From Adbusters #57, Jan-Feb 2005
There are forces in informational capitalism that are undermining the current social contract, argues Scottish musician/theorist Pat Kane. The rise of open networks has led to open source, peer-to-peer networking and file sharing, and a new way of living, he says, in which we live to play, not to work.
Kane says that people – he calls them ‘soulitarians,’ hackers and independent young creatives in IT – are beginning to find the space to realize themselves as creative individuals. He explains: “Given how digitization, networks, computation and mobility both empower us as individuals, yet place us in a much less stable and dynamic world, the ‘work ethic’ seems a woefully cramped and inadequate mentality for these times. Why tie our identities to duty and survival, when our connected technologies compel us to live creatively?”
In The Play Ethic, his self-styled “manifesto for a different way of living,” Kane mixes reportage (on how soulitarians approach jobs as an extra opportunity for passionate play) with a political program (reducing the working week to 30 hours). He examines the idea further on his blog.
Kane’s overall argument is that play (“one of our enduring human capacities, one that explicitly embraces change and possibility”) is a powerful alternative to work, as a measure of human worth and value. A worker “accepts that their public and productive activity will only ever partially express their passions,” says Kane. Instead, players strive to align these two realms.
“Play allows imaginative headroom to imagine what kind of lives we would lead if we eventually constructed our benign, peaceful global system,” he suggests. “The play ethic, at least in the West, is about keeping societies liberal and complex. We need it so that citizens, consumers and producers can have enough consciousness to impede our political elites from doing the kind of harm to the world they’re doing at the moment.”
Kane isn’t indulging in old hippy ideas and doesn’t sentimentalize play. Instead The Play Ethic belongs with other ‘slacktivist’ initiatives like the Italian Slow Movement. It’s about helping individuals and societies to step back from free market frenzy and create new more creative, independent, appropriate ways of living.
Jim McClellan is currently interactive writer-in-residence at the BBC and writes for The Guardian.
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