Creating The Alternative | Pat Kane
Creating The Alternative | Pat Kane
How to code a culture of resilience and creativity
Appears in this episode
“If the internet was based on a kind of commons, an almost scholarly freedom, then we need to pressure the people who are regulating the virtuality of our digital lives and say we need an early internet-like space and zone in this, where people can, for example, test out realities, test out new kinds of economy, prototype things, take those prototypes into reality, see if they work, take them into the virtual world again.”
“I think the destruction of the biosphere is baked in and therefore the social disruption is baked in as well. So we need some kind of continuity of civic space on the virtual realm that is potentially before us. We need a civic stake in the specific continuity between being in the streets and protesting and literally having to quarantine because of the next biospheric disruption.”
Imagine is a world beyond our wildest dreams...
“A life beyond your wildest dreams” is promised to those entering Narcotics Anonymous, a decentralised, collectively-run program for sobriety in which fellow addicts help one another get and stay clean. The promise doesn’t make sense when you first hear it—it’s only after months, even years, of becoming someone different that you realise how limited your imagination was made by addiction.
I think of our global relationship to capitalism very similarly. It’s difficult to imagine life without it, and thus a better world, but that doesn’t mean such a world isn’t possible. So how do we unleash our imaginations and creativity to create a culture and a world beyond our wildest dreams, one in which we look after one another and the more-than-human world? How do we code for care?
This is what Pat Kane joins me to discuss. Pat is a writer and musician, an activist, and a futurist. He writes a column for The National in Scotland and is also the co-founder of The Alternative, a media organisation embedded into community resilience and imagining alternative ways of organising. Pat to join me to discuss culture—how to understand it, how to code it, how to change it. We explore the possibility of the internet as emergent collective consciousness and a tool for creativity, resilience and connection. We discuss the importance of play: the psychology of play, the impact of play, and how play as resistance reveals the absurdity of the human systems that we are forced to interact with. We meander through this and more on love, truth, cosmology, resilience, difficulty and imagination.
Creating The Alternative | Pat Kane
What a great episode! Thank you so much! What made me think was your optimistic take on Gen Z and following generations to revolt having „nothing to lose). What I‘m very concerned about and what I would love to investigate/have investigated is if and how this can actually take place. The young people I teach in my Philosophy classes in a school in Germany in what I would call a pretty average school with mostly middle class, lower middle and working class kids with a good share of kids with a migration background, completely internalised a neoliberal mindset (with very few exceptions) being against any kind of inheritence tax, progressive income taxation, state action to limit corporate power etc in the name of freedom and personal responsibility. This picture changes when you look at university track students at “Gymnasium” but that is the minority. So the majority of young people that I talk to and observe are not conscious of their position and their own interests let alone of forming moral views that would require action to help others in need when this would entail limits to markets, higher taxes etc. So I’m wondering if this is something worth taking a closer look. On some level, a sociologically informed perspeective, that is very unsurprising - that is the chrrent state of affairs reproduced through sociolization in the very system that needs change. But on another level it seems, 14-18 yearolds becoming conscious of their situation, position and (future) interests seems vital for the project that you and your listeners push for.
Anyway, just a thought! Thanks so much for the amazing work you are doing! After having postponed becoming a paid subscriber I finally managed to do that and will try to win some other friends to do the same!
I'm always learning something new from Planet Critical. This episode with Pat Kane was no exception.
I'd heard of Bernays before, but the way his work was described here resonated in a different way. Industrialisation had created all of these extra commodities, and Bernays weaponised psychology in the form of advertising to increase the desire for them in the worker. No one actually really wants this stuff, we're just made to believe we do.
Totally agree about XR. Where has that injection of absurdity gone? It was that which really captured the imagination..the audacious artwork, the deafening drumming approaching down the high street and the installation of makeshift structures in Trafalgar Square. It felt magical and like a movement with real potential at the time.
A recurring theme that comes up in these conversations is the transformative potential of popular culture. Is this where we could see the absurd and the playful re-injected into the public consciousness? At the moment we seem to be paralysed by Black Mirror style dystopian futures as pointed out here.
One thing that was touched on in this interview was the idea that "people who start to distrust the whole of the public realm are susceptible to fascism". This really concerns me at the moment, and I see people I know getting sucked into that vortex of really weird stuff through the strands of Covid anti-vax sentiment, Brexit and now ULEZ.
Planet Critical usually comes out the day after The Great Simplification. It can be interesting to listen to both in close proximity to get a cross-fertilisation of ideas. Does anyone else find this?
Fun fact: I used to play one of Pat Kane's songs in a band about 30 years ago.