The Blind Giant (16 page)

‘Play’ is a small word that describes a very big concept. Some of the time it denotes something children do more than adults, an unstructured babble of changing fantasies and improbable imaginings. In fact, we traditionally define the arrival of adulthood as the end of freedom to play, which can make the conventional education system into the slow banishment of creativity, as the urge to turn ideas and wisdoms upside down and shake them is cut away and replaced with homogenized thinking. But play is much more than simply what you do to pass the time while you’re waiting to grow up – and it’s more than just a disguised form of learning, too. Renowned Dutch historian
Johan Huizinga asserted all culture was partly a form of play, and enumerated a number of qualities that he felt play possessed, among them that it is separate from the everyday ‘real life’ both in location and in duration, and that it is not connected with material reward. The digital environment initially met both of these criteria, and even now many of the activities that enliven it – social media sites, blogs, games and user-generated content on YouTube – are free.

Huizinga is not the only one to place great importance on play. Psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan and critic
Roland Barthes both used the concept of
jouissance
(‘enjoyment’) to denote something somewhat similar, though
jouissance
has more than a hint of the erotic: the word also means ‘orgasm’.
Karl Marx and
Ayn Rand (an alarming pairing) both proposed that the basis of unhappiness and iniquity in human society was the subversion or appropriation
of the creative urge by malign entities – although they both characterized that creative urge as an urge to work rather than to play. For Marx, looking at the working conditions of the late nineteenth century, ‘malign forces’ meant capitalism. For Rand, a refugee from Soviet Russia, they meant socialism. Both urged forms of revolution as a proportionate response to the violation of the fundamental human need to create.
Creativity appears to span the gap between working and playing – or, rather, it seems that creation as an activity is not interested in the final fate of the product. More, both work and play can drop into a focused freedom of the mind, what psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call a ‘flow state’ in which labour becomes a function of identity and an expression of it: a route to contentedness through a state somewhere between meditation and intense concentration.

The Internet was staked out early as a play space, a place where there was no need for the conventional rules of society because there were no physical consequences to what happened there. Safety was guaranteed, because the only thing happening online was words. That being the case, the entire digital enterprise could be governed by nothing more stringent than guidelines.
Free speech was assumed. The whole concept was an experiment, an opportunity to do things right. The Occupy camps around the world, with their group decision-making, quasi-collectivism and barter culture, are drawing on the same ideals. It’s not just protest, it is an actual, simple attempt to organize society in a different way.

The hearth space, with its uncodified rules and informal ethos, is set against the professional world outside the home, where the rules are made to govern not a single family but every family. Laws are an attempt to set down justice in a form that can predictably be applied across thousands of non-identical cases, to counter patronage and favouritism. Professional personas, meanwhile, attempt a similar thing: one person functioning as a tax
inspector is supposed to be identical in effect to another. There should be no difference: the identity of the individual is submerged beneath the role. The same is true in a corporate situation: ideally, an employer wants to be able to send any given employee to perform a particular task for which they are qualified and know that the result will be the same. The space outside the hearth is owned by systems – interlocking collections of rules performing the functions of government and commerce, acted by human beings. Balancing the demands of these two worlds is how most of us spend our lives: making sure we spend enough time working to sustain our home lives; making sure we spend enough time with our home lives to maintain them and enjoy them while not losing our jobs.

The playfulness of the Internet, of course, remains to this day.
YouTube videos made for fun (often to a very high standard) and
LOLcats proliferate. Interesting to me as an author is the playfulness of language that has evolved out of digital technology: the variations of English that have come out of the new media are often zesty references to typing errors that occur when you’re trying to play and type on the same keyboard. My favourite is the verb ‘to pwn’. It means ‘to rule’ or ‘to achieve a crushing victory’ (appropriately, since Huizinga wrote extensively about the play of chivalric conflict). It has a sense of utterly unashamed jubilation, even gloating, but it’s also used ironically, with a knowing nod to how silly it is. It has both transitive and intransitive forms and obviously isn’t intended to be said aloud. It’s a typing joke, inaccessible to the ear. In fact, it relies on the layout of the QWERTY keyboard. The evolution of the word, I think, is relatively straightforward: typing quickly, ‘I won’ becomes ‘I own’. A new use of ‘own’ arises, meaning ‘to win with extreme prejudice’. A further slip of the finger generates ‘I pwn’. What’s significant is that it has been adopted – infused with lexicographic life.

Every time I run across a new one of these, it reminds me of
Patrice Leconte’s delightful 1996 film,
Ridicule
. In the movie, which is essentially about barbed wit and its capacity to ruin lives in the eighteenth-century court of Versailles, there’s a moment that stops the breath:
Charles-Michel de l’Épée, the originator of sign language, makes a brief appearance at court. In France at the time deafness was seen at best as a form of mental retardation, and when de l’Épée presents his students, the nobles are vile to them. The game changes completely, however, when one of the students makes a snappy comeback in sign language. When asked to translate, de l’Épée responds that this is impossible. The joke cannot be rendered in words.

The Internet, too, has its own humour, sometimes coarse, sometimes almost embarrassingly lyrical. But you have to see it for yourself. I can tell you that the sunset over the Barrens is gorgeous, too, but you won’t understand unless you climb one of the hills Blizzard’s designers created for
World of Warcraft, and sit down and watch it yourself.

All of which comes down to this: the part of us that plays – the deep, strong playfulness of creative adulthood and of the hearth – has come to understand the Internet as being a venue for play. Yes, it is also used to do work, but the way our interaction with the Net and its technology has evolved has made it primarily something that is used creatively, humorously, playfully – even where it is pressed into service by the professional world. The divisions between worlds are blurred online, and intrusions occur in both directions (look how many companies complain at the amount of time employees spend on Facebook). The prevailing ethos of those who created the protocols that underpin the Internet even now – people like
Richard Stallman and
John Gilmore – was a libertarian one, in so far as it was consciously articulated at the time. The share-and-share-alike culture of researchers and scientists is at its heart. The Free Software and
Open Source movements that created GNU and
Linux were about making things that were needed and contributing them
to the community without charge.
David Farber described it as Marxist, but it might be more accurate to call it genuinely anarchic – and it has anarchism’s uncertain relationship with the notion of ownership.

Still, when proprietary software systems such as
Windows came along, Stallman and others resisted them and tried to create alternatives so that users need not be locked in to the systems of one company. Microsoft and Apple spawned a resistance
movement that persists to this day, but by the time they arrived on the scene, the basic character of the electronic world was to some degree already set: it was an environment that did not need or acknowledge rules, a place separate from normal society, where there were no consequences and almost anything was possible and allowable. It was a refuge.

People had set the Internet aside as a play space that belonged to them, and not to the exterior rule-driven world – and there are very few of those left. So when someone suggests that the Internet may be bad for you, or that what is happening online is a problem for the economy, or any number of other things, they’re not threatening to take away a pleasurable vice or a useful tool. They’re trying to take away one of the most important venues for being what we are – playful, creative, communal creatures – that has ever existed. That space is regarded as home territory by a very primal part of the self. So it’s hardly surprising that the reaction is negative in the extreme.

We draw lines as a matter of course. We make a separation in our thoughts between private and public, professional and personal, family and friends and strangers, Like Us and Not Like Us. We draw lines in time – birthdays, anniversaries, festivals – and lines in space such as borders and property boundaries. We separate the world into chunks so that we can understand it and control it, or at least predict it. People crossing from one chunk to
another without permission alarm us: a work colleague reading our personal journal, or someone jumping over the hedge into our garden. We delineate different spaces that we reserve for certain purposes – churches, sports fields, bars, bathrooms – and we don’t like it when someone uses those spaces for other purposes, such as playing football in a church or music in a library. Spaces have purposes, and so do times.

The introduction of a governmental, corporate or legal perspective into a play space feels like a gross intrusion, or, worse, a simple mismatching of concepts, like demanding perfect adherence to the rules of international professional soccer at an under-nines Saturday afternoon kickabout. On the everyday level, it’s the guest at dinner who won’t shut up about immigration policy while everyone else is talking about television, sex or sport. It’s the arrival of parking regulations in our favourite side street. And, inevitably, the same feeling of mismatch applies for many to the belated attempt to force Scandinavian file-sharing anarchists to obey copyright law, bolt a conventional paid-for business model to the age of digital reproduction, or curtail the assumed (but never legislated) freedom of expression in the online world.

Social media services such as the newly arrived
Google+, and to some extent also Facebook and Twitter, replicate this sort of partitioning. You can determine who you share information with – at least notionally, and at least up to a point. The desire to keep your parents from knowing what you did last night, or your friends from seeing your baby pictures, is respected by the software. On the other hand,
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s creator, told
David Kirkpatrick (author of
The Facebook Effect
) that having two identities for yourself was an example of a lack of integrity. In Zuckerberg’s worldview, it seems, the days of this kind of separation are numbered – if they aren’t over already. The various partitions, Zuckerberg appeared to feel, would collapse in on one another, leaving a stew of subcultures and fractions all
jumbled together, all able to see one another, and no one would be any the worse for it.

That perception is not entirely disinterested. Zuckerberg’s company has an immense paper value – investment firm General Atlantic put it at $65 billion in March 2011 – and a large part of that is the notional value of all the customer information in the network. That information, properly analysed and deployed, could allow the kind of targeted selling companies are only able to dream about (and, ultimately, the kind I proposed in both my opening digital scenarios, as well). If Facebook users started to defect
en masse
, though, either by ramping up their privacy settings or moving to other social media services that allow more perfect control of data, the company could deflate rapidly – a fate familiar to watchers of (and investors in) Internet companies. Facebook needs its users to feel easy in their minds about sharing, and to decide that integrity of the sort Zuckerberg talks about is something they believe in and relate to; or, at the very least, don’t hate.

Meanwhile, everything you do online – and increasingly in the outside world, because between your GPS-enabled mobile phone, your credit card and the many CCTV cameras that cover a great portion of the urban environment of many countries, there’s not much difference any more – leaves a trail of breadcrumbs. That trail not only leads back to you, it actually draws a picture of who you are. It might not be one you’d wish to recognize or to which you’d want to own up in public, but it will be in some ways strikingly accurate. It may even be more accurate on some levels than your self-perception. Over time, and with broad access, that accuracy approaches what Google CEO
Eric Schmidt might call the
Creepy Line. Schmidt told the
Washington Ideas Forum in October 2010: ‘With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know
where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.’