[iDC] some remarks on ludocapitalism

Wed Oct 3 10:57:27 UTC 2007

Greetings everyone,

Well, this has been a very interesting discussion, thanks to all who have
contributed. I would say the post from Adam Arvidsson finally brought it
over the top, and into reality.

Ludocapitalism has been here for many years. It is the result of the
absorption by the capitalist system of both the 1960s revolts (including
Situationism, with its key reference to Huizinga's book, Homo Ludens), and
the more diffuse technological utopianism of the 1990s. The basic principle
of contemporary capitalist culture is, come play in my sandbox, i.e.
express yourself in a situation whose parameters have been deliberately
designed by an organization that is looking to maximize the profitability
of one or several of your behaviors. Whatever other kinds of pleasure or
gratification you receive along the way is fine, because that will
encourage you to come back, probably with others. Anyone needing to be
convinced of this can read Arvidsson's excellent text published by
ephemera, entitled "Creative Class or Administrative Class?" It contains,
among others, this sentence: "In the most advanced factions of immaterial
production users are indeed in charge (to use the motto of the present Web
2.0 movement), their *agency* creates the kinds of products that have the
greatest use-value for the capitalist system."
(http://ephemeraweb.org/journal/7-1/7-1arvidsson.pdf)

In other words, he says that people working under the game-rules of
ludocapitalism  are autonomously producing a culture that can be profitably
manipulated by others. For a genealogy of how this came to pass, and why
people tolerate this situation, you can also check out my widely circulated
text on the Flexible Personality.

I think there are two important things which have not yet been discussed.
One is the kind of research program that Arvidsson proposes (which we have
also been carrying out in the journal Multitudes, but not in a rigorous
enough way), in order to see exactly how, and to what extent, the so-called
"creative class" derives its profits from the appropriation of values which
are produced externally, in the open, social milieus of free interaction,
whether this is on the web or in the urban environment - or more likely, in
the interconnection of both. To what extent are we really talking about a
new managerial or administrative class?

The other thing, however, would return us to the initial question of
ethics. Is there an ethics of ludocapitalism, or of what I would still
prefer to call "flexible accumulation"? Arvidsson speaks of an ethics among
cultural producers, but it is the strictly ego-centered concern of
maintaining authenticity, or "cool," or whatever you want to call it: an
underground aura of autonomy and superior disinterest in all things
managed, which characterizes only a rather small group of artists, the
"deep underground." If, however, something like ludocapitalism is really a
"spirit" of capitalism, in other words, if there are basic tenets,
productive principles, modes of exchange, metrics of valuation and also
kinds of personality structures that come to pervade the entire system and
not just the froth of its consumer production, then how could such a system
be made in some way *just*, subjected to some kind of ethical judgment on
the basis of notions of equality, sustainability, acceptance of difference,
and respect for the spheres of life which lie outside of work and
consumption? How, in other words, to put limits on the reach and
controlling power of this ludocapitalism?

There I see two existing approaches. One has been detailed at excessive
length in the book by Boltanski and Chiapello, now translated into English
under the title of The New Spirit of Capitalism. It begins with the
Protestant Ethic reference used a little casually here, and proposes to
look at a succession of "spirits" of capitalism, of which networked or
connectionist capitalism is only the most recent. What they do is show how
each spirit installs new kinds of trials or tests allowing for a judgment
of people's merit and value under specific working circumstances. In other
words, they describe the internal, functional ethics of labor relations,
and how those are translated into wider governmental regulations and
institutional structures; and they show how poor in ethical content the
contemporary spirit is, how little "connection" it has to what they call a
"city of justice." This is a long-term reflection and one that's worth some
consideration, especially by people who are engaged in developing social
media or other kinds of interactive environments. What is best practice,
and what is bad practice? What is exploitation? How can it be identified?
How can it be denounced? What sort of recourse can there be? How to develop
relations of solidarity and reciprocal emulation that do not freeze up the
interaction, but don't leave it open to predatory behaviors either? and
finally, how to restructure the institutions of education, health care and
redistribution so that they address the real needs and problems of everyone
living under the new spirit of capitalism?

The other, more immediate thing is to directly attack the most exploitative
aspects of the new capitalism, typically by disruptive protest actions that
take place, not in a closed workplace environment, but in the open milieu
from which value is now being siphoned off. This is a way to forcefully
state the case for the need of a new ethics. It is being done increasingly
in Europe as different kinds of immaterial strikes gather steam, since the
reinvention of Mayday for flexible workers in 2002. The largest such action
so far has been in France in spring of 2006, where a good chunk of the
national population, led by students, acted to abrogate a law that would
have rewritten the rules of the working game, to the advantage of those
playing on the side of capital. And the most dramatic such action has been
in Copenhagen, following police repression of the very alternative culture
that creative-class managers want to make so much money off of. I think
this kind of strike also matters to those engaged in so-called social media
- because it's dealing with the "deep bonds of participation" that
networked connections are helping to create.

Of course, a third alternative is to enjoy your afternoon in the sandbox.

best, Brian Holmes

Adam Arvidsson wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I've been following the Ludocapitalism debate and wanted to briefly 
> convey my imressions. 
> 
> If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's 
> because they express the corporate situation with great precision, 
> Gilles Deleuze,/ Postscript on the Societies of Contro/l. 
> 
> Deleuze's assertion that for many immaterial workers, work is already 
> play, playing the mertiocracy game, playing at office politics, 
> acquiring more or less explicit (and sometime quantifiable) expressions 
> of esteem from colleagues, playing the publishing game if you are and 
> academic etc. This assertion i think casts some new light on Keith 
> Hart's splendid point in stressing the importance of the nature of the 
> game.It would seem that the reintegration of ludic element in capitalism 
> that has occurred in the post-war years has much to do with with change 
> of forms of power. Discipline transforms (for some people in some 
> places) into control and  'ruling through freedom' (Nicolas Rose). The 
> way to do this is to construct an artificial envrionment (a game) in 
> which freedom and passions are put to work. Brands are a good example of 
> that. In some places they have managed to almost totally reconstruct the 
> rules of ordinary sociality (I'm just back form Shanghai, teaching 
> brand-crazy students) transforming the free flow of sociality and 
> passions into productive labour that is directly connected to financial 
> markets. Corporate culture, coaching, NLP, are other forms for the 
> exercise of power through the construction of subjectivity and the 
> erection of an 'everyday game'. (Coaching artists into successful 
> players in the 'experience economy', is, as one of my recent 
> interviewees put it' about teaching them to see themselves as
commodities.)
> 
> 
>  The erection of such a capitalist game long predates Second Life. I 
> would date it to the post-war years. Key influences I think are the New 
> Age movement and its influence on management beginning in the 1970s 
> (motivational seminars, the corporate survival weekend), and, predating 
> that, the growing interest in the subjectivity of workers and consumers 
> that emerges out of the Industrial Relations movement, Maslow's 
> enormously influential work and, on the consumer side, Motivation 
> Research. What happens here is that management begins to take a direct 
> interest in suubjectivity as an underlying factor that shapes the 
> relations between workers and the company, or between consumers and 
> goods (some key works: Ernest Dicter, The Strategy of Desire, Dough 
> McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, both published in 1960). Instead 
> of trying to impose such relations from above, one now tries to alter 
> (program) the conditions of subjectivity from which they emerge, change 
> the rules of the game.
> 
> 
> What is put to work here? What is the essence of the game, if such a 
> concept is possible? I think Rifkin is right when he connects what he 
> calls Deep Play to 'the creation of deep bonds of participation'. After 
> all (pace World of Warcraft) this is the way play, the ludic of 
> effervescence has been thought by the likes of Durkheim and Huizinga. 
> Play is about the ethical element to human interaction. At least in the 
> Aristotelian sense of ethics as 'that which has to do with custom or 
> character (ethos)'- the construction of social relations among free men. 
> And for Aristotle ethics was about play (in the modern sense of that 
> term), work belong to the a-ethical sphere of the oikos where there was 
> no room for freedom. So is the turn to play as a managerial strategy a 
> reaction to the increasing (potential) autonomy and freedom of today's 
> productive forces, their leaving the modern oikos of the factory (where 
> Hannah Arendt saw them) and becoming public? This would be manifested in 
> fact that a growing amount of wealth is not produced by commanded and 
> un-free labour, but by a socialized general intellect (or mass 
> intellectuality) that is impossible to command. (You cannot order 
> someone to be creative or cool.) Instead, power is exercised by creating 
> the game, by imposing an ethic? 
> 
> 
> Adam Arvidsson
> Associate Professor, Media Studies
> Department of Media, Cognition and Communication
> University of Copenhagen
> Njalsgade 80
> 2300 Copenhagen S
> 
> check out what I'm doing at
> http://web.mac.com/adamerica/iWeb/AdamArvidsson/Intro.html
> rate me at:
> http://www.actics.com/my/profile?index=1
> 
> tel +45 35328124
> fax +45 35328110
> cell  +45 26174875
> +46 702416473
> Skype-ID adamerica70
> Blog: http://blog.actics.com
> www.media.ku.dk
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity
(distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
> 
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> 
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
> 
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
> 
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
> 
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web.com – Enhanced email for the mobile individual based on Microsoft®
Exchange - http://link.mail2web.com/Personal/EnhancedEmail