Seven Oaks Magazine.

In an age of soft power, complexity is the name of the game. Soft power? Ask New Integrity, the London based “human potential consultancy” headed up by Indra Adnan and former Hue and Cry crooner Pat Kane. Having provided consultancy – or rather “human potential” services – in a number of environments ranging from business to government, they conclude that what the world is waiting for is a “New idea of Integrity”.

And what might that big idea be you ask? What big new idea captures the spirit of what they call the new adventure? The Play Ethic. Kane, who also wears creative and organisational consultancy (clients have included Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Demos, the Design Council and Nokia) and arts journalism hats, is the author of the recently published The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way ofLiving. Painting from an eclectic but always alliterative pallete – “from the Enlightenment to Eminem, Socrates to Chaos theory, Kierkegaard to Karaoke” – ThePlay Ethic establishes play’s fundamental role to both society and the individual and the failings of the work ethic which has dominated to date in a contemporary world.

Why, asks the social commentator, journalist and broadcaster, do we tie our identities to duty and survival, when our connected technologies compel us to live creatively? An idea he’s been bouncing around since 1997, Kane has described the play ethic as partly an “attempt to gather together all the disquiets of men and women in the more primitive sectors of the information economy, and turn them into an effective movement for reform”. Granted, these are fine, worthy intentions, but is it really as simple as re-configurating one’s beliefs from that of worker to player: I play therefore I am?

To be fair to Kane, he doesn’t mean “play” in the frivolous and notional sense of the word. This is play before it was partitioned off, segregated and made to sit at the back of the bus while work sat up front. According to New Integrity, play is “about a means of transcendence in the everyday – another ‘breath’ of life’ (pneuma) that animates fixed situations, accepted boundaries – puts things ‘in play’.

Like spirituality, play is about a means of transcendence in the everyday - another ‘breath of life’ (pneuma) that animates fixed situations, accepted boundaries - puts things ‘in play’. Like spirituality, play is about embracing possibility and change rather than fearing it – because play is grounded in a deep common reality for humanity.”

Taking inspiration from A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality author Ken Wilber’s “four quadrant” thinking, New Integrity “play audits” promise to take hot-deskers and home workers alike through the “seven rhetorics of play”, opening up the “infinite possibilities arising from full engagement of heart, body and soul.” Got that? No? Then let’s try again. Do you believe that fun and pleasure shouldn’t just be confined to after work hours? If the answer’s yes, you’re a player.

According to Kane, players aren’t the yuppies of the 80s nor the downshifters of the 90s; players are the backpackers of “The Beach”, taking advantage of low frills air travel and lonely planet handbooks to make the world their playground. They’re the ravers who “grew up a bit, without leaving behind or forgetting those blissed out moments when drugs and beats blurred the boundaries of their selves.”

The soulitariat, as opposed to the proletariat. So far, so depressingly, predictably connected. Douglass Rushkoff, Professor of Virtual Culture at New York University, and Al Gore speechwriter Daniel H. Pink have been effusive in their praise of Kane's tome. New Integrity is just one of the army of think tanks whose fortunes have risen in concert with the Third Way politics which have found such favour under Tony Blair.

Dedicated to tackling the thorny policy questions of life in 21st century Britain, a veritable industry where terms like “soft power”, “connectivity” and “synergy” are workaday vocabulary has sprung up to address – to use a suitably jargony phrase - the “disconnect” in contemporary British life. Demos, formed in 1993 by former Marxist Today leading lights Martin Jacques and Geoff Mulgan and probably the most infamous of the more vogueish think tanks (thanks in no small part to former research associate David Ashworth’s war on nomenclature – going as he does by the slightly less conventional “Perri 6”), also sees something in this play thing.

In “The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society”, Demos senior research associate and Downing Street Policy Unit adviser Charles Leadbetter, adopting a premise but a stone’s throw from Kane’s player model, argues that Pro-Am workers will reshape society in the next two decades to come.

Employing the very broadest of brush strokes, the Living on Thin Air author claims that the 20th century was marked not by warfare, as some serious students of modern history might contend, but rather by the rise of the professional classes: in medicine, science, education and politics. However, that situation is now altering, with the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation. Passionate amateurs empowered by technology – what else? - and linked to one another are – wait for it - reshaping business, politics, science and culture. The proof? Rap music, debt reduction campaigns, open source software and the Sims PC game.

Inverting the Wildean tenet that each man kills the thing he loves, today's cultural and policy wonks merely write about the achingly trendy things they love: rap music, developing world debt reduction, open source software and video games. For the record, Tony Blair has called Leadbetter an “extraordinarily interesting thinker”, while Mulgan is now a member of the Downing Street Policy Unit. The beatification of Bart Simpson must surely follow.

A hapless Independent journalist given a recent guided tour of the Demos offices finds that the “thinkers” sit in pods of strictly anti-hierarchically structured neutrally coloured desks. “As with everything at Demos” the writer concludes, “someone has spent a little time thinking about it.” Indeed. But who’s listening?

Demos’ and Leadbetter’s swift ascendency under Blair notwithstanding, think tanks increasing dependency on corporate sponsorship in recent years and the attendant conflict of interests that creates has sent the think tank gurus into policy freefall with little or no real influence on the three major political parties.

Writing in the New Statesman (31/01/05), former Foreign Policy Centre Communications Director Rob Blackhurst argues that the new Labour think tanks have, much to Tony Blair’s chagrin, failed to propose policies in the way that the Institute of Economic Affairs helped Margaret Thatcher tear up the British postwar consensus. Blackhurst contends that most London think tanks either rely on teams of lowly-paid recent graduates or smoke and mirror operations with skeleton staffs and inflated online presences. Moreover, their dependency on corporate cash skews research agendas to corporate ends.

Demos’ “On the Future of Organisations” 2004 project was financed in its entirety by mobile phone operator Orange. A fact which Demos head of strategy James Wilsden, continuing the Independent journalist’s chummy guided tour, bizarrely claims is proof positive of Demos’ independent status. “At any one time, we have over 20 funders. We're deliberately not dependent on any one funding stream.” Other clients helping to maintain Demos’ impeccable independent credentials include Cable and Wireless, British Gas and Shell. The problem with the Kanes and the Leadbetters of this world is their zealous insistence on an online, open source technological, networked cyber-utopia which confuses familiarity with the fads of the day with serious critical enquiry. The result of which is a drunken misalliance of Chicken Soup for the Soul touchy-feely network spiritualism and the crass market genuflecting offered up in books like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s best-selling business bible The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

It really needn’t be said that the dedicated players and Pro-Ams (“…climbing says more about who I am than my job. Journalism is my job but climbing is my passion.”) who best typify this dawning age are noticeable by their absence from the coal face of the information economy. The new media age has yet to produce the shorter working hours that Kane yearns for, nor has it produced a new generation of players: for every ad agency creative loitering at the water cooler, for every down-with-it pro-am actor slacking off from the PR company, there are too many McJob workers taking Leadbetter’s “Living on Thin Air” slogan to dangerously literal extremes.

This writer is reminded of the cautionary tale told by an acquaintance working at a Berlin dotcom company. “When I worked there I wasn’t able to interest anyone in joining a union. A lot of people thought everything was okay because we were on first name terms with the bosses and a lot of us even played football, went drinking and socialised with them. We were all partners, members of the team – there were no hierarchies. At least, that’s what they told us.” The company went bankrupt. The staff, some of whom had already been waiting months for their first wage proper, didn’t receive a penny of the money owed them. Who’d be a player?