral day, in 1987, from British Rail as a long-term administrative worker (and when he left, first-rung manager). Bye dad, we love you.

WHITE COLLAR

Hero of the lucid memo
Rest your fountain pen
Office grace is giving way to glassy eyed young men
Champion of compromise
The world has changed for you
No need for the gentle touch when a rabbit punch will do

So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck

There were times when class and class had known the same stairwell
These are times when hatchet men are shuttled up from hell
Leaving Day was thick with jokes and how they knew you well
Friends and enemies agreed you were more than personnel

So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
Rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
Rest your head, rest your weary head

Seems like we've begun again on the same side of the street
I have found this happy man when the system let him be

So rest your head upon a White Collar, snapped around your neck
Rest your head upon a White Collar snapped around your neck
Rest your head, rest your weary head
Rest your head, rest your weary head

The fair cop in cyberspace

I reviewed Lawrence Lessig's new version of Code for The Independent last week. It's really set me thinking, and even brooding somewhat, on what the internet has been, and is becoming. I know what Lawrence has tried to do with the book - which is, as usual, to get the digital classes to be aware of what can so easily unravel about the web, and defend it vigorously. But some of his cures - digital passports to manage our identities online, government regulations over aspects of html coding - seem to me, when I'm feeling wobbly, almost worse than the disease. I'd love some of you who've read the book, or just my review, to give me some comments below. Do we have to countenance the end of the open internet? Is the playground about get a new, sterner monitor?

Scottish Utopias and Dystopias

I wrote a short essay for an excellent publication called View - the policy journal for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. 'Scottish Dystopias and Utopias' is now available here on PDF and Word file.

I'm also creating a new blog category for it - Scotland In Play - simply because I know I'll be posting more on Scottish topics, from the general perspective of the Play Ethic, in the run up to the May elections in the Scottish Parliament. The conjunction in the title is deliberate: there's a sense that much indeed is 'in play' in Scottish politics, with the SNP making inroads into the Labour party's hegemony here. And hopefully, a revival of politics and civic activism and general democratic energy in the country will be the result.

Creature discomforts

Thanks to Jonathan Rutherford for sending me a copy of my review (PDF) for the forthcoming edition of Soundings, to which I contributed an essay on play a few months ago. The book was Wendy Wheeler's The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (Lawrence and Wishart). It really focussed my thinking about the impact of what could be called the 'complexity' sciences - to which I can now add 'biosemiotics' - to my understanding of play. And what a vision of a thoroughly  'communicational' human nature might (or might not) enable politically.

Though I am critical of the social and political prescriptions the book draws from its utilisation of the science, I must give tribute to Wendy for pulling together such disparate material, in such an accessible and passionate way. Her book demands many strong responses, and is at least much more diversely sourced than most of those riding on the 'well-being' bandwagon at the moment (see below).