[iDC] Micheal Jackson, playlabourer

pat kane playethical at gmail.com
Sun Jun 28 10:03:22 UTC 2009


Hey all

Been on the sidelines of this brawling symposium, writing punditry  
for cash, but said punditry certainly informed by this discussion,  
even as I sneak it past the newspaper editors...

Here's a piece on Micheal Jackson as, I guess, 'playlabourer'  http:// 
www.theplayethic.com/2009/06/michealjackson.html

And here's my forthcoming review of Douglas Rushkoff's Life  
Incorporated for the Independent newspaper.

Will properly engage with the most recent 30,000 words soon...

pk

LIFE INCORPORATED
How the world became a corporation and how to take it back

Douglas Rushkoff (Bodley Head, £12.99)

When faced with windy laments of civilisational decline, you can  
always rely on British popular culture to worm its antic way into  
your brain. Throughout this overstated thesis in praise of bottom-up  
community against top-down capitalism, I kept seeing and hearing the  
frightening visages of the BBC's The League of Gentlemen: "We're  
local people… doing local things".

Unfair, I know. But Rushkoff is so infuriatingly magisterial in this  
book that you reach, with some desperation, for the nearest court  
jester.

It's the right moment to read long-view analyses of our  
commercialised society. Ruskoff's Life Incorporated is as fluent and  
well-researched as any of his books – but its target is too large,  
and too badly constructed, to help us much. In a heaving rush of anti- 
modern sentiment, Rushkoff bundles together vast and complex trends  
over the last half-millenium – political, economic, scientific and  
cultural -  into a monolith called 'corporatism'.

For him, corporatism isn't just a form of commercial enterprise  
cooked up by 15th century merchants and monarchs to control and  
standardise the varied social markets of the early Middle Ages – an  
account he takes, accurately, from the great French historical  
masters Aries and Braudel. It's also a kind of permanent  
civilisational war – abstraction, universalism and individualism,  
versus the face-to-face, the local and the communitarian.

But like a CGI-generated Transformer robot with a faulty program, the  
monster's pieces just don't hold together. For one thing, not all  
universalised standards – a brand which Rushkoff sizzles into many  
hides, from the first central currencies to the latest "flashy"  
social network – are as implicitly "fascist" as he suggests.

How about that brutal reduction of our oral traditions known as the  
printed book? A format so standardised, both physically and in terms  
of the settled national languages it regularly deploys, that it can  
convey the new verities of the village to audiences all round the  
world. Rushkoff deprecates the cultivation of interiority and  
subjective reflection in almost every realm except the one in which  
he plys his own trade.

So oppressive is the shadow of this corporate behemoth in Rushkoff's  
mind that the actual historical forces of resistance to capitalism  
and imperialism (more boring but more accurate terminologies) end up  
being downgraded or ignored. The Renaissance and Enlightenment is  
nailed for being an epistemological hand-maiden to domination by  
distant, centralising powers – its "clean, universal truths [keeping]  
people's attention and eyes upward, and off one another": a  
disconnection that allows David Hume to support slavery and democrats  
to ignore the rights of women.

But what about Romanticism? With its celebration of the organic and  
the rooted, its passionate feminists and early ecologists, casting  
off the "mind-forg'd manacles" of industrial society – and fuelled by  
all that nasty subjectivism?

Rushkoff's attitude to the labour movement as a corrective to the  
march of corporations is also, as he might say, kinda weird. He often  
bundles unions in with other "community-minded" groups, whose hands- 
on, in-the-streets sociability is swamped and subverted by a miasma  
of capitalist ruses – everything from housing regulations to self- 
help courses, never mind the obvious traps of easy credit and ad- 
driven consumerism.

But again, is this really a battle between local, face-to-face virtue  
versus universal, faceless vice? Rushkoff undercuts his own argument  
when he supports industry-wide collective bargaining on wages and  
conditions. Yes, you could see it as part of the Sabbath tradition of  
holy days of collective rest – but it's also a continuing modern  
struggle conducted (at its best) in a supra-local way.

That Rushkoff is a sinner in repentance has been evident from his  
last few books. He turned spy on the marketing industry that  
initially feted him in Coercion, urged companies to eschew  
consultants in Get Back In The Box, even attempted to create his own  
open-source version of Judaism in Nothing Sacred. But there's  
something particularly galling about a one-time evangelist of  
'cyberia' and 'playing the future' (titles of his earlier books) who  
decides to wizz all over the current vibrancy of social media.

Yes, it's a battleground between the copyright enclosures of the  
corporations, and the frankly neo-communist behaviours of users,  
hackers and convivials – but there is a battle of values going on.  
One which shapes Californian internet platforms so much that they  
find themselves being used as tools for Iranian insurgents – their  
locality becoming our world responsibility, through (guess what?) the  
robustly universal protocols of the internet. In Rushkoff's Tolkien- 
esque, Mordor-like vision of corporatism, that simply shouldn't have  
been permitted.

At the beginning and the end of this book, Rushkoff evokes what's  
wrong and what's right about the community values of his own upstate  
New York neighbourhood. With children and wife in tow, the writer has  
been clearly moved to celebrate the immediate, the friendly, and the  
love-driven, from the place where he lives and nurtures. No argument  
there. But such bucolia can't justify Rushkoff's gross misreading of  
the societal structures of the 21st century. It's an ultimately  
disempowering account, which makes you feel (wrongly) like a deluded  
dupe for even trying to engage with current realities.

To paraphrase our friends from Royston Vaisey, "universal people  
doing universal things" (meaning not just corporate elites, but daily  
cosmopolitans) have to be part of the progressive picture too.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and one  
half of Hue And Cry.

On 28 Jun 2009, at 02:36, Mechthild Schmidt wrote:

> Armin,
>
> I made the comment in reference to the notion of play  as (quote  
> Davin:) "distinct from "ordinary life" (Huizinga), and that it  
> constitutes an "occasion of pure waste" (Caillois)"
>
> ... as not pure waste but quite opposite: an ideal state of mind to  
> achieve in the balance of ratio and emotion
>  in their search for truth, beauty, art  (in context of Schiller's  
> admiration for Ancient Greek culture);
> such 'play'  as an artist lost in their work, a writer, a  
> philosopher - different from 'play' as in gambling (Glücksspiel).
>
> Best,
>
> Mechthild Schmidt
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 26, 2009, at 9:37 PM, Armin B. Wagner wrote:
>
>> Am 26.06.2009 um 17:15 schrieb Mechthild Schmidt:
>>
>>> Is this an inappropriate response of a lurker who enjoys the
>>> conversations but never finds the time herself to contribute? The
>>> thought crossed my mind. But here is my 'Twitter' comment on play-
>>> labour (The footnote alone exceeded Twitter - apology for the trim)
>>>
>>> Go dance. Empty your mind. Read Schiller[1] on Play and Truth. Go
>>> dance.
>>>
>>> [1] Friedrich Schiller: Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen.
>>> Reclam Nr.8994 [2] 1977, 14. Brief
>>
>>  From the 15th letter:
>>
>> "But perhaps the objection has for some time occurred to you, Is not
>> the beautiful degraded by this, that it is made a mere play? and  
>> is it
>> not reduced to the level of frivolous objects which have for ages
>> passed under that name?"
>> [...]
>> "...we must not indeed think of the plays that are in vogue in real
>> life, and which commonly refer only to his material state. But in  
>> real
>> life we should also seek in vain for the beauty of which we are here
>> speaking."
>> [...]
>> "Reason also utters the decision that man shall *only play* with
>> beauty, and he shall *only play with beauty*."
>>
>> Schiller's argument is complex and ambiguous, but I am pretty sure he
>> didn't imagined a Taylorization of leisure masking labour as play.
>> And he wouldn't have liked TopCoder.
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