PLAY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NET · Web viewPLAY, POTENTIALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NET PAT KANE In a 1999 CNN article (still available online), Tim Berners-Lee answers

PLAY, POTENTIALITY AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE NET PAT KANE

In a 1999 CNN article (still available online), Tim Berners-Lee answers what now seems like an antique organisational question: What role do network managers serve in the Web-based computing environments of the future?

Network managers need to get out of the way and not be seen. The user's job is not to use the network, it is to do whatever they do. Network managers need to create systems where they are not needed for users to create new files, new workgroups or new directories. They should not get in the way of people's creativity. You might want to filter what goes out to a public Web site. But within a company, you need to let people use the Web as a play space.1

As we now know, post Web 2.0, the 'Web as a play space' has truly burst the boundaries of the company. And there is something intriguing here about Berners-Lee's sensitivity to the need for organisations to manage their public net profiles, while internally retaining the Web to encourage a culture of occupational creativity (perhaps a hangover from the peer-to-peer, pure-science conditions at the CERN laboratories where hypertext was birthed). 2

Ten years later, in Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky describes the rise of "insanely easy group-forming tools" after the first wave of web services and development at the turn of the millenium. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Groups or Ning allow for "people's creativity" – not awkwardly "using the network", in Berners-Lee's words, but freely "doing whatever they do" – to slip under the floor of traditional organisational structure, and fashion their own, low-cost, constituency-seeking projects.3

Shirky's title is taken from the leitmotif ("HCE") to James Joyce's mind-wrenchingly ludic and aleatory final novel, Finnegans Wake.4 A vision of web culture as exactly this overwhelming, overlapping, polymorphous torrent of forms, driven by all the available human forces of desire, identity and technique, is Shirky's (and many others') neo-naturalist view of the Net. His closing metaphor makes this explicit: charting a course for the development of web culture is not like driving a car round a route, but a matter of keeping a kayak stable, in a turbulent stretch of river not of one's choosing.5

Between Berners-Lee's early (and curiously constrained) vision for the web as a kind of organisational sandpit-meets-toybox, and Shirky's near-surrender (similar to that promulgated by Kevin Kelly6) to open digital networks as a new domain of second nature to which we must continuously adapt and exapt, the question of whether the internet is "factory" or "playground" - or some unholy fusion of both - is acutely posed.7

Much of the heat of the discussion in online forums like the Institute for Distributed Creativity8 laments the evident shift from active to passive technical consciouness that is underway in Berners-Lee's quote, and fully realised in Shirky's book. For some digital activists, to be a "network manager" (or a "sysadmins op") is not an impeding layer of organisation to be smoothed away by more amenable interfaces and interaction designs: it is a necessary critical understanding about what constitutes our networks that needs to be recovered, and more widely distributed.9

These activists would read Berners-Lee's moment of organisational double-think ("you might want to filter what goes out to a public website") as an early indication of the underlying control logics that drive the creation of 'insanely easy' social tools. In the case of a Web 2.0 enterprise, the intra-company 'creativity' that Berners-Lee concedes could easily be directed towards the fine-grained marketing analysis of user data. Shirky and Kelly may flirt with the idea of the user's experience of Web 2.0 as being like a responsive organism in a fertile, niche-generating ecology. But critical digital theory sees behind this the true exploitative ingenuity of the net-capitalists.

On the iDC list, Mark Andrejevic asserts that the goal of harvesting hard data from avid users is about "discerning a dominant feeling tone" around products and services. They aim at "a kind of gestalt reading of the data flow: a means of seeing the whole without necessarily having to read through all the discreet data, that is reminsicent of the new spate of attempts to privilege gut instinct, first impressions, body language, etc".10

Brian Holmes notes further that, after rational homo economicus died in the financial Crash of 2008-9, social cognitive neuroscience now aims to "get closer to what makes Jane investor and Joe consumer really tick". If this intellectual strategy towards shaping human nature – aiming to discern "neobehaviorist reflex-arcs originating in the autonomous nervous system" - then shapes the design of our interfaces and apps, the

effect will be "the manipulation of people for the usual purposes of naked greed and subliminal control".11

For many critical digital theorists, this is a pernicious nexus. Interaction design encourages a 'naturalised' user response to the environment of the web – where our species-specific sociability and symbolic creativity find a new means of expression and extension. Yet our conviviality-with-digital-tools provides market and state enterprises with an ever-subtler flow of psychometric data.

This sustains the accumulative momentum of a capitalism that is now fully focussed on the manufacture of needs as much as of goods, on the commodification of consciousness as much as nature, on the exploitation of our communicative as well as our physical powers. There may be some ambivalence among these thinkers about whether this "biopower" is a pervasive act of dominion, or a permanent potential for resistance (the work of Antonio Negri expresses the confusion particularly).12

But there is little doubt in their minds that for all our avid embrace of the platforms and interfaces of Web 2.0, for all its organisational upheaval and institutional corrosion, the process is shaped by an underlying rationale of exploitation – our clicking, posting and gaming a "free labour" that allows corporate power to analyze our sentiments, and refine their commercial strategies.13 The games theorist Julian Kucklich, in an unlovely but penetrating phrase, describes our input into the mainstream social and content networks of the current web as one of "playbour": our experience is that of free and unalienated interaction, but the reality is that our activities are being used to add value to a communication-based capitalism.14

Our joyful play with and in networks is, essentially, the new opium of the people. Or as Kucklich puts it: "Play becomes a manifestation of our interpellation in he world of 24/7 real time labor/consumption (consumption having become an aspect of labor and labor an aspect of consumption)….Sisyphus might have ultimately been convinced to pay a monthly fee for the pleasure of pushing that rock up the hill."15

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Yet can play be so easily made into an instrument of commercial strategy? Is playful experience, as Brian Holmes puts it, only the lubricant

to "a perfected system of second-order cybernetic control over the consciousness of the [developed world's] middle-classes… a kind of world-creating and attention-channeling system [based on] contemporary social media, in its dominant corporate 2.0 forms"?16

To answer these questions requires that the "playground" element of the internet is analyzed and plumbed just as deeply as the "factory" element - with due respect to the former's intrinsic complexity and eclecticism as a topic of study, and thus as an angle of inquiry on the nature of digital networks.17 My claim here will be that there is a deep homology between the multi-disciplinary zone of contemporary play scholarship – particularly in biology, ethology, neuroscience and complexity theory – and the constitutive forces that maintain (despite the various attempts at enclosure and exploitation already mentioned) the openness and creativity of what Manuel Castells called "the internet society".

Probably the most comprehensive recent account of play in its many dimensions comes from the educational psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith, in his 1997 masterwork The Ambiguity of Play. Sutton-Smith hazards what is essentially a socio-biological defintion of play as "adaptive potentiation". By this he means all those experiments, simulations and virtualisations – games, jokes, stories, constructions - that we recognise as play, but which clearly serve an evolutionary purpose: namely, to aid our flourishing. Play does this, as Sutton-Smith puts it, "by mimicking or mocking the contingences of survival, in ways that excite bodily arousal".18 We establish zones where we take reality lightly, and joyfully: and we do so in order to master the tensions and challenges of sociable living with other complex, communicating and interiorised human beings.19

Sutton-Smith is careful to challenge the Piagetian model of play as merely the "scaffolding" of youth development, eventually falling away (a "putting away of childish things") to reveal the mature, post-ludic adult beneath. The continuity of play forms throughout the lifespan – not just leisure pursuits like hobbies and sports, but all manner of potentiations pursued in our occupational, domestic and civic lives - demonstrates humans' extended neoteny (meaning the sustaining of child-like characteristics throughout the lifespan) as compared to other play-exhibiting complex mammals.20

It is around the concept of extened neoteny – our continuing playfulness as one of the distinctive markers of our species-being - that some of the

initial linkages between the consilient science of play, and play as it operates in the networked world, may begin to be forged.21 Within the discourse of critical digital theory, we find one of the most powerful accounts of the role of neoteny in human affairs in the work of the Italian autonomists – in particular, the sociologist Paulo Virno.22

Virno argues that all politics has to contend with the fact that the human animal is the potential animal. By comparison with even other complex-mammalian relatives, we are always in an "unfinished state". There are four natural causes of this open potentiality in homo et femina sapiens: a) the language faculty; b) our instinctual non-specialization; c) neoteny; d) the absence of a univocal environment, and its replacement by a 'world'.

Our language faculty isn't some kind of Chomskyan universal grammer, says Virno, but the "biological and physiological requirements which make it possible to produce a statement" – beginning literally in a baby's gurgle, the basis of all lingusticality. This power or dynamis of language gives us the ability to set ourselves at a distance from our instinctuality. Or rather, language is our uniquely a-instinctual instinct – one marked by "polyvalence and generalisation", which allows us to "adopt behaviours that have not been preset" by evolutionary programming.

Virno takes his definition from neoteny from Stephen Jay Gould: "the retention of formerly juvenile characteristics produced by retardation of somatic development''. As human animals, "indecision befalls us": we are "congentially incomplete" because of our "constitutively premature birth". Virno puts it unsentimentally: "a chronic infancy is matched by a chronic non-adaptation, to be mitigated in each case by social and cultural devices".

The societal consequence of this combination of elements – the language faculty, non-specialisation, neoteny – lead to what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Virno's account of the 'potential' animal. Because our nature is explicitly non-specialised, we are never at home in any definite "environment": there is no natural fitness landscape in which we "insert oneself with innate expertise once and for all". We must thus '"wrestle with a vital context that is always partially undetermined, a world in which a stream of perceptual stimuli is difficult to translate into an effective operational code".

We can already begin to see some crucial differences between Virno's account of 'potentialised' human nature, and the 'adaptive potentiation'

play-theory of Sutton-Smith. Sutton-Smith identifies one evolutionary function of play as the continuation of "neonatal optimism" throughout the life-span. The "unrealistic optimism, egocentricity and reactivity" of the growin child, all of them "guarantors of persistence in the face of adversity", characterise many of our adult play behaviours.23 Play brings a sense of joyful indefatigability and energetic resilience, which – like the pleasure of sex for procreation – is evolution's "salute" to the human animal for maintaining a "general liveliness", in the face of the challenges of existence.24

Yet while Sutton-Smith's player draws on the organismic resources of joyful potentiation to cope with an open, perpetually challenging world, Virno's "potential" human animal faces the same unpredictable social universe with, it seems, much less supportive emotional resources.

His homo sapiens exists in "a state of insecurity even where there is no trace of specific dangers". Where adaptive potentiation generates a plethora of symbolic objects and routines invested with pleasure, the 'potential' human of autonomist Marxism needs social and cultural forms to "blunt or veil [its] disorientation". The "dynamism" that linguisticality unleashes must be tied down to "a circumscribed set of possible actions". Virno makes it clear that this anxiety is more manageable in traditional societies, where pseudo-environments (religious, regional, linguistic) are steadily brought forth to enable stability in the face of this intrinsic anxiety and indeterminacy.

What is so fiendish about contemporary capitalism, in Virno's account, is that is deliberately accelerates this indeterminacy – the faculties that open us up to endemic flexiblity and openess – to make it the very fuel of the social and economic order: "The death of specialized instincts and the lack of a definite environment, which have been the same from the Cro-Magnons onwards, today appear as noteworthy economic resources". Virno moves through our natural faculties of potentiality, and lashes them methodically to the flexible personality required by informational capitalism.25

Our biological non-specialization? The grounding for the "universal flexibility" of labour services: "The only professional talent that really counts in post-Fordist production is the habit not to acquire lasting habits, that is the capacity to react promptly to the unusual". Our neotenic forever-youngness, always ready to learn and adapt? We are now subject to "permanent formation… what matters is not what is progressively

learning (roles, techniques, etc) but the display of the pure power to learn". That fact that we are not determined by our environment, but make and construct our worlds? This is mirrored by the "permanent precarity of jobs", where we wander nomadically from one cloud in the nebulous world of labour markets to another.

With a sardonic gloominess worthy of Theodor Adorno, Virno denies that this intrinsically unstable system necessarily leads to unruliness – "far from it". In traditional societies with less pervasive markets (which one presumes includes Fordism), our deep ontological anxiety could be contained by "protective cultural niches". The "omnilateral potentiality" of flexible capitalism shakes those niches to fragments. Yet even though this disembeddedness allows for an "unlimited variability of rules", when those rules are applied, they are much more "tremendously rigid" than the Fordist workplace. Each productive instance is like the tight rules of a competitive game, easily entered into but severely binding when the play begins.

When commanded by our managements to respond to today's adhoc list of tasks and projects, in a world of frazzling openness and potentiality, we display "a compulsive reliance on stereotyped formulae". It is via these formulae that we "contain and dilute" the pervasive indeterminacy of the human condiion. Virno characterises them as

reaction-halting behaviours, obsessive tics, the drastic impoverishments of the ars combinatoria, the inflation of transient but harsh norms…Though on the one hand, permanent formation and the precarity of employments guarantee the full exposure to the world, on the other they instigate the latter's reduction to a spectral or mawkish dollhouse.

Virno's tapestry of the social pathologies of flexible capitalism is doubtless populated by more characters than those we find grasping or perched at their screen-displays. But there is something about the image of a "spectral or mawkish dollhouse", or the "drastic impoverishments of the ars combinatoria", as a description of the triviality that often courses through corporately-owned social networks, that lends the playbour critics some near-poetic ammunition.

Yet from the perspective of play theory, the neotenic openness of our human condition generates a wide spectrum of possible human agency, from absolute voluntarism to cosmic dependency. If we grant this, it

would defy Virno's attempt to damn human potentiation as endlessly susceptible to exploitaton as biopower; the implication of which is that, under the conditions of informational capitalism, play will always collapse into playbour.

In The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith's own typology of dominant play epistemes – if not "metahistorical", then certainly applicable over a very long duree – illustrates how much the domain of play escapes, or more accurately encompasses, most or all attempts to place it functionally within any societal logic, let alone that of any particular political economy.26 Sutton-Smith describes seven "rhetorics" of play, ways of talking legitimately about the effect of play across all disciplines across a very broad historical reach, which he divides into ancient and modern rhetorics.

Modern rhetorics he characterises as play-as-self (play as an expression of free-will and voluntarism), play-as-imaginary (play as imaginative freedom in arts and sciences), and play-as-progress (play as a contribution to human development through education and nuturance). This is a modernist, progessive picture of "health-through-play", a play forged by Enlightenment.

By contrast are the ancient rhetorics of play – play-as-contest (play defined by agonism, sport, war), play-as-identity (communal play, aimed at confirming social identity), play-as-fate-and-chaos (play as manifested in gambling and religion, presuming a degree of individual powerless before the operations of a cosmic system), and play-as-triviality (sheerly antic play, nonsense, tomfoolery). Play here often defies its modernist interpretations – there is coercion, there are actual as well as virtual consequences to each play, there is surrender to greater and more implicate orders, instead of simply a rehearsal of one's own mastery.

The very diversity of play-forms, says Sutton-Smith – and in particular the way they express autonomy and heteronomy at different levels and in different contexts - is to some extent a refutation of "reductive sociobiological theory" and its inability to see how play stages collaboration between altruism and cooperation. Play's diversity may also pose a bigger challenge to evolutionary theory:

… the neurological and evolutionary developments involved [in play] point to something more complex than Darwin’s notion of

natural selection as the single driving force behind evolutionary change. To the contrary, the concept of natural selection may have biased us to favor unitary explanations and prevented us from appreciating just how complex these matters become. According to recent research by Douglas H. Erwin27, evolutionary outcomes are likely also to depend on complex, functional, internal, and spontaneous neurological developments within the genes themselves.28

By quoting a Santa Fe complexity theorist like Erwin, Sutton-Smith indicates that an understanding of play in relation to any network or system, natural or artificial, might depend on a more holistic, or at least non-linear, conceptual framework than the neo-Marxist, critical-theory approach represented by Virno (I will develop this point in the closing section).

Virno in particular demonstrates the dangers of being too instrumentalist with the insights he takes from the sciences of human potentiality. In his essay "Natural-Historical Diagrams", he states confidently that "human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process". 29Yet Virno's own shifts and contradictions as to the specifics of that relevance shows how slippery play can be as any foundation for a particular political analysis.

In Virno's most recent book, Multitude: between negation and innovation, humour and jokes are now an immanently-availble resource for political innovation. Virno begins by invoking neuropsychological research on 'mirror neurons' – sometimes known as 'Gandhi neurons'30 for their identification of basic processes of intra-species empathy. This allows him to re-state his belief in the constitutively open (and dangerous) power of our linguisticality. That is, our ability to use language to negate that very mirror-neuronal empathy; for the Nazi guard to say to the prisoner, "this is not a man". The joke becomes our permanent linguistic opportunity to "negate the negation". Linguistic humour addresses such cruelty head on, and turns both these characters into provisional figures in an alternative reality. In short, dark humour in the worst of times makes the claim that "this is not not a man" (which is a more capacious and diverse position than the presumption of intra-species empathy ("this is a man")).31

For Virno, the joke brings us a brief moment of expanded illumination, showing us all as broken and contingent on the same blasted heath (and if the first joke doesn't do this, the second might, and so on…) The joke defies the Aristotelian injunction of 'tertium non datum' – that there is no third term beyond, say, domination and our resistance to it. In doing so, humour maintains a discursive latency in our minds that other innovative courses of social action are possible – for example, a creative exodus into new styles of living, loving and creating together. 32

And yet… Wasn't humour the very instrument of degradation in those empire-puncturing torture snaps from Abu Ghraib? Don't we have a 'comedy industry' on both sides of the Atlantic that functions as a safety valve for collective anger, as much as it might grant us some cognitive wriggle-room? In terms of Virno's own attitude towards the susceptibilities of our potentiating nature, his theoretical incoherence is obvious. Don't jokes and humour flourish in exactly those "mawkish dollhouses" and "impoverished combinatorics" which Virno identifies as the inevitable and degraded coping-culture of the 'potential' human, whose innate improvisation is now harnessed to capital accumulation? To challenge Virno straightforwardly: can he claim play as both liberating, and oppressive, as it subtends the constitutively open post-Fordist society?

Virno's confusion – where potentiation both traps us in a velvet cage of cliché and compulsive behaviour, and is an everyday linguistic resevoir for political innovation - demonstrates that play's lability is a challenge to even the most capacious of social theories. And his opportunistic grabs for brain science and biology as naturalistic anchors points towards the need to bring a much wider and more integral field of play theory and studies to bear on the "internet as factory and playground".

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One question that play theory poses for critical digital theory is whether play is being used by interactive capitalism - or is play using it? Is "playbour" on platforms and networks a compelling and seductive new form of exploitation, which uses our desire for self-control and autonomy against us? Or is playfulness a sign that a new, joyful collective consciousness – arising from innate human faculties of potentiation that have been amplified by communication networks and simulation software – is beginning to form, pushing

back against old organisational and institutional structures?

I am fully aware of the conceptual politics of such a framing – which could easily be cast as "Deleuze's society of control" versus "de Chardin's noosphere". And I am also aware that appeals to the neuro-physiological or socio-biological determinants of playful behaviour on the Net are not far behind either. John Marks's excellent paper 'Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics'33 carefully outlines how different the cybernetic vision of living-in-information-networks is from the tougher, more resistant vision of Deleuze. Both the cyberneticists and de Chardin identify an "evident kinship" between human neurology and "the apparatus of social thought" (Marks), further animated by a post-Cold-War idealism that saw free and easy communication as a bulwark against fascisms and totalitarianisms. By contrast, Deleuze sees the same dream of "instant communication" as compelling us to endlessly modulate our identities, "obliged continually to reinvent and account for ourselves. We are denied the privilege of having nothing to say, of cultivating the particular kind of creative solitude that Deleuze values" (Marks).

Yet even here, in arguing that communication can be about resistance as much as consensus, Deleuze (like Virno) reaches for the sciences of human nature. Against a brain whose information processing is continuous (or at least homologous) with that of digital neworks, fulfilling a dream of informational transparency between minds, Deleuze argues for a dynamic, plastic brain, where "any new thought traces uncharted channels directly through its matter, twisting, folding, fissuring it… New connections, new pathways, new synapses, that's what philosophy calls into play as it creates concepts".34

As Marks says, this is Deleuze's "expressive materialism" in operation, as opposed to the "reductive materialism" of computational or cognitive models. But his move is still significant. The temptation to reach for innate biological faculties as some kind of explanatory locus for the sheer dynamism of the networked society is understandable, and persistent. For example, Manuel Castells' most recent work Communication Power links cognitive science and his theory of socio-technical networks, in a way which emphasizes how susceptible the citizen's brain is to framing techniques by major political parties – and, as a corollary, how

important bottom-up communication activism is to the health of a information-age democracy.35 Yet whether we prefer models of neuro-psychology that emphasize plasticity and emergence36, or models which identify recalcitrant residues of evolutionary struggle in our minds – or any other hybrids or transcendances of those – we must concede the moot point: there is a clear biological/socio-biological determination to the "biopolitical" which cannot be waved away as "naturalist fallacy".

In the context of the internet, play brings the question of those determinations to a head. Can we articulate the Net as a tool to serve the expression of human neoteny, a medium for generic faculties of potentiation - without falling into the idealism of noopolitics or cybernetics, or falling foul of a critique of digital innovation and playfulness which links it directly to capital accumulation and the subtlest of social repressions?37

For me, there may well be grounds for doing so, if we consider what we could call the constitution of the Net. I partly take this notion from Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas, where he tries to defend the internet as an "innovation commons". In his pains to valorize the end-to-end network structure of the Net, and to defend its openess and dynamism against corporate or state incursion, Lessig compares the protocols and practices that make up the functionality of the internet to a political constitution. Lessig specifies a constitution as an "architecture of value", an ordering of space and time guided by certain robust principles. No doubt guided by his background as a legal counsel in constitutional affairs (not just in the US but across the post-Communist European states, where he served as a consultant to their own constitutional drafting), Lessig attempts to rally "netizens" to protect the "constitution" of the Net.38 In a more critical, control-society mode, Alexandar Galloway might also call this "protocollary" dimension of the net - where the power of "distribued networks lie in invisible architectures that drive behaviour in one direction or another".39 Yet I want to hang on to Lessig's more equitable vision of the structuration of the internet, and to ask whether what the Net demonstrates is the relationship between constitutional power and constitutive power.

Constitutive power, coming from the later theoretical refinements of

the Italian autonomist tradition, has its own philosophical lineage – particularly in the counter-modern tradition that Negri identifies stretching from Duns Scotus and Spinoza to Descartes and Deleuze.40 But I think that the concept can be stretched to encompass the potentiative human faculties that both Virno and Sutton-Smith explore, from their differening (indeed, nearly Romantic and Tragic) perpsectives. The constitutive power inherent in internet behaviour can be understood as an expression of human neoteny through open digital networks. The tumult of networked invention that Clay Shirky eulogises at the beginning of this paper is thus an expression of play-forms as adaptive potentiation, the responses of netizens to the risks and challenges of their environment.

Yet what I want to steer clear of is that turn from cybernetics, through biology and game theory, towards complexity studies (or "complex adaptive systems"), as a bigger framework for comprehending the internet. There is always the danger that complexity theory reduces the imaginative and enterprising human power of neotenic innovation within socio-technical networks to a kind of "proteanism" or "iterationism" – the random, unpredictable play of elements or players which keeps a system perturbed, open to bifurcation and branching, the infamous "order for free" described by theoretical biology.41 I don't discount that there might well be a distinctly "netological" dimension to the analysis of internet phenomena – both Sean Cupitt and Galloway/Thacker have pointed towards the non- or a-human agency of network power42, not to mention Kevin Kelly's current exploration of the concept of the "technium" as a neo-naturalized envelope of technoculture with its own, near-Gaian autonomy.43

It is also worth mentioning at this point (as Michel Bauwens frequently has in his many writings and activisms44) that one cultural tributary feeding into the networked autonomy of peer-to-peer platform innovation and "open" projects of all kinds is a non-Western, non-dual, thoroughly web-like epistemology and ontology – surely one of the consequences of the impact of the "counterculture" on "cyberculture" that Fred Turner documents, effective as recently as Google's organisational embrace of the Burning Man festival.45 That the spectacle and matrix of the Net induces the most startling echos of Buddhism's Net of Indra, or Hinduism's Lila, playful god of endless forms,46 is surely a mild caution to critical digital theory to be

aware of its Western dialectics of enlightenment, post- or not.

Yet for those of us who have not (or cannot, or will not) make the tiger's leap out of the prison-house of ego just yet (to dwell in the immanent connectedness of universal com-passion), will have to concern ourselves with more mundane forms of exodus - the construction of polities, infrastructures and socio-technical networks, guided by values which come about as the result of both determinate will formation, and of knowledge practices which stake some claim to falsifiability, at least.

And neoteny's generation of play and playforms throughout the human life-span strikes me as a credible area for inquiry, as one of the deeply constitutive processes shaping the design, functionality and culture of the internet. One epochal response to our potentiating faculties that the internet could represent is that of an extension of the "ground of play" that we see across the higher mammals – that open but distantly monitored developmental time and space, where potentiating risks are taken by explorative, energetic organisms, in conditions where direct scarcity is extant or held at bay.

1 It must have loose but robust governance2 It must ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff3 It must treat failure, risk and mess as necessary for developmentSimplest way to think of this might be to compare three grounds of play - two of them, indeed, not even entirely human: - Lion cubs on the savannah- A children's playpark- The Internet

 Cubs on the savannah1 Loose but robust governance? The mother and father of the cubs are at a proper distance - far enough away for the cubs to undergoe the scrapes and falls necessary for learning, but close enough to defend them against predators.2 Surplus of time, space and stuff? Play happens when cubs are fed, when the pride in general has a distance from scarcity. Play presumes either a surfeit or excess of objects. Or alternatively, an attitude that an object can be made gratuitous, is up for play (Adult: stop playing with your food! Child [silently]: I can't help it - it's my nature!)

3 Failure and risk as developmental? The cubs represent the primal scene of play. As Gregory Bateson once said, these animals are indulging in play as a 'meta' position, taking reality lightly: the bite on the ear says, "I'm now biting you on the ear - let me see your response". We must remember that, from one angle, play is strangely maladaptive: it opens you up to injury and predation. But we complex mammals have to do it, we have to rehearse the social complexity we are walking into. A playpark (in Huddersfield or Wakefield) - a good one1 Loose but robust governance? Let us lament the demise of the parkie... but in any case, a good playground will tend to be well managed externally by local council. It also takes strength from the investment of the community in its preservation and development - social capital guarantees that vandalism or destruction is keep to a minimum. And of course, there is 'auto-governance' generated by the sense of 'fair play' inherent to each game that children agree to play - otherwise, it's not much of a game...2. Ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff? The well-built playground sits in a generous space, and is on an open space full of constructions that are strong enough to withstand endless repetitive use, or creative misuse. the playground thrives when it's an uncommodified, open space - no hourly rates or tickets for entry. It's open from hour of waking, to hour of sleeping.3. Failure and risk as developmental? There have been much needed recent debates on the need for children to experience physical risk and challenge, as a developmental input into health and even citizenship. But we need things to dangle from, we need sand to get messy with or blocks to recompose... That's what we know and love about playparks.The Internet1 Have loose but robust governance? Surely that's the very definition of the Internet. It has a variety of non-governmental institutions which manage domain names, and the improvement of codes and protocols that enable the web. And these codes themselves have come from a variety of actors that are neither public authorities or private enterprises, but exist somewhere in the 'commons' of open source software production. Yes, we have state interference in the net in China, North korea, Iran - but these only make it clearer what we have to defend about the Net. 2 Ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff? Again, that's the very definition of the Net. It ensures the infinite copyability of digital information, it exists in a state of total plenitude of content. Time

mulitplies on the net: the way that social networking eats into organizational time is evidence of the way the Net busts the boundaries of our schedules, enables us to break time into bundles that suit us.3 Treats failure, risk and mess as necessary for development? The mantra for web development is not 'ready, aim, fire' - get it right, hope you hit the mark - but 'ready, fire, aim' - keep shooting, try many trajectories and options, and out of the many iterations a few things will hit beautifully. In Here Comes Everyboyd, Clay Shirky writes about Sourceforge, the repository for free software. 85% of free software on this has never even accessed, never mind used. But that doesn't matter, the sheer excess of options means that the ones that are used are robust, well-tested and genuinely popular. 

The researches of Adam Ardvisson and Michel Bauwens, both stalwarts of the iDC list that has propelled us to this conference,

You have to try to define the point at which you're willing to say that the net is a kind of inevitable consequence of Robert Wright's idea – of the ever growing complexification of society through game theoretical exchange.

And finally somehow get back to the intro in some way – the nature of the play space – how a deeper anchoring of what we regard as playful behaviour on the Net aids and abets

It may be that play is a sociobiological source of the optimism required to make politics work

It could also be Goodwin's complex adaptive systems take on play - keeps the adjacent possible open.

The driving force of net culture is a matter of play and creativity finally outracing work and scarcity - that "biological prerogative" being expressed.

--- The net as a ground of play – the point is that Virno IS completely humanist about his account of human potentiality – what do we gain by overcoming that Marxist anxiety about being a bee in a hive, and seeing our play as a kind of connection with nature which we can build on for a more sustainable life? [You'll have to go back through the essay to refine that insight]

1

NOTES

? "Web inventor sees his baby as a 'play space'", CNN, October 21, 1999http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9910/21/berners.lee.interview.idg/index.html2 Get ref to this3 Shirky book 4 Get HCE ref on finnegans wake5 Shirky ref6 Kelly's Technium. Also find discusion on iDC of Kelly's socialism.7 'The Internet as Playground and Factory', title of the conference to which this paper is a contribution. See http://www.digitallabor.org8 idc ref9 quote some links from iDC. Rushkoff also says this in Life Inc10 IDC andrejevic, Octboer iDC11 IDC –Holmes12 Negri's stuff in In Praise of The Common13 Tiziana – 'Free Labor'14 Kuchlich's definiton of playbour: "If we assume that play is distinct from "ordinary life" (Huizinga), and that it constitutes an "occasion of pure waste" (Caillois), then playbour is the re-entry of ordinary life into play, with a concomitant valorization of play activities. Insofar as life (bios) is always productive, and be it only in the sense that it produces waste, the extraction of value from play can be seen as a form of waste management; and insofar as play can be seen as a waste of time, the logic of playbour demands that time be wasted efficiently. In this sense we could also call playbour the Taylorization of leisure. Like other forms of affective or immaterial labour, playbour is not productive in the sense of resulting in a product, but it is the process itself that generates value. The means of production are the players themselves, but insofar as they only exist within play environments by virtue of their representations, and their representations are usually owned by the providers of these environments, the players cannot be said to be fully in control of these means. Playbour is suffused with an ideology of play, which effectively masks labour as play, and disguises the process of self-expropriation as self-expression. However, exploitation and empowerment, subjectification and objectification, wastefulness and efficiency coexist in the ambiguous "third space" of playbour, where these binary oppositions break down, and thus open up new possibilities of intersubjectification." from idc mail 26 June. 15 Kuchlich from IDC - early

---- Play and the Net – some outcome of game theory and evolution (Robert Wright)?

--- Cubitt's 'Does Gaia get a vote' objectivism…

16 Holmes, later IDC. Also refer to the Ulmer article quoted by Bauwens17 See 'A General Theory of Play', Chapter 3, in my book The Play Ethic: A Manifesto For A Different Way of Living (Macmillan, 2004) 18 Ambiguity of Play reference 19 See also Stuart Brown, Play (Little, Brown, 2009)20 Pick out Stuart Brown refs on neoteny21 I take 'consilient science' from E.O. Wilson's Consilience22 In particular, Virno's essay, 'Natural-Historical Diagrams: the 'New Global' Movement and the Biological Invariant", in The Italian Difference, edited by Alberto Toscano, Re-Press, 2009. http://3.ly/virno

23 Sutton Smith ambiguity of play, p 23124 Sutton Smith, emotions essay25 mention Brian Holmes's idea26 In The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith describes seven "rhetorics" of play, ways of talking legitimately about the effect of play across all disciplines across a very broad historical reach, which he divides into ancient and modern rhetorics.

Modern rhetorics he characterises as play-as-self (play as an expression of free-will and voluntarism), play-as-imaginary (play as imaginative freedom in arts and sciences), and play-as-progress (play as a contribution to human development through education and nuturance). This is a modernist, progessive picture of "health-through-play", a play forged by Enlightenment.

By contrast are the ancient rhetorics of play – play-as-contest (play defined by agonism, sport, war), play-as-identity (communal play, aimed at confirming social identity), play-as-fate-and-chaos (play as manifested in gambling and religion, presuming a degree of individual powerless before the operations of a cosmic system), and play-as-triviality (sheerly antic play, nonsense, tomfoolery). Play here often defies its modernist interpretations – there is coercion, there are actual as well as virtual consequences to the game, there is surrender to greater masteries than simply a rehearsal of one's own.

27 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26essay.html28 Sutton Smith – emotions essay29 Virno essay page

Arvidsson: "What Marx did not foresee was that the very expansion and complexity of the productive process that has promoted this new importance of General Intellect also creates the conditions for a new standard of value. When production is hyper-complex and networked, and builds on commonly available resources, the scarce element becomes the ability to coordinate such complex and mobile processes in real time in ways that ensure the successful appropriation and utilization of General Intellect. Economic value becomes contingent on the ability to build, however transient, social values and norms that are able to coordinate particular and situated productive processes, to construct the temporary, particular and situated nomos that allows a flexible and complex productive process to go on. In other words, value becomes contingent on ethical practice.

Neoteny in s's and brown - means we have a creative restlessness through life, we maintain a neonatal optimism

Neoteny in Virno - this restless is deeply exploited by performative capitalism, and pushes us to mega conformism, playbour

Virno - play is what makes us distinctively human and open and vulnerable

30 vs ramchandran, new yorker31 I explore Virno's theories on jokes and political innovation in [[Momus review]]32 exodus – and the joy of being communist – get refs33 John Marks, 'Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics', in Deleuze and the Contemporary World, Edinburgh University Press, 200634 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972-1990, Columbia University Press, 199535 Castells, Communication Power36 dig out that Radical Philosophy review or here's a Malabou interview http://www.jcrt.org/archives/09.1/Malabou.pdf37 There is of course the vision of the Net as a complex adaptive system, coming from Kelly and the complexity theorists38 Lessig, Future of Ideas39 Bauwens mail, Galloway quote40 Negri on counter-modernity41 Kauffman. Also Geoffrey Miller 42 Terranova on Galloway/Thacker43 Kevin Kelly's the Technium44 Bauwens quote from various mails45 burning man Turner essay46 richard schecter's performance theory

But for play theorists, it's mostly about what connects us to advanced mammalian condition

In a more recent book, Multitude: Between Negation and Innovation, Virno foregrounds the innovative, playful character of language indicated by humour and jokes. Witz (to use Freud's term) can save humans from the bad side of their constitutive openess – the power that language posseses to negate our baseline empathy and fellow-feeling (which Virno locates in the mirror-neuronal aspects of brain functioning). The joke opens out a field of meaning which can stage "a negation of the negation".47

Virno proceeds from a hard case of first-order negation: the Nazi camp soldier who chooses not to feel the pain of the prisoner at his feet ("this is not a man") Linguistic humour addresses such cruelty head on, and turns both into provisional figures in an alternative reality. In short, dark humour in the worst of times says that "this is not not a man" (which is a subtler, more diverse position than a basic presumption of intra-species empathy, "this is a man"). The joke brings us a brief moment of expanded illumination, showing us all as broken and contingent on the same blasted heath (and if the first joke doesn't do it, the second might, and so on…) The joke defies the Aristotelian injunction of 'tertium non datum' – that there is no third option between, say, authority and resistance to it. In doing so, humour maintains a discursive latency in our minds that other innovative courses of social action are possible – for example, the creative exodus into new styles of living, loving and creating together. 48

On one side the "mawkish dollhouse" and impoverished combinatorics; on the other, the discursively liberating power of the black joke… So: is play bad, or is play good, as it subtends the constitutively open post-Fordist society? I salute Virno's attempts – as well as his autonomist colleagues, like Antonio 47 pages from Virno's book48 exodus – and the joy of being communist – get refs

Negri, Christian Marazzi and others - to reckon with the challenges to solidarity and the "friendly life together" that the subjects of informationalised, performative capitalism bring, in all their meta-reflexive and deeply mediated complexity.

Yet it seems to me that the very diversity of play's forms – produced by Sutton-Smith's "adaptive potentiation" - is a real challenge to Virno's discourse. Those potentiations that are generated by our naturally adaptive and exaptive faculties can clearly both kiss and kill us. For Virno, our potentiation both traps us in a velvet cage of cliché and compulsive behaviour, and is an everyday linguistic resevoir for political innovation.

4

'the renewed prestige which for some decaes now has been accorded to the notion of 'human nature'. It does not depend on the impressive tectonic shifts within the scientiic community (Chomsky's pitiless critique against Skinner's Verbal Behaviour or such like) but on an ensemble of social, economic and political conditions.. Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process. That is because we are confronted with a peculiar empirical manifestation of certain phylogenetic, which is to say metahistorical, constants that mark out the existence of Homo sapiens.

In The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith describes seven "rhetorics" of play, ways of talking legitimately about the effect of play across all disciplines across a very broad historical reach, which he divides into ancient and modern rhetorics.

Modern rhetorics he characterises as play-as-self (play as an

expression of free-will and voluntarism), play-as-imaginary (play as imaginative freedom in arts and sciences), and play-as-progress (play as a contribution to human development through education and nuturance). This is a modernist, progessive picture of "health-through-play", a play forged by Enlightenment.

By contrast are the ancient rhetorics of play – play-as-contest (play defined by agonism, sport, war), play-as-identity (communal play, aimed at confirming social identity), play-as-fate-and-chaos (play as manifested in gambling and religion, presuming a degree of individual powerless before the operations of a cosmic system), and play-as-triviality (sheerly antic play, nonsense, tomfoolery). Play here often defies its modernist interpretations – there is coercion, there are actual as well as virtual consequences to the game, there is surrender to greater masteries than simply a rehearsal of one's own.

I quote Sutton-Smith's vast typology (constructed, by his own admission, as a counter to an overly Puritan reduction of play to triviality and youthful development) not to add more terms to an already cluttered debate, but to point towards the kind of conceptual generativity that comes from contemplating play whenever it appears in our critical studies. And to return to the internet locus of this paper, it seems difficult to frame the net as a kind of 'playground' (even if 'playlaboured' in) without accessing some of the socio-biological knowledges that constitute play as a topic of study. Virno notes

….the renewed prestige which for some decaes now has been accorded to the notion of 'human nature'. It does not depend on the impressive tectonic shifts within the scientific community (Chomsky's pitiless critique against Skinner's Verbal Behaviour or such like) but on an ensemble of social, economic and political conditions…. Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process. That is because we are confronted with a peculiar empirical manifestation of certain

phylogenetic, which is to say metahistorical, constants that mark out the existence of Homo sapiens.49

….A human nature constitutively open to the potentiality of all its actions, ends up in the pasty figure of a jittery, trend-obsessed social networker, reactive to every celebrity meme that passes through his or her corporately-owned social network. Or twittering their 'friends' about their high status in a Mafia or Farmyard Facebook game, ethically promiscuous in their affectless engagements. Meanwhile, deep in the lowered floors or far-up in the mirrored heights, psychometricians are in an apophenic fever, sifting, calculating….

This paper will explore these connections, and claim that the age of informational plenitude has disclosed a socio-biological 'ground of play', or generic capacities of potentiation, that might explain the enduring resilience and inventiveness of cyberculture. 

But here's what might be the truly revolutionary fact of our digital and networked lives: Its symbolic and immaterial plentitude, and the participative design of its tools and platforms, helps adults to recover, and then extend and develop, that constitutive experience of play. As many of the Italian Marxists say, particularly Paulo Virno in his recent 'Multitude' books, there might be a new anthropology required to cope with a world in which the most protean of human faculties – language, affectivity and symbolic analysis itself – becomes the basic productive infrastructure of organisational, community and personal life. 

Does this deep nexus between species being and our digital+networked 'extensions of the human' (to smarten up McLuhan), around the axis of play, have consequences for how we

49 quote Virno essay again

arrange our productive lives? Shirky tells us that it's a matter of insanely-easy group-forming networks opening up space beneath the Coasian floor, but there's more to it than that. To explain this fecundity, I keep finding myself turning away from sociology or economics, and either turning to philosophy – the creative ontology and transcendental empiricisms of Deleuze, Negri, Virno and others – or to what has to be called (with some tentativeness, I concede – but only some) the 'socio-biology' of play. (Maybe biosemiotics – see http://bit.ly/SvDT5). In a recent presentation, http://bit.ly/RGjlU, I talked about the common conditions for a 'ground of play'. Cubs cavorting on the savannah, children having fun in a playpark, adults interacting with the Web: each of these playgrounds have 1) loose but robust governance, 2) ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff, 3) treat failure, risk and mess as developmental necessities. I went on to cite Google's 20 percent rule – where its engineers are encourage to devote 20% of their work time to projects that don't follow company imperatives – as a rare example of a mainstream company trying to recreate those constitutive conditions of play for their employees. (I've also been delighted to dive into Fred Turner's archive, triggered by his contribution to this list, and find this brilliant essay on Google's embrace of Burning Man culture, which corroborates my point http://bit.ly/AvFUZ). 

So much of this discussion is rooted in a Marxist/post-Marxist framework about the nature of labour as 'exploitation' (in terms of realising surplus value) or 'alienation' (in terms of the divisions of labour and their effect upon our subjectivities). I want to try and step back towards some roots of the Marxist analysis, and attempt to link that to current multidisciplinary understandings of play. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton devotes a chapter to Schiller's Letters of the Aesthetic Education of Man – one of the most important theories of play ever (and much quoted by Johan Soderberg in Hacking Capitalism). Eagleton notes that Schiller's evocation of the importance of play – what he called the 'play drive' – allowed Marx to envision the kind of rich, fully-extended humanity that exploitation and alienation would damage and distort. "Marx's

critique of industrial capitalism is deeply rooted in a Schillerian vision of stunted capacities, dissociated powers, the ruined totality of human nature" (http://bit.ly/rcBx). The "play-drive" for Schiller is also the ground of possibility of all human action: it suspends the destructive tendencies both of our appetites ('sense-drive') and our reason (form-drive), and creates a zone of "free determinability". From this sublime experience of possible states of being (which Schiller terms 'aesthetic'), we will be able to assess the best, most "graceful" options for personal and social action. So Schiller's vision of the play-drive is that of a space of potentiation in the human condition – and I guess Marx's radicalism was to see that this protean, self-creating force at the heart of our species being needed a revolutionary redeployment of resources to come into its own. But what is interesting about the study of play since Schiller, right up to the present, is that so much biology, zoology and psychology confirms his characterisation of play as that zone of possibility in the human condition. Play is 'adaptive potentiation', as the great play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith puts it. By this he means all those experiments, simulations and virtualisations that we recognise as play, but which clearly serve an evolutionary purpose - namely, to aid our survival and flourishing. How? By helping us rehearse strategies for dealing with our complex social worlds, composed (as they are) of other linguistic and richly emotional human beings. (On Sutton-Smith's latest formulation of this, see http://bit.ly/wQTwp). So play is deeply constitutive of human sociality: we know this from child development. And that productive adulthood has been about the 'soul's play-day being the devil's work-day', or the 'putting away of childish things', is a Puritan truism that any student of Weber knows about. And any other student of E.P. Thompson also knows how relentless was the campaign needed to subject the pre-capitalist culture of festivals and 'Happy Mondays' to disciplinary, workplace rule. But here's what might be the truly revolutionary fact of our digital and networked lives: Its symbolic and immaterial plentitude, and the participative design of its tools and platforms, helps adults to

recover, and then extend and develop, that constitutive experience of play. As many of the Italian Marxists say, particularly Paulo Virno in his recent 'Multitude' books, there might be a new anthropology required to cope with a world in which the most protean of human faculties – language, affectivity and symbolic analysis itself – becomes the basic productive infrastructure of organisational, community and personal life. Does this deep nexus between species being and our digital+networked 'extensions of the human' (to smarten up McLuhan), around the axis of play, have consequences for how we arrange our productive lives? Shirky tells us that it's a matter of insanely-easy group-forming networks opening up space beneath the Coasian floor, but there's more to it than that. To explain this fecundity, I keep finding myself turning away from sociology or economics, and either turning to philosophy – the creative ontology and transcendental empiricisms of Deleuze, Negri, Virno and others – or to what has to be called (with some tentativeness, I concede – but only some) the 'socio-biology' of play. (Maybe biosemiotics – see http://bit.ly/SvDT5). In a recent presentation, http://bit.ly/RGjlU, I talked about the common conditions for a 'ground of play'. Cubs cavorting on the savannah, children having fun in a playpark, adults interacting with the Web: each of these playgrounds have 1) loose but robust governance, 2) ensure a surplus of time, space and stuff, 3) treat failure, risk and mess as developmental necessities. I went on to cite Google's 20 percent rule – where its engineers are encourage to devote 20% of their work time to projects that don't follow company imperatives – as a rare example of a mainstream company trying to recreate those constitutive conditions of play for their employees. (I've also been delighted to dive into Fred Turner's archive, triggered by his contribution to this list, and find this brilliant essay on Google's embrace of Burning Man culture, which corroborates my point http://bit.ly/AvFUZ). Does Google, or any of the 'netarchical capitalists' that Michel Bauwens talks about, in any way exhaust the organisational possibilities available? In no way. And can the engaging interactions that we have upon these 'grounds of play' be pointed towards socially progressive ends? We know from people like Jane McGonigal (http://www.avantgame.com) how much gaming has the possibility to

improve governance, foresight and collective wisdom. So I resist the notion of the 'play-labor nexus' advanced by Julian Kucklich and Brian Holmes on this list, and perhaps suggest a 'play-network terrain' instead – a landscape to be explored, and flexibly de- and re-territorialized, rather than a fiendish strategy to create 'dividuals' out of individuals, and extend the tendrils of biopower everywhere. We need to keep carefully attending to the design of our networks, protocols and interfaces – immersing ourselves in an "aesthetic craft" which Schiller and Marx would both have recognised as the authentic practice of autonomous, non-alienated labor. (And which playcraft Richard Sennett in his book The Craftsman locates as the very conditions of citizenship http://bit.ly/nQTS). As Soderberg rephrases Schiller in his book (http://bit.ly/DsZ3a), "If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom". Both adherents and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that flow from the "beauty of the baud" and the play with source code in the computer underground." Like Bauwens, I see this playfully-driven moment of infrastructural and organisational creativity as an opportunity for civic enterprise on a number of fronts (and niches), rather than as one more version of the 'bigger cages, longer chains' tradition of left pessimism (as Brian Holmes at least admits). Trebor's wish that the Digital Labor conference has a strand concerned with "peer producing infrastructures ourselves", without which the "sharing mode by itself is not strong enough to sustain itself", is one I share. Building good, generative playgrounds is noble labor indeed But for my neo-Marxist friends on this list, I respectfully suggest that the "multitudinous, multivalent" phenomena they're observing may have its roots in the way that digital networks articulate a long-occluded aspect of our species being. Femina et homo ludens, as a mainstream and self-conscious identity of developed-world citizens, may be exactly who the bearded one was waiting for. 

second mail

Play is a primordially ambiguous domain of human responsiveness. Indeed, in terms of its evolutionary role as maintaining a sense of energized possibility for the organism, the darkest power-plays as well as the most bucolic festivities have to be part of its repertory of simulations, repetitions, games and laughter. (I often, and no doubt contentiously, say that if the work ethic can take a bad trip and end up at the sign over the gates of Auschwitz, the play ethic can also terminate in the boudoirs and rape/torture chambers of the good Marquis).

Indeed, our multidisciplinary ludi-guru, Brian Sutton-Smith, would be the first to assert that, as Julian's quotation from him shows, the too-idealised zone of child's play is a pulsing phantasmagoria of transgression, insurrection, corporeal anarchy - if only adults could hear it. Part of my definition of a 'play ethic' is partly that the sheer non-moral openness of play compels us to think "ethically", in that Foucaultian sense of ethics as a practice of freedom. It's too powerful in our lives not to take, as it were, deadly seriously.

Play's murkier potentials must be acknowledged: we should reject those blithe boosters about its effects that appear in management circles, play as a toolbox for positive psychology. But when, in the final words of The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith lays out his evolutionary thesis about play, he confesses that "despite my extensive criticisms of the rhetoric of progress, I have now invented yet another form of it, although this time as only the potentiation of adaptive variability".

The resource that play theory presents to critical thought is similar, in my mind to the role that fractal mathematics, non-linear systems theory, or neuroscience played for Deleuze and Guattari. Play theory confirms that there is an immanent creativity in the human condition. And it counterposes a more open and unpredicable bio-subject than the "Homer Economicus" of behavioural economics identified by Holmes et al. This coming governmentality in Euro-America construes our evolved psychosomatic equipment as supportive of a very weak, conflicted citizenship, needing to be

"nudged" this way and that ahead of their savannah atavisms by a mandarinate of "liberal paternalists".

Does Schiller's theory casting the play-drive as the ultimate civic seduction, the ultimate embourgoisifier: "The revolutionary individual is not to be crushed, but should ultimately *become* the new regime".

Can one be a reformist in this discussion, as well as a revolutionary? Can play be developmental, as well as disruptive? Progressive as well as liminal? Bauwens' argue that an autonomous digital counterculture can "fight/hack for user rights, open standards, free network service principles" with the commercial platforms: they can establish a 'social contract' (a social democracy?) from a strong base in which they build their own "radical distributed infrastructures". It is this counterculture (which Fred Turner hymns) which presses externally and internally upon organisations like Twitter and Google. Hackerism has deeply enabled - indeed, "conditioned" - the openness and iterability of the platforms currently being used by the Iranian people.

The Italian autonomists claim that our new sense of collective power (see Kevin Kelly's 'New Socialism' thesis in Wired) is more than just a by-product of an increasing cyberneticized fabric of society. Techno-potboilers like James Harkin's Cyburbia try to claim that cybernetics is the militarily-originated episteme that keeps us phatically and pointlessly chattering to each other over brightly-coloured networks.

But as Micheal Hardt puts it (http://www.vinculo-a.net/english_site/text_hardt.html), interactive machines aren't just "a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds", but also "a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves". This presumes a seer-through-the-lens - meaning, to some degree, a subject who can gain some Enlightenment-style purchase on their embroilment in protocol and code. An autonomous, passional, strategic player, not just the heteronomous, befuddled and processual played.

The point about the 'ambiguity of play', its necessary potentiation and proteanism, is that it encompasses (as Sutton-Smith says) both extreme agency and extreme envelopment. Play-as-fate-and-chaos, yes, the play of being caught up in cosmic mechanisms way beyond

ones power to control or influence - but also play-as-progress, play-as-imagination, play-as-freedom. Cybernetics is indeed subtle and pervasive in its harnessing of human differentiation and singularity - but I'd contend that play is more powerful, more generative and more constitutive of said difference and singularity. Because it is the 'difference engine' of our species, it always gives us enough cognitive and affective headroom - not just to generate better antagonisms to systems, but better systems as well.

At the end of his essay on Schiller and Trocchi, Brian Holmes invokes the map-makings of personal and political potential conducted by Felix Guattari: that is, he points to a better system to support richer play. Radical creatives might want to disidentify from the interactive funfair of the entertainment-military complex, asks Holmes. But where, other than the metropolis as a stage for "processual social events" and "punctual encounters", can they go to practice, let alone theorise, their counter-play? There is something deeply traditional about Holmes's answer:

The art circuit today – including not just museums, but the enlarged and diversified networks of experimentation, debate and display – can function as a public site of initiation to this kind of reading, making it a new form of common knowledge, too broad and unpredictable to remain under corporate control. In this way, art can help reactivate the suspended promise that sixties’ thinkers saw in the expansion of free time. If it can avoid capture and “ennoblement” (or conversely, brutal repression) by the pervasive powers of the corporate capitalist state.

The artworks before your eyes appear irreducibly singular, tangential, distant; and everything else that gives consistency and dynamism to dissenting subjectivities – the discourses, the technologies, the territories of intervention – is necessarily elsewhere, displaced into another space. Yet even within the seeming calm and neutrality of the museum, these constellations of distant universes are inviting you to play an essentially different kind of game.

This recalls the powerful essay that Habermas wrote about George Bataille in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Bataille's transgressive and illimitable practice – which is hard-core, radically-potentiating play - is good for the steering systems of modernity, in that it reminds governance that there will always be challenges to its complacency about meeting human needs and desires. Art

institutions need artists, system needs lifeworld (even at the Bataillian limit), and networks need play (and players), to develop, form and reform.

Critical digital theorists are right to be vigilant over forms of interaction labor that canalise the full spectrum of playful possibilities. But it is a more exciting moment for systemic development, of all kinds, than a counsel of "control-society" despair would allow. And this is precisely because we're players, and not laborers, in these playgrounds.

This paper will explore these connections, and claim that the age of informational plenitude has disclosed a socio-biological 'ground of play', or generic capacities of potentiation, that might explain the enduring resilience and inventiveness of cyberculture. 

In The Ambiguity of Play, Sutton-Smith describes seven "rhetorics" of play, ways of talking legitimately about the effect of play across all disciplines across a very broad historical reach, which he divides into ancient and modern rhetorics.

Modern rhetorics he characterises as play-as-self (play as an expression of free-will and voluntarism), play-as-imaginary (play as imaginative freedom in arts and sciences), and play-as-progress (play as a contribution to human development through education and nuturance). This is a modernist, progessive picture of "health-through-play", a play forged by Enlightenment.

By contrast are the ancient rhetorics of play – play-as-contest (play defined by agonism, sport, war), play-as-identity (communal play, aimed at confirming social identity), play-as-fate-and-chaos (play as manifested in gambling and religion, presuming a degree of individual powerless before the operations of a cosmic system), and play-as-triviality (sheerly antic play, nonsense, tomfoolery). Play here often defies its modernist interpretations – there is coercion, there are actual as well as virtual consequences to the game, there is surrender to greater masteries than simply a rehearsal of one's own.