The playfulness of Web 3.0 and crypto culture - the coming era of the internet - is a feature, not a bug, says Pat Kane

This is a piece from A/UK’s co-initiator Pat Kane’s Substack newsletter, E2: the Future (and Scotland Too). In it, Pat wonders whether we best understand the rise of crypto and Web 3.0 through the lens of play, both culturally and in human nature.

It’s a Sunday, I’m blogging, I’m staring obtusely at a crypto-manifesto, voiced in the character of a “DisCO CAT” (DisCO stands for Distributed Cooperative Organisation). I’m also wondering why I’ve ended up at looking at this stuff at the age of 57.

Dimly, a sense of anniversary presses in on me from the ages. I let it come, and there it is. A confirming search reveals that precisely 25 years ago, on the op-ed pages of Scotland on Sunday, Jan 5th 1997, was when I first publicly wrote about the idea of “the play ethic”.

Seven years later The Play Ethic became a bulky and lauded book, but most of its argument was captured in these 1336 words (ah the concision and certainty of young manhood). I’m not surprised by my triggered recall, as I’m currently peering into the carnival of what is coming to be called “Web 3.0” or “Crypto”, some felt settling of a new paradigm for the internet.

Because play—for which my condensed definition in 1997 was “taking reality lightly”—seems to be the default mode for much of this activity. Both for its juvenalia, and in its very ontological understanding of the world.

As I was at pains to point out at the time, “taking reality lightly” did not mean defying or ignoring reality, living under illusions. It meant putting solid and determinate matter into a fluid, morphing state - indeed, into play.

That might mean imaginative or psychological projection onto existing objects (like the cardboard box that becomes a child’s mystic portal). But it might also mean reducing something to fragments, modules or elements, so that it could be reassembled and recombined in some startling way (like Lego - or the great scientist as Heraclitus’s child at play on the shore, sifting through nature’s possibilities).

I always imagined that if humanity realised this faculty well—and I was growingly aware that a digital networked society might be its means of realisation—the pinched horizons of a “work ethic” would be blown away.

A play ethic would assume a human nature that defaulted to optimism, creativity, conviviality. What amazing structures of all kinds we’d build, if this shift in appreciation of our species-being could be made! And weren’t the tools appearing to hand?

A quarter-century later, there’s quite a reckoning to be had about all this (in particular, my late-90s blindness about our disrupted biosphere is startling).

One insight would be that a “play ethic” has indeed actually manifested, in the existing culture and practises of crypto, blockchain and Web 3.0.

There’s currently a lot of handwringing over the playful antics of this sector. What kind of economic future do currencies have that are based on jokes about dogs (or “Doges”)? What should we make of new kinds of intellectual property based on breeding google-eyed cats? How can there be such a thing as a “meme stock”, where pieces of (often poor) cultural/digital form gather economic value, from being made artificially scarce? 

Yet one benefit of writing The Play Ethic was that it enabled me to perceive the forms and rhetorics of play in any human field. And also, to source them in a common root: what the magisterial play scholar Brian Sutton-Smith would call “adaptive potentiation”. By this, Sutton-Smith means that play-forms are a testing-out and rehearsal of creative options, in order to prepare oneself for a difficult, unpredictable world (comprised of individuals, society, environment).

Lay this frame over crypto and Web 3.0, and you begin to see deeper coherences and influences. And also a profound realisation: for this community, play as rehearsal for reality is becoming play as adventures into reality.

There’s an obvious deep shift in literacy and media behind this. At one level, the continuity between cryptocurrency, and the “virtual” currencies at work in online computer worlds for years, seems obvious (but maybe not sufficiently remarked upon).

In 2005, I reviewed the economist Edward Castronova’s book Synthetic Worlds, which alerted us to the way that in-game currencies were being cashed out in real-life currencies (the Gold Farmers in World of Warcraft). 

In his later book Wildcat Currency, from 2014, Castronova makes an amazing prediction. He holds that the ease and enjoyment experienced by those hundreds of millions participating in synthetic economies—the clear rules from the start of the game, the fun creativity of the gameworld itself—will start to challenge “normal” economic practice. A prescient insight, I’d say.

BUT between the two dates of Castronova’s books, history provided its own accelerant to cryptocurrency: the crash of 2008. Bitcoin first appears only two months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Its ambition is to function as a currency without the back-up of a central bank as a third party. Bitcoin also features a pseudononymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (mask-wearing and avatar-posing are elemental play moves).

The sordid elite spectacle of the Crash - major private bank operators baled out by the state, no arrests of executives who enacted the asset bubble, the imposition of austerity on wider populations - is known to have been a motivational fuel for the development of cryptocurrencies. But to my eyes, this is where the self-consciously playful culture surrounding crypto fuses with its structural ambitions.

“Taking reality lightly” can also means taking financial and economic reality lightly - and arrogating the right to do so. When national banks so easily use their fiat powers to press the big button and digitally “print money”, or “quantitatively ease” their economies, what is the prohibition against doing it for your own bounded community? Especially as two generations of computer gamers are completely used to the idea of invented currencies oiling their collective imaginations.

Incidentally, the title of Castronova’s book (Wildcat Currency) points to a period in American economic history, which is often evoked in informed objections to this currency creativity. Stephen Diehl’s recent blog The Case Against Crypto refers to the Free Banking Era from 1837 to 1863, where state banks created their own currencies. They were so inefficient and even corrupt that the National Bank Act of 1863 was brought in to shut them down.

Himself an elite coder, Diehl makes an interesting humanistic point about the appetite for currency diversity:

The argument laid out in this article is a quite complicated edifice, and requires a large amount of knowledge at the intersection of several fields of study that, quite frankly, the public should not have to concern themselves with learning to safeguard themselves against fraud.

Public money should just work for most people without them having to be concerned with the details. This is ultimately where cryptocurrencies tap into the ignorance, desperate faith in technical solutionism and political resentment of the public… Weaponizing it for the aims of these libertarian private money charlatans to engorge themselves.

These guys aren’t building a new financial system, they’re just lining their own pockets.

I wouldn’t refute that these intentions and practices are rife. But I also can’t suppress a sense that a certain manner and scale of ambition is also involved in the crypto and Web 3.0 furore. An ambition that such core technologies and institutions of our lives should be shaped by more than the usual accredited and reinforced elites.

Let me refresh my recently-expressed scepticism (as a long-time leftist) about the usefulness of “socialist”-sounding solutions to such problems. I wonder whether seeing the world as a zone of playing and games-making is actually the more radical vocabulary here. A zone where new groups have the opportunity to invent and experiment with the underlying rule-sets, or “game mechanics”, of our societal reality. 

Indeed “ontology”, our theory of the nature of reality, might be an even more relevant term. (Although one might also say the point of such philosophising is not to merely interpret the world, but to design it, and thus change it.)

TO those crypto-tastic millenials and post-millenials who will accuse me of still “not getting it”, I will hazard a little elder wisdom. First would be that your ludological, rules-innovating frenzy is not happening in a vacuum. Indeed, your currency creativity has a planetary-level challenge (really well laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future). To wit: can you think about inventing forms of commerce which do not locate noxious and polluting “externalities” beyond their books?

You should know there are blockchain/crypto folk who are thinking about this. Take the ambition of Vinay Gupta’s conception of crypto/blockchain, as a means of instrumenting the wastefulness (and increasing the incentive to repairability) of the stuff in our lives. And also Michel Bauwens’ exploration of new forms of accounting, that can measure material and financial flows in a system.

The DisCO Collective mentioned at the start here are trying to bind their members into a supremely planet-and-justice-conscious practice, enterprising and organised. They do so in a joyful spirit, allowing themselves to be thrilled by the advanced and complex socio-technical system they are building (indeed, so complex they imagine their cat can voice it).

As a play advocate, I’m going to accept that such surface lightness can open up deeper and more intractable resources. I won’t damn it for these moods and tones, like an (equally trivial) puritan.

My second attempt at wisdom would be to ask crypto-radicals to attend to the conditions that best support play and games aimed at development and flourishing (not crushing and exploiting). These conditions involve a conscious calibration between security and risk. We need to be able to identify when too many risky endeavours threaten to unravel the infrastructures of security that best supports playful organisms (see my Young Foundation presentation).

This is not an easy call. I now question my old assumptions about the “infrastructures of security” that best support play. My recommendation in 1997 (and 2004) was essentially social-democratic. I believed that the best support for a play society involved reducing working days, providing a universal dividend from automation, and ensuring cheap housing and access to cultural tools. All of this would be enacted by institutions and regulations at a national- (or continental-) state level.

(FWIW, I still believe the establishment of an newly independent Scottish nation-state would an opportunity to attempt such reforms).

However, decades on from the late 90s, I would now also add another option: the creation of commons in society. A modern commons is a material and digital resource, requiring the active, skilled attention of citizens (or commoners), so that it can be viably maintained and sustained.

If there is a citric note arising—between the rise of open-source software and the onslaught of crypto/Web 3.0—it’s from this. The intervening 20-odd years have required me (us) to imagine contending sources of value and prosperity to capitalism. We can’t just evade the question in gauzy dreams of dot-communism.

So, I place a few kindly strokes upon the DisCO CAT, and upon the menagerie of initiatives prowling around this new paradigm. I don’t rule them out for their playfulness, which may electrify deeper inventiveness. And neither should you.

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