Soulitarian City: Creative digital identities and practices in Glasgow

Pat Kane, The Play Ethic

the ‘digital divide’ is now as likely to be drawn between exploiters/controllers, and explorers/users, as between those with or without access

On the policy and management side,

the search should be on for identities that can ‘bridge’ the gap

between an ever-more-potentialised ‘soulitarian’ workforce,

and organizational structures of wage-labour and contractual coercion

which hold less and less legitimacy.

The point of digital activism is not just to defend the quality of existing information structures, but “to encourage you to invent new systems” (Howard Rheingold)

… So it’s interesting to look at coders/programmers, who are most likely to do so

Creative consuming

Creative prosuming/produsing

Creative producing

A continuum of digital creativity

A “folk culture of software” (Simon Yuill)

- meaning a rich environment of collective experimentation and creativity -

is as crucial to the pre-eminence of advanced technological sectors like San Francisco, Seoul or Helsinki,

as either the concentration of venture capital

or the presence of large corporate clients.

1) A group of six S5 and S6 pupils in a secondary school in the East End of Glasgow, taking the Higher course in Computer Studies, interviewed in their school

2) A group of three PhD candidates in the Computing Science department of a major Glasgow university, interviewed in their lab

3) A number of artist-programmers at play in Glasgow, interviewed on location at their projects, and with a review of their digital productions.

Three groups of coders in Glasgow

Oxford Internet Institute’s 2005 Survey on UK internet usage

…little prosuming/produsing at all,

No producing

Are these produsers/prosumers (template users)?

Or producers

(html/code writers)?

Drumchapel Project, Glasgow Caledonian University

East end soulitarians, S5-S6

4 boys, 2 girls, studying Computer Science

All with broadband at home

Interviewed early 2006

East end soulitarians, S5-S6

An S6 boy told of a website he’d built that had gotten “forty-thousands hits or something.” He had chosen computer studies because he’d felt it would be “more valuable than do to the art option, which I could do later”. He used his html skills learned in class to create a site based on the Madden NFL console game – “kinda like a fansite… I played out the games, and then I’d type up stuff about it, as if it was a real sports commentary…And people would come to read it, and follow each team as I wrote it up”.

East end soulitarians, S5-S6

The group talked about how some of them had helped some friends put up a site for their band – a Glasgow-accented rap group called ESB (standing for ‘Erratic Schemeboys’), who had put up files for download, “so people can hear it… But they’re not gonny get anywhere” [general laughter][Update: ESB (http://d-esb-d.tripod.com/) have mutated into Empafy (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=45245688) http://www.root8recordings.com/EMPAFY.HTML– and from crude self-coded site on Tripod, to the full multi-media representations of MySpace, using a template refresher (http://myspace.nuclearcentury.com/profileeditor.php)

East end soulitarians, S5-S6

The group also told of “gang sites”, made by local feuding groups through standard web-hosting services, that were used “to organise gang fights”. All of them claimed no involvement in any of these sites.

Go to browser link

East end soulitarians, S5-S6 Darknet activities We did a brief exercise with the group where I asked them whether they recognised a range of software ‘brands’, ranging from the very obvious to the more obscure and underground. X marks the show of hands: Google X X X X X X MSN Mssg X X X X X X Live Journal X X X X X MySpace X X X X X X Napster X X X X X X WinMX X X X Kazaa X X X X X X Linux X X X X Open source X X X Hacker X X X X X X Script kiddie X X Much admission of darknet activity - free registration codes to unlock software, “hacking PS2’s down the barras”, downloads of proprietary material through p2p networks

East end soulitarians, S5-S6

Were any moral qualms expressed about this? Yes, to some degree:

“It’s not fair that you’re not buying it when your using it but… we can’t buy it.” “It’s just that easy to get. They should pay more money for precautions”. “If it wasn’t so easily available we wouldn’t take it”. “Companies will try to find a way to make us pay for all this stuff. But we’ll keep trying. It’s just what you do.”

When asked whether they were worried about being caught illegal downloading or using software, one replied wryly, “but everybody is doing this – if they had to come for people they’d have to come for the whole street”. And another: “This is what all my pals think. I don’t see anyway round it”.

The most significant comment came from one computer science student, who said with some passion: “there’s always going to be a way round

everything”.

Glasgow computer science post-grads

Digital autodidacts

“there's a lot of people who are completely self taught who are a lot better that people who have actually got a computing degree.”

Digitality and rule-bending

“We weren't programming a finished product, anything usable, we were just coding to see if I could do it” (an exam cheat on calculator)

“

Glasgow computer science post-grads

Digitality and rule-bending

“When you get to uni, You do things that might not always be legal - you can do packet sniffing, and find out things from wireless networks, and get information you're not really supposed to get from certain tools.”

“The first time we were doing it – Brian and I figured it out a while ago - it was: can we do this? Is it fun? Can we do it for all networks? It was a challenge to break it. To do it for free wasn't why we did it. It was to see if it could be done.”

“

Glasgow computer science post-grads

The dignity of (digital academic) labour

“The point is that we're absolute perfectionists. If it’s not done right, we say ‘that's stupid, that's crap’. If it’s something we could do better, we normally go off in our own time and try to do it better.”

“A lot of the systems we’re creating for mobile devices - these came up from just stupid things that we came up with in our own time and implemented.” “A lot of people who work for open source projects, they do it because they love it. And they're perfectionists. Even if I know no-one's going to use my code, no-one's going look at it, it has to be

perfect, it has to be used in the way it's supposed to be used.”

Glasgow computer science post-grads

Open platforms and digital innovation“Whenever we can, we do try to make money. But when we've gone and opened stuff up, we get so much interest - people create slightly different versions, making it fit their own ends. In the public interest, everything should be completely open. You can't envision all the ways in which things are going to be used, so by opening up the access to everything, it lets people appropriate it so they can do whatever they want with it.

Learning from the city“As far as working and coding, I could live on an island and do everything I do now with an internet connection. But I think being in a city is encouraging.“My inspiration doesn't just come from the net, but the everyday, just

meeting people. You see someone do something and you think, yes…”

Glasgow computer science post-grads - reflections

These are embodiment of the hacker ethic (Pekka Himanen)Like East End teenagers, for them coding (and digital creativity in general) is an act of free association with peers, using software resources that can be shared and recombined. Attitudes towards legality and normative behaviour – •whether current (in terms of invasion of privacy)•or in their past (in terms of exams cheating) – are some distance from any model of social propriety that might ideally underpin ‘employability’ or ‘lifelong learning’.

Glasgow computer science post-grads - reflections

They are aware that their purist, robust and problem-solving academic programming might well have commercial applications – but they are much more interested in the near-aesthetic challenge of building well-designed, elegant and usable code

A blend of ethics and aesthetics around coding

Glasgow artist-activists:

Simon Yuill

The spring_alpha project

"spring_alpha" is a networked game system set in an industrialised council estate whose inhabitants are attempting to create their own autonomous society in contrast to that of the regime in which they live. The game serves as a "sketch pad" for testing out alternative forms of social practice at both the "narrative" level, in terms of the game story, and at a "code" level, as players are able to re-write the code that runs the simulated world. The original narrative is based on a series of drawings by Chad McCail, "Spring" and "Evolution is Not Over yet", which also shape the game's visual style. The original stories and images become a framework that is fleshed-out by people's own ideas and experiences. The basic aim of the game is to change the rules by which the society in that world runs. This is done through hacking and altering the code that simulates that world, creating new types of behaviour and social interaction. How effective this becomes depends on the players' ability to spread these new ideas into the society.

http://www.spring-alpha.org/pages.php?content=about

Glasgow artist-activists: Simon Yuill

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Chad McCall http://www.spring-alpha.org/pages.php?content=story

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

Glasgow artist-activists: Simon Yuill

http://www.spring-alpha.org/video/module_04/huddersfield.ogg

Introductory clip, 2005

Development pagehttp://www.spring-alpha.org/pages.php?content=development

Refs: Second Life, ‘The French Democracy’

“I’m more about code as empowering people to do things, than merely being a utility for people – more ‘free software’ than ‘open source’. It isn’t just about distributing assets to people, but distributing the knowledge about how to use

the assets… This is what free media labs are all about.”

All examples of “distributive practice”:

Glasgow artist-activists: Simon Yuill

Inspired by Yuill’s ‘distributive practice’ - Radius Glasgow

www.radiusglasow.org

www.pollokshields.net

www.greenmap.org.

“It’s the social patterns and models that I like as much as anything. The idea that people, once they’ve been brought up to the appropriate level of skills, can be involved in the creation of complex and powerful structures, is very empowering. I also like the ‘free’ aspect of it. FLOSS is a common resource that users can build on and enrich by their participation, before we get anywhere near commercial or business

applications.”

Urban Learning Space - digital activity matrix

Our coders are far up to the top right hand box - but do they ‘integrate actual business issues’!?

Conclusions….

How does the community element of hacker/soulitarian ethics and practices fit within an enterprise, rather than a social welfare context? How can the kinds of independent, freely-acting, boundary-disrespecting practices of motivated coders

and programmers relate to the imperatives of prosperity and wealth-creation?

How can levels of dynamic and creative expertise be embraced by those who most need to embrace it?

What are the intrinsic motivations that can drive someone to ascend levels of skill and competence that can add value to their own lives, and to society?

The hacker mentality of programming and coding, in a similar way to practices of musicianship in rock subcultures, is at least one tangible example of how a high-end skill can be generated out of the imperatives of everyday life in the digital society.

Yet the contexts in which this skill is aspired to, and gained, are far removed from existing institutions and practices of lifelong learning and skills acquisition.

Contact

PAT KANE

patkane@theplayethic.com

www.theplayethic.com

www.theplayethic.typepad.com

www.newintegrity.org