(2009-05-20) Kane Welfare System For Players

Pat Kane revisits the origins of his Play Ethic meme, considering whether the Play Ethic could generate its own political arrangements, its own social compensations, to match those of the Work Ethic.

As writers like Richard Sennett have been mordantly pointing out for years, those were the psychological habits demanded by the new Capitalism - demands not just driven by computers and networks in themselves, of course, but by the new pressures of global competition that they enabled. In his view, these habits resulted in the very "corrosion of character" itself. A strong character, according to Sennett, was composed from those traditions and practices that people derived from apply themselves to their trade or occupation. The new capitalism literally tore those old occupational identities to shreds, and then expected people to compose and recompose themselves from the fragments. (Network Economy)

Yet I always resisted the idea (also promoted by critics like Zygmunt Bauman) that such "players" were just the bright-eyed, endlessly malleable jack-rabbits of super-capitalism. This scepticism almost certainly came from my experience as a musician. There's no shortage of lifestyle and career flexibility in that realm. But within and around your art, you were free to make critical statements about politics and society - statements that would surely not be encouraged in any usual market-facing organisation, where your smarts and adaptability tend to be harnessed to serve "world-class competitveness", first and foremost.

When I discovered Hacker communities (primarily by way of Pekka Himanen's The Hacker Ethic), I found some kindred spirits. Hackers were as joyfully committed as musicians to their symbolic craft (making code rather than music, though of course both are notation in some way). And they were even better at deriving an ethics and politics from their practice.